Yawn.

I tend to love conflict free cdrama romcoms. This show however is not a comedy at all, but as it happens I also like slow-burn melodramatic shows, as long as they are low on the makjang & that certainly applies to this one. So why is it that my rating stopped at 5.5? Well, in my opinion this is a fairly boring show overall, I fell asleep multiple times watching it. The romance is basically a Hallmark tier love story. Yes the actors had pretty good chemistry & looked great together in the second half of the show, though I do think they took their sweet time to get comfortable around each other, thus the early episodes were far worse than the later episodes because of that reason. I've been told repeatedly that me finding the romance boring in this one is because I wanted more conflicts & love triangles and whatnot. I assure you all that is not the case, this drama is just really mediocre compared to some of the better recent and similarly conflict free cdrama romance stories. (for example "Meet Yourself" or "Hi Venus")

If I look at things outside of the OTP romance, the drama is really really annoying on multiple levels. It feels like it was funded by the police/government to help find partners for officers and perhaps just to aid with recruitment, as such there is all kinds of social engineering in the show.
Also the amount of patriotism presented is on another level. My tolerance is very high in this regard, because American shows tend to have a lot as well and I grew up watching those, but good grief, there is really an immense amount here..
One other thing I hated how the writers dealt with the -toxic- fathers. Basically both of them decided to just suddenly stop being toxic & that's it. (this makes literally 0 sense based on the plot up to that point)

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There were some amazing acting performances in this drama. I've always been a big fan of Gong Hyo Jin and she has been amazing here, she has shown (once again) that she has quite the acting range. The rest of the actors were great too, especially Hyangmi, but there are no -acting related- weak points really. It's worth noting that this is a very pretty show, the cinematography is just excellent.

Onto the bad stuff:
One of the biggest problems with this drama is that they've extended it to 20 episodes, all the filler stories that were used to fill up the additional 4 episodes were related to things I usually don't enjoy watching in a kdrama, namely Confucianism crap and an incredible amount of melo. I'm fine with watching melodramatic scenes in general, but this was just way too much, for way too long. There is also a shift in writing after XYZ's death, it's like all my favorite things in the show got dialed down to the bare minimum. Some characters got some personality & intelligence adjustments mid way and then in the finale everyone suddenly changed their world views for a super fast ending that was quite underwhelming. To sum it up the pacing is just off. The disadvantages of live filming were on a honking display here. Oh I almost forgot, the 30 million won thing, I have no words for how stupid that was..

So why do I still rate the show at 7.5?
Well, I enjoyed the first half (more like 2/3rds), there was quite a lot of "Monogatari style" dark moody, but funny dialog. The romance was great up to the point when Yongsik's mother started interfering with them. The balance was perfect between romance,comedy and mystery too up until XYZ died. Even though I'm not happy with the last 6~ episodes, I would feel bad to give a show this memorable a score any less than this.

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Watching the first 3 double episodes I was thinking that this show was hugely underrated, it was insanely fun. However as the story progressed I started to feel bored & by the time I reached the end there were more negatives than positives. The love triangle isn't good, the leads did not really have a good chemistry, once they started a more cordial and friendly relationship. Also the writers kind of given up on the timeloops quite early on and instead we delved into office politics & corporate in fighting. I'm yet to enjoy office politics in a kdrama and the focus shifted onto this way too much. The last few episodes were a clichefest with a lot of "noble" intention. Even though there is a happy ending, it's the rushed 10 minutes long unsatisfying kind.

Thumbs up for it being a time travel drama that does not feature any Joseon hats.

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Enjoyable, but perhaps a wee bit overrated. (and the Love Triangle is fairly strong)

I've been had. I've read in the comment section that the love triangle is not an issue & so I started watching this with no reservations, unfortunately that is definitely not he case. The triangle is - at least from my perspective - pretty bad, not only is it present throughout most of the drama, but also the plot devices used to keep it going were not great. Okay, it's objectively not horrible compared to some of the worst offenders, like it's nowhere near Jealousy Incarnate bad. Yes, the FL never hesitates about whom she wants, but her rejections were most of the time half-hearted & she got teary eyed due to the second ML way too many times. I couldn't even FF button his scenes, because the second ML is just to integral to the plot.
I'm guessing that people that like this trope would love this though..

