SPOILER WARNING: DO NOT READ IF YOU STILL PLAN ON WATCHING THIS SERIES OR HAVEN’T FINISHED IT YET!!

Crash Landing on You
(사랑의 불시착 / Sarangui Bulsichak / lit.: Love’s Emergency/Crash Landing)
MyDramaList rating: 8.0/10

Hi y’all! I’m back with a new review! Isn’t it nice to finish a drama just as you finish a month? I don’t know, it feels like a nice way to close off January by finishing this series. Of course, I’ve been wanting to watch this for a while but I was sticking to my list so I kept pushing it off. But the time had come, and I’m really glad I watched it.

I have a lot to say about this series, and also about its characters, so I’m gonna construct my review a little differently this time. I won’t start with a short summary, but I’ll just go through the events in the story as I write my thoughts about them. One thing I can say beforehand: I thought it was really good.

Okay, so, Crash Landing on You is a 16-episode series, you can watch it on Netflix, but beware that every episode is about 1,5 hours long. When I wanted to watch an episode before going to bed, I ended up going to bed very late. The title is a direct reference to the biggest event in the first episode and the accident that sets the whole story in motion: a crash landing.
Yoon Se Ri (played by Son Ye Jin) is a rich chaebol heiress in Seoul. She is the youngest of three children (she has two brothers), and she owns her own fashion company called Seri’s Choice. This company provides many different fashion-related products from clothing (sleepwear, sportswear, etc.) to beauty products (shampoo, soaps, perfumes etc.).
She doesn’t have a very good relationship with her family. Her two brothers, both married to ambitious wives, are both solely interested in inheriting their father’s company Queens and this leaves little room for family sentiment. Her mother, who is not her biological mother, has never completely approved of her (I believe she is the mother of her two brothers, though). The only one who seems to be on her side is her father, who surprises everyone in the first episode by naming Se Ri as the heiress to his company. Se Ri keeps herself composed but is silently beside herself with excitement and gratitude for this recognition.
One day, she personally goes out to test some equipment and clothing for paragliding for the Seri’s Choice sportswear line. Even though the wind is quite strong, she insists on trying it out for herself. As she is floating through the sky, all of a sudden the wind becomes even stronger and she is faced with an actual typhoon.
She goes missing in the storm.
When she comes to, she finds herself landed in a tree. After trying to reach people to no avail, she notices a man in soldier’s clothing on the ground, pointing a gun at her. As it turns out, the typhoon blew her ever so gently over the border, right into the demarcated military zone of North-Korea.
The guy who finds her, Ri Jung Hyuk (played by Hyun Bin), luckily isn’t the strictest and he actually gives her an opportunity to escape, but all she does is end up in a military village, where she meets him again since he lives there.

The first half of the series (about ten episodes) is about Se Ri being stuck in North-Korea, getting to know the village people and attempting multiple times to get back over the border to the South in secret, helped by Jung Hyuk and four of his subordinates. She eventually manages to get back and then from the second half it’s the other way around: a dangerous military guy creeps into the South to go after Se Ri and Jung Hyuk follows him and he and his subordinates end up spending some time in South-Korea.
And of course, the main storyline is about Se Ri and Jung Hyuk falling in (star-crossed) love.

I have to admit, even though I knew how hyped this series was and that it was about a crash landing in North Korea, I didn’t know anything beforehand about the characters. I didn’t know Se Ri would be this super rich famous woman. She is quite snooty in the beginning, continuously emphasizing how big of a deal she is in the South and expressing her disdain when she has to resort to the primitive way of living in the Northern countryside (no Internet, regular electricity/power blackouts, no warm water). However, the longer she is forced to stay there after several failed attempts to escape, she actually starts to appreciate the village and the people there more.
What I did like about her since the beginning was her confidence. Even after meeting Jung Hyuk in his military uniform the first time, she tells him right off the bat that he’s her type. When he keeps protecting her and doing sweet things for her, she makes it no secret that she’s attracted to him and even gets a little flirty sometimes, but never in an intrusive or forceful way. But also how she acts towards people she meets for the first time in general, she’s not shy.

When she finds the village and thinks she’s crossed the border at the end of the first episode, the realization that she was still in North Korea was quite thrilling. The village people buying their goods from passing carts, doing their morning group exercises at dawn, the marching children, all the communistic slogans… My first impression was, ‘oh no, it’s a cult’ haha. In the end, it wasn’t that bad, though.

I have to say that before watching this, I was not 100% sure what the true relationship between the North and the South is, and even after finishing this I’m still not sure. Except for the fact that they are definitely two separate countries that also see and treat each other as such.
The image I have always had of North-Korea (the image the news and media give us) is that of a dictatorship, a prison of a country where people are brainwashed to worship the Kim family and you have to stick to the rules and it’s near impossible to escape without risking your life.
That’s why I found it really interesting that this story had so many North-Korean characters that really broke down that prejudice. Of course this is all fictional, but I like to think they did at least some research for this. Most of my favorite characters (if not all) were from the North side.
Even though I still can’t say for sure how accurate the depicted sceneries and situations on the North side are, I think the writers did a great job portraying all the characters so incredibly human while still keeping that stark contrast between the South and the North.

The thing I liked most about Se Ri and Jung Hyuk from the start was how naturally they got along. Of course, in the beginning there was some conflict since Jung Hyuk had to keep her hidden, but from the beginning he was nothing but nice and civilized to her, he even went to bring her products from the market and scented candles. His ever-calm attitude made that they never really had a falling out. He kept trying to be distant, whenever it seemed Se Ri would be able to escape again he kept saying that she should forget about this place and him, that it would be for the best, but slowly he started getting attached to her more and more.
After a couple of missed chances, there is this one attempted escape where Jung Hyuk actually catches a bullet for her and Se Ri decides to stay with him at the hospital instead of still going ahead and catching her ride South. I think the moment when Jung Hyuk really came to terms with his feelings for her was when he woke up and saw she was still there and realized she had also donated blood for him, even though she could have gone home already. He first gets angry at her for staying, but after that he kisses her for the first time.

Also not unimportant to mention: Jung Hyuk actually has a fiancée. Seo Dan (played by Seo Ji Hye) is the only daughter of a rich family. Her mother owns a department store in Pyongyang. She went to school with Jung Hyuk and has had a crush on him ever since, but Jung Hyuk actually doesn’t remember her from that time. They’ve been engaged for seven years, but neither of them are really making any romantic advances. She came to visit him once in Switzerland when he was studying there, but he kept taking pictures of the scenery. So, even though they are engaged and initially stick to that by principle, there is no real spark between them. This is also caused by the fact that both of them are quite rigid and not very social people.
When Se Ri starts expressing her attraction to Jung Hyuk more and he finally tells her he has a fiancée, Se Ri is initially a bit indignant at him for not mentioning this before and letting her expectations toward him grow. But she never actively tries to steal him away from Dan, it’s just that they spend a lot of time together and the nature of their bond is more special than the feelings Jung Hyuk has for Dan. He accepts it quite naturally when he realizes his feelings for Se Ri, and as soon as he does, he goes straight to his parents(-in law) to tell them he doesn’t want to get married to Dan.

Though Dan is initially very upset about this, she doesn’t get revenge. She does tell Jung Hyuk’s father about Se Ri, and then Se Ri is basically kidnapped by Jung Hyuk’s parents. However, when they see how Jung Hyuk is when it comes to her, they do not actively oppose their relationship either, on the contrary, his mother even takes a bit of a liking to Se Ri. I really loved the scene where Se Ri tried to hide when Jung Hyuk came to his parents’ house and his mother just pushed her into the room being all like ‘She’s right here! Take responsibility for your actions!’. I really liked Jung Hyuk’s parents (who were by the way played by Jeon Gook Hwan and Jung Ae Ri). I loved how his father, the General Director of the Political Bureau (or something) had so much power he could just flick away the bad guys. And I loved how much his mother cared for her son.

Speaking of loving mothers, I LOVED Dan’s mother. First of all, I loved the contrast between the village women and the well-off ladies in the capital who wore these extravagantly colored clothes. Dan’s mom’s whole being was quite extravagant, she even incorporated English words into her speech (that ‘OH MY GOSH!!’, I can’t). In the beginning, she seems like a bit of a comical character, she’s not really involved in any of the dark stuff and she just wants Dan to get married to Jung Hyuk. But we also get to see her relationship with Dan, and how much she cares about her daughter. When Dan starts to fall for Seung Joon (I will get to him in a moment) after Jung Hyuk breaks off the engagement, her mother is actually quite alright with switching to another son-in-law. When Seung Joon dies, leaving Dan devastated, she does whatever she can to be there for her daughter. When Dan turns over a new leaf and becomes more ‘I don’t need a man’ independent, her mom just starts searching for relationship-specialized fortune tellers for herself, lol. I really loved this actress (Jang Hye Jin), she was amazing. And the dynamic between her and her brother, Dan’s uncle who was also a military man (played by Park Myung Hoon), was hilarious.

I have to write about Seung Joon now before I go back to the topic of mothers.
Gu Seung Joon (played by Kim Jong Hyun), grew up as an orphan but has turned into a businessman with a European citizenship. However, he is also a conman. In a plan to revenge his father’s death (which was on Se Ri’s family) he first attempted to get into the Yoon family by getting engaged to Se Ri, but she saw through him right from the start. So as a last resort he got involved in some shady business with Se Ri’s 2nd older brother, lend a lot of money from him and then tried to hide in North Korea.
What’s interesting about his character is that he’s not 100% trustworthy. Despite this, he does become a good person to Se Ri when they meet coincidentally in Pyongyang and he is the first familiar face Se Ri sees after getting to the North. In the end, Seung Joon even helps Jung Hyuk and her get to the South Korean border where she finally manages to escape.
After this, he becomes Dan’s new love interest. I couldn’t help but love him despite his debatable motives. In the end, his heart was definitely in the right place, even though he damned himself for it. In the end he couldn’t admit to hating Se Ri so much he’d help get her killed, despite his grudge against her family. And his feelings for Dan were really pure, I loved the part where he got so messed up because he couldn’t figure out what she meant by one single sentence and he got so sick Dan had to bring him food. Their dynamic was really nice, especially as Dan also started acknowledging her own feelings for Seung Joon. I really liked the parts where Seung Joon caught her off guard and she suddenly burst into a smile. These were the only times we see her actually show happy emotions, most of the time she’s really composed and serious. Her grief over his death was painfully pure as well, but I love how in the end she got over it and became this strong independent woman. Seung Joon is the only main character to die in the series.

