It's hidden enough & it's almost a gem..

In regular kdrama terms this is about 4 episodes long and that is just the right amount for this kind of story. Had this been extended to 16, I'm sure it would have been an unwatchable makjang show for me.
The acting is good (Hani is excellent), the chemistry between the leads is also fine. There is not much fluff, but the romance is really realistic . The plot itself is quite juvenile & silly, but due to the short length it's quite bearable, though I think the show would've been better if the ex stayed away in the current timeline. The whole bartender thing is quite unique as far as kdramas go and even the toxic sismance is interesting.

XX is totally worth watching!

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Fun, but stupid

The Good:
⌲ The excellent chemistry between the leads (far better than in Love Equations)
⌲ The acting is relatively good across the board.
⌲ The fluff is great & there is A LOT of it.
⌲ The whole pursuing the man thing was a lot of fun most of the time.
⌲ The top tier comedy before the timeskip (It's been consistently funny)
⌲ The love triangle is very tame & fizzles out in time.
⌲ Fun cohabitation
⌲ The contract marriage trope works great in this one.

The Neutral:
⌲ The half brother's ambitions (Seems like due to censorship all that buildup has been for nought, his story has gotten axed & he had only appeared for like a minute after the timeskip)
⌲ The childhood connection (I've seen far worse)
⌲ As cute as their kid was, I've seen better Chinese child actors.
⌲ The side couples

The Bad:
⌲ Episodes 22,23 and 24 are utter garbage.
⌲ The separation due to noble reasons
⌲ The redemption arks are the worst. (father, stepmom, GaoE - neither of these make sense)
⌲ I'm sick and tired of practicing doctor leads needing to go aboard just when they are about to start enjoying life.
⌲ There is not a whole lot of plot, but it's incredibly dumb at times.
⌲ Simon (bad acting, super weird stuff before the timeskip)
⌲ Lu Fang Ning chickening out felt horrible to me. (At one point ML gave up resisting in anger, but..)

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The biggest problem with the drama is that it's simply quite boring.

I guess I can be considered a fan of the leads, but this pairing is just not very good. It was always obvious to me that neither of these two are great actors, but they choose roles very well to cater to their strengths. In this drama though the characters they are supposed to play should have had more depth than what we've gotten on screen & their chemistry is just too weak. No matter how many fluffy moments we've had in 40 episodes, I just had a hard time immersing myself in their romance.

On the positive side there are no love triangles and the leads don't break up. Even the mandatory quarrel/conflict thing that lasted like 2 episodes was quite bearable. I also really liked the second couple.
As juvenile & silly as the portrayal of mental illnesses was in this drama, it's always nice to see this topic talked about wholesomely in an Asian drama.
The OST is very good, it's way better than anything else in this drama.

Most reviewers talk about how draggy it was, 40 episodes yada yada, I think the length was sort of okay, had the drama been just a little bit better written & less hastily filmed, then I think I would have been perfectly fine with the length. Though I must mention air pistol shooting is sure as hell boring to watch. It's like watching pre-fight stares in Dragon Ball Z.

I could talk about how this drama had countless minor annoyances, or that how stupid the villain characters were, but ultimately the biggest problem with the drama is that it's simply quite boring. It's not boring, because the plot drags, but rather it's just not very exciting. Seems like I'm being contradictory here, It's quite difficult to explain what I mean here. For example I really really like the forced cohabitation trope, the way how people adjust to that situation pleases me almost every time. Not in this drama though, the lack of chemistry & the lack of comedy too I guess makes it kind of lifeless.

TLDR: If you are REALLY REALLY bored you can watch this, but make sure you have watched GGS2 & Put Your Head on My Shoulder first.

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It's a relatively well done cliche-fest romcom!

This drama is full of silly & full of stupid, but somehow it has never become unbearably annoying for me. The comedy is good, the fluff is there, ultimately the entertainment is on a fairly high level. As bad and ridiculous as the plot is, it has never gotten in the way of the romance, or the comedy. There were some moments, when I felt that the writer is insulting my intelligence, that's why I decided to rate this lower than 10/10, but otherwise this is worth watching. Also this is safe for triangle haters to watch, just barely.

To say something good about the story, I suppose it's nice that all the adversities and BS roadblocks have gotten dealt with in minutes, there are no breakups either, it's a completely relaxing experience.