Okay with that out of the way, I think the second biggest problem with the drama is that it's quite draggy at times, the same misunderstanding is recycled over and over to make it far longer than it should've been. Also the plot is not very polished or coherent, there are some really weird shifts in the story. For example how we transition from e27's cliffhanger to e28 makes less than zero sense to me. The corporate embezzlement/laundering case in the final episodes was quite bad as customary, but I've seen worse.

So why is it still 7.5? Well, the things that everyone else is saying are true. Both couples had great chemistry, the acting is great, the comedy is on point as well. Also the macro plot is pretty amazing. Annoyances aside it's fantastic how they handled the dream situation. Before watching this I was totally prepared to talk about how cdrama time travel shows always have to be dreams, novels, or just imaginations due to recent changes in Chinese censorship guidelines, but they've really killed it here. They way how the dream ended is just about perfect. The way we transitioned back to real life & how they kept the fantasy going was also pretty great. (I mean While You Were Sleeping is a hundred times better, but for a contemporary Chinese drama this is really pushing the limits of what's possible to be shown on TV) I've recently complained about how in Business Proposal they've cut out my favorite part of the webtoon and the Asian drama gods have heard my plea, because that exact plot is here in this drama. (It's about the FL wanting to turn fake into real & pursuing the ML real hard) The second couple was pretty fun, though their story is 1:1 Toradora.

The OST is not bad, at least as a completely separate entity from the drama. However I think the tracks often did not fit the drama's mood & the mixing is just strange.

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Relatively well written thiller, sponsored by RAZER©. (only minor spoilers below)

Okay so 8/10, objectively this should probably be worse, but for a CHINESE crime/thriller drama this is quite incredible, the best that I've seen thus far. Most of the plot is cleverly written and the acting ensemble is up there with the very best cdramas. Also it's extremely laudable that they did not try to explain the magic, how the time travel/loop aspect works, that always leads to unsolvable plotholes that they've nicely sidestepped here.

Speaking of plotholes there are quite a few non time travel related ones though. For instance, it's established that ML's parents exists & also that FL has a "home" to call. Does it make any sense that the police would not rally those people, not even once in any of the loops? Also why was the innocent truck driver held responsible?
The young hot headed police officer really behaved out of character in the last episodes.
Another nitpicky point is related to how the police attempts to stop the bus with cars pushing up against it with their tires spinning so fast that smoke is generated, that's not how physics works in real life :P
I could also talk about how incredibly competent the Chinese police is in this drama. L, L2 & their old master is nothing compared to the reaction time & intellect some of these policemen have. Normally I don't particularly care if Chinese nationalism, or some sort of political agenda shows up in a cdrama, but this was way too much for poor old me.

Besides the nitpicky problems I've highlighted above, I have three major problems why this is not 10/10 amazing.
The first is that in the first 5-6 episodes the police interrogations are way too draggy & it's annoying how the leads willingly walk into them without a plan. (We dutiful citizens must inform the police!)
The second is that the perpetrator backstory is utter garbage, in a bad kdrama-like fashion and not only is it garbage, but also an entire episode is wasted on it.
The third and final thing is that there is no peace for the leads, there is not much intermission. They had the option to chill, to mentally recover between more active, traumatizing loops, at least before they have become aware of a certain issue & they've not taken it once. In other timeloop stories those intermissions are often the best parts. (for example Jack kissing Carter in Stargate SG1 and many other intermission scenes in that episode)

As silly as the ending is & as much as it's not exactly the ending I've wanted, I enjoyed it very much despite how juvenile I felt it being. (I wanted the leads to produce some 40 minute long fluff after everything's over)

Based on reading other reviews before starting this show, I thought that this would barely have any romance. The reality defied my expectations, the romance is actually quite excellent here. Not only is it great how the OTP is bonding during literal life and death situations, but also their progress felt really natural. There was no silly courting & silly confessions, they have just become each other's everything after all that they've gone through. (It goes without saying that there is no time for a love triangle)

Some of the supporting characters were pretty mundane, borderline boring, but "Lu Apostle of Cat, Conqueror of Asthma, Chosen One of the Light, Di" is the absolute best drama side character in the history of dramas.
Then again it would have been way more unrealistic to have 8 super interesting individuals randomly show up on a random (or not so random!?) bus ride.

The rewatch value is low, because there is not all that much fun to be had after completely knowing the plot.

