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My Roommate Is a Gumiho korean drama review
Completed
My Roommate Is a Gumiho
5 people found this review helpful
by Sinasina
Jul 23, 2021
16 of 16 episodes seen
Completed
Overall 7.5
Story 7.0
Acting/Cast 8.0
Music 7.0
Rewatch Value 7.5
This review may contain spoilers

It's decent, but perhaps somewhat overrated!

Obviously this is a very decent romcom, but it fell a bit short of my expectations already early on. Took me a while to figure out what is the biggest factor limiting my enjoyment and that is the ML, Jang Ki Yong. I've seen him before performing great in Seach: WwW, but in My Roommate Is a Gumiho he just doesn't work for me all that well. It's not even a chemistry problem really, it's just that the aloof gumiho character is something that he kind of failed to pull off in believable way. It might not even be entirely his fault, his character supposed to have A LOT of character progression and probably nobody on the production team cared to tell him to adjust his character a little.

At first I did not like Hyeri in this show either, but after a few episodes I got used to her character & it did not take very long for me to realize that she is carrying the drama, alongside the second couple. Hanna is always a pleasure to watch & she had great chemistry with her partner & their characters were also written pretty well, they had some great lines and admittedly quite a few cliche misunderstandings.

Most kdramas have annoying things that I can barely force myself to watch. This one is better in the sense that the writers did not milk every single conflict and misunderstanding to the max. There are two tropes in this drama that I have always liked, namely forced cohabitation and pretend amnesia. The amnesia thing with the indignant FL was especially fun to watch, the cohabitation could've been done better though, but it was still enjoyable and fluff filled.
I especially loved how nicely they resolved the "student dating the professor" scandal. I really thought that would get blown out of proportion..

The biggest problem I had with the writing is the flea-like second ML, it felt like he is a manhwa character from Extraordinary You, his need to keep confessing, confessing and confessing when they are "on the stage" would have been more funny if they played that certain soundtrack from that show during those scenes. As far as love triangles go this one is on the weaker side of average, since the FL never hesitated, but it could not have been more unnecessary and it only ended at around episode 14. Also the whole red string of fate storyline annoyed me to no end.

There were more minor annoyances than I'd like. Like how the leads separated for a short while THREE times in the drama. I mean sure it was at most for 30-40 minutes each time, potentially not even reaching weeks in the drama's timeline, but if only they could've forgone just one of them, I would be that much more content right now.

I'm not entirely happy with the ending. I love happy endings, but this one is WAY TOO SHORT with a lot of wasted potential. The writers could have explored how he is adjusting to being human at length. I would have preferred if they spent the last 2 episodes doing just that, rather than sticking to the foreshadowed melodramatic things that ended up happening, or almost happening. Just imagine how nice it could've been, when ML was about to announce that he is turning human, he could have just turned human, like there was really no reason to really push for that dramatic ending in this one. (the whole explanation why that needed to happen & the criteria for him specifically to become human were just ridiculous)

This show is obviously very similar to Goblin & Angel's Last Mission in many ways, but Goblin is like a hundred times better. ALM:L should be worse objectively, but I enjoyed that one much more for some inexplicable reason. I rated Goblin as a 10, ALM:L at 9, so with that in mind I can only give My Roommate Is a Gumiho a 7.5.
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