Disclaimer: this is a review, and as such it contains spoilers of the whole series. Please proceed to read at your own risk if you still plan on watching this show or if you haven’t finished it yet. You have been warned.

Love of Summer Night
(夏夜知君暖 / Xia Ye Zhi Jun Nuan / Summer Night Knows Your Warmth)
MyDramaList rating: 6.0/10

Hello hello! Welcome to another drama review. I’m happy I got to finish this one quite fast without taking too many breaks in-between. I remember adding this show to my list quite recently, maybe after seeing a clip from it on TikTok or something. It was nice to switch between shows that I’ve been waiting for to watch and ones that I only recently discovered. There were definitely a lot of inconveniences while watching this show and it had a lot of flaws, but overall it was a cute simple love story with an interesting plot. Sometimes it’s nice to watch a show that’s just cute to watch despite not having too much depth, especially when it’s short and refreshing. In any case, let’s just get to it!

Love of Summer Night is a MangoTV Chinese Drama with 24 episodes of about 35 minutes each. The story is about college student Su Nuan Xia (played by Wang Zi Wei), who aspires to reassemble her dad’s basketball team. Her father was the respected coach of the Qingmeng University basketball team, but when he passed away from a heart attack right after his team lost an important match, the team disbanded and most of the members lost their passion for basketball altogether as a result from losing their beloved coach. Nuan Xia, majoring in sports management and anatomy (I believe) at Qingmeng, wishes to follow in her father’s footsteps, reassemble the team and become the new coach. Supported by her roommate and best friend Xiao Tu Tu (played by Jiang Shen), who will act as the team’s manager, Nuan Xia starts tenaciously pursuing the old team members while keeping an eye out for new potential talent along the way. She encounters her first hurdle when she meets Jun Ye (played by Deng Chao Yuan/Aaron Deng), the former star player who doesn’t seem to have any intention to return to the team whatsoever. When the former captain of the team and the girls’ childhood friend Chu Ran (played by Zhang Da Yuan/ Darrien Zhang) shockingly decides to transfer to the basketball team of rivalling university Shenhua, it leaves them even more discouraged. However, through trial and error they still succeed to recruit the original team, including the remaining members Shen Ying Liang (Meng She), Zhang Xiao Qiang (Li Dong Shan) and Qi Feng (Zhang Mao Chang) and one new promising player called Ling Xuan (Qi Tian Ying), a very agile delivery guy. With this new team, Nuan Xia strives to beat Shenhua University and make her late father’s wish come true, even if that means starting from scratch in getting all the players to get along and play as a team. Also, she and Jun Ye start developing feelings for each other that seem to go way beyond coach and player – will they be alright?

Let me just start right off the bat by saying that it was nearly impossible to watch this series with proper English subtitles. I looked around and saw a lot of similar complaints about it, so I know I’m not the only one. I eventually watched it on Dailymotion because even the YouTube captions couldn’t do it for me. The subtitles were so confusing and all over the place that it made it hard to follow what was going on; they mistyped the characters’ names a lot and even started translating them into half English half Chinese at some point, which made it even harder to figure out what everyone was called (which is already a struggle for me in Chinese dramas in general). I’m convinced that I must’ve missed a lot of information provided in the original dialogue that wasn’t included or conveyed clearly enough in the subtitles, which is a real pity. I really don’t understand why people can sub Japanese and Korean shows flawlessly, but there’s never a Chinese show with proper, clear, grammatically correct English subtitles. In this case, it actually took away from my watching experience because I legit couldn’t understand some conversations because of this barrier.

