Reviewing this as someone who’s read the webtoon. I wasn’t obsessed with the webtoon but I enjoyed it and was excited to see a female-centric drama with such a cynical, no-nonsense protagonist.

After finishing the drama, my perspective that it’s overall a decent adaptation, but it DEFINITELY feels watered down. Harin is less subtle, the backstory is less tragic, and the stakes just feel a tiny bit lower. I think the biggest change I didn’t like was the backstory — the original was really interesting, whereas the Jaeun/Harin relationship feels more anticlimactic in the show; they also gave more scenes to an old classmate who was bullied, and I felt like this was just anecessary. Kdrama has already had a lot of these types of backstories and Pyramid Game could’ve stood out from them more without it.

In fact, I think they added a lot more “kdrama” type scenes that just overall made the show feel less claustrophobic than the webtoon.

Even with the changes, however I noticed some off pacing, which made this feel much like an adaptation; they jumped from scene to scene, some of which I recognized, but the reasoning and development felt kind of choppy and unexplained. I feel like the themes were just less clear. The climax just also felt less world-changing, though I think this one might’ve been affected by its budget.

Still, one perfect part of this drama is the casting, especially Suji, Jaeun, Harin, Yerim, and Eunjung. It’s super interesting how each character pairing has their own dynamic and it truly felt like every actress understood the assignment.

And I just want to give an extra gold star to Yerim/Eunjung and sapphic representation; it’s still very low-key, but between Yerim/Eunjung and Sol/Jiwan from Nevertheless, it’s obvious that “girl friends to girlfriends” can be peak friends-to-lovers if done well.