Going back a little to the topic of mothers, I want to say something about the relationship between Se Ri and her mother (played by Bang Eun Jin). From the first episode it’s clear they’re not on friendly terms. Se Ri seems to have accepted this, but we also learn that she’s secretly sad about it. When in the North people ask her about her mother, she talks about her with an expression of sad expression, which made me think she would actually like a better relationship with her mother. There is this thing that happened between them when Se Ri was still young, where her mother abandoned her on a beach.
Later, we find out her mother’s side of this flashback and see that the next morning, she went back to search for her on that beach because she did feel guilty about leaving her there and she has felt guilty about it ever since. When Se Ri gets involved in a shooting accident back in the South and ends up hospitalized, her mother overcomes her partial dislike for her and confesses how sorry she has felt and they are able to make up.
As there is a recording device under Se Ri’s hospital bed (mainly with the purpose of recording her brother’s secret intentions), it also records the words her mother says to her while she’s unconscious and after hearing this, she is able to forgive her. I really loved how close they became after that, putting aside their differences and everything that happened in the past.

I have to talk about Se Ri’s family now (look at me reconstructing this review as I go, lol). As I mentioned, Se Ri has two older brothers, Se Joon (played by Choi Dae Hoon) and Se Hyung (played by Park Hyung Soo). They are married to respectively Hye Ji (played by Hwang Woo Seul Hye) and Sang Ah (Yoon Ji Min).
When Se Ri disappears, neither of the brothers seem particularly concerned for her wellbeing. They are mostly interested in what will happen to their father’s inheritance while she’s gone.
The 2nd older brother Se Hyung is the most greedy of the two and he also has the most shady connections. He has gotten into trouble before because of these connections with bad people and he is also the one chasing after Seung Joon. His wife Sang Ah is also quite ambitious. Together they are quite the cunning couple and they are bent on getting Se Hyung to take over the company – which he does. At some point Se Ri stays missing for so long their father has no choice but to consider the worst and he has to choose one of his sons to take over. At some point, when they manage to get a hold of Seung Joon in North Korea, they find out Se Ri is alive there and they try to keep her there. When she eventually comes back, and this North Korean bad guy comes after her, they even go as far as to make an alliance with him (even though this is more Sang Ah than Se Hyung, who is a bit intimidated by the guy).
Hye Ji isn’t as greedy as Sang Ah. She’s mostly there to reconfirm Se Joon of his own worth. She seems a bit shallow and superficial in the beginning, when Se Joon is also still pining for the inheritance it also seems like they don’t genuinely care that much about Se Ri but at least she keeps pretending to like her.
When Se Ri comes back and Se Hyung and Sang Ah are busted, Se Joon and Hye Ji side with Se Ri.

It’s time to talk about Cho Chul Gang. I realize I haven’t anything about him yet even though he is a very important character and the main villain in the story.
When he meet Cho Chul Gang (played by Oh Man Suk) in the first episode, he is Jung Hyuk’s superior, but we soon find out he’s bad news. We see him give orders to kill several people in secret, and he also lends favors to important people just so he can blackmail them when he needs their influential power to get away with things. He doesn’t trust Jung Hyuk and when he gets wind of him hiding someone from the South, he goes to great lengths to bust him.
When he himself is busted for his crimes and also for being responsible for the murder of Jung Hyuk’s older brother a long time ago, he gets arrested by order of Jung Hyuk’s father. However, he manages to escape en route to prison and sneaks into the South to go after Se Ri in order to punish Jung Hyuk.
Jung Hyuk follows him, not only to protect Se Ri but also to finally take him down. In the South, Cho Chul Gang sets up a sort of alliance with Se Ri’s 2nd older brother and his wife, as I mentioned, and he almost manages to kill Se Ri; he is aiming for Jung Hyuk but Se Ri drives her car in front of him and catches the bullet through her car window. In the end, Chul Gang is shot by the South Korean police, but he doesn’t die before he threatens Jung Hyuk one last time – he tells him that if he goes back to the North, his parents will be executed.
Fortunately, this doesn’t happen, because as soon as they arrive back in North Korea and are ambushed, Jung Hyuk’s dad shows up and saves them (again).
Seriously though, I couldn’t help but think how easily both Cho Chul Gang and Jung Hyuk were able to sneak into the South, after all the trouble they went through to get Se Ri back. It took her so long to get back, and when they went, it seemed like the next day that Cho Chul Gang was already undercover as part of the security AT SE RI’S COMPANY and Jung Hyuk was able to appear in the right shopping street where Se Ri was taking an evening stroll. After getting such a strong impression of the heavy military security when it came to crossing the border, this undermined that impression a little for me.

Going back to the case of Jung Hyuk’s brother, there are some additional important characters I need to discuss. First of all, Jung Man Bok. In order to discuss Man Bok, I’ll have to get into Jung Hyuk’s personal history first.
Jung Hyuk didn’t intend on becoming a soldier, he was actually training to become a pianist. He even went to Switzerland to study classical music there. His older brother, Ri Moo Hyuk (played by Ha Suk Jin), who was in the army, discovered some important information about the corruption of Cho Chul Gang, how he had killed a lot of people and had leverage over a lot of people who were indebted to him. Through his various connections, Cho Chul Gang learned that Moo Hyuk was onto him and had him killed in an accident involving trucks with very sturdy armor that could just pierce another car or truck. He had been using these trucks to push cars off the road under the cover of night for a while, and now Jung Hyuk’s brother was dead as well.
Jung Man Bok (played by Kim Yeong Min), nicknamed ‘The Rat’, is a wiretapper, hired by people of influence like Cho Chul Gang to listen in on people and report on what they’re doing and pass on information about their plans. Man Bok lives in the same military village Se Ri arrives at, but he lives in constant agony over what he’s helped do. He was personally very fond of Jung Hyuk’s brother, who always showed him kindness and he is still filled with guilt about being involved in getting him killed. But when Cho Chul Gang threatens him about the safety of his wife and son, he just can’t go against the power he has over him.
When Cho Chul Gang gets arrested, Man Bok decides to come clean to Jung Hyuk about his involvement in Moo Hyuk’s death and sides with him. He even joins the party of Jung Hyuk’s subordinates on their mission to get Jung Hyuk back to the North and in the last episode we see that he’s managed to get his life around: he and his family move to Pyongyang and he becomes a sound engineer, getting to record sounds of nature for in movies and things like that.
I actually found him one of the most interesting characters of the series because we get to see how he lives in misery, not wanting to be a part of this conspiracy but still being forced into it. I’m really happy he managed to get out okay.

For my favorite part, I would like to talk about my absolute favorite gang of characters in this show:
Pyo Chi Soo (played by Yang Kyung Won)
Park Gwang Beom (played by Lee Shin Young)
Kim Joo Meok (played by Yoo Soo Bin)
Geum Eun Dong (Tang Joon Sang)
Jung Hyuk is the Captain of the Korean People’s Army 5th Company and these four guys are his direct subordinates, ranking from Sergeant Major to Staff Sergeant to Corporal to Private (thanks for the additional info, DramaWiki).
They are all introduced in turn in the first episode, in the sequence where Se Ri tries to sprint all the way to the South Korean border and, for that, has to cross military territory.
Chi Soo is the first one to spot her trying to escape and attempts to shoot her from a distance. This first encounter creates their initial dislike for each other. He takes himself very seriously, believes he is a big shot, even though the others don’t and they like to make fun of him. When they go to the South, he believes he’s the one that passes for a South Korean most naturally in both speech and fashion, but he actually stands out the most. He’s quite the tsundere as well – he keeps pretending he doesn’t care about Se Ri until they have to say their final goodbyes and then he’s the one who pushes back the tears the hardest. He actually becomes Jung Hyuk’s replacement Captain when Jung Hyuk quits at the end, so good for him.
Gwang Beom is the one who always follows Jung Hyuk’s orders. He is deemed the most handsome of the group, when he arrives in Seoul he gets scouted by several entertainment agencies on the streets. Apart from that, he’s very reserved and doesn’t really do small talk. He’s quite serious and very loyal to Jung Hyuk. He also assists in Jung Hyuk’s research on Cho Chul Gang’s trucks and in the escape attempt where Jung Hyuk ends up catching a bullet for Se Ri. He himself also gets shot in the leg in this incident.
Joo Meok is introduced as the guy who misses Se Ri running by his watchpost because he’s too immersed in a South Korean drama. Because of his love for K-Drama, he actually knows the most about manners and traditions from the South, and he also can ‘translate’ certain words or expressions that differ in Southern and Northern dialects. He bonds with Se Ri the quickest because of this link. When he comes to the South, Se Ri actually sets up a meeting for him with his favorite K-Drama actress, as she promised him once she would (although at the time expectations of getting back to the South were still nihil and she assumed this would only happen after the North and South would reunified).
And then, the baby of the group, 17-year old Eun Dong, who just joined the military team and suffers from homesickness the most. He is first shown missing Se Ri running by because he’s crouched down in the high grass crying over how much he misses his mom. He’s the most gullible and inexperienced out of everyone, but his older ‘hyungs’ take really good care of him.
Joo Meok and Eun Dong were my favorites of the group. I loved how excited Joo Meok could get over his dramas and that scene when he met his favorite actress, his face was just bursting with happiness.
With Eun Dong, I had to pause the show several times just to face an invisible camera (The Office-style) and say ‘Can I just take him home?’
These guys really made the show for me. I didn’t know any of the actors, but they were really well casted. (Edit: checking DramaWiki, it seems that the four of them really haven’t done that many series/movies, but some of them are in a couple of my still-to-watch series! Getting even more excited to watch those now).

