In the beginning the story felt like it was dragging a lot, enough that I had to put the drama "on hold" for about a month because I couldn't bear watching it anymore. Different from what I expected, the middle part of the drama was very interesting and not dragging at all, at least not from my perspective - thank goodness, theren is tomb raiding in some way, I doubted that for quite some time - and it only slowed down again in the end, which was very confusing for me. I think it was a good idea to end the drama with some glimpses of the future. However, in my opinion, it was poorly executed. The last episode basically consisted out of flashbacks from throughout the drama, you might enjoy that if you tend to watch things over a long period of time and don't binge-watch like I do, some parts were not-really-flashbacks and then, all of a sudden, we were in the middle of the war with no clue what actually happened in between. And, I hope this is not too spoilerish, Huo Sanniang is a badass warrior, which makes me wonder why there are so few strong female characters throughout the whole series when they can be as good as any men. I mean, I get it in this particular adaptations since the story takes place in the early or mid 20th century (honestly, no clue when exactly) but in the later ones it's just baffling how few there are. Yes, sorry, I'm digressing from the topic. Other than that, I basically skipped all of the scenes with Hendry Cox because his voice and way of speaking Chinese sounded absolutely awful to me (a non-Chinese speaker), resulting in me skipping most of the "bad people"'s scenes. Some characters have way too much screen time and there definitely are too many flashbacks. However, overall it's quite a decent drama.

I don't think that I will watch this show again. I think it's very important to watch it once because otherwise there are going to be a lot of things in the other adaptations that you simply will not understand because the background knowledge will be missing, but I think if you watched it once and occasionally search online if you don't understand something you wil be fine watching the rest of the adaptations. However, If you want to watch it again, do it. I don't think it would be wasted time as I personally often find things that I didn't see or realize when watching for the first time and I think it's possible to enjoy when rewatching.

I'm sorry if this review is confusing, I wrote it at 2am while nursing a headache because of the weather :) Probably will edit it later but for now, that's how it stays.