This review may contain spoilers
not Yin Tao's finest work
—ROMANCE—
Don't watch Unveil: Jadewind for the romance. The romantic chemistry is barely there, and many comments below express they would have preferred the show without that. I'd say the second couple was better than the first, and even that pairing was totally optional (their scenes together felt like they were filmed to be flexibly deleteable on a whim).
—PROD + OST—
The production-wise it's ok but not particularly good (some uneven audio, some weird cuts, fight scenes between decent and boring). The OSTs are fairly meh too, just the opening song is one of the best I've heard in years. Sadly the show doesn't have a clue what to do with it during actual scenes.
—ACTING—
This show has a huge lot of actors that I know are good actors, but something is off with them here, like they are miscast (given unfitting roles) or are misdirected. It's fair to say that Bai Lu carries the show and even the ML is more like a supporting character for her, yet the role of being a trained warrior never seems to fit her like a glove and her action scenes frequently have awkward elements. If you've seen Wang Xing Yue in The Double you know what he can do, but here he doesn't get to do nearly as much. Zhao Yi Qin and Min Xing Han feel like they more or less had their wings clipped.
None the less it was pleasant to keep recognizing faces even in very minor roles. Maybe I'm a bit biased because I also recently watched all of Blood of Youth / Dashing Youth / Blood River, but to me this show is in the top 10% of cast depth. An unfortunate side effect of this is that you can predict an actor that stands out to be the next murderer or victim.
—STORY—
The writing is not only not good, but also already gets repetitive within the first few episodes. There's certain formulaic elements that keep being used. One loop is that a character commits a crime to attract the attention of the FL's Palace FBI to point at a bigger crime. They initially are an antagonist, maybe attack the leads, only to become a misunderstood new best friend for the FL. Repeat for the next case.
»» Extra spoiler: The "misunderstood new best friend for the FL" characters frequently kill themselves once the case that spawned them out of thin air ends. Maybe this is to prevent the FL from having a dozen different sidekicks to summon, but it feels overblown.
As a whodunnit type investigation, it's not a suitable watch. The audience doesn't get hints to solve some sort of riddle themselves. Instead, a supporting character waltzes into a scene to declare that they now have the next hint, and this happens almost all the time.
One thing I'm not sure I should praise or criticize is the very high amount of deaths and especially suicides shown. Early on this has a pattern like "our next hint is this person - let's go to them - either they refuse to talk and then they're dead, or they're already dead to begin with".
I read comments here on MDL that said "all the cases are actually connected!!!" and such, but I heavily disagree. They're mostly free-floating with no lasting relevance, and the middle has some straight up filler content that changes nothing.
Writing-wise there's zero-logic elements that were either never supposed to make sense or any explanation was cut. For example, early on, there's a human excrement transporter who has top tier martial arts skills on the level of the FL as well as Batman-level combat tools, even an army of combat bats hidden in his coat. Yet his back story is... that he spent his life working in the palace shoveling poop.
There's the usual stuff that writers forget about, like in the first episode the FL has a highly trained special owl sidekick. Never appears again. (Maybe the CGI department couldn't get the owl vs bats fight scenes to look good. Sorry.)
After a breakup the ML got super deadly sick, coughs blood, is only barely alive due to absurdly expensive treatments snuck to him by the FL's underlings... and then the writers forgot about it. His illness? Never mentioned again. If FL knew about him coughing blood or not? Who cares. A few scenes later he's fit as a fiddle and back to being ultra smart.
The (very bad) last episode in general boils down a lot of plot resolution to some ultra compressed cliff notes format as if an hour or two of runtime had to be cut and it's almost time to turn the lights off.
The overall morality and deeper plot conclusions are also somewhere between chaotically random and contradictory.
Problematic morality elements you get from the very beginning, where the FL's actual official best friend is another princess who kills between somewhat innocent and entirely innocent other girls just because she can, and yet we are supposed to commiserate with her. This turns into a repeating pattern of the FL and her sidekicks being partial to some more pitiable offenders and repeatedly overlooking their crimes.
A few episodes from the end, when the FL can stab the (quite weak and insufficiently explored) primary villain to a justified death, the ML stops her with a grandiose speech about how killing the villain herself results in her 15+ years of nightmares getting replaced with new nightmares. Some episodes later, witnessing something makes her realize the ML was right. In the last episode, she kills said villain just like she could have done in that first-mentioned ep, or maybe more brutally, and then we are told her nightmares have now ended. Seriously?