Also not unimportant, the village people. After double-checking, I don’t even think the village has a name, lol. Even on DramaWiki it’s mentioned as ‘the North Korean military village’.
After Se Ri takes refuge in the village, it doesn’t take long before an unexpected house inspection occurs. Jung Hyuk isn’t at home at the time, and Se Ri is discovered. Jung Hyuk arrives just as she’s dragged outside and he saves her by making up a story that she’s his fiancée and that she’s a spy from ‘Division 11’ who spent a lot of time undercover in South Korea (explaining her accent). The village is a military village for a reason, it’s close to the demarcated military zone and therefore mostly militaries live there with their families.
There is a small group of women in the village that gathers regularly to do laundry and make kimchi together, but their main purpose of gathering is, of course, to gossip.
These women are Ma Young Ae (played by Kim Jung Nan), Na Wol Suk (played by Kim Sun Young), Hyun Myung Sun (Man Bok’s wife), (played by Jang So Yun), and Yang Ok Geum (played by Cha Chung Hwa).
Although initially also a little spiteful of each other, the bond that deepens between these women, and also how they end up affecting Se Ri, is really wonderful. They only get to know Se Ri for a short while before she leaves, but even when they learn she is really from the South, they just worry about how hard and scary it must have been for her to be alone in a strange place.
Ma Yeong Ae is the wife of the Senior Colonel and is therefore a bit higher in rank than the others. The others were initially trying to impress her and get on her best side, but in the end they all became really close. At some point, the Senior Colonel is arrested and Young Ae and her son have to hide inside in order not to get arrested as well and the other women come at night in secret to bring her all sorts of food and stuff.
When Myung Sun and her son are almost taken away because of their connections to Man Bok, the other women unmask the arrestors as the fake officers they are and get Myung Sun and her son to safety.
I cried a little when Man Bok came home to the village and was reunited with his family.
I loved the part at the very end, when Dan’s mother comes to bring them the newest beauty products from Seri’s Choice, each box designed with a drawing of each of their faces and their names as brand names (Wol, Young, Myung and Ok). In this sweet way, Se Ri is able to convey to them that she still remembers them.

Okay, I’ve left this part out until now but it’s quite important. To be absolutely honest, I didn’t necessarily see the added value of creating an extra ‘destiny element’ between Se Ri and Jung Hyuk because the story of how they meet and all they go through together in the North and then in the South would have been strong for me to establish their relationship. However, this is a K-Drama, so of course there is, as I have come to call it, a ‘destiny element’.
As it happens, Se Ri and Jung Hyuk have actually met a few times before, in Switzerland.
As I’ve mentioned, Jung Hyuk studied classical music there. Se Ri went there, presumably in a period before starting Seri’s Choice. A very dark period in her life in which she sincerely wanted to die. Her doctor in Europe recommends her to go to Switzerland as the beautiful sceneries there have helped many people rediscover the beauty of life. Feeling a bit sceptical, Se Ri ends up going anyway. This is around the same period that Jung Hyuk learns of his brother’s death and is summoned back to his homeland. As he’s waiting for the movers to come pick up his stuff, his piano is put by this gigantic lake and he plays a piece he wrote for his brother right there and then.
Se Ri, who just at that moment happens to be on a boat in that same lake approaching the shore, hears this music. The beautiful tones echo over the lake and invade her dark thoughts and literally save her life. She’s not able to see the face of the person playing the piano, but ever since then she has been looking for that melody.
There have been more occasions, she also met him and Dan together. She was on this bridge, planning to jump off it, when Jung Hyuk came up to her to ask if she could take a picture of him and his fiancée. He even took a picture of her standing there on that bridge by herself.
They discover these prior encounters when they are both in South Korea, and then all the pieces come together to finally make them realize that them meeting must have some sort of fateful nature.
The destiny element always make things more fictional in my opinion, and that’s why in this case it decreased the level of credibility for me a little. It’s not like they wouldn’t have fallen for each other if they hadn’t met before. They only discovered this afterwards so it was like a nice bonus. Of course, in the final moments of the series, their reunion in Switzerland was only possible because of their shared memories of this country.

One of my absolute favorite scenes was the scene when Jung Hyuk and his subordinates get back to the North.
This scene gave me so many goosebumps.
First of all, the contrast in delegation between the South and the North.
The South Korean State Security guys who deliver the six men all wear black suits and are just waiting outside their cars. The North Korean State Security guys show up all in military uniforms, marching in rows to the border. The six men are handcuffed as soon as they set foot back over the line.
And then Se Ri comes running, her mom drove her straight from the hospital, she’s still sick and recovering from her surgery. When she sees the guys being handcuffed, she starts running towards Jung Hyuk.
The North side is the first to pull their guns, in contrast to the South guys, who, despite all the illegalness of the situation, still feel for this star-crossed relationship. The guy who kept guard over Jung Hyuk, especially. I really liked him, he was super professional but you could see how he was also empathic towards the situation and how he could understand what the two lovers must be going through. He even tried to stall after receiving a call that she was coming to say a final goodbye before they had to cross the border.
Meanwhile, for the North side, it’s all purely political.
The way they pulled Jung Hyuk away from Se Ri’s embrace, how the subordinates were all bawling their eyes out… seriously, MY HEART. Incredibly well staged and acted.

So then Jung Hyuk leaves and they are separated ‘for good’ and both try to cope while missing each other to death. Some time after Jung Hyuk leaves, Se Ri receives a bunch of text messages that he pre-planned so she would get them after he’d left. In his last message, he writes that they should meet again in the land where they first met, and so they both start making arrangements to return to Switzerland, but leaving it up to fate whether they will actually meet again, as it had happened before.
Se Ri starts a scholarship fund for underprivileged children with great musical talent to help them go study classical music in Switzerland and Jung Hyuk quits being a Captain to go back to studying his beloved piano.
They ultimately meet, still unexpectedly, as Se Ri goes paragliding in Switzerland and ‘crash lands’ again.
After that, they each take two weeks every year to meet up in Switzerland, the only place they can be together. As Switzerland is known in Europe as literally a ‘neutral’ country (also the only European country without the euro as currency), it’s a very appropriate place for them to be together on ‘neutral territory’.
I liked that play on the literal ‘neutrality’ of Switzerland as their base ground for meeting. And of course, this wouldn’t have been possible if they hadn’t met there before, so I’ll have to approve of the destiny element this time, haha.

Other scenes I really liked were the ones where they had to camp out because their train to Pyongyang temporarily stopped (see the picture at the top for an impression of that scene). It was just a really nice vibe with all the people sitting around their own little campfires.
The scene when Jung Hyuk found Se Ri, who got lost in the village’s marketplace, by holding up a scented candle to literally light her way back to him. All the scenes where he got her stuff and where they would be somewhere together and she would just lay her head on his shoulder.
The entire part of the Gang coming to the South with that amazing cameo of Kim Soo Hyun as the special crowned moment, I LIVED for that cameo!! I had no idea he would make a guest appearance!!
It made me so happy, I couldn’t stop smiling even after I finished watching the episode.

One more character mention before I go on to the cast comments and final summary.
I still want to say something about Se Ri’s loyal employees, because they deserve that. The only people who were genuinely sad and worried that she was gone and refused to believe she was dead were her company’s team leader Hong Chang Sik (played by Go Gyu Pil) and Park Soo Chan (played by Im Chul Soo). There was another guy, but I don’t know his name and I can’t find him in the casting list. Anyways, Chang Sik was with Se Ri when she went paragliding and he was the only one continuously searching for her as more and more victims of the typhoon were brought down. Soo Chan was Se Ri’s life insurance manager who was on the verge of getting laid off and he literally needed Se Ri to be alive. He was the person who, even when Chang Sik started to waver, did actual research on similar accident cases where people did come back and he was probably the most grateful when Se Ri eventually came back. As a thanks to what he’d done to convince people she was still alive, she offers him a job. These two guys were all Team Se Ri and I loved it.

Going on to the cast comments!
I realized I knew Son Ye Jin from somewhere and they I found out she’s the actress from Personal Taste/Preference! This drama is from 2010, my god, it’s been ages since I watched it. I haven’t seen anything from her since then. I think she did a great job. I really like how her character developed and we got to see a different person behind the initial snob. She was able to show a lot of different layers and emotions, from snooty and confident to vulnerable and scared. We learn about the toughness of her life back home, with a family that mostly doesn’t even care whether she comes back alive or not. After coming back, she really turned her life around, she definitely learned from her experiences and even though Jung Hyuk kept telling her to forget about her time in the North after she went back, I have to agree with her in that that would be impossible. It completely changed her as a person.

It was so nice to see Hyun Bin again! The last thing I saw from his was Hyde, Jekyll, Me, which is from 2015.
I don’t think I’ve seen him portray a character like Jung Hyuk before. Jung Hyuk is quite a rigid and composed man, he never really had the urge to get emotionally involved with people, but he starts to loosen up more as his feelings for Se Ri deepen. He would pout when she talked about dating other men and then that tiny smirk when he would hear her say something nice about him…. Also, this guy is so handsome?!?! With his tall appearance and broad back, I wouldn’t mind being protected by him.
I read that Son Ye Jin and Hyun Bin actually became a real-life couple after filming this drama, I hope they fare better than the Song couple. I wish them a lot of happiness, they’re really cute together.

I also really like Kim Jong Hyun, I watched a couple of series with him before, the last being Go Go Waikiki. In Crash Landing on You he shows yet another, great performance that really confirmed his versatility in acting for me. I don’t think I’ve seen him in the same kind of role twice. He did really well.
I think I’ve seen Seo Ji Hye before, she was in Jealousy Incarnate and I think I also know her from 49 Days. She’s always casted as this serene but kind of poker-faced woman, but I liked the duality of Dan’s character. It’s like she couldn’t even help being so stern, and there was this innocent naive part to her when it came to actually falling in love.

There were a lot of characters I didn’t know, which was super refreshing!

From the village people, I only knew Kim Sun Young (I saw her just recently in Romance is a Bonus Book, she is amazing) and Jang So Yun played the kind office lady in Touch Your Heart.
I swear I know Kim Young Min from somewhere as well… okay, I seem to recognize him from Fantastic, where he played a douchebag, and also from My Mister, although I don’t recall him that well from there.

