Lead actors chemistry was great!
Overall I kept on watching bc the leads are great actors with oberflowing chemistry.Tbh, that's the selling point of the series, the chemistry between the leading characters, if you try turning off your brain on some of the major plot holes you can enjoy the cute and funny moments.
The male friend storyline was really not enjoyable though. It makes you wonder what it was that the writer was trying to do with that weirdly developed side story. I won't say more bc I'll get into spoiler territory.
Good music, great actors, messy script. That's how I would describe this drama.
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Bad script.
Continuing the trend with a lot of -the last couple of years- k-dramas, this show also suffers the "disease" of a bad script.Contrary to what others have said, I actually think this isn't a complicated story. It's just a badly written one.
I've watched a lot of mystery-thrillers and the script and acting are the most important factors for a show of these genres to be good. For any show to be fair.
Once again, what is going on with South Korea and its writers? Are they using Ai or what, bc I can't think of a reason where the writers are so uninspired with their work.
For this drama its ONLY saving grace is Lee Junhyuk. This man is one hell of a actor. Anyone that hasn't watched his dramas need to drop what they're currently watching and start "Dongjae, the good or the bastard" right this second. Now, THAT'S a good show.
Anyway, such a seriously disappointing drama. How can you have known, serious actors and the budget to shoot a Netflix thriller but not try to have a better script?
Unoriginal, uninspiring and frankly I'm over korea's obsession with luxury brands and surface level "rich people-poor people" concepts.
K-dramas need to do better.
The 4.5 is for Lee Junhyuk, otherwise I'd give it a 2 for the annoying script.
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A mess of a script.
Once again I asked myself "how should I rate this drama?" I tend to feel like that when there are elements in a drama that have really annoyed me.The answer became clear when I finally gave up on episode 9, not interested anymore on reaching the end.
Honestly the script was so unintelligent that I wondered who was the target audience. Plotholes all over the place, the villain characters cartoonishly evil that was almost laughable, and the romance for me was not romancing enough to save the series.
Among all this, Choi Sooyoung's acting was the only thing I enjoyed. Her character had such an interesting background, a devastating past which had my eyes welling up when they occasionally mentioned it.
Her dad's case was the reason I kept watching, but when I reached ep9 and they were still dealing with the "evil" CEO and the "evil" prosecution I was finally fed up.
Overall, this drama is not for people that enjoy intelligent or even semi-intelligent scripts. I really wanted to like this, but when I kept spending my time wanting to skip scenes and frowning with the badly written story, no amount of Choi Sooyoung's intriguing acting could make me stick around for more.
I had so many thoughts (not good ones) while watching the episodes but now that I'm writing this I don't know what to say anymore.
Anyway, this series was not for me and that's about it.
I gave it 4.5 for the acting and ok directing but story based it's not even a 2.
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This review may contain spoilers
I didn't add that many spoilers afterall.
I feel like this drama belongs on the "peculiar" Netflix k-dramas category that for me it's kind of hard to rate because when the ending credits of ep8 rolled I couldn't tell if I had liked it or not.What I liked:
1. The acting. Even with the most over the top roles, this drama has an all-star cast that is a pleasure to see them act all together.
2. The concept of the money in the story, I think I liked it. Esp in ep1 there's a scene where he avoids helping people in fear of spending his money.
It reminded me of how a lot of times no matter how giving one would want to be, if you don't have enough money you end up struggling with the need to keep yourself afloat while wanting to help others too.
Although I wouldn't say the series delved that deep into this concept. lol
3. I actually liked how over the top of an evil man Jo Nathan was. And he was played really well by its actor!
4. I really liked the female lead's character. She is a smart woman (a lot smarter than the male lead which is something I found quiet interesting) and a go-getter. Shout out to the actress that played her bc she did so well, esp in the emotional scenes.
What I didn't like:
1. I wasn't crazy about the music. With the amount of money they spent on special effects and sets they could have easily done better on the bgm and ost department.
2. The son-father relationship should had been explored more and in general the script should have had more depth.
3. Some cringe lines that made me think "who wrote this? Is this once again a web-comic adaptation?"
Conclusion:
It's a really weird drama compared to most k-dramas. It gave me the feeling that a lot of people will either drop it or dislike it altogether, however there's some freshness in it that makes it worthy of a try.
Now that it's been a few hours since I finished it:
Was it a fun watch for me? Yes, I think it was.
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A hidden gem of a romance drama.
As many have said I never expected this drama to be as good as it was. The romantic atmosphere was really beautiful, the directing creative and the characters felt like real people with actual personalities.So many points that one can appreciate here, one of them the TOP quality soundtrack.
Music sets the mood and drives a plot forward by elevating a scene's impact, and finally a modern c-drama (besides the First Frost of course) that managed to do this well. The OST songs are incredible, they're now on a separate playlist on my spotify.
Every post-production decision really HIT the spot with me and I'm a very hard person to please with these things.
Now with the characters. I really loved the script which means I really liked the characters. Is it a perfect script? No, probably bc a perfect script doesn't exist since it's really hard to make a show where you can develop all characters as much as one would want, but this show did its best with what they had.