Having said that, when I look past the practical inconveniences and focus on the story in general, I did think it had an interesting premise. The idea of a female protagonist wanting to reassemble her late father’s basketball team was fun and original, also because it included breaking a certain gender stereotype (in this case, having a female basketball coach), something I always appreciate seeing in Chinese dramas. I remember really liking Sweet Combat because it featured so many strong athletic female characters and it actively challenged gender stereotypes in the context of sports and physical strength. I liked the concept of Nuan Xia having to prove herself to be her father’s daughter in terms of coaching skills, and how she would have to find ways to get the players to get along and start playing as a team. It was a nice way to start the series, showing Nuan Xia’s determination to do this for her dad whilst maintaining her own personal ambition for following in his footsteps.
My only criticism in this regard would be that I think they could’ve done way more with it. The premise was strong, the intention was there, but they didn’t actually go as far as to really use basketball as a way to tap into the characters’ personalities or the technicalities of the sport itself. I believe the only time they really started analyzing gameplay and tactics was during the final match in the very last episode. Despite the fact that the actors actually had to play basketball and seemed to be apt enough at it, it felt like they didn’t actually use the sport as a bonding tool as much as they set out to do, and the way they depicted the trainings felt quite shallow. Despite Nuan Xia’s eccentric ideas of cuffing the players’ hands together to become more in sync with each other and the occasional jogging sessions around the athletics field, there was no realistic in-depth training depicted. I couldn’t help but read some comments on MDL that also criticized this, how it didn’t give a very realistic portrayal of playing basketball. Honestly, as a complete sports noob, it didn’t bother me as much that the basketball playing wasn’t that realistic, I enjoyed the parts where they were playing nonetheless. But I did find it a pity that they didn’t use the training to, for example, tap into each player’s personal strengths and weaknesses more. Introducing the players individually throughout the trainings and attributing them their own personal quirks and flaws would have given them much more to work with, and it might’ve made up for the lack of backstory and depth in both the story and the characters.

This lack of backstory and the fact that this caused the characters to remain quite one-dimensional makes it hard for me to really analyze the characters as elaborately as I usually do in my reviews. What I’ll do is I’ll just go through the main cast one by one to give a concise summary of their personalities and relationship dynamics with the others, adding my personal comments and criticisms as I go.

Starting with Nuan Xia, as I said, I really liked how determined she was from the start, because this made it very easy to root for her from the get-go. I also liked that she wasn’t just some typical female lead with rose-tinted glasses on who just wanted to grant her dad’s wish without actually having the skills to do so – besides being very physically strong, she actually inherited her dad’s coaching skills, which immediately shone through when she started scouting people. She didn’t shy away from commenting on the guys’ body proportions and physical strengths, or even from touching their chests and stuff – she acted really professional when it came to the team and I thought that was very cool of her. I guess it was just nice to see a confident and athletic female character who accepted herself for who she was, even if she wasn’t the “girliest” in the way she acted and dressed. I think she even mentioned to Jun Ye in one of the final episodes that he would have to accept that his girlfriend had “manly” characteristics (after which he very sweetly pointed out all her feminine and cute ones). It was just nice that she was unapologetic about who she was, and that she never got insecure about her looks or personality even once. She was a very solid female character, and I appreciated that. I think she was one of the few characters in the story that remained very consistent, even after she became lovey-dovey with Jun Ye. There was no sudden change in her personality, she adapted very naturally to the new feelings and still remained herself. She actually had a couple of legit badass scenes, like when she filled in during the first match against Shenhua’s reserve team and how she got out of that car wearing the sunglasses – even if the situation was silly, I really liked the energy she gave off during those scenes.

Jun Ye comes from a wealthy family and is expected to take over his family’s company – which is why his grandpa doesn’t like him going back to the court. That’s about all the backstory we get from Jun Ye, during the short arc where his grandfather tries to stop him from dating Nuan Xia and playing basketball. Other than that, while seemingly stoic and guarded at first, it doesn’t take him long at all to start falling for Nuan Xia. I was actually really surprised when he already started daydreaming about her in like, episode four or something. On the other hand, it might have been for the better because it definitely sped things up between them and getting to the point can sometimes be very refreshing compared to a slowburn romance. In any case, it didn’t take long for Jun Ye’s cool demeanor to thaw and for him to become more cooperative in Nuan Xia’s attempts to revive the Qingmeng basketball team. If I remember correctly, he had a personal attachment to the basketball court hall since it was built for him by his father (?) or something, and that’s how he ultimately ends up joining the team. Since the disbanding of the original team, Jun Ye’s skills have definitely dwindled and he needs to up his game as much as everyone else in order to regain his former reputation of star player. What he may lack in skills, he makes up for in looks and popularity – he has his personal cheering squad, led by a girl named Anna (Wu Jia Xuan). Luckily for Nuan Xia, he is cool enough to dismiss all these fangirls and outward attention when it comes to expressing his feelings for her. I appreciated that he didn’t beat around the bush and didn’t send any mixed signals but just approached her directly as soon as he acknowledged how he felt about her. Although it happened quite fast, it was nice to see how he just couldn’t help be intrigued after witnessing how physically strong she was; I like to think that that’s the first thing that really made an impression on him, just like how Domyouji started liking Makino after she kicked him in the face in HYD, lol.