This show is such a nice mix of serious and dark but also light and fun parts. There were so many parts that made me go from NOOOO!!! to YESSSS!!! When it seemed like Cho Chul Gang would finally get to Se Ri after teaming up with Sang Ah and it seemed like he threatened Man Bok into wiretapping for him again but it turned out that they were all one step ahead and Man Bok had decided to officially resist him and he’d told Jung Hyuk and the others the truth. I was so scared for Man Bok since he had openly betrayed Chul Gang.
And most of all I loved all the human relationships in the series and how it still, in a way, unified the North and the South a little. I loved how we get to know all these North Korean people that show no sign of being corrupted or bad or anything.
The only thing shown as far as the dictatorship goes is the military uniforms, all the signs with communistic slogans and the fact that everyone needs to wear a badge and display portraits of the Kims in their homes (portraits which were occasionally blurred/censored, I noticed). For the rest, no one really spoke about ‘the Great Leader’ or anything like that. The Northern military people were just a little more strict than the Southern ones. It made me think that there are really good people in the North who just don’t know any better. But hearing Dan’s mother use English, see the children also learn English, and the fact that people still talked about ‘the South’ made me feel like they weren’t completely closed off from the rest of the world.
I loved learning about the difference in speech / dialect between North and South (I learned as much as some characters when they met a language barrier).
And now I really want to go to Switzerland, because those sceneries were stunning.

I also really liked the introduction theme video, where Se Ri’s and Jung Hyuk’s lives were put in parallel and how the scenes overlapped with each other, that was really nicely done. It also came back in the series a little at the end, when Jung Hyuk went back to the North and left Se Ri those messages and they started synching their daily routines based on that (eating an apple for breakfast, going on a walk at 12:30 etc.).
I watched the intro every time, as it was also the perfect length to get settled in before the episode would start (grab some last-minute snacks, organize my blanket etc.) #comfortfirst

I’m really glad I watched this drama, I really enjoyed it. I could tell they had a big budget as they were able to film a lot overseas. I really liked how everything was wrapped up in the end, and although it grieved me that Seung Joon had to die, I did think at some point ‘someone will have to die or it won’t be realistic’. I just felt like the dark layer of the series would be highlighted at some point and someone would have to catch a bullet and not survive. And it was quite fitting, in a weird way, that Seung Joon’s final thoughts included something along the lines of ‘if someone had to die, it’s only fitting that it should be me’. I wanted him and Dan to be together, though #sadness

I think I’ve mentioned all the main points and people I wanted to discuss, if I remember anything else I’ll just add it later. I still wrote more summary of the story than personal thoughts or discussions, but there really isn’t much more to mention from my side. I just really liked a lot of parts in the story and I wasn’t bothered by any details or inconsistencies or whatever. I genuinely had a good time watching this 🙂 but I’ll try to be a little more analytical and critical again next time!
Thanks for reading again, if you have any thoughts or opinions, please feel free to share in the comments!

See you in my next review! ^^

SPOILER WARNING: DO NOT READ IF YOU STILL PLAN ON WATCHING THIS SERIES OR HAVEN’T FINISHED IT YET!!

Dying Eye
(ダイイング・アイ / Daiingu Ai)
MyDramaList rating: 5.0/10

I finished this series within one week because it only has six episodes and I was in a hurry to finish it as I will explain in a moment.
It was probably on my list because of Miura Haruma and it looked thrilling, but it ended up being a lot more angsty than I expected.
If I had to categorize it, I would probably put it on the same shelf as Switched and Repeat, only with higher levels of obscenity and maturity.
This will probably not be a very long review, since the series isn’t that long, but I definitely have some critical comments about it.

I’d like to start with something serious.
Many drama fans will undoubtedly know that actor Miura Haruma, also the main protagonist in this show, committed suicide last year, about one year after this drama aired.
I was really shocked when I read the news, not only because I’ve had the biggest celebrity crush on him ever since Last Cinderella and I was just as heartbroken as everyone else that admired him for the great actor that he was. But also because he was only 30 and presumably hanged himself as a result of depression. It seemed like no one knew he was going through anything, and I just couldn’t stop thinking about how someone as famous and popular and seemingly fine like him had to go through such despair and loneliness all by himself.
Depression is not a joke. I feel like lately the number of famous people in the Asian entertainment industry (and anywhere else for that matter) taking their own lives because of mental health issues is increasing and there are still people who don’t take it seriously. People are still like ‘you just need to get over it’. But this keeps proving the point that depression is lethal. It can destroy people from inside out. It’s not just something you can ‘get over’ if you just change your way of thinking.
I just wanted to make a mention of this before starting to comment on his performance in this drama, because I definitely watched it with mixed feelings because of this.
My thoughts are with you, Miura-san. You were one of my favorite actors and I will miss you. Rest in peace.

Dying Eye starts with the introduction of Kishinaka Minae (played by Takahashi Maryjun), a piano teacher. After supervising one of her young students, she cycles home in the rain and we learn through her narration that she’s pregnant. A moment later, we see her get into a fatal accident where a car crashes into her and smashes her into another car, killing her almost instantly.
We then switch to about half a year later and we meet Amemura Shinsuke (played by Miura Haruma), a bartender who works in a bar called Myoga. One night, his last customer is a slightly melancholic looking man. Nothing seems out of the ordinary, he reminisces a bit about his late wife, has a drink and leaves. However, when Shinsuke locks up and leaves the bar, he is attacked from behind by this same man, who hits him hard in the head with a fire extinguisher.
Shinsuke has head surgery and when he wakes up, he has lost part of his memory. The only person by his bedside is Murakami Narumi (played by Matsumoto Marika), Shinsuke’s girlfriend whom he also lives with. She works as a hostess in another bar.
Slightly later, two detectives show up to tell him that the guy who attacked him killed himself. The man turns out to be Kishinaka Reiji (played by Kakizawa Hayato), husband to Kishinaka Minae, the woman who died in that accident. It is then revealed that Shinsuke was involved in this accident half a year ago, but because of his amnesia he can’t remember the accident.
As he slowly recovers, Shinsuke finds himself curious about that accident and attempts to regain his memories, even though everyone around him seems to advise against this for some reason.
Not only Narumi, but also his former boss Ejima (played by Namase Katsuhisa) and his current boss, nicknamed ‘Mama’ (played by Horiuchi Keiko). They all seem to have some knowledge or information that they don’t want Shinsuke to remember or know about.
Then, one night, a mysterious woman in dark clothes and heavy make-up appears at Myoga, and Shinsuke finds himself weirdly attracted to her.
After this, more weird things keep happening and Shinsuke finds himself in a really confusing situation as the enigmatic woman keeps appearing in front of him and the people around him all start to act increasingly suspicious as well. Will he be able to completely remember what happened during that accident and uncover everyone’s mysteries?

I discovered afterwards that this story was written by Higashino Keiji, a very popular mystery writer in Japan. I also watched Higashino Keigo Mysteries a couple of years ago, which is a collection of short murder/detective stories written by him. Miura Haruma also acted as the lead in one of those episodes.
From the first episode on, I felt confused. After it was revealed that Shinsuke was involved in that car accident it seemed like a legit motive for Kishinaka to attack him, as a revenge plan. But why did he kill himself afterwards? And what is up with that strange woman who, as can be noticed immediately, looks exactly like Minae (and who is also played by the same actress, Maryjun).
After kissing Shinsuke once after their first meeting, she appears again only to get more intimate with him (first time in the bar, second time in a bed). And from the start this felt really weird to me. Besides the fact that she creeped me out with her eyes doing the flickery thing, she felt really predatory from the get-go and I wasn’t able to watch the intimate scenes continuously because it made me super uncomfortable. There was no build-up in their mutual attraction, it was like she hypnotized him and he wasn’t able to resist, so it almost felt like she was taking advantage of him. I don’t know, it just felt wrong and super awkward, especially the time when they were in the bar and she got on top of him and went all orgasm-y while they weren’t even having real sex, like, they were both still wearing their clothes and she was basically dry-humping him. Seeing that made me feel a little nauseous.
The second time she invites him to her apartment (or AN apartment) and they really ‘sleep’ together, as in, clothes off, in bed. That’s when her real intentions finally start to show. She suddenly starts saying things like ‘We’re going to live in this house together’, ‘We’ll always be together’ and even ‘I want to give birth to your child’. As far as suspicious goes, Shinsuke finally realizes something is really not right with her, especially when he finds himself cuffed to a chain when he wakes up. She keeps him locked up in this strange apartment, until Shinsuke is finally able to get to his phone and he calls the police.

So at this point, looking at just Shinsuke’s point of view, apart from the fact that Ruriko, as the woman calls herself, looks exactly like Minae, we don’t know what any of this means, what any of this has to do with the accident or even IF it has anything to do with the accident. Shinsuke doesn’t even recognize her, he never saw Minae’s face during the accident and he only recognizes Ruriko after being shown a picture of Minae by the police during a hearing. So why is there a woman who looks like Minae still walking around? Literally, she’s following people around. Don’t get me started on the mannequins in the shop windows – stuff of nightmares.

During all this, whilst Shinsuke is being seduced by Ruriko, Narumi suddenly disappears. We don’t know why, we only see in-between shots of her desperately searching for something and getting super anxious whenever Ejima calls her.

The two detectives that showed up at Shinsuke’s hospital bed after his surgery, Detective Kozuka (played by Kimura Yuichi) and his subordinate Enoki (Yoshida Kengo), end up helping him with his case. Shinsuke has regular meetings with Kozuka, who has also heard rumors about this strange woman, as a neighbor kid even described her as ‘Minae-sensei’s ghost’. I found it quite peculiar that Kozuka immediately took this so seriously, I kind of expected they would just disregard the little girl’s words, but he kept thinking about the ghost story and even reported it to his superior as a serious case.
Detective Kozuka is also the one who rescues Shinsuke from that apartment, and when they start investigating all the rooms, they find one completely filled with mannequins, and some closely resembling Minae. There’s drawings and designs on the wall, and they find diaries belonging to Minae’s husband. Through this, they discover that Kishinaka, a mannequin designer by the way, was working on a mannequin that looked exactly like his wife.

When Shinsuke files a missing person’s report for Narumi, he passes by the Trafficking Department to get more info on his own case from the accident and that’s when he finds out he was actually not the person who hit Minae. He made her dodge, and then she was hit by another car coming from the opposite direction.
Honestly, seeing the fragmented flashback he had, I was already wondering how we was able to crash into her even though he was driving behind her. The car he was in only alarmed her from behind, which made her falter and then she was hit by the other car. With some help from former colleagues, he finds out the identity of the person in the other car: Kiuchi Haruhiko (played by Fuchikami Yasushi).