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This is not the worst thing I have ever seen from beginning to end, but it comes pretty close. If I look only at the main romance, then that's a decent 6/10 guilty pleasure with a minor twist, where the woman is the mysterious aloof one, not the other way around. The problem is that there is just too much padding. Later on there are episodes, where the main characters have less than 1 minute of screen time. Overall the part that I wanted to watch took up about 10% of the drama.
Even though the -extremely pretty- actors are okay in terms of acting skill, overall the characterization in the drama is just terribly bad. Most characters couldn't be any more 2 dimensional, I mean sure this is a fluff cdrama so I did not expect too much depth, however the writing is beyond terrible. Each storyline outside of the main romance and perhaps the hacker girl's stuff is dull, boring and uninspiring. The entire drama feels incredibly sloppy. It's like every second scene should have been reshot, but the director decided that it was "good enough" let's go home early today, which is a pretty big shame, considering that the production quality otherwise is quite good, they used high quality camera gear, hired a skilled cinematographer & the 2-3 original soundstracks were also up to standard.
There is also the issue of subtitles. The machine translated subs are enough to understand the story, but there are many fine nuances lost and there were times, when I couldn't make a sense of it.

I'm a bit baffled by some of the other reviews, perhaps ppl are just a bit too mesmerized by beauty? ^
If you are interested in watching a fluffy Chinese romcom look elsewhere. A Love So Beautiful, O2O, Put Your Head on My Shoulder are all infinitely better in almost every way.

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it's not in the same league with Hospital Playlist.

The Good:
-Seo Hyun Jin
-The show has charm.
-There is no love triangle.
-The head nurse and her ?ex-husband?

The Neutral:
-The romance is alright, but there is very little of it.
-It's not a very well researched medical drama
-The overdramatized surgeries
-I could just not warm up to Teacher Kim.
-Hospital Playlist is just a thousand times better in almost every way.

The Bad:
-There is not much plot beyond going from emergency to another emergency, but what plot there is, it is just pretty bad.
-The hospital politics
-In Bum is a somewhat poorly written character
-Surgeons do crazy non surgery related med things.
-The silly main villain
-There were way too many unreasonable BS characters.
-Yoo Yeon Seok's acting (It's crazy how much he has improved since this drama finished airing)
-The big cheating/drunk driving reveal never really happened.
-Seo Jung's PTSD faded into nothing. "It's alright, the audience won't remember!"

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I feel that I wasted my time!

The Good
⌲ The main romance is alright, though there is not a whole lot of it.
⌲ The friendships
⌲ Muscular Teacher Watermelonface
⌲ No love triangles (though as I said, there is not that much romance to begin with)
⌲ Chae Soo Bin did not disappoint.

The Average
⌲ FL's family (heavy character adjustments here)
⌲ Tak's backstory
⌲ The underutilized Min Do Hee
⌲ Kang Daniel was bad, but I expected worse for his first appearance as an actor, he is not totally hopeless like Lee Minho.
⌲ The cleaning lady

The Bad
⌲ The crime/procedural part of the story is full of intelligence insulting plots. (Windows password 4 digits, copy protected video, lack of food during boot camp & countless others)
⌲ Corruption in kdramas is always portrayed in a really weird way, here it's worse than usual.
⌲ The first three episodes are about abuse by older students, this is no fun to watch, should not have wasted more than 30 minutes on that.
⌲ Assault is a crime, even in South Korea, Uhm Hyuk should be in prison not training cadets.
⌲ There is no satisfying conclusion, the ending is just whelming.
⌲ Dae Il's random romance with Hana
⌲ *'s meaningless death, I did not even feel sad, just confused.
⌲ The cadets investigating stuff.

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40% sports, 60% romance

The Good
⌲ The top tier noona romance
⌲ The nice romantic plot in general
⌲ The chemistry between the leads
⌲ The lack of breakups
⌲ The high jumps were filmed very well, they looked very authentic to my eyes.
⌲ Jumping was more interesting than I thought it would be.
⌲ There is a lot off fluff.
⌲ The realistic progress of their relationship
⌲ ML is acting immature even for his age, but it's refreshing that Lou Na just likes younger clingy guys, it's not the usual 30 year old noona with the personality of a high school junior formula..

