galaxygkm23

I started watching this drama to fill in the void left by Alchemy of Souls, and fortunately, I was not disappointed. When I first started this drama, I was annoyed with how childish the FML was and wasn’t as invested in the story as I wanted to be. I picked up this drama again after putting it on hold for a while, and I was pleasantly surprised with how good it was. The FML’s character growth and the buildup of the main lead’s relationship was done really well. I went from not really liked her character in the first few episodes to loving her halfway through the show. Even the side characters and villains (e.g Changfeng, Black Dragon, Jielei, Xunfeng) were really well developed and had a lot of depth. One thing I did appreciate about this drama that I feel like I haven’t seen much in other romantic dramas is the equal amount of focus on both the FML’s and ML’s character development. I feel like sometimes dramas tend to focus much on only one of the ML/FL storyline to the point where the other character doesn’t get much development, but we don’t see that here. Both Dongfang Qingcang and Xiao Lanhua had very interesting backstories which contributed to their character growth and I think the drama did an excellent job at gradually unveiling them as the story progressed.

If I had a few things to criticize this drama for, one would probably be the lack of development of some of the secondary characters in this show. While Orchid’s development was great, I think I would’ve liked if Jieli had more character growth throughout the show. It feels like the writer’s mainly used to her character as a plot device to move the story forward, although it would’ve been nice to see her change as well especially given her friendship with Orchid and relationship with Shang Que. Not necessarily a huge issue though, (I still liked learning about her backstory plus Danyin’s) the story definitely did get more interesting for me when she was introduced. Speaking of the 2nd leads, they had an interesting dynamic but their romance felt a little forced in my opinion. I was rooting for Jieli to become a better person as the story progressed but I ended up feeling like she did not deserve Shang Que, nor did she deserve Orchid’s friendship. It didn’t necessarily take away from my overall enjoyment of the drama but I was beginning to get annoyed with her scenes towards the end. Another issue for me is the last 4 episodes of the drama. Although the ending wasn’t necessarily a bad ending, it just felt mildly underwhelming and rushed. It felt like most of the drama’s runtime for the last few episodes were spent trying to wrap up the side plots in such a short amount of time to the point where DFQC and Xiao Lanhua barely got enough screen time. I also didn’t really like how their personalities suddenly changed after she reincarnated. The back and forth sacrificial trope got annoying after some point, and honestly I probably would’ve preferred the drama had ended at episode 31 instead of this was how they had planned to wrap up the story. Overall though, this was a solid xianxia drama and I would highly recommend this for anyone trying to get into Xianxia since there is not too many episodes and the plot is simple yet engaging enough for newcomers to follow.