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My Strange Friend Season 2 chinese drama review
Completed
My Strange Friend Season 2
2 people found this review helpful
by Lyson
Mar 10, 2021
12 of 12 episodes seen
Completed
Overall 6.0
Story 5.0
Acting/Cast 7.5
Music 1.0
Rewatch Value 1.0
This review may contain spoilers

There was a plot to this, it was just very badly executed.

I think this story suffered from contrasting story perspectives behind the scenes. It may have been one person who came up with this story, but as it played out it felt like two people with different ideas were involved. On one side, there is the humorous somewhat pseudo-serious unraveling of quirky villainous events and odd supernatural powers, then on the other side there's a few cliche love stories. Unfortunately, these contrasting things are not well balanced, and that results in a messy narrative where the scenes go from following a linear plot with some action/comedy and superpower/bad guy reveals, to girls and guys falling in love (very quickly) and then lamenting over their poorly or barely developed relationships in every other scene.

The creator of this show, who clearly felt it was necessary to couple off everyone by the end, should have done a better job of managing the romance. They had 24 episodes, which was not much considering the intended plot idea of this show, and with those 24 episodes they should have chosen their romance moments more wisely. As it stands, the romance and filler side scenes took up so much screen time, that the actual plot wasn't tidy enough and fell by the wayside.

The acting of this show was okay, nothing special but for the roles they had, they did well enough. It was both funny and too obvious that Wang Yibo (Wei Yi Chen, the literal main character) was filled in with a body double in quite a few scenes (important and filler). I can only assume WY was not able to be present for filming, but I found it funny anyway. It honestly didn't change much or affect the story in any major way.

And I don't usually care much for the OST of any show, but this show had like two songs and they used them over and over which was really lame. Same with the wardrobe choices. It was fairly easy to tell which scenes were all filmed on which days by what the cast was wearing. There were also continuity issues. Also, I'm not sure why it's tagged for bromance, when Duan Mu Hao and Wei Yi Chen barely got along 90% of the time. Same with the strong friendship tag, makes no sense, by episode 24 I didn't get the feeling that the five of them were particularly close to each other, not even the couples. They felt more like five people who circumstantially ended up spending time together occasionally.

Eh, over all, I'd say it's okay to watch if you have some free time. The first half of the show is better than the second imo, and it was pretty funny in many places. I didn't have trouble watching it in the end, it wasn't a struggle to get through the episodes, it was just a bit jumbled up, but it wasn't horrible.
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