The actors have done a pretty good job, there were no major chemistry problems either I think. It's worth noting that the FL looks like an oldschool sports anime heroine. (wide angular face + ginormous eyes!) I found her very amusing most of the time and not just visually.

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Overflowing with cuteness, but takes two forevers to reach the good parts

The Good:
⌲The OTP's relationship (the timeless frenemies to lovers trope)
⌲ The cuteness
⌲ The fluff
⌲ FL's chubby face
⌲ ML's relatively good acting
⌲ The complete lack of breakups (there is one 10 minutes long quarrel)
⌲ The lack of convoluted problems
⌲ Great secondary couples
⌲ Great chemistry x3

The Neutral:
⌲ This is an extremely silly show.
⌲ It had an OST?
⌲ Archery things
⌲ I've seen far worse triangles, but it's not great.
⌲ Cainiao & Razer product placements. (the Cainiao ones were horrible + Cainiao sucks)
⌲ Cannot believe that FL did not spend 3 hours to open the locked box herself.

The Bad:
⌲ The first half of the drama is fairly weak (instead of the usual slow burn romance/friendship, the FL pretty much dates another guy & there is a lot of time wasted on irrelevant things.
⌲ The FL's parents' situation
⌲ FL's mother's remarriage makes 0 sense based on what we learned
⌲ FL starts to casually rent a luxury apartment after graduation
⌲ The dumbest separation plot ever (why would an archer need to train abroad etc)
⌲ The delusional jealous roommate & she has gotten a quick redemption ark as well.
⌲ The most useless coach ever
⌲ FL's stepsister served no purpose
⌲ The side couples should've had more screen time
⌲ As adorable as FL's juvenile personality was, some of her actions were incredibly stupid

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It's somewhere between almost boring and enjoyable.

The Good:
-The noona romance was great, at least when it finally started.
-The chemistry between the leads
-ML's airhead mom
-A "strong independent woman" character that actually works.
-The 12 years younger ML
-Non romance focused Asian office dramas almost always suck, this one is not great or anything, but better than anything else I've seen in an office focused cdrama.
-Even though there are quite a few nonsensical things, most of the time the show is pretty down to earth.

The Neutral:
-FL's low key horrifying mom
-The show has been extremely slow, borderline boring most of the time.
-The whole show is an advertisement for the electric car business. (It's not addressed, where the electricity comes from to charge them, just that they are AMAZING)

The Bad:
-The preschooler level solution that solved all the office problems in ep28.
-The juvenile & universally petty villains
-The invader in the last few episodes
-It took 3 forevers for the romance to start.

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Unreasonable in-law galore!

Five Again is probably the third highest rated family drama on MDL, after having enjoyed Once Again & My Father is Strange I have decided to give this one a go.
Overall I don't regret watching this show, but it's been quite difficult to reach the rolling credits. The previously mentioned two family dramas are much better, I guess it's not a coincidence those two hold the top two spot in this genre.

The Good:
- The wholesome main romance, office romance
- Shin Hye Sun & Im Soo Hyang
- Some of the child actors
- The happy ending
- All the couples were somewhat entertaining to watch.
- The production team has not gone to extreme lengths to please all demographics equally.
- The lack of real love triangles

The Neutral:
- The story is not that coherent. (There were some strange character adjustments)
- Even the kinder, seemingly more reasonable elders went pretty crazy at seemingly random times.

The Bad:
- The whole in-law situation. (this is by far the worst thing in this drama.)
- FL's cheating ex & the time wasted on his trashy new family
- Sung Hoon is not a good actor now, let alone in 2016 when this has been filmed.
- The secondary couples had too many minor breakups, there's been way too much push-pulling for me.
- The drama had 10 bad episodes in a row, following the marriage of the main leads.

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Good, but incredibly slow.

It's been like three years since I've watched Eternal Love 1. It was my first, or second cdrama too. Having seen Dream now I'm thinking that perhaps I've been looking at the original drama with rose tinted glasses. The reason being that Dream is incredibly SLOW and thinking back perhaps EL1 is just as bad in this regard.
The original novel is titled "Three Lives Three Worlds, The Pillow Book". I have not read it, but I'm guessing that all the reincarnated, or semi reincarnated lives witnessed in this drama originate from the novel and oh boy the author did not fail to exhaust this plot device. This is the single worst thing about the drama. Spending 10 episodes in the mortal realm & 10 in another realm living different, or semi different lives is not my definition of a fun story. Had this been a normal 24 episode drama I would have been okay with that, but it's 56 episodes. That's not even all, the show has many makjang-ish moments, it's way beyond what I would consider a frustration free viewing experience.