I really want to get to the point and explain everything, because up to this point in the series I was really frustrated and impatient.
I just wanted to know what was going on, but all they did was give you crumbs until finally, in the last two episodes, the truth about the accident and Ruriko’s existence are revealed.
Everything leading up to that, all the tiny plots and happenings, all just added to the list of things that I wanted explained. I just wanted to know who Ruriko was and what her deal was and what the hell was up with those eyes.
You know that feeling of frustration you get when you’re asking someone something and they just look at you with this self-righteous look on their face but they don’t answer you? It was like that every time with Ruriko.
I was like, if you’re going to act so mysterious and creepy, just explain yourself already. Don’t just be so creepy. In the end, everything about her is revealed by Kiuchi, she never utters a single word of truth or explanation by herself. The only things she says are shrouded in riddle.

Okay, so here’s the deal, I’ll cut right to the chase and give away the entire plot.
Shinsuke wasn’t the one driving the night of the accident, it was Ejima. They had just dropped off Ejima’s young wife who was drunk and they were on the way back. Ejima tried to light a cigarette while driving, took his eyes off the road for a moment, spotted Minae and dodged. Minae dodged as well, alarmed by the car’s headlights behind her.
Then, from the other side of the road, another car approached, containing Kiuchi and his fiancée, Uehara Midori (played by Mizusawa Elena). They got distracted as they were planning their wedding and Midori was driving, even though she’d had some drinks. She spotted the other car suddenly dodging, panicked, dodged, and crashed right into Minae. As Kiuchi immediately got out of the car and spoke to Ejima, who did the same, Midori had a short moment where she looked right into Minae’s eyes. Right before collapsing, Minae’s eyes exuded some kind of terrible power, all the emotions she was going through, both from dying and from losing her unborn child, and these emotions quite literally ‘pierced’ Midori.
Meanwhile, outside, Kiuchi tells Ejima that he will take the blame, and he asks Ejima to state that Midori wasn’t in the car with him, it was just him who had been driving under influence. He thought that, by doing that, he would be able to protect his fiancée and solve everything.
However, by saying this, he gives Ejima the same idea. Ejima goes to Shinsuke and asks him to trade places with him. He says he will give him 10 million yen if he will say that he was the one driving and Ejima wasn’t even in the car. He ends up agreeing to it for 30 million yen.

The fact that all of them were just standing there talking about money while a woman was literally dying in front of them and they were too busy worrying about themselves to even call an ambulance just made me question the humanity of every single character in the series.
Especially from Shinsuke, I just couldn’t understand how he, the only person present that was even remotely concerned with Minae, at that moment still shifted his thoughts to ‘actually I’ve been dreaming about my own bar and I could really use the money’.
Another important difference is that Kiuchi made the decision to swap places out of concern and love for his fiancée, while Ejima did it purely to protect himself and get away with it more easily.

Anyways, so both Shinsuke and Kiuchi become ‘replacements’ for the two people actually responsible for the accident. Shinsuke serves three years in prison (seriously though, 3 years prison and 2 years suspension for killing someone?), and gets his 30 million yen, which he hides in his apartment.

After being attacked by Kishinaka and losing part of his memory, Ejima thinks ‘Ah! Now he probably also won’t remember the money I gave him, so I’ll just get it back’. Ejima contacts Narumi and orders her to find the money and bring it to him. However, Narumi happens to have a lot of debt. She borrowed a lot of money from her workplace and some other places as well, so when she finds the 30 million, her greed jumps in and she runs away with the money – her disappearance is explained. Ejima, however, manages to find her with the help of Mama (who pretends to care for Narumi but just as well sells her out to Ejima). And then he kills her, supposedly.

On the other side of the story, Kiuchi and Midori face a lot of problems as Midori is haunted daily by the vision of Minae. They end up visiting Kishinaka to ‘apologize’ to Minae.
As Kiuchi waits outside, Midori discovers the mannequin that Kishinaka is making in his wife’s image. She starts frequenting his house, and eventually even helps him get a bigger atelier (the one in the apartment where Shinsuke gets locked up in) and a weird relationship is born between them.
When Kishinaka makes a mistake and goes crazy because he has to start all over again, Midori takes it upon herself to undergo plastic surgery – she literally changes her entire face and body to Minae’s.
By then, the engagement between her and Kiuchi is already cancelled since she became so estranged from him. After changing into a completely different person, she seems to have completely lost her mind.
When Kishinaka commits suicide the night after attacking Shinsuke, she finds him at his home. From this point on, she decides to become Ruriko and starts appearing in front of Shinsuke.
So actually, Ruriko only comes into being after Kishinaka kills himself, and her actions towards Shinsuke are completely based on the warped idea that he was the one responsible for killing her (Minae, probably, as she by then believes she herself to be Minae) and for making Kishinaka kill himself.

In the end, Kiuchi tells the whole story to Detective Kozuka.
At home, Shinsuke is first attacked by Ejima, and just as Ejima is declaring how he drove the car that night, Ruriko appears and she hears this confession, finally finding out that Ejima was the one responsible. She goes after him instead, but he ends up strangling her and she falls over backwards from the balcony (which looked super weird, by the way. She was standing with her back to it as she was being choked, and then suddenly, like a rag doll, she made this backward flip over the railing.)
Ejima is locked up, but, like Midori, is also haunted by Minae’s eyes and ends up gauging his own eyes out.
Shinsuke is sent to jail to serve his rightful sentence for involvement in the car accident and not reporting it. In the last scene he meets up with Mama, who once again advises him to forget everything that’s happened, but he says that this time, he won’t forget. So many people have died, so many things have happened, and it will be his punishment to remember, out of judgment for them.

Okay, so. There’s a lot of intense storylines crammed into those six episodes.
Even though some of the mysteries were explained, I still think there are a lot of loose ends and weak plot solutions at the end. It didn’t leave me with the feeling that everything was wrapped up, in any case.
First of all, because the whole thing with Ruriko targeting Shinsuke and taking sexual advantage of him turned out to be based on a complete misunderstanding from her side. She completely forgot about her own identity as Midori and that she herself was the one who directly killed Minae – not only had she convinced herself to be the person she took everything from, she started going after the wrong person as well. So basically the whole beginning plot of her appearing and being all seductive was thereby debunked.
Not even having a legit and true motive for stalking someone and going after their body, this just weakened the entire thing for me even more. Also the whole, ‘I want to have your baby’ thing, as messed up as that was, was just a result of her cognitive dysfunction – she wanted to punish the person who took ‘her’ unborn child from her by forcing him to literally give her back a child.

Secondly, I wish to disagree with the murders of Narumi and Enoki. I’ve mentioned Narumi being supposedly murdered by Ejima, but in Enoki’s case it was just really unfair and also irrelevant to the story.
When Shinsuke and Detective Kozuka discover the hidden room with all the mannequins, Kozuka calls Enoki to come help him and leaves him alone in the apartment while he goes to follow another lead. Enoki has no idea what’s going on, he is ordered to stay and take pictures of everything in a creepy room full of life-like dolls. It struck as me unbelievable that Kuzoka didn’t even think about the possibility of Ruriko returning to the house at any moment.
Anyways, she does, she returns while Enoki is there by himself. She sees Shinsuke has escaped and the secret room is open. She goes in while Enoki hides behind the door and we don’t get to see her discovering him, but we can assume that Enoki is not able to escape without noticing. Anyways, after that, he disappears as well.
The next time Kuzoka returns to the house, it’s been completely cleaned out.
They only find Enoki’s body in some abandoned warehouse in the last episode and it’s revealed that Ruriko has said that ‘she couldn’t let that detective live after he had broken into her sanctuary’ or something.
Anyways, in both Narumi’s and Enoki’s cases, I found the decision to kill them off really extreme and unnecessary. They could’ve just let Narumi live, Ejima could’ve taken the money from her and let her flee to a faraway place. She kept talking about going to a place where no one knew her, so they could’ve just let her do that, after making her swear not to talk about anything. And for Enoki as well, he didn’t have anything to do with the case, he just followed an order, but I’m mostly mad at Kozuka for just leaving him there, especially because Enoki was already hesitant to remain in that house all by himself. It just didn’t make sense.

Furthermore, in my opinion, they could’ve done more with Mama, especially since they made her out to be such a double-sided character. At first you think she’s this nice lady who stands up for Shinsuke and Narumi, but then she’s revealed to have an affair with Ejima – at least, they’re shown in bed together one time. The true relationship between them is never fully established and she also doesn’t seem to be very concerned with what happens to him at the end. She doesn’t really seem to care about anyone. Even after it’s suggested that Ejima got rid of Narumi, she’s just like ‘well, since Narumi has gone to a far away place now, there’s no use in worrying about her’. And I mean, I really believe she was in on a lot of stuff happening. She knew Ejima killed Narumi, first of all, and who knows what other scandals she was aware of – she was a bar owner, after all.
It just felt a little weird and unfair that she wasn’t suspected of anything and that she just got to go on with her life by herself in the end while every single other character in the series had to suffer in one way or another.

I’d like to mention a couple of minor critical points, because I was just generally very critical about this drama. Apart from the series itself and the story, I noticed some continuity inconsistencies in the filming.
When Kozuka and Shinsuke return to the apartment with Kiuchi and find it completely empty, Kiuchi says something like ‘There wasn’t anything here to begin with’ (at this point he’s still denying any knowledge of anything). When he says this the first time this scene is shown, they are in the kitchen. In the next episode, when showing the scene again, he says it while standing in the doorway of the room itself.
Later, when he finally confesses the whole story about the accident and Midori to Shinsuke, in the original first scene he is standing up and faces Shinsuke at the end (dramatic close-up). When showing this same scene again in the next episode, he is sitting in a chair with his back to Shinsuke.
Minor things, maybe, but little slips like this always contribute to my criticism ^^”

I also found it weird that, even though Kiuchi and Midori were engaged and seemingly really relaxed and in love with each other, she still called him ‘Kiuchi-san’. I don’t know, that created a very weird contrast.

