Love O2O (2016)

Refreshing Love Story

It was definitely better then I originally thought. I've been putting it off for months now, but I've recently been in the faze of watching online gaming dramas and Love O2O was of course in that list of dramas to watch. What really helped was that I've been listening to the soundtrack for a while, while not knowing that it came from this drama.

A couple things that I love about this drama is that there aren't any break ups between the two leads, to add to that there also aren't any misunderstandings that lead do bad outcomes. They have so much trust between the two which I love. Even before both of them getting together in real life Xiao Nai was protective of Bei Weiwei and would not let any other man chase after her.

The antagonist Female didn't create too many problems/conflicts for the two leads, which was refreshing to see. They always to have them to be very cruel to the Female Main Lead, but she just had a huge crush to the Male Main lead and surrounded herself with friends that made her misunderstand situations and make her overall jealous of the Bei Weiwei.

On another note I love Yang Yang so him being in this drama was an added bonus.

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Sweet but URGH those kissing scenes !

THE GOOD:
The drama is a fluffy one where everything is perfect, no misunderstanding, no unreasonable behaviours from the leads EVER.
Nice animations, interesting story stand point.

THE BAD :.. those kissing scenes... urgh. The female just stand there like a dead fish, looking like she's being stabbed by thousand needles every time he touches her. The male lead is good and knows how to kiss but i couldn't stand the apathy she displayed.
I much much prefered the secondary relationship which was a lot more natural and seemed a lot more real.
One thing that bothered me too is the high pitched female voices. Got irritating after a while.

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Missed this when first released, glad I came around to it now

I really enjoyed this drama, there's a ton of other reviews and loads of people have already said why it's such an amazing drama so I'll just take this opportunity to say there were a few problematic issues but they really didn't overshadow the good vibe that was the overall tone of the story.
Things I wish were different:

The FL actress lacked kissing experience and it showed, her kisses never got any better. Her first kiss looked like a real first kiss, but by the third or fourth one she should have been responding and moving her lips too or at least puckering them a little ffs.

There were WAY too many mentions of weight, eating too much, being fat ect. NONE of the characters had a spare ounce on their bodies.

The overwhelming attention paid to people's physical beauty. Our FL and ML both had good personalities that would have made them wonderful partners even if they looked average or unattractive, but somehow because they were both the MOST beautiful people in the world apparently, everyone would stop to tell them how good looking they were. That's a little weird.

Several times various characters would belittle someone for not being pretty "enough" though who gets to determine that is random consensus?

There were several problematic mean girl characters who never really faced any consequences for their behavior, they were promptly ignored and forgotten by the leads (as they should be) but they also should have paid the price for their bad behaviors and they never really got called to account for that.

Despite these 4-5 things, EVERYTHING else was amazing about this drama. Relationship free of drama, best friends that stick through thick and thin, intelligent and fun? Check, check, check, and CHECK! Amazing show. Absolutely watch it if you haven't yet.

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I thought it would never end!

Don't shoot me, this is just my personal opinion, but what did I just watch? There were a couple of things that I liked about this drama, but truthfully it irritated me no end. I don't actually think I should have rated it as high as I did, but it did have some redeeming value for me. I watched this show a couple of years ago and just watched it again after watching You Are My Glory and loving Yang Yang.

What I liked:
1)Yang Yang - he's better in YAMG because he's grown as an actor, but here he was very cute. He doesn't show a lot of emotion, but there is something so magnetic about him, I kept watching, waiting for his smiles. He knows how to do good kissing scenes. Unfortunately, it looked like he was kissing a piece of wood here. I blame the actress or the way she portrayed the character. In the kissing area, she's of the dead fish variety, until the final episode.
2)Good CGI for the gaming.
3)The Hao Mei/KO storyline.
4)Episode 30 - they turned up the heat in this episode!
5)His friends were funny.