The Average
⌲ The love triangle (it's not bad, but the sML had a few rather annoying scenes)
⌲ Chinese sports dramas tend to be borderline unwatchable for me, this one may be better than usual, but the sports aspect is at best average. (training and coaching are rather strange..)
⌲ The supporting cast is rather numerous, but most of them faded into the background.
⌲ ML's mom (She is bad, but has so little screen time that I found her character tolerable)
⌲ Shi Yin (token -pointless- love interest for ML that just gave up without wasting too much screen time)
⌲ This may be a romantic comedy, but the comedy is not exactly fantastic.

The Bad
⌲ The party with the childhood photos
⌲ Li Ge (the drama could've been 4 episodes shorter & I would've rated it at 9 without this character existing)
⌲ The discipline switching, twice
⌲ Stealing a kiss from a sleeping woman..
⌲ Episode 24 is horribly bad. (rushed scandal BS to chase away the talented athlete, I'm surprised this passed the censors tbh)
⌲ The ending is less than whelming. (rushed happy ending following a senseless long distance thing)
⌲ The cinematography is fine, but the editing is horrid. (brightness, contrast, color grading)
⌲ Some things about sports & athleticism were extremely poorly researched, or just forcefully adjusted to fit the frame of the story.

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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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The most important things to know about this show are that the leads are really cute together and they have great chemistry. Also the themes shown in the show are nicely balanced, the drama is about 50% romance, 15% music, 15% gaming, 5% school life. I enjoyed the noona romance, the OTP relationship may not be the deepest I've seen on TV, but the apparent shallowness did never reach my nerve threshold (unlike in Intense Love). The fluffiness is on point and entertaining throughout most of the drama. The comedy/fluff ratio is a bit tilted, meaning that the drama could've been funnier, but still there was sufficient amount of comedic relief.

The story is on the weak side of mediocre. I enjoyed how they dealt with the leads realizing what each other's real identities were, the writers did a reasonable job there, but there is not much else to praise about the writing. It feels like most of the plot follows a template, there is not much innovation or creativity here. Luckily in a romcom the story is not that important, if the annoyances are low & that is the case with Love Scenery, at least for the most part.

The creators could've done a much better job at making me believe the gaming scenes are real, if they had just made the characters wear vr glasses & haptic gloves, then I would've been okay with all the things they supposedly have done in game.
Still compared to O2O the gaming scenes are HUGELY better here, I did not need to use the fastforward button, despite the unrealistic presentation.

It's nice that despite FL working in the entertainment industry they've mostly forgone the typical events that go down when actresses/idols fight each other for resources, fame and whatnot. Sure there was a little of that, but the conflicts were always resolved in a civilized way and even the fans/netizens mostly behaved in the drama. ^

I was not blown away by any of the songs, but overall the OST is certainly above average with a decent amount of variety.

I'm okay with Ma Shen Shen's story. I've read in the comments how people hated this character and blaming drama logic for her unrealistic behavior. I've seen a similar case in real life, so it's not like people never break down in such a manner after a breakup, it's rare but it can actually happen, it's not too immersion breaking. As for her relationship with Sun Bin Yu, I think it was pretty fun to watch. I mean sure it was a bit draggy before the last 5 episodes, but still I had some minor laughs and I was quite happy for them by the time we reached the last episode.

The worst part of the drama is without a doubt FL's secondary love interest. I had the impression that he was not even miscast, but probably the writers wanted to intentionally frustrate the viewers with this creepy uncle character. I am not adverse to age gaps, but the 25 years? age gap between the actors looked quite jarring. Anyway all the mini plots he's been involved in were bad, or borderline annoying. I guess his relationship with the OTP can be considered a pretty standard love triangle. He does not have success and FL does never hesitate or anything like that, but still a woman that wouldn't know what's going on with her so called friend's advances certainly does not exist in real life. To sum it up his relationship with FL is just an overused cliche, made that much worse with all the creepy uncle with a mustache thing. It was almost like a teacher hitting on a 16 years old high school girl.
Now that I think about it, I don't think I have ever seen an FL call someone other than the ML ge or gege and me not ending up hating that character.


The 8/10 rating may be a bit high, but I think this was a pretty entertaining fluff romcom, perhaps even a rewatch is in the cards, eventually.

edit: I ended up watching the drama again. In retrospect I may have underestimated the story a little, I enjoyed it quite a bit more now, calling it mediocre is uncalled for. On the other hand Uncle Ulterior Motive has annoyed me even more than before, despite my best efforts to fast forward button his scenes.