Slightly irrelevant and nothing to do with the drama itself, but I still wanted to mention it: I watched this series on Dramacool and I spotted a lot of translation errors in the subtitles. Sometimes the subber had even added notes like ‘I’m actually not sure what he’s saying here’.
Doesn’t Dramacool check the quality of the subs before posting them? If even the subber doesn’t understand what’s being said, it doesn’t do the viewers any good either. Sorry if that sounds strict, but I was just surprised that these subs were published.
That being said, if anyone has any recommendations on websites with good quality subs and dramas, please let me know! I tend to switch whenever I find a site with faster streaming or better video quality, but it never hurts to have some backup sites 🙂

Back to the drama contents, it made excessive use of repetitive flashbacks. The scene of Minae getting squashed against that car and blood spatting on the car window was shown about 50 times, and it never got any more pleasant to watch. Also, during the final ending credits in the last episode, they showed an entire recap of the series, as if we needed to be reminded of the story we’d just finished following. So that wasn’t very necessary in my opinion.

The last thing that I wonder about regarding the ending is, of course, did Ruriko really die? Because as we see Shinsuke walking through the city at night, new determination in his eyes, we get one last close-up of a shop window mannequin, and its eyes still move to follow him. The whole thing about the eyes never really became clear to me, and also how she was using the mannequins to keep an eye on people.
(Mannequins creep me the hell out in general, so when they entered that room filled with them, I definitely shivered. Also, when Enoki was there by himself taking pictures, one time you could see the doll behind him follow him with her eyes and oh my god I hope I won’t dream about this.)
The only thing I gathered in the end is that Minae’s eyes started doing something when she was dying, they exuded some kind of power, and suddenly her gaze was able to stun people or hypnotize them in some way. Every time her eyes changed color, it looked like it was some sort of magic trick, but in the end I think it wasn’t really a ‘power’ but more like a really intense, paralyzing gaze. And I’m also confused how Midori/Ruriko was able to take over this gaze, except if she literally had Minae’s eyes implanted when she changed her appearance (disturbing idea number #8474). And also how this gaze was able to drive people (Midori, Ejima) crazy, that made sure they kept seeing her. Because with the introduction we get of Minae, I don’t know if she would’ve wanted any of this aftermath to happen.
Of course, it was a very tragic accident and, as Shinsuke also mentions at some point, all the people involved in it eventually suffered. But the most ironic thing was that the one person who wasn’t present during the accident, Kishinaka, was the only one to follow the victim in death. I thought this was an interesting perspective.
Ejima had this whole theory about being either lucky or unlucky. If you get into an accident, you were just unlucky. If you aren’t, you’re lucky. And that’s how he’s lived his life, making sure that luck remained on his side, and even use power to get his hands on that luck. But I don’t think it’s like that. I mean, you can think whatever you want, of course, but it’s not so black and white in my opinion.

Before I conclude, I’ll make some comments about the cast. It has ultimately become quite a long review after all.
Again, I will stress the mixed feelings I had while watching Miura Haruma. In this drama, his character was quite modest, he wasn’t the type to talk about himself that much, but he still had a raw edge and he had enough pride to stand up for himself. When he finds out there was another car and he meets Kiuchi, he immediately confronts him to ask if he too was attacked by Kishinaka. He immediately feels wronged for being the only one who was attacked, especially when it becomes clear he wasn’t the only one involved.
I found his relationship with Narumi quite interesting, because at some moments it felt like they were just friends with benefits, like, they lived together and were close, and they occasionally had sex, but then when she wouldn’t come home he would just be like ‘Could she be with a guy? Well, not that it matters’, and then I was like Oh? When she disappears, he worries, but it doesn’t keep him up at night. When he finds out Ejima killed her, he gets sad, I think he gets a little emotional at one point, but he’s not heartbroken.
Okay, anyway, Shinsuke has an interesting personality, because he’s a victim, but he doesn’t become pathetic and even though I didn’t always find him super sympathetic, I did feel for him.
I think I’ve seen about 5 or 6 dramas/movies with him, most of them in which he played a high schooler or something, so this was one of the dramas (probably together with Watashi wo Hanasanaide) where he got to show some very mature acting. And I don’t just mean the kissing/sex scenes (this series was quite mature in that area but still not explicit enough to show any body parts, the breasts were always covered and we never see anything below the waist, not even butts), but just in general.
All in all maybe not the most amazing performance I’ve seen of him, but it wasn’t because of his acting, I just think Shinsuke is a very mellow character and he portrayed him as modestly as possible.

I know Takahashi Maryjun by name and I’ve mainly seen her as a guest appearance or side character, but this is the first time I’ve seen her in a main role. The way they made her look like a doll/mannequin in this series (or how they made the mannequin look like her) was impressively creepy. I have to say I was a little too intimidated by Ruriko to remain objective about her performance, but she definitely had to portray some heavy stuff, she had all these intimate scenes as Ruriko, she had the car accident scene as Minae. I think I’ll have to see more of her acting to make more comments about her, but this time I was just a bit too scared of her character, haha. Minae seemed to be a really nice person, though. She definitely showed versatility.

I hadn’t seen Matsumoto Marika before, but she was cast perfectly for Narumi’s type character. Cute hostess material with a high pitched voice, but also the tenderness of Shinsuke’s best friend who really cared for him. My only issue with her was that she made so much noise, haha. Whether it was when she was snuggling up to Shinsuke, or when she was running for her life, she was constantly panting and exhaling so loudly. I’ll stop my nitpicking now, haha.

The only other actors that I knew/was familiar with were Namase Katsuhisa, Horiuchi Keiko and Fuchikami Yasushi, I’ve seen them in multiple dramas. For the rest I don’t think I knew any of the actors, which was also nice and refreshing in a way.

So, to conclude, this was without a doubt one of the most confusing, disturbing and frustrating Japanese dramas I’ve ever watched. In the end there are still so many loose ends, Narumi and Enoki’s deaths were completely unnecessary and Ruriko’s obsession with Shinsuke was completely based on a misunderstanding. She thought Shinsuke killed Minae and therefore wanted to punish him and make him give her back what she lost, but in the last episode she finds out it was actually Ejima who caused the accident and literally everything is debunked.
As I said in the first paragraph of this review, I would probably put this drama in the same category as Switched or Repeat in the sense that it’s another dark and angsty Japanese drama with some random graphic moments, a lot of spilled blood and nudity. It’s just not really my thing, I actually looked away a couple of times because I was too uncomfortable.

Then again, it’s good to be familiar with different types of drama, in this way I can also start categorizing what genres I like better than others.
Next up on my list is another K-Drama that I’ve also been looking forward to for a while now and I’m going to watch it on Netflix so I’m curious as to how fast I’ll go through it.
Until my next review, bye-bye!!

SPOILER WARNING: DO NOT READ IF YOU STILL PLAN ON WATCHING THIS SERIES OR HAVEN’T FINISHED IT YET!!

Love O2O
(微微一笑很倾城 / Wei Wei Yi Xiao Hen Qing Cheng / One Smile is Very Alluring)
MyDramaList rating: 7.5/10

Hello hello everyone!

First off I want to wish everyone a very happy New Year! It hasn’t been easy, and it still won’t be easy for a while, but I’d like to think that we’re still going towards something good.
The holidays were a bit mixed for me since I learned that my contract at my work won’t be renewed, which means I have to find new work from March on. I’m really not looking forward to searching for a job in the current crisis, but on the other hand I’m thinking this may be a good opportunity to find out what would really suit me job-wise. Staying positive!
Also, my computer had some errors, I was suddenly not able to log onto my Desktop anymore and I was forced to reset my computer’s system settings (without losing any files, luckily). Since then I have had to re-download some programs and log in again into some sites I frequent, but I see that now for some reason the layout of my WordPress posts is back to how it used to be… WordPress wasn’t working well for a while now, it didn’t automatically save my drafts and I had to try 50 times before it would want to publish a post because it kept saying that I wasn’t authorized to publish anything or something… But now everything seems to work fine, and WordPress is saving my drafts automatically again so I hope the reboot deleted any sort of bugs my PC might have had!

It took me a while to finish this series, and I took some breaks in-between because of stuff that happened at work and during the holidays. Therefore some of the details from the beginning of the series may have gotten a little hazy, but I still hope I can write a proper review 🙂
Overall, I really enjoyed watching this, it was really sweet and fun, but I also have some thoughts and comments that I’d like to share, so here we go!

In short summary, Love O2O is about computer science major university students Bei Wei Wei (played by Zheng Shuang) and Xiao Nai (played by Yang Yang). They are both top students and very popular on campus. Xiao Nai is the heart-throb of the campus because he’s very handsome and rich and Wei Wei is the ‘department beauty’. There is also the ‘campus beauty’ Meng Yi Ran, but I’ll get to her later.
Xiao Nai is Wei Wei’s senior and even though she’s never talked to him in person, she really admires him, just like everyone else. Unknowingly, the two have already met through a popular RPG game called ‘A Chinese Ghost Story’. In this game, the two of them are also top players (Xiao Nai for the male and Wei Wei for the female players). At a certain point, they decide to team up (aka ‘marry’) in the game to perform quests and battle monsters together. They grow quite fond of each other through the game and when eventually the time comes to meet in real life, Wei Wei is completely astonished to find Xiao Nai standing in front of her.
The story is about their romance, how it enfolds as soon as they meet in person, and about the people around them, both friends and foes. It connects a lot of people from the game to their real life players, because most of them happen to live in the same city and have already encountered each other before.

Just to make matters easier, I will first jot down all the characters’ names and their game characters’ names, just so there won’t be too much confusion about whether I’m talking about the real life person or what happens in the game. Some of the game characters’ names are pretty long, so I’ll just abbreviate them.

Wei Wei > Reed
Xiao Nai > Nai He
Er Xi > Joyful Xi
Cao Guang > Wei Guang
Zhen Shao Xiang > Zhen Shui
Yu Yao > Enchantress Yu

The first thing that I have to comment on is how original I thought it was to integrate the theme of the RPG game. From the start, we are introduced to the main characters through their game characters.
When depicting scenes that take place in the game, we see the actors dressed up as their game characters which gives a kind of fantasy movie idea. Of course, in the game they can’t see who’s really on the other side so this is just to clarify to the viewers who is who in the game.
The scenes that take place in the game are very regular in the first part of the series and become less frequent from the moment Wei Wei and Xiao Nai get to know each other in real life. From there on, the scenes in real life become more frequent.

