I was at first really frustrated at this drama, because it's 20 episodes long, and it took over half of that time before the plot got even slightly interesting. I almost dropped it at episode 2 because I was so bored and confused by it right from the start. However I persisted and watched the whole thing. I was bored out of my mind for like literally 12/20 episodes. The complicated royal relationships, schemes and all the corruption were really confusing and hard to keep up with.

I have to give a huge shout out to Shin Hye Sun, because she was 100% the carrying force of this drama. She did such an amazing job in this, I was really impressed. If it wasn't for her, I probably would have dropped this drama at the half point at the latest. It was only her who got me through my boredom and all the way through the end of this drama. The other people in the cast were honestly just okay, they got the job done. Some of the people they cast in this were very similar-looking, and because most of the people in this wore the same clothes, same hats, and same fake beards, it made some of them look almost identical. To the very end I had a hard time telling the palace maids apart, and it literally took me at least like 6 episodes before I learned to tell the king and the queen's cousin apart from each other. I have to admit, that I often have a hard time remembering faces overall, but it didn't really help that the people whom I already had a hard time recognizing, all wore the same clothes that made them look alike even more. One example of my struggle was that in episode 3 or so, I didn't realize that the king was the king because he wore a different coloured robe than before xD So this drama was a bit of a struggle for me and my two face-blind braincells lol.

This drama was seriously so boring and confusing over halfway through, things only started to get interesting towards the very end. I feel like this drama could have been only 10-16 episodes long and it wouldn't have lost anything of importance. The first half of it was soooo slow paced, that I feel like they could have done better with this drama as a whole. Also, there were some choices made in the plot/with some of the characters that made like 0 sense whatsoever, but I'm not going to specify to keep this review spoiler-free. Overall I scored this drama a solid 5, mostly because of Shin Hye Sun and the last 5-7 episodes. I have to say I would not recommend this especially if you're not very familiar with historical dramas. Some people seem to have enjoyed this a lot, but this just wasn't for me.