This review may contain spoilers
A breath of fresh air in the genre
When this series first came out I was charmed by its premise: guy and girl meet online in an MMO and later fall in love irl. I ate the drama, read the novel, looked up fanworks, watched the (less than stellar) movie, etc. There's something very innocent, sweet, and teenage optimism about this whole work that I really liked. It also gave me nostalgic memories of my own days with MMOs, though Chinese ones are a completely different vibe and look (I've played a couple set in historical times with wuxia/xianxia elements like Love O2O's, they're very fun but yeah, not like Western/KRN MMOs at all).
Yang Yang was super handsome as Xiao Nai and his in-game character and I loved that he fought with a guzheng, which isn't exactly new in terms of wuxia but WAS pretty fresh for drama protagonist weapons. Zheng Shuang was actually a little too skinny in some parts (her arms made me worry for her) and it turned out later that she admitted she was struggling with her body image during this time. If she's already a stick on-screen, you can imagine what she looked like offscreen. Then later on she ran into some other scandal but this is a drama review so I won't get into that here, I'll just say that her skinniness actually distracted me from fully immersing in the drama at times because anytime she was her in-game character, who had a costume with no sleeves, I couldn't buy it that she was some amazing fighter cause it looked like you could snap her bones with a stick...
Some parts are also very idol drama style with weaker basis in reality, such as Weiwei elegantly tapping the keyboard and mouse as Xiao Nai passes her in the internet cafe. Supposedly, he fell in love with her because of her flying fingers over the keyboard, but the shots made it look more like she was typing a Microsoft Word document. Heeeeeelp.
Rest of drama was fine, with nice high and low points. I don't remember too much but I know I enjoyed the faceslapping scenes and Mao Xiaotong was extra cute as the best friend character with her own loveline. All in all, a classic for the cdrama books! And the songs and OST are sparkly cute too!
Yang Yang was super handsome as Xiao Nai and his in-game character and I loved that he fought with a guzheng, which isn't exactly new in terms of wuxia but WAS pretty fresh for drama protagonist weapons. Zheng Shuang was actually a little too skinny in some parts (her arms made me worry for her) and it turned out later that she admitted she was struggling with her body image during this time. If she's already a stick on-screen, you can imagine what she looked like offscreen. Then later on she ran into some other scandal but this is a drama review so I won't get into that here, I'll just say that her skinniness actually distracted me from fully immersing in the drama at times because anytime she was her in-game character, who had a costume with no sleeves, I couldn't buy it that she was some amazing fighter cause it looked like you could snap her bones with a stick...
Some parts are also very idol drama style with weaker basis in reality, such as Weiwei elegantly tapping the keyboard and mouse as Xiao Nai passes her in the internet cafe. Supposedly, he fell in love with her because of her flying fingers over the keyboard, but the shots made it look more like she was typing a Microsoft Word document. Heeeeeelp.
Rest of drama was fine, with nice high and low points. I don't remember too much but I know I enjoyed the faceslapping scenes and Mao Xiaotong was extra cute as the best friend character with her own loveline. All in all, a classic for the cdrama books! And the songs and OST are sparkly cute too!
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