What I didn't like:
1)Zheng Shuang as Wei Wei (both the actress and the character). She had the wide-eyed look down to a science. She is a stunning woman, but she didn't display much range in this role. He facial expression pretty much stayed the same the whole time. She was treated unfairly (a lot) but her expression never changed. Very poorly done kissing scenes. And her character? She was supposed to be this brilliant computer science girl, but once she got with Xiao Nai, she was just an accessory hanging on his arm. Up until they met in person, she was this cool young woman, the type that other women admire and aspire to be. They met and it was as if her IQ immediately took a nosedive. She couldn't look at him, she was doing all this stupid internal dialog, she was behaving in a silly manner (was it supposed to be cute? It wasn't).
2)The dubbing. This is always a problem for me in Chinese shows, but it seemed especially bad here. I swear, the FL and at least three of the other females were dubbed by the same person with the same high, squeaky, breathy, irritating voice.
3)Too much gaming. I get it, it's a show about gaming, but come on!
4)Her friend group, especially Er Xi. They behaved in a juvenile matter all the time, chasing each other around, tickling each other, etc.
5)The character of Er Xi. She gets special mention because of how much she irritated me. The high dubbed voice, the overacting, the yelling, the immaturity. Ugh!
6)I didn't come into this show expecting realism, but the way that everyone fawned over Xiao Nai all the time was absolutely ridiculous. Women running toward him and standing around him talking about how handsome he was. He comes into a room and everyone takes out their phones to take pictures of him in all his handsomeness. Conversations cease, staring begins, and the thesaurus comes out to come up with new words to describe how handsome he is. There is one scene in particular that stands out. They are trying to take graduation pictures when he shows up. No one can pay attention to what they are supposed to be doing because they are all enthralled by him. The photographer says, "Handsome guy, go stand behind that tree." That pretty much sums it up, If he's in the vicinity, he must be fawned over.
7)Mean girls. A plethora of them, each one more mean and scheming than the other. They were portrayed as "the popular girls", but with the way they badmouthed Wei Wei to her face and to everyone around them, there was NO ONE to stand up for Wei Wei and tell them to shut up? It was verbal bullying at a very high level.
8) ASMR. We were privy to EVERY indrawn breath, surprised breath, and sigh of Wei Wei.

I would love, love, LOVE to find a Chinese romance that I didn't have to use the fast forward button so much. The concept of the romance was cute, but not executed that well, and there was SO MUCH boring stuff to get through!

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Where should i start? This is not a light and fun drama if you are someone who likes depth in their dramas.
The male lead is arrogant, bossy and all around idiot in my personal opinion.
Kisses are cringe as always.
The female lead is supposed to be smart from the synopsis but is actually a pushover.
Most of the characters are shallow.
Oh and despite dating for two years ,the main lead has not hit it and has not cheated either. I mean ??????.
How i finished it Lord only knows. That and I was bored.
This was my second Chinese drama and I hated it. I am wondering if the main leads are all around shitty actors. Clearly they don't know how to choose projects.

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Where'd the plot go?

I was pretty excited about Love O2O. The idea of merging MMO culture with Asian dramas is exciting. The first few episodes focus heavily on two opposing ingame power couples, famous in their generic Chinese MMO and renowned for their prowess in PvP. It also draws parallels to the real world, wherein the main character Bei Wei Wei attends college and struggles with her renown as a campus beauty. It's a pretty awesome premise.

But like most Asian dramas that have awesome premises, the show-runners just couldn't resist the temptation to gradually turn Love O2O into every run-of-the-mill rom com. Over time the game is featured much less and more focus is given to real-world character relationships and endless inconsequential scenes where side characters act like toddlers.

And the show couldn't even do that right. Once Wei Wei and her emotionless cardboard cutout of a love interest get together in real life (not really a spoiler since the show screams it at you from the beginning), the plot comes to a screeching halt.

I don't mean "comes to a halt" like most dramas do. We're not dealing with an endless barrage of scenes where nearly-identical Asian actors look constipated in slow motion for five minutes while a power ballad plays loudly about "loving you" and/or "missing you."

I mean the show just comes to a halt. I dropped the show at 18 episodes, so I don't know if it picks up or not, but after 5 episodes of absolutely -NOTHING- happening, I had to drop it.

It doesn't help that Wei Wei isn't an interesting main character. I don't know if the actor playing her just sucks, but Wei Wei doesn't emote much. She sounds friendly, emotes very carefully and very precisely, but there's just nothing beyond that. No character to be seen behind the friendly voice and unchanging face. An endless void lies beyond her eyes.

Her love interest is no different. He has no flaws, no personality, nothing. The relationship between Wei Wei and Forgettable Male Drama Lead No. #75831 is so boring. Nothing happens. Nada. Nothing. Nich! I was questioning whether or not Netflix was looping the same five minutes for five hours. What a complete waste of time.

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FM was horrible, at least to me

So I've dropped this one because I couldn't stand the female lead. Her acting was horrible, at least to me, and it just made me cringe too much.

The worst part were the kissing scenes where the ML tried really hard and you can see that he could be a great kisser (acting vise) if only he had another partner, but the female lead kept her mouth shut like a statue. It just felt really weird to watch him try to kiss her, and as hard as he tried the harder she shut her mouth. Omg, I cringed so hard.

I also didn't care much for the main plot either. It didn't really catch my interest. But that could be easily forgiven if only there was a little bit of chemistry between the main leads.