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I'm extremely surprised that this is getting so much praise, nearly as surprised that I did not drop this early on around EP 4-5. I think my biggest gripe is that up till episode 7-ish there was nothing but pain & suffering. I realize that this is a melodrama, but in order for me to feel the value of this genre, in order to feel a sense of loss the characters' lives need to be introduced before everything went to oblivion for them. I'm giving this a 5 instead of a 1, because the main leads had great chemistry and the acting on their part was outstanding and their romance was well written too I guess. The cinematography was decent & the OST is quite memorable too. Usually I like the 16 episode format, because the writers don't have a chance to overdo fillers & they can just freely use their best ideas to full effect, there is no need to hold back for further seasons, but here I felt that 16 episodes were too condensed for all this borderline sadistic writing. That's not all, there were so many characters I felt apathetic about. Mr Shifty-eyes Architect, or that CEO? that always shouts, why did I have to see his pointless attempts at romance, just why? I like Kang HanNa, but her character made little sense to me, so I guess her acting talent might've been wasted here.
I've been reading the comments under the final episode & everyone was like "Thank God it's a happy ending, like this it's 10/10" etc, but I'm just not that forgiving. Literally 5 minutes of moderate happiness before the ending credits isn't enough to forget all the bad things, feels like the writer was pressured into changing her originally planned ending too.. Naturally there is no way that I would ever rewatch this drama. On the upside watching good melos mess me up for quite a while, but since I did not become emotionally invested in this one I'm already over it :-)

edit: For reasons unknown I kept missing the show, so after rewatching it I liked it a lot more than for the first time, so changing my rating to 6.5 stars. :-)

edit2 (a year later): I'm looking at this review that I've written and it feels surreal that I gave this 5/10 the first time around. Changing the score once more! .-)

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The cutest slipper commercial in the universe!

The biggest problem with this drama is that the part I wanted to watch starts only at episode 8~. Until then there were quite a few uncomfortable moments, due to some really weird casting and cinematographic choices. The young FL is supposed to be a 14 year old, but the actress playing her is like a second grader in elementary school, her interactions with ML were nothing bad in terms of plot and script, but the suggestive lighting & framing is really really weird at times. (I had a hard time getting past this part tbh)

Every romance drama has some flair & flavor to give a little contrast to all the sugar. This one has very few scenes outside of the leads' personal world, but what little there is, tends to be rather boring, or just plain bad. (concerns of ML's parents, ML's family things, ML's stalker, stalker's boss friend, workplace things)

Another minor gripe I have with the drama is how much FL is treated like a teenage princess in her relationship. This seems to be a recurring theme in cdrama roms these days, but I'm just not a fan.

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So why is it still 8/10?

Well, we watch romantic comedies for the actual romance and that is really absolutely out of this world good in this one. The chemistry, the visuals, the mood, the acting, the red ears, well really everything pertaining to romance (well other than the princess thing) is 10/10 awesome. I always understood why Lusi is touted by many as THE romcom queen, but personally I did not like a single one of her dramas due to various reasons. I feel she is far better in this one than in anything else before & there is some real acting chops here, beyond just being a top of the line comedienne. (and ML of course is the perfect partner)

I too found the brother-sister relationship very amusing & wholesome, but I don't think it's possible to have such a brother in real life. :-) (I'm talking about FL's real blood related brother here of course.)

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Avoid!

Imagine the worst plot you possibly can & then spend a month to find more ways to make it even worse. That is the plot of Lie to Love. Romance could have still saved the drama, but unlike in Love is Sweet even the romance is pretty weak in this one. Cheng Xiao should just stick to singing, I wouldn't dare to assume that she has no acting talent, but she does not even seem to make an effort, her boredom on set is almost palpable. I'm sure it surprised no one that she has no chemistry with Luo Yun Xi.

I've read people saying that the first 20? episodes were quite good, it only become bad after, but I cannot disagree more. I'm honestly surprised I have not dropped this, sure things get even worse later, but it was never good.

Originally I was prepared to talk about love triangles, badminton, the randomly found hedgehog, or all the "barging in" that's happened in the drama, but I've decided to just end it here, this drama is not worth a more elaborate review. 3/10 :poopy emote:

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