Certainly one of the better 2025 dramas!
Pros:
- The revenge really revenges.
- Important dialogues are well-written.
- The actors all put in the work.
- The leads' attitudes to each other.
- You don't have to wait to the 75% point for a lame confession, with one hug as it transitions into the credits. It's not that type of show.
- The viewer never suffers. It's not that type of angst.
- The villains aren't just clownish evil for evil's sake, but have reasonable motivations, with a dash of "once you're too far down the wrong path you can't turn around".
- Outside of the leads, there's a lot more characters delivering friendship, loyalty, brotherhood, family bonds, and so on. Compared to something like A Journey To Love though, the supporting characters of the ML's soldier crew are a bit more one-dimensionally loyal and otherwise don't have much personality.
- Some of the sets look really refreshing compared to the always-same palaces viewers got used to. The costumes are decent too.
- On the female general scale, this female military commander FL is typically more convincing than the average seen in Legend Of The Female General, Shadow Love, Wonderland of Love, etc.
Mixed:
- Once in a while, the cinematography or editing impresses you so much that you want to immediately rewind. Sadly, it's rare, and a lot of this powder is fired at the very start.
- In the middle, the plot gets a bit weaker for some time, when the twists all twist at once.
- The fighting scenes are a mix bag. There is strong attention to detail in the front, but later on you can spot lifeless actors/stuntpeople doing "left-right-left-right" pretend-fighting in the back. Maybe that kind of lazy production is due to budget limitations?
- The FL being voice acted by Duan Yi Xuan made me hear the Till The End Of The Moon FL (Bai Lu) all the time.
- The comedy is hit and miss; there's only one duo in the later episodes who really deliver.
- Kiss-wise 2025 viewers are spoiled by WDBTD, and this isn't it. One wouldn't be wrong to claim that another couple in Fated Hearts has more chemistry than the leads.
Cons:
- The OST. There's barely any songs, and the ones they have aren't memorable. If Goblin or anything Chen Xue Ran is 9–10/10, and Till The End Of The Moon like an 8/10 in the OST department, then this is a 5/10 or something.
- The ending / post-story could have gotten more screen time.
Primarily I would have liked some characters' story arcs to end in different ways (but it's not a choose your own ending book) and others to be fleshed out further.
- The revenge really revenges.
- Important dialogues are well-written.
- The actors all put in the work.
- The leads' attitudes to each other.
- You don't have to wait to the 75% point for a lame confession, with one hug as it transitions into the credits. It's not that type of show.
- The viewer never suffers. It's not that type of angst.
- The villains aren't just clownish evil for evil's sake, but have reasonable motivations, with a dash of "once you're too far down the wrong path you can't turn around".
- Outside of the leads, there's a lot more characters delivering friendship, loyalty, brotherhood, family bonds, and so on. Compared to something like A Journey To Love though, the supporting characters of the ML's soldier crew are a bit more one-dimensionally loyal and otherwise don't have much personality.
- Some of the sets look really refreshing compared to the always-same palaces viewers got used to. The costumes are decent too.
- On the female general scale, this female military commander FL is typically more convincing than the average seen in Legend Of The Female General, Shadow Love, Wonderland of Love, etc.
Mixed:
- Once in a while, the cinematography or editing impresses you so much that you want to immediately rewind. Sadly, it's rare, and a lot of this powder is fired at the very start.
- In the middle, the plot gets a bit weaker for some time, when the twists all twist at once.
- The fighting scenes are a mix bag. There is strong attention to detail in the front, but later on you can spot lifeless actors/stuntpeople doing "left-right-left-right" pretend-fighting in the back. Maybe that kind of lazy production is due to budget limitations?
- The FL being voice acted by Duan Yi Xuan made me hear the Till The End Of The Moon FL (Bai Lu) all the time.
- The comedy is hit and miss; there's only one duo in the later episodes who really deliver.
- Kiss-wise 2025 viewers are spoiled by WDBTD, and this isn't it. One wouldn't be wrong to claim that another couple in Fated Hearts has more chemistry than the leads.
Cons:
- The OST. There's barely any songs, and the ones they have aren't memorable. If Goblin or anything Chen Xue Ran is 9–10/10, and Till The End Of The Moon like an 8/10 in the OST department, then this is a 5/10 or something.
- The ending / post-story could have gotten more screen time.
Primarily I would have liked some characters' story arcs to end in different ways (but it's not a choose your own ending book) and others to be fleshed out further.
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