On a more positive note, there are a lot of amazing things in this drama as well.
In my opinion this is how a cultivation novel should be brought to screen. Sure the CG is pretty low fidelity, however all the daoist powers, formations, creatures and realms were portrayed pretty closely to how I imagined they would be after reading about them for many years. Even an ascension pool is featured!

Of course ultimately this is a romance drama & the OTP had great chemistry and - whenever the characters were aware of each other's identities- their romance was really entertaining to watch, with lots of comedy included.

The supporting cast is absolutely amazing.

The love triangles may be weak, but the secondary love interests caused a decent amount of angst and many misunderstandings. So the overall score is not that great, triangle-wise.

The audiovisuals were excellent, bad CG notwithstanding.

Overall I would say that I greatly enjoyed about half the drama, most of the other half was on the boring side of frustrating, however considering how memorable this drama is for me I think rating it at 8/10 is more than fair.

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Memorable drama with significant frustrations!

This show has a lot going for it, I do think it's overrated, but it's different from how Crash Landing is overrated. I can totally understand why someone would rate this at 10 stars. One of the biggest reasons I did not love this show that much is entirely subjective, parts of the show felt like the Korean society is airing its dirty laundry and I always had a difficulty watching that kind of content. Another less subjective reason is that the last 2-3 episodes were a mess. We had this healing romance thing with some witty comedy going on there was absolutely no need for the events that went down in the last 2 episodes, not cool! (They could have focused on the queer couple instead..)

The actors were great, the leads had okay chemistry. This is perhaps the first drama I've come across with Oh Yeon Seo in it, but I have not seen anything that would justify the hate that she's been getting for being a bad actress. The main romance & how they dealt with the mental issues was pretty great. Calling it realistic is a bit of a stretch, but I did not find this aspect particularly immersion breaking. It was a more authentic portrayal than in IOTNBO, but the difference is not nearly as much as the comment section would have you believe.

The drama is about as long as 8 regular kdrama episodes, I disagree with the people that wanted more episodes. Anything more and I could not have tolerated all the angsty bullshit backstory and the Women's Association anymore. I'm of the opinion that it's better to make dramas shorter than longer. The show could've been re-edited to 11 episodes & I would have given it a 9/10 rating. (Alternatively they could have filled up the time with Samantha+part timer stuff, but I recognize that would not have been popular in Korea)

In my review I may not have elaborated much on the positive points, but MfEO is certainly an extremely memorable drama for me. Perhaps I'll even rewatch it later, with some intensive fastforward button action it will probably be much more enjoyable.

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If a friend asked me what is the plot about, It would be pretty difficult to put the drama in a flattering light->
~
It's a Cinderella story with a mean mother in law. The ML's family has family relations so complex, that Mexican soap operas pale in comparison. There is a brother (who may, or may not really be a brother) who tries to compete with ML for the family business, he is also using underhanded methods to get his way. FL ends up in the hospital very frequently, some supporting characters also lose their babies..
~
So to summarize the plot is just bad. It's like a bad romance webnovel's plot. Despite that I still enjoyed this show a lot. In fact all episodes excluding 28-29 were very enjoyable for me. This is not a romantic comedy, but rather pure romance, so the plot should've mattered, but even though the story is clearly bad the scriptwriter did a great job with the dialog, I could just listen to the leads talk to each other forever, obviously it's not as good as in Before Sunset, but it's up there. Also the leads had great chemistry and uncountable beautiful scenes together. In fact the entire cast did a near flawless job, there are no acting related weak points in this one.

The main strength of the drama is how it portrays the progress of this beautiful romance. Everything is just so great about it. It's not just sugary fluff, though there is quite a lot of that, but rather it's really about two fated people meeting and getting to know each other slowly. This is romance with depth, not the typical shallowness that I'm quite used to in modern cdramas.
There is no real love triangle, no breakups, no misunderstandings and the leads communicate with each other very well. ♥

People talked the lack of kissing issue to death already. My take is that I think I would've been totally okay with just the one kissing scene early on, but for some reason the production team felt the need to torment the audience with countless "kiss the forehead, kiss the cheeks, kiss the hand and kiss whatever else you name it" scenes. I feel that there was zero need for that. I think just the one kiss scene plus the hugging scenes & their numerous bed scenes were more than enough skinship for my viewing pleasure.

