YMMV / A Chinese Odyssey

• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: Tripitaka telling Joker to take up the mantle of Monkey King by singing a rendition of Only You.
• Bilingual Bonus: Joker's Chinese name Zhi Zun Bao (至尊宝) refers to the Pai-Jiu combination. The same combo is also called the Monkey King Pair (猴王對). Foreshadowing Much?
• Completely Different Title: Unless you count Joker's unwitting trip 500 years into the past (and reuniting with his fellow pilgrims when he was the Monkey King), nobody is embarking on a terrible odyssey to find their family.
• Hollywood Tone-Deaf: Law Kar-Ying (Tripitaka) is actually a veteran Chinese opera singer, and the "Only You" scene only reached its memetic popularity due to him dialing it all the way down.
• Memetic Mutation: Raise your hand if the only thing you remember from the duology is Tripitaka's gut-busting rendition of Only You.
  Tripitaka: Only you can take me to the scriptures in the west...
• Moral Event Horizon: Bull Demon King commanding his demonic minions to brutally torture Qingxia in Xiangxiang's body as a result of a "Freaky Friday" Flip spell gone wrong on themselves, all while he forces Zixia to kowtow every time her other split persona trapped in Bull's own sister gets impaled.
• Signature Scene: Tripitaka singing Only You. Mo lei tau at its finest.
• Tear Jerker:
  • Joker lying to Zixia about his love for her, by vaguely mentioning Jingjing:
    Joker (narrating): In that moment, around a centimeter before her sword touches my throat, within a short period of time, a hundredth of a second I think, she will fall for me whole-heartedly. All because of a lie I told her. I've told many lies in my lifetime, but that one is the best I've pulled off in my life!
    (Drama Ensues)
    Zixia: Don't come any closer or I'll kill you!
    Joker: You're right! I should've been dead in the first place! There was an opportunity of sincere love with a girl I encountered, but I did not cherish that love, and when she was gone, regret is all that is left in me. That, is incomparable to the most painful of moments of suffering in the life of man... So kill me if you wish. If heaven gives me one more chance at humanity, I will tell that girl three words: I love you. And if there will be a limit on how long will that love last, I hope... it will be ten thousand years.
  • Demons or highly trained warriors have the ability to Body Surf at the physical level, with the option of actually seeing their internal organs. After Joker meets with Zixia, there's a moment where he challenges her to view his heart for herself to see if he's been lying about the whole time travel thing. Later on, he finally finds Jingjing, and he convinces her to view his heart for herself to see that his feelings are sincere. For some reason it backfires and Jingjing leaves him - but then tragedy strikes as Jingjing's sociopathic fellow demon, the Spider Demon, kills all of Joker's friends and has Joker at her mercy. Joker's last request - that he die by Diagonal Cut so he can see his own insides and figure out what Jingjing could have seen to make her leave him. What he sees is the tears shed by Zixia, upon learning that he was sincere about Jingjing - because she'd fallen for him herself.
    Jingjing's letter: Your consciousness tells me that you never loved me at all, but for another woman instead. When I saw what she has left behind in your heart, I came to the conclusion you traveled back these 500 years not for me, but for her. This may have be our destiny after all, or what is meant by fate.
  • Zixia's last reunion with Joker. After making his grand appearance reincarnated as the Monkey King by kicking Bull Demon King's ass, he rejects Zixia's attempts to propose to him (or even follow him on his pilgrimage with Tripitaka and company) as a result of his Vow of Celibacy, to the point that he saves Tripitaka insitead of Zixia when Bull begins to lift the entire demon village towards the sun. As Joker attempts to stop the village from being hurled towards the sun, Zixia comes to quarrel with him about the string of bells he gifted her earlier, only for her take the trident from Bull. Joker then embraces a near-dying Zixia for the last time, with his restraining circlet contracting and magnifying his anguish over her death.
    Zixia: I imagined my true love would be a knight in shining armor, riding on colorful clouds all the way to come and propose to me. I may have got the opening right, yet I did not expect that this is how would it end...
• Vindicated by History: The duology saw modest box office returns when it premiered back in Hong Kong during 1995, which weren't enough to sustain Chow's previous film company to the point it closed down (though it did receive a few awards). Nowadays the duology ascended as a classic, especially in Mainland China, where its extended cut saw box office returns that blew the amount from the premiere back in 1995 out of the water. Being seen as a magnet for potential allegories for life, especially on the topic of love, at there helped as well.
• What Do You Mean, It's Not Didactic?: There are loads of analyses in China on how the duology views romance, especially on Joker's relationship with Zixia (with greater emphasis on the "I love you for ten thousand years" quote from Joker). Some viewers even see Joker's character arc leading to him accepting the mantle of the Monkey King as an allegory for fate itself.
• Woolseyism: The English subtitles for some of the character names are... unflattering, to say the least. 'Longevity Monk' for Tripitaka/Xuanzang and 'Grandpa Buddha' for Puti, for example.