This review may contain spoilers
a very good live adaptation, but I have a couple of issues (long rant)
This is my first time writing a review so please have mercy. As someone who is a big fan of the original Payback manhwa, I very much enjoyed watching this live action adaptation. It is for the most part very accurate / faithful to the original material, I loved the music and casting, especially ToptapMinlee, who I've begun to become very obsessed with due to their amazing chemistry. However, going back on that "accuracy / faithfulness," I have some issues, in particular regarding two scenes in the last episode.1. Sunny's final confrontation with Sun and Jay. To be honest, this scene felt... underwhelming? Anticlimactic? When compared to the original manhwa that is. Starting from the setting being completely different and just overall Sunny's reaction. In the original manhwa, there was much suspense as up to that point, Sunny still doesn't know who Sun's sponsor is and when he discovers the truth, he was so shocked that he immediately ran away. It made think "THIS is Payback. This is what the series has been building up to." And then in the live adaptation it felt more like "Yeah I'm his sponsor, you mad? Sunny doesn't even seem to be so surprised about it, it's like he already knew. It's not necessarily bad by any means, but it just felt underwhelming to me... It doesn't really have the same effect.
2. Director Jeong / Karn's film. Now THIS I have more of a bigger issue with. I'm not gonna go into full detail on what Karn's film is supposed to be about, but to put it simply, it's about a suicidal documenter who documents three people who all reflects his mental state / identity and this was thoroughly explained towards the ending. I was truly CAPTIVATED by this by this part of the original manhwa. It was such a memorable scene that truly sets the stone of Payback being one of my favorite BLs, you really have to read it yourself. Naturally I expected this scene to also be part of the live adaptation and I set my expectations pretty high because of how accurate the adaptation has been so far, it is a pretty crucial to the story after all in my opinion. Oh boy, words can't describe how DISAPPOINTED when I found out that this part of the story wasn't even mentioned in the slightest. It literally held me back from giving this a 9 star rating. That's how upset I was. To be fair, you can't expect a live adaptation to be 100% accurate most of the time and the series was still pretty good overall, but to just skip this entire section of the story, is such a shame. Now, not all hope is lost, because there are rumours going on that special episodes are coming, and I'm just HOPING that they will be able to be do me justice and bring Director Karn's film to live as it truly deserves.
Overall, despite all of this, I still very much enjoyed watching this series. There are some things I have issues with, but there are also a lot more things that I like with this adaptation much more than even the original manhwa (like that NC scene hehehe). Anyway, idk who's going to read all of this but I hope you enjoyed my loooong rant lmao. Thanks for reading.
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