To first introduce a few important side characters: Wei Wei initially lives in a college dorm with three friends, her eccentric bestie Zhao Er Xi (played by Mao Xiao Tong), Xiao Ling (played by Qin Yu) and Tian Si Si (played by Song Yi Xing). Out of the four of them, Wei Wei is the only one addicted to games, but Er Xi eventually also starts to play ‘A Chinese Ghost Story’.
Zhao Er Xi is like a fairy, super bubbly and energetic and seemingly careless. I personally found her so adorable because she was like an animated character.
Then we have Cao Guang (played by Bai Yu), who is a major in Foreign Languages. He’s also interested in recording/photographing and he has already been involved with Wei Wei once before for uploading a picture of her that led to a lot of rumors. While clearing up that misunderstanding, he falls for her.

Then we have Xiao Nai’s comical trio of friends: Yu Banshan, (played by Niu Jun Feng), Qiu Yonghou (played by Cui Hang) and Hao Mei (played by Zheng Ye Cheng). They seem quite jovial and silly from the outside, but they are a loyal bunch and also quite smart as they work with Xiao Nai in his business as well. The four of them are the foundation for Xiao Nai’s self-found game/software developing company Zhi Yi Technology. Throughout the series they get a lot of compliments for being such a young but talented business team.

Moving on to the characters outside of Wei Wei & Xiao Nai’s university, there is Zhen Shao Xiang. His character Zhen Shui used to be Reed‘s former partner in the game before he left her to team up with Enchantress Yu. Zhen Shao Xiang and Enchantress Yu’s player Yu Yao have become a couple in real life as well. Zhen Shao Xiang is the son of the director from Zhen Yi Technology, another big game developing company that becomes a rival company to Xiao Nai’s. So you could say that Zhen Shao Xiang and Xiao Nai becomes opponents in real life as well as in the game.

Then we have, as I like to call them, the gossipers.
First of all, I have mentioned her before, Meng Yi Ran (played by Ma Chun Rui). Yi Ran is the ‘campus beauty’ and she has won the most recent college beauty contest (Wei Wei became 2nd). She’s rich and pretty, but also a little clueless. She is in love with Xiao Nai and also happens to be the niece of Zhen Shao Xiang.
Yi Ran does not play the RPG game, but she gets involved in the main characters’ lives in the real world.
At her side, her friend Nana (played by Zhou Chen Jia). I think Nana is in the Journalism major or the Journalism club or something, anyway, it’s in her blood to find juicy information. She is without a doubt the biggest gossip in the series, but mostly so because she takes things she picks up from random people, pulls them completely out of context, and creates her own assumptions and stories which she then spreads around. So yeah, she’s not a very nice character. She’s also the person who keeps bad-mouthing Wei Wei to Yi Ran, almost encouraging her friend to do something to break Wei Wei and Xiao Nai up.
Luckily at the end, Yi Ran discovers for herself how two-faced Nana is and decides to reflect and apologize to Wei Wei in a very mature manner.

And then finally there’s Yu Yao, so Enchantress Yu‘s real life persona and her three followers Qingqing, Mianmian and Feifei. Especially with these last three, it’s like they can only ever talk about other people behind their backs. In the end Zhen Shao Xiang breaks up with Yu Yao because he’s sick of their never ending gossipping and that for some reason the three followers are almost like a package deal – I don’t know why but they kept showing up with Yu Yao everywhere, just like in the game, even when Shao Xiang and Yu Yao went on a date together.

So, now that I’ve described the most important characters, let’s go by the main events of the series one by one.
When the series starts, Reed is teamed up with (or ‘married’ to) Zhen Shui. They fight battles together and go on quests together and all that. Then, out of nowhere, Zhen Shui declares that he wants to switch partners and they split up (‘divorce’). He then joins forces with Enchantress Yu.
Shortly after this happens, Nai He asks Reed to team up with him. Wei Wei gladly accepts, though surprised because she knows Nai He is the top player of their server.
Xiao Nai spots Wei Wei by coincidence one day in an Internet café and is fascinated by the speed and nimbleness of her fingers as she games. He sees her from the back first and is able to spot her game avatar.
So Xiao Nai finds out that Wei Wei is Reed before Wei Wei finds out that he is Nai He.
He spots her a couple of times around campus afterwards, but doesn’t tell her. When they have finished multiple difficult couple quests and made a promotion movie for a special event in the game, they decide to meet up in real life and then of course Wei Wei is completely astonished by the fact that it’s Xiao Nai.

From then on, one of the things I struggled with a little started. Because it really seemed to me that Xiao Nai, when he discovered who Reed was, had already planned everything out for how this was going to go. From the moment they meet in real life, he sort of just ‘assumes’ they are dating now and immediately starts treating her like his girlfriend – or even, his wife.
Wei Wei on the other hand, is still trying to grasp the fact that Xiao Nai and Nai He are the same person and needs to take some time first to figure out what they are to each other.
I just wanted to point this out because throughout the series, even after they become an official couple, the dynamic between them felt a little off to me sometimes. I could feel how dominant Xiao Nai was.
It almost seemed like Wei Wei accepted the fact of their relationship quite easily, and that it was pretty convenient for her to have a boyfriend. However, when it came to being intimate, she completely shut down.
Honestly, there were multiple kisses between the couple in the series, but they were all very passionately initiated by Xiao Nai while Wei Wei was just standing there, letting it happen. For most of the kisses, I didn’t even see her lips move and towards the end, when they were actually starting to talk about marriage and babies already, when he hugged her she barely even touched him back. Her hands were on his back, but still kind of awkwardly clenched and not actually embracing him.
So it really seemed that Xiao Nai had this whole plan in his head, and from the moment he saw her in that café and realized she was Reed, he kind of just decided on their life story from then on and Wei Wei just had to go along with that. And she did, she went along with everything really easily. But there were moments where I was like ‘girl… if you stop and think for a moment, are you sure you’re ready for this? Don’t you think this is a bit fast?’ And several times Xiao Nai just kind of cornered her to kiss her without even waiting for her consent, which gave me occasional chills as well. I mean, if she’s okay with it, okay, but seeing her barely respond to his kisses and frankly just looking quite uncomfortable receiving his kisses, I wondered whether she chose to do this. Or maybe the actress is just really bad at kissing scenes, I don’t know.
As much as I liked Wei Wei and I really think this is one of the more active roles I’ve seen of Zheng Shuang, in my opinion she was still very awkward in their intimacy.

Anyhow, moving on, so Wei Wei and Xiao Nai get together. And then the storyline with Cao Guang starts to enfold more. As I’ve mentioned before, Cao Guang has a crush on Wei Wei. When he finds out she’s with Xiao Nai, he feels betrayed because (for some reason) he automatically thought she liked him too. Let’s make it clear here that Wei Wei has never given him any kind of indication that this was the case – in my opinion his pride was just hurt when he was confronted that his one-sided crush didn’t like him back.
However, he takes it quite personally and starts accusing her of two-timing him. As unfortunate timings go, just as he is venting to his friends over this, Nana walks by and decides to record what he’s saying about Wei Wei to use it in her case to help Yi Ran bring her down.
Cao Guang initially starts playing ‘A Chinese Ghost Story’ to get more familiar with Wei Wei’s interests when he still likes her, he figures that if he approaches her through the game they might find more common grounds. In his mission to find out Wei Wei’s username, his asks his female classmate if she can find this out.
His classmate finds an opportunity to pop into Wei Wei’s dorm and spots her playing under Er Xi’s character, Joyful Xi. Therefore he is led to believe that Wei Wei is Joyful Xi and he approaches her as an apprentice and gets closer to her, but in reality the person he is getting closer to in the game is Er Xi.

During the summer, Er Xi applies for an internship at Zhen Yi Technology. When she learns that she will be asked about her gaming experience during the interview, she goes to Wei Wei for advice since she’s never gamed before. Wei Wei tells her to ‘just say you’re playing on this and this server and that this is your username’ (some random username she once used herself). But during the interview Er Xi gets nervous and accidentally uses Wei Wei’s username Reed.
Zhen Shao Xiang is in the room during her interview and when he hears her say that she is Reed, he’s immediately interested and ushers for her to be hired. Because of her newly acquired internship, Er Xi decides it’s best to get more familiar with gaming and starts playing ‘A Chinese Ghost Story’ herself. Since she is a complete noob and doesn’t know where or how, she regularly asks Wei Wei to help her in completing battles and gaining experience points for her. This was what Wei Wei was doing when Cao Guang’s classmate popped in.

Er Xi and Cao Guang have met before in an elective movie analysis class and are initially like cats and dogs, but as they find themselves in several situations together (Er Xi ends up breaking his camera and agrees to pay him back, partly by taking care of his cat), they start to grow a little closer.
When Cao Guang’s purpose for getting close to whom he thinks is Wei Wei in the game leads him to stab her avatar with a sword that Er Xi spend a lot of time making for him, Er Xi is completely shocked by this betrayal. She was really starting to like Wei Guang and she couldn’t believe it when she found out that 1. he’s Cao Guang and 2. he thinks she’s Wei Wei.
Besides this there was another case in which a group of snooty girls (Yu Yao and her 3 followers) came to mess with her at Zhen Yi because they thought she was Wei Wei. When she finds out she went through 2 separate harsh situations because she got mistaken for Wei Wei, Er Xi distances herself from her best friend for a while and there comes a strain on their friendship.
Luckily, the whole thing is cleared up in the end and she’s even able to forgive Cao Guang. Even when Yi Ran and Nana, still convinced about the whole ‘Wei Wei is a two-timing bitch’ story, even try to manipulate Er Xi into badmouthing Wei Wei to them, Er Xi proves her loyalty to her best friend.