As an end-result they had relatable, strong women and men that grew from their past. Also with the supporting characters like the parents , I actually understood why they were the way that they were and the reasoning behind their behavior.
Is there anything to say about the main couple that hasn't been said? Top of the top chemistry, they felt like an actual couple, & made my heart flutter every time they interacted in my screen (it also doesn't happen that easily with romance shows).
Overall: Great directing, great cinematography, really good script, loved the acting. LOVED the music & editing.
The vibe was mature but fun and I WILL watch it again bc such well-made romance c-dramas are hard to find.
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This review may contain spoilers
i think I didn't end up adding any spoilers afer all. lol
I finished this drama when it was done airing back in November and I guess the time has come that I finally write down my own thoughts on it.For some reason this drama did a really difficult thing that in general doesn't happen to me.
It made me forget that there were things that could have been done better, eg the script and some post-production editing.
Let me start by saying overall the directing, cinematography and music production were really good.
The acting of all the cast was also exceptional.
However the most important part of this show for me was the LEADS and their characters as individuals & as a couple.
Honestly, the main couple for me was the winning recipe that got me hooked AND it was why I give this 10/10 in rewatch value, considering how I've rewatched it 2 times already.
For me the main couple captured that realistic but quite rare, intense first-love feeling of 2 people that are lucky enough to find each other in their early 20s and learn how to grow together as indiduals and as a couple.
And this happening in a xianxia drama with that whole "lying" about who they are and their intentions, etc thing.
As a I've said before there were some script choices about the overall story and some post-editing that had me raising my eyebrow for a moment, but the leading characters saved it by being that young-adult couple that learns what "love" is and how to stand together AND for each other, against a lot of difficult circumstances.
By the way the Situ Ling interpretation of the "crazy-fan" (that should learn to live for himself) is something that should be seen by a lot of "intense" fans out there but something tells me they wouldn't understand that they're looking into a mirror and learn/get something out of it. lol
Final thoughts:
Hou Minghao and Lu Yuxiao nailed it out of the park being the leads here. The characters felt sincere, complicated (which is good bc i hate one-dimensional characters), with a connection that made me feel like it was one of the most realistic chemistries I've seen in this type of drama.
Special mention: the main female lead portrayal of the "cutesy" moments and how she's probably the only character in a c-drama that hasn't made me hate this type of "forced-cute" stuff. In fact I found those moments really lovely, especially when you see the contrast of what that character had gone through growing up.
Overall this drama gets my 10 for all the above & bc I love beautiful portrayals of touching love-stories.
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Its best point was about death and how they approached it.
If I were to give the story's approach to death a score I'd give it a 10. As someone that has gone through a difficult loss a year ago, this drama was very comforting and touching.The romance part was quite good until the last 3 episodes were it went a bit downhill and dragged in a weird way as if the sceenwriter didnt know how to conclude some parts of the story.
The acting was great, the music could've been better.
In general, I liked how flawed most of the main characters were. To me that's realistic. Bc most people have a lot of disappointing traits that come from our own traumatic life-experiences. So not all dramas need to have the overly cliche toxic characters or the overly cliche "doing everything correctly" protagonists.
However it did feel like the characters weren't developed as deeply as they deserved considering they were people with extremely traumatic pasts and the material for a deeper dive into why they were that way was right THERE. |
Anyway, I did like the drama even with its last episodes messy approach, especially the first half of it.
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Overall I liked it bc of the acting.
I'll start by saying for this drama the scores didn't really matter.The most important thing for me is that I thought "Lee Juhno what an exceptional actor that you are!". Probably bc I've lost my father a year ago, I resonated a lot with the way he portrayed that feeling of missing your loved one. And both the leads created really lovely chemistry as a couple.
Anyway the drama itself lacks in its writing,bc I felt there were a lot of plot-holes and the "bad" guys at times gave off "villain caricatures" .
However I did end up enjoying the series bc the whole cast did really good at portraying such a difficult time for South Korea.
The music was also great.
There were multiple moments tears welled up in my eyes which is nice when you can "feel" a characters emotions reach you through the screen.
And even though I loved all the actors' performances, I will give a special mention to Kwon Hansol (the actress playing the younger sister). There was this moment I won't spoil here that made me go "wow she did so good at this scene" and had me replaying it just so that I see her again say her lines. 👏
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I actually really wanted to like this drama!
I started this drama bc I kept finding people on tiktok saying it's the best drama of 2025 so maybe my expectations were quite high.Sadly I'm deciding to give up on it after watching the first 8 episodes and it's mostly bc of the production quality.
Reasons I wont finish it:
A major one was that the bg music kept annoying me. I wouldn't mind the "slower" plot if the post-production team hadn't tried inserting that low-quality background music every other scene. For me it took away from the actually really good acting.
Overall, even though i had no issue with the characters themselves and the age-gap between the leads, the post-production choices and the overall directing ended up making me feel like I was wasting my time trying to watch it.
I really wanted to like this bc I believe when a lot of people like something there must be a good reason behind the hype, but sadly I didn't.
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