Don't watch Unveil: Jadewind for the romance. The romantic chemistry is barely there, and many comments below express they would have preferred the show without that. I'd say the second couple was better than the first, and even that pairing was totally optional (their scenes together felt like they were filmed to be flexibly deleteable on a whim).
—PROD + OST—
The production-wise it's ok but not particularly good (some uneven audio, some weird cuts, fight scenes between decent and boring). The OSTs are fairly meh too, just the opening song is one of the best I've heard in years. Sadly the show doesn't have a clue what to do with it during actual scenes.
—ACTING—
This show has a huge lot of actors that I know are good actors, but something is off with them here, like they are miscast (given unfitting roles) or are misdirected. It's fair to say that Bai Lu carries the show and even the ML is more like a supporting character for her, yet the role of being a trained warrior never seems to fit her like a glove and her action scenes frequently have awkward elements. If you've seen Wang Xing Yue in The Double you know what he can do, but here he doesn't get to do nearly as much. Zhao Yi Qin and Min Xing Han feel like they more or less had their wings clipped.
None the less it was pleasant to keep recognizing faces even in very minor roles. Maybe I'm a bit biased because I also recently watched all of Blood of Youth / Dashing Youth / Blood River, but to me this show is in the top 10% of cast depth. An unfortunate side effect of this is that you can predict an actor that stands out to be the next murderer or victim.
—STORY—
The writing is not only not good, but also already gets repetitive within the first few episodes. There's certain formulaic elements that keep being used. One loop is that a character commits a crime to attract the attention of the FL's Palace FBI to point at a bigger crime. They initially are an antagonist, maybe attack the leads, only to become a misunderstood new best friend for the FL. Repeat for the next case.
»» Extra spoiler: The "misunderstood new best friend for the FL" characters frequently kill themselves once the case that spawned them out of thin air ends. Maybe this is to prevent the FL from having a dozen different sidekicks to summon, but it feels overblown.
As a whodunnit type investigation, it's not a suitable watch. The audience doesn't get hints to solve some sort of riddle themselves. Instead, a supporting character waltzes into a scene to declare that they now have the next hint, and this happens almost all the time.
One thing I'm not sure I should praise or criticize is the very high amount of deaths and especially suicides shown. Early on this has a pattern like "our next hint is this person - let's go to them - either they refuse to talk and then they're dead, or they're already dead to begin with".
I read comments here on MDL that said "all the cases are actually connected!!!" and such, but I heavily disagree. They're mostly free-floating with no lasting relevance, and the middle has some straight up filler content that changes nothing.
Writing-wise there's zero-logic elements that were either never supposed to make sense or any explanation was cut. For example, early on, there's a human excrement transporter who has top tier martial arts skills on the level of the FL as well as Batman-level combat tools, even an army of combat bats hidden in his coat. Yet his back story is... that he spent his life working in the palace shoveling poop.
There's the usual stuff that writers forget about, like in the first episode the FL has a highly trained special owl sidekick. Never appears again. (Maybe the CGI department couldn't get the owl vs bats fight scenes to look good. Sorry.)
After a breakup the ML got super deadly sick, coughs blood, is only barely alive due to absurdly expensive treatments snuck to him by the FL's underlings... and then the writers forgot about it. His illness? Never mentioned again. If FL knew about him coughing blood or not? Who cares. A few scenes later he's fit as a fiddle and back to being ultra smart.
The (very bad) last episode in general boils down a lot of plot resolution to some ultra compressed cliff notes format as if an hour or two of runtime had to be cut and it's almost time to turn the lights off.
The overall morality and deeper plot conclusions are also somewhere between chaotically random and contradictory.
Problematic morality elements you get from the very beginning, where the FL's actual official best friend is another princess who kills between somewhat innocent and entirely innocent other girls just because she can, and yet we are supposed to commiserate with her. This turns into a repeating pattern of the FL and her sidekicks being partial to some more pitiable offenders and repeatedly overlooking their crimes.
A few episodes from the end, when the FL can stab the (quite weak and insufficiently explored) primary villain to a justified death, the ML stops her with a grandiose speech about how killing the villain herself results in her 15+ years of nightmares getting replaced with new nightmares. Some episodes later, witnessing something makes her realize the ML was right. In the last episode, she kills said villain just like she could have done in that first-mentioned ep, or maybe more brutally, and then we are told her nightmares have now ended. Seriously?
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