I think that the ML was good and I will definitely watch other dramas with him, but the FL was really bad in my opinion. I am not sure why this drama has such high rating, I can only think that the fans of ML gave it high rating because they love him. Other than that I can't find any good reasons.

I dropped the drama at ep 21 cos I just cringed to much at the FL character.

I wouldn't recommend it because there are other dramas that are way better.

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I don't know how to explain this but I hated that they made her say her lines on set but then made her record her lines and put it over her voice. There was just so much echo. While the others voices were completely normal, the girl just had this extremely annoying voice.

YangYang never had expressions on his face. Even my dead fish had more expressions then him.

The show was extremely cringy. I had to pause it like every 2 minutes just to take a deep breath and calm myself down because of the cringiness.

Absolutely no plot at all. I felt like a 5 year old produced and wrote the lines for this show. This drama, well no, you can't even call it a drama since it literally doesn't have any at all. This show was just so boring, I had to force myself to watch the whole series, because I thought that maybe the plot would be later in the show, but no. I just completely wasted like 1 month of my time watching this. (yes I do take alot of time to watch them because of school)

Definitely DON'T WATCH IT. Don't know how this got such a high review .

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SUPER OVERRATED. This drama should not have been as popular/well reviewed as it is

Probably like many of you, I found this drama when I was new to C-Dramas and wanted to find recommendations. Thankfully I watched a couple other dramas before this one, or this would've turned me away from C-Dramas completely. I felt like this drama is older (probs male) producers trying to pander to teenage girls by incorporating the not-mainstream/stereotypically male component which is RPG gaming and IT. Basically, it's the producers using the 'I'm not like other girls' and 'rich cool smart guy falls in love with ordinary but smart girl' tropes until they drive it off a damn cliff or something.

First some positives:
1. I think the secondary characters were super interesting when they weren't used as devices to uplift and showcase the main characters' competence. I didn't mind the roommates' interactions and
2. The gaming and tech elements are unique. It had potential to become super interesting had it been fleshed out or been about the differences we interact in-game and in real life; how in-game romances transcend into a real, meaningful relationship.
3. Music was okay. It didn't stand out, but it wasn't bad either.

What I didn't like:
1. As much as the drama wanted to tell us 'girls can do gaming too!' and 'girls can do computer science and IT too!' what it showed was a whole other story. Throughout gaming events, Wei Wei was constantly sidelined or delegated to fight mostly the weak females. The game/competition elements made her rely so much on Xiao Nai. Putting the low-key sexism aside, wouldn't that make the event super boring for one half of the players? Why on earth would I want to watch my partner complete the event meant for two people to work together? I'd wanna play too dammit. And Wei Wei is praised more as this beautiful-looking person rather than a highly intelligent one. I felt that the show is telling me Wei Wei is the only female with brains and intellect that can live up to her appearance, which is the exception. All the other females were lacking either intelligence or beauty. Xiao Nai too. He's a rich, genius, handsome, and stoic guy from the get-go and remains that way throughout the whole series; while his roommates are portrayed as inferior to him (they even said they'll just blindly follow Xiao Nai. tf?) this aint it man.

2. There was no plot. First of all, online romance does not immediately equal real life romance (I feel like the producers were so out of touch with this one). This led me to not being able to buy into their romance. The series didn't really progress or develop their relationship much once they got together shortly after meeting irl for the first time, which is why I dropped this drama.

3. This resulted in acting that was so flat, lacked any chemistry, and dragging & repetitive scenes.

All in all, I think this drama backed themselves into a corner when they decided that their main leads were going to be perfect unrealistic human beings and that they were to be constantly portrayed as such. There was no room for them to grow, and no room to show how they love each other other than PDA. This drama prioritised superficiality above all else and I am kinda disappointed in humanity bcs we all just fell for it.

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This drama seriously gave me a run for my time. I became so obsessed with this drama that it basically took over my life. I would want to rush home from work to watch it. I would rave about it to everyone that would listen. I couldn't pin point why this drama was so good at first, but then I realized its because it is different from everything out there. There is no plot twist, huge conflict, an annoyingly useless lead, or a character that is hateful due to pitiful reasons.

This drama is very chill compared to everything that is out there. It is a pure love story with little bits of dramatics mixed in. The OTP is meant to be shipped and it shows (there is no one else to be rooting for). The story rolled nicely and there was no terrible cliff hangers. You just wanted to watch the next episode because of the warm feeling every episode gave you. There was a good amount of laughter, romance, and small issues in each episode. It is a must watch if you're tired of characters possibly dying or going crazy at every turn.

PLUS, it just made you giddy inside EVERY SINGLE TIME the OTP appeared on screen. Give it a try if you're looking to relax and feel warmness brewing inside of you.

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