While I liked the romance between Nuan Xia and Jun Ye and how naturally it happened, one thing that kind of took away from the romantic development between them was the addition of the extra scenes at the end of each episode. I read several comments about these, and apparently no one really understands what they were for and if they were supposed to be hypothetical scenarios or something. They are basically cute short scenes of Nuan Xia and Jun Ye as a couple. While there wasn’t anything wrong with the scenes themselves, my point is that they already started showing these extra scenes before the two actually became a couple in the main story, which was very confusing. Showing their lovey-dovey relationship dynamic ahead of time kind of ruined their romantic development for me. It took away the anticipation of watching how their love would bloom and how they would be as a couple. I honestly still don’t understand why they felt the need to add these extra scenes. In my opinion, they could’ve either added them in the main story once the two got together, or omitted them altogether. I thought it was a very weird decision to structure it like this. After all, their dynamic pretty much starts off as a kind of enemies-to-lovers trope, so prematurely spoiling them as a lovey-dovey couple right off the bat took away the whole effect of watching them slowly grow closer.

Chu Ran was the captain of the original Qingmeng basketball team, and he and Nuan Xia’s father apparently shared a bond similar to one of father and son. This also supports the storyline that he and Nuan Xia grew up together, and that he was always like a big brother to her. Nuan Xia’s father’s heart attack happened right after Chu Ran missed the final shot in their final important match, and it’s revealed in the very last episode that he’s always been haunted by that. This incident has made him believe that winning is the only important thing, and that’s why he decides to join Shenhua as an assistant coach, as their chances are higher than Qingmeng, which had fallen apart. Despite now being rivals, Chu Ran still remains on good terms with Nuan Xia and Tu Tu.
The most confusing thing about Chu Ran for me was the fact that his intentions remained very unclear to me. He initially says that Nuan Xia and Tu Tu are like younger sisters to him, and when Tu Tu first tells him that Nuan Xia and Jun Ye are getting together, he doesn’t seem to be affected by that news at all – he even says something along the lines of “they look good together”. But then, after that, it’s suddenly insinuated that he actually does have feelings for Nuan Xia, creating a sense of love rivalry between him and Jun Ye. This became even more confusing with the “introduction” of the random girl in the extra episodes, who seemed to suddenly become Chu Ran’s girlfriend (I’m getting back to this later because this actually made no sense to me). Until the very end, I had no idea whether Chu Ran was actually in love with Nuan Xia or not, because if he did, it was really only in words and not actions. It may have also had to do with the actor’s stiff acting and the fact that he consistently had one and the same expression on his face throughout the show, which made it hard for me to read him. In any case, it wasn’t that Chu Ran was an unsympathetic character, but the fact that he remained so stoic and his intentions weren’t conveyed clearly (again, this might be the subtitles’ fault) I found it a bit hard to gauge what he was thinking most of the time. I also found it a bit weird that they only played out that dramatic emotional story of him being traumatized by Nuan Xia’s father’s death, believing it to be his fault and causing him to get obsessed with winning so as not to cause something like that again, in the very last episode. Like, they could’ve revealed this psychological layer to his character gradually throughout the story. Dumping the lore of Nuan Xia’s father’s notebooks in which he wrote so much about Chu Ran in the last episode without any gradual buildup or closure, only to wrap it up within ten minutes, felt kind of random and it definitely didn’t have the dramatic effect that it could’ve had.