The OST on the whole is not all that impressive, but I found the >Give You Give Me 给你给我 by Mao Bu Yi 毛不易< song quite pleasing to the ear.

The story of One and Only does not appeal to me, so I decided not to talk about that in my review. I think there is no need to watch OaO to enjoy this show.
I have a feeling that I will rewatch FaE eventually.

edit: I decided to rewatch the drama and it feels so incredibly SLOW now, even at double speed. I loved this drama, but rewatching it feels pointless.

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This drama is about 50% sweet romance, which I would rate at about 9/10 and 50% is about working at a publishing house, which is at most a 5/10. I realize that the end result being 8/10 doesn't really compute, but ultimately it comes down to me enjoying the romcom parts a lot & tolerating the business related things.

The romcom part is close enough to realistic cdrama perfection, I guess I would have loved a bit more comedy and faster progress in the OTP's relationship. The production team did a good job maxing out fluff & sugar, no complaints there. It's really nice how the bromance/weak live triangle thing was handled.
The leads are a match made in heaven, I found them a pleasure to watch throughout the entire drama. Also their love story is nicely written and even their short mini breakup felt well executed & timely. I'm extremely happy they did not do that in the final episodes, I hate that!
I did not like the second couple's story very much, there was too much push-pulling. I liked the characters & the actors though..
The cast in this drama is very good overall, right now I cannot recall a single weakly cast supporting character.
Also there was a crazed bitch character trying to take away ML from FL, she appeared nearing the end of the drama. I think that plotline was completely unnecessary, but it was still tolerable, she was rebuffed at 100% efficiency every time.

As for the life at a publishing house, it's easy to criticize many work related happenings, the story is not all that interesting and there are all kinds of villainous, or semi villainous characters. If I look at this having seen many carrier oriented dramas before, then it's still pretty okay. Corporate scheming & infighting are almost always total garbage in other cdramas, here it's not so bad. The biggest issue is that the adversaries had weird & meaningless motivations and they have often done really arbitrary illogical things. The characters themselves are okay, we don't quite reach the cartoon villain territory. The largest annoyance I've had is the biggest crisis plot in the drama, involving ghost writing claims & lots of unreasonableness. I think it would not have been very difficult to come up with a better, more realistic plot involving Asian cancel culture.

I think people criticizing Esther Yu's voice are in the wrong. However around episode 9-11 perhaps there were too many scenes involving childish temper tantrums & fake baby talk :p I don't think it's fair to blame the actress for that though!

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It's much better than Abyss!

This show is a little bit of a nice surprise, based on the comments i thought it would be terrible, nearly as bad as Abyss. Luckily nothing in the show annoyed me in a major way. Doom is a nice fluffy drama with some slight melodramatic vibe. I had a pretty good time overall, I enjoyed even some of the most criticized episodes.
I mean sure, the storytelling is a bit arbitrary and abrupt at times and the second leads do form a love triangle, but the (Beauty Inside) screenwriter has redeemed herself with giving me a nice, easily digestible ending and the second leads were a lot more entertaining than I thought they would be. The triangle did not devolve into a makjang-ish mess and it almost made sense, almost. it goes without saying that I found great that the main leads had no secondary romantic interests.

The two biggest problems I've found with the drama were the somewhat lacking chemistry between Park Bo Young and Seo In Guk and the lack of impact. The chemistry issue somewhat resolved itself by the time we reached the ending credits, it's obvious that the actors have grown used to each other. As for impact, let me explain. The theme of the show and the events that happened between the leads should've felt extremely impactful. Perhaps the writer failed with buildup a little & perhaps there were some acting hiccups in the delivery too, I don't know. The slow pace and all the gazing did not bother me at all, but I cannot help but feel that there was more than enough time to properly build up to those dramatic plot developments & make them less arbitrary, less immersion breaking.

As I have mentioned already the writing is less than flawless, but the frame of the story is really sound. It's properly written, it's not a cliche fest. The one big cliche plot the show had, the memory loss thing was well executed. Then again I always liked it when lovers reconnect after an amnesia situation. it's commendable that no third party with ulterior motives tried to take advantage of their amnesia.

