This drama is a hard one to rate. For sure there are flaws, but I don’t believe it truly deserves all the negative reviews it is receiving. Maybe because it was not well advertised and then started off much more stronger but then fell apart, that missed potential and disappointment is showing up in the reviews.
Unfortunately this drama suffered from what I see happen way too frequently in Chinese and Korean dramas: awesome actors and ideas ruined, by no fault of their own, from terrible script writers and plot points. What a sad waste.

All the actors did a good job really. Our ML is not usually my cup of tea, but in this drama he was fantastic and believable. He carried some really hard nuanced and emotional scenes. I hadn’t really noticed the FL before, but I found her natural beauty and acting much more charming than many of the overly stiff and perfect looking female leads today. Yes, like many others I was much more invested in their past lives plot. Together they had great chemistry, nuance, and really sold me on the angst. Now why did they have terrible fish kisses circa old Chinese dramas? Again, blame it on the director.

Which brings me to my last point. This drama really reminds me of older dramas made in the early to mid 2000’s. It felt a bit dated in some good and bad ways. The bad? The music style, questionable angst, some stiff kisses, and not able to entirely carry off then tie up all the senseless, terrible things that happen to our characters.

It is not easy to pull of this genre and some older Kdramas did it much better than others. Those dramas that did it well were the full package and have stood the test of time, but others crashed and burned hard. I think if this drama was released 10 years ago it would’ve done better than now, issues and all.