One thing I appreciated so so much in this series was the bond of trust between the main characters.
Between Wei Wei and Er Xi and between Wei Wei and Xiao Nai. They talked to each other about everything.
When Yi Ran approached him to show him the video Nana took and tell him Wei Wei was two-timing him, Xiao Nai went straight to Wei Wei to tell her about the rumors. As a matter of fact, he didn’t believe any of it.
Also when Nana found it necessary to show up at Er Xi’s work and tell her about ‘all the things she found out about Wei Wei’s true character’, Er Xi didn’t immediately respond in words but in her inner monologue we immediately learn that she doesn’t believe any of it either and that she’s just worried about Wei Wei having to face all these false rumors by herself – heck, it even drives her to make up with her right that moment.
It’s so great to not have any misunderstandings between the main character and I loved how much clarity and transparency there was between them.

The gossipping was the most annoying thing ever. I found myself saying ‘GET A LIFE’ so many times to Nana and the three gossip girls. It’s like their lives literally existed of talking about other people behind their backs. Without even knowing the people they were talking about.
When there was this meetup for all the people from Beijing in the game and Xiao Nai came to pick Wei Wei up and one of the 3 girls literally yelled at him as they were walking away ‘Your girlfriend is deceiving you! She has so many lovers in the game!’ I was just astonished by it. What the hell? Mind your own freaking business?
I was so relieved to see Zhen Shao Xiang’s one moment of sanity when he broke up with Yu Yao like ‘y’all are gossipping bitches, I don’t want to be a part of this anymore’.
And even when Cao Guang went to ‘settle the score’ with Nana for the video she took of him, when he left I was like ‘sorry dude but this is not going to stop her from going after Wei Wei again’.
At least Yi Ran had the ability to reflect and properly apologize to Wei Wei in the end. In hindsight I actually don’t think she was that bad of a person. She was immature and foolish in the beginning when she couldn’t get Xiao Nai to like her back, but she just had the wrong influence with Nana whispering negative stuff in her ear. In the end, after leaving Nana somewhere because she’s upset, she actually goes back to pick her up after all and then she hears Nana talk to herself (out loud, in the middle of the street because hey you’re in a drama), badmouthing Yi Ran for being so stupid and that’s when she realizes Nana never was a true friend to her either. She was just making use of Yi Ran’s popularity.
She even admitted to her own initial immaturity to Wei Wei, which I think was very mature of her.

One more thing I have to write about because I loved it so much: Hao Mei and KO.
Hao Mei, one of Xiao Nai’s dorm mates/friends/work partners, is easily said the most clueless of the three. He has a girly name because his mother had already decided on it, thinking he would be a girl. His nickname becomes ‘Mr. Beauty’ and he is teased the most by his friends.
KO (played by Zhang Bin Bin) is a stoic guy who works at a restaurant Xiao Nai and his friends (and later Wei Wei) frequent. He is a really good cook, although he doesn’t say much. Later he turns out to be this super famous hacker and starts working for Xiao Nai’s company after losing a bet with him – he hacked Hao Mei’s computer for some reason. In general he just seems to be really taken with Hao Mei.
I SHIPPED THEM SO MUCH. Because honestly, even looking at it objectively, it wasn’t just friendship between them. Hao Mei may not have noticed it because he’s so all-over-the-place, but the way KO looked at him??
Those were definitely heart eyes, man. You can’t convince me otherwise. At a certain moment I was thinking, man I’ve never seen such blatant bromance in a Chinese drama, they better do something with this.
In the end, KO moves in with Hao Mai to ‘cook and do all the household chores for him’….
I’ll just be here, filling in the blanks by myself.

Another part I really liked (although it was quite dramatic) was in the beginning of the series, when Xiao Nai and Ban Shan got into a car accident. I really appreciated how emotional they made Ban Shan there, especially since in Asian dramas the emotional gap between men and women is always emphasized so much. When Ban Shan thought Xiao Nai was going to die because he hadn’t been paying attention behind the wheel his acting while he was waiting outside the OR was so powerful. And even after Xiao Nai turned out fine, there was this scene where he talked to Yong Hou and Hao Mei about how he felt and thought about Xiao Nai, and he started crying so much – I’m really glad he got to show that side. MEN ARE ALLOWED TO CRY.
This made the scene so much more powerful to me, because yes, he just went through hell and it scared the shit out of him and he needed a moment and he had all the right in the world to cry. Good stuff.

As I am now describing individual scenes and parts that made a certain impression on me, I’d like to say a little more about Zhen Shao Xiang, because I had mixed feelings about him. There were some aspects of him that I could respect, such as him breaking up with Yu Yao and the fact that his will to compete with Xiao Nai in real life never extended to actually sabotaging him.
As the final confrontation of the series, both Zhen Yi and Zhi Yi Techonologies have a presentation about their newly developed version of ‘A Chinese Ghost Story’. Some people from Zhen Yi (Shao Xiang’s father, by name) have planned to sabotage Zhi Yi’s presentation by causing a server malfunction just as they need to present.
Shao Xiang was not aware of this plan, and in his anger towards his company when he finds out they were responsible for that error, it was clear that no matter how irrational his intention to take revenge on Xiao Nai was, he himself would’ve never resorted to this kind of childish behavior. And those guys were adults, for god’s sake.
However, there were also a few moments where I sincerely disliked him. When he broke up with Yu Yao, while that was fine in itself, it was clear that it also had to do with the fact that he had just seen Wei Wei in person for the first time (the real Wei Wei, not Er Xi as he first thought to be her) he is clearly impressed by her beauty. He suddenly seemed to lose all interest in Yu Yao and it just looked like their gossipping was the final drop. And then there was this super uncomfortable part where he tricks Er Xi into giving her address (after learning she and Wei Wei live together). He drives in that direction and sees Wei Wei walking with her suitcase as she’s just about to move into Xiao Nai’s place for a while (when she and Er Xi are on bad terms due to the misunderstandings, she offers to move out so Er Xi can have some peace). And there he was just this typical ‘can’t accept no’ kind of guy. He kept driving next to her, kept asking her to get into his car, kept saying that he already knew who she was (even though this was a bluff and thank god for Wei Wei to be smart enough to see through this). She said ‘no thank you’ like 5 times and he KEPT insisting. This was really inappropriate and I loved when she was like ‘I’m moving in with my boyfriend, I’m fine’ and just pulled over a taxi. Wei Wei was a lot of things, but I loved her ability to stand up for herself most of all.

Except for some awkward extras (the foreign couple on the swing lmao) and the blatant product placement of the same nuts from Rush to the Dead Summer (which is actually from one year later than this drama), I still had a good time watching this drama. It had a nice energy, nice pace and I liked the balance between the game and real world events. I found it really nice how, despite their love for the virtual reality of RPG games, Wei Wei and Xiao Nai were the most realistic people ever. They were grounded deeply into the real world and were perfectly capable of separating the two (which is hard for some people, I know). They never used the game as an escape from the real world, but they just gained experience and this enabled them to actually build a career in game development. Wei Wei starts interning at Xiao Nai’s company and never leaves, and after developing his ‘A New Chinese Ghost Story’, Xiao Nai’s status grows gradually as well.

To go on with some additional cast comments before I wrap it up.
I’ve seen Zheng Shuang in two other dramas, her debut role in Meteor Shower and in Rush to the Dead Summer. I really liked her in Meteor Shower, she was a really spunky Makino, and in the other drama I was slightly freaked out by how skinny she was. In this drama too. I just read to my dread on DramaWiki that she was 35kg when filming this drama. THAT’S NOT OKAY. How was she still standing up?! I don’t know if this is the industry, or that it really was her failing at getting into shape and losing tons of weight instead, but this is not okay. She’s already such a doll, she’s a literal Disney princess, she could use some more flesh on her bones.
Anyways, I’m still wavering what I think about her acting style, because it’s quite consistent, the dreamy stares, the frugal smiles and giggles. But I have to admit I did like her a lot in this drama. It was really nice to see her be more active rather than just a passive female lead who let the guys handle everything for her.
Even though Xiao Nai definitely was more dominant than Wei Wei, in other parts (as I’ve mentioned above) she really stood her ground and showed her loyalty to her friends and also her ability to mind her own business. Even when she found out about the rumors that others had spread about her, she was like ‘Why would they do that?’ but it didn’t keep her awake at night because she knew they were wrong and she had enough people around her who would never think of her like that and that was enough. She was confident and smart and I liked her.
Also, I’m still waiting on her drama with Lee Jong Suk, Jade Lovers, which was supposed to come out like 5 years ago but is still being banned by Chinese television -__-

I didn’t know Yang Yang, this was the first drama I’ve seen of him. Although I found him a little stiff most of the time, I liked how he changed when the relationship between Wei Wei and Xiao Nai deepened. He started smiling more, also showing his teeth which immediately gives more expression to his face.
And I had to admit, even though they weren’t equally reciprocated, from his side the kissing scenes were really credible and passionate (I just missed some of that same passion from Wei Wei’s side, lol).

Mao Xiao Tong has the most animated babyface I’ve ever seen. I found her so adorable. And the character seemed to come so naturally to her, she just WAS Er Xi. Not that I knew beforehand how Er Xi was supposed to be, but I just think she was casted really well for the part.
The girl who played Xiao Ling, Qin Yu, really reminded of Japanese actress Honda Tsubasa for some reason. I liked her and Si Si a lot as the two roommates who were always there for Wei Wei and Er Xi even though they weren’t into gaming or anything. The dynamic between the four girls was really natural and nice.

Actually, I didn’t know any of the actors besides Zheng Shuang and I think I’ve already mentioned what I thought of the characters sufficiently (plus it’s past midnight ^^”), so I think I’ll wrap it up with this! If I think of anything else I’ll add it later 🙂

As I said, I liked it, my friend recommended it to me and I’m glad I watched it. I liked how it showed insight in the game developing industry and although I couldn’t always 100% follow what they were talking about (there was a lot of software/programming jargon in there), it was never boring to watch.
The characters were fun and had a lot of individuality and it was nice to see women choose their own path instead of being led by a guy as is usually the case in Asian dramas. I’ve never seen a drama incorporate this fantasy element like this, it looked really cool and I’m assuming it took some serious budget for the in-game sequences. It really showed the fun of gaming, but also how it can reflect the people playing.
It’s important to stay aware that the game is just a game and it’s not directly connected to real life. I liked how they showed multiple cases of friendships being formed through the game and people also deciding to meet in real life. It was nice 🙂

I can’t promise when I’ll be back with my next review, but you’ll know when I do ^^

Until then!