The cast on the whole was really on point. Everyone was pretty great at their respective roles, except Kevin. Not the actor's fault, but good God they should have given him less screen time, nobody involved knew what to do with his character..
I loved the deity. Her difficult to explain decisions notwithstanding the actress did an absolutely phenomenal job, I enjoyed every second of her being shown on screen. (and she did have some great lines as well)

This drama has many similarities with Angel's Last Mission. That drama is better due to Shin Hye Sun's acting & the OST, but that's pretty much it, though that's admittedly quite a lot! Doom has a hugely better ending & a more balanced cast.
Another point this brings up how strong an effect music can have, when it comes to enjoyment of a drama and there Doom certainly falls a bit short.

The line about "writers being technicians" amused me to no end . It could be a fitting motto for the screenwriter. (especially if we consider The Beauty Inside too..)

TLDR: Doom is not the best drama I have ever seen, not even close, but it's been entertaining during the show's entire run and it has wrapped up in a nice way, so I'll go with 8/10.

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It's normal for fluffy romcoms to be weak in the story department, but in good fluffs the plot should just quietly get out of the way. However here it has gotten increasingly frustrating before we reached the final episode. Even the OTP relationship is not that great. I mean sure the leads were real pretty, the FL is especially super cute, but all the push-pulling up until the last two episodes was just too much for me to completely enjoy their romance.

Outside of the OTP stuff there is not a whole lot to like in this drama. She is an alien, but her powers are terribly useless most of the time, her powers even failed at providing consistent comedic relief. Her status as an alien does not really come into play up until the last 5? episodes (excluding the hormone thing) & even at that time it's only used for some real stupid stuff and mainly as a tool for the typical 2 years separation plot. The triangle may not be the be the most annoying I have ever seen, but it takes FOREVER to resolve and Xiao Qi even pretends to hesitate up until like the penultimate episode. The plot should've just focused on comedy and the cultural differences between the alien FL & ML, instead we have not only gotten the usual corporate bullshit plot, but it was even presented in a really juvenile way, with the evil stepmom & uncle acting like cartoon villains, then again there are much better Disney cartoon villains out there.. The father character was also just the typical controlling chairman type, fast forward buttoning all his scenes would have certainly improved my viewing pleasure.

The reason why I still ended up rating the drama above 5 is that the comedy in the early episodes was real nice. The alien FL going all handsy after getting high on his hormones was a pretty fun gimmick.

My Lover from the Star and My Amazing Boyfriend 1-2 are hugely better dramas in the same genre, there is no contest whatsoever.

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This drama is a simple, but fluffy romcom. It's entertaining enough, but a couple weeks from now I don't think I'll be able to recall much of the plot, then again is there really a plot?

There are two sets of subtitles for this drama, the machine translated ones on YouTube are unintelligible, the fan made subs are better, however even those are suspect, especially for the first 10-12 episodes. Some of the dialog does not make sense. Either the writer really tried to insult my intelligence, or the subber made up some lines..
The romantic progress of the OTP in the early episodes felt strange, almost jittery to me. That's why I brought up the issue of subtitles, because in Chinese the romance might just flow much more smoothly, at least in those early episodes, it was fine later on.

I think the leads had okay-ish chemistry, nothing extraordinary, but it was fine. In the comments the issue of age gap has been brought up. I don't see what the fuss is about it, in fact the actress is 2 years older than Eden Zhao. Yeah they made the FL appear juvenile here and there, but it's not like Eden Zhao looks like a mature individual or anything. I thought that they were pretty cute together, I enjoyed their fluff and I can easily digest this much sugar. It's nice that there was no breakup, nor did the secondary love interests have any chance, but I wouldn't necessarily call the triangle weak, see evil side bitch below..

The biggest problem in this drama is the evil side bitch and her minions. Her plots & schemes were ignored for way too long and her plotline is like 30% of the drama. Instead of the usual "FL wins these skirmishes & then the face slapping commences" situation, the characters just ignored her and "turned the other cheek" for like 15 episodes.

In a drama like this expecting realism is a stretch, so it's not surprising that they completely misrepresented how real voice acting work is produced, but I wasn't bothered too much. (I could be wrong too, since Chinese dubbing is typically so horrifyingly bad that who knows, they might just really do it like this)

ˇ^
Overall I just turned off my brain and I have been sufficiently entertained. It's best not too think to much while watching this drama, because once you do you will realize how toxic and weird these relationships are and then suddenly it's like 2/10 trash.

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