If there was any character I would’ve liked to have more substance, it was Tu Tu. Despite the fact that she’s the cute, happy-go-lucky ever-loyal sidekick of Nuan Xia, which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, the point was that she really was just that: a sidekick. She really just exists as Nuan Xia’s best (childhood) friend and college dormmate who goes along with everything her bestie does. She even joins her on the whole basketball mission, even though it’s never established what her own personal attachment to the team or the sport is. I originally didn’t think about it too much, figuring she just did it because she’d also known Nuan Xia’s dad and was just being an supportive friend, but in hindsight it hit me that she actually didn’t seem to have a life of her own.
I remember loving how in A Little Thing Called First Love, the best friend character went her own way in college, being the only one who decided to study something else than the rest, creating a life for herself besides her friendship with the FL. I feel like Tu Tu would’ve been a much more interesting character if they’d at least given her something to do besides tagging along with Nuan Xia all the time. Honestly, it didn’t feel like she had any personal ties with or knowledge of basketball and she definitely didn’t seem like the sporty type herself. She was always just kind of hanging around during the trainings, occasionally bringing in some drinks and meal boxes. She really didn’t seem to have her own personal life besides that. Even after she got together with Ling Xuan, the only change was that she started occasionally helping out at the boba shop where he worked part-time, but that’s it. It’s like she was only ever the supporting character in other people’s stories, but never the main character in her own. I was really curious to find out more about how she and Nuan Xia came to be such close friends – I mean heck, if she devoted her entire college life to assist Nuan Xia in her dream without expressing any personal ambitions for herself, it must mean they had an unbreakable rock-solid friendship, right? Despite the way she dressed there was really nothing that set her apart as an individual character with a mind of her own, and that was a real pity. The only time I thought she showed some proper backbone was when, after Ling Xuan finally confessed back to her, she expressed her self-awareness by acknowledging that she felt rushed to respond to his confession, and that she didn’t immediately want to jump in on it, but instead preferred to take it slow to reconfirm that she still felt the same way. That was unexpectedly, dare I say uncharacteristically mature of her, compared to the simple-minded hopeless romantic girlie she was initially made out to be. Besides this, I also had an issue with the actress’ acting, because she really didn’t seem to know how to convey anything through her facial expressions and it just seemed like she was saying her lines without any feeling behind it. Tu Tu could’ve been a really cool supporting character, and I liked how they “designed” her with the cute clothing and the bunny references in her accessories, but I would’ve liked it if she’d shown at least a bit more personality and individuality in her own life and hobbies, rather than only ever hanging around Nuan Xia or Ling Xuan.

Ling Xuan was one of the characters that quickly piqued my interest because of his personality, as he immediately set himself apart from the others. I really liked the way Nuan Xia discovered him, how she saw him run really fast while doing deliveries and just went straight after him. I thought it was also nice to have at least one slightly whimsical character in the show, because his mood swings actually kept me on my toes, lol. I also liked that they paired him up with Tu Tu, although the way they portrayed their romance did feel a bit forced to me. I personally think they could’ve been an absolutely adorable couple if there’d been a little bit more chemistry between the actors, but the buildup between them was pretty sweet. Just like they saved the dramatic story surrounding Chu Ran until the end, they also created some last minute conflict with Ling Xuan suddenly feeling so insecure that he even debated transfering to Shenhua. I thought this was a bit extreme, and he should’ve just accepted that they let him win that trial match with Jun Ye to get his spirits up for the real match (although I really blamed Tu Tu for telling him the truth in the first place). All in all, it felt like they suddenly drew something dramatic out of something that wasn’t actually that big of a deal, just to create some last minute friction before the final match, and it felt a bit unnecessary to me. Still, I did like Ling Xuan as a character, and although I don’t actually remember if they explained why he had to work so many part-time jobs, I did feel like giving him that “side quest” of maintaining several jobs contributed to his character, because at least it proved that he had a life outside of the basketball team and Tu Tu. I thought he was a nice addition to the team in terms of personality and energy, even more so because he tended to be a bit hotheaded at times.

My personal favorite basketball team member was Shen Ying Liang, the most compliant player who was also the first to agree to come back to the team. I guess it must be because I like characters that have a life of their own outside the events of the main story, because Ying Liang was the only character with a completely different study path than the rest, he majored in science. He was frequently shown doing experiments in a lab. I don’t know what it was with him, but he was just such a sweet beanpole. I loved that he wore his science glasses during trainings and matches, and it was so typical that he literally had a streak of three consecutive shots before he passed out from exhaustion, lol. My boy was fragile, not gonna lie. Still, he brought a really calm and peaceful energy to the team and I liked how he always managed to stay professional and mature, even when people would tell him he should just give up on the team. He enabled a nice balance between players who made it hard for Nuan Xia to bring everyone together and players who just went along with it and appreciated what she was trying to do.

Zhang Xiao Qiang is initially always seen hanging around Jun Ye, even calling him “bro”, but once the team is complete and Jun Ye starts hanging out with Nuan Xia more, he kind of becomes this duo with Qi Feng, which was kind of typical. Anyways, Xiao Qiang was more like the casual, funny guy of the group. He didn’t really seem to take Nuan Xia’s plan seriously at first, but he did end up becoming one of the most loyal team members who always showed up and gave everything he had during the trainings. Again, I liked his energy, how he had another completely different personality within the team to brighten the mood and it was also funny how he immediately started calling Jun Ye out for crushing on Nuan Xia. It was kind of a pity that they took him away from Jun Ye’s side, because that also meant he got lesser screentime, and I would’ve liked it if he’d remained more of a best-friend-to-the-ML kind of character rather than that they just pushed him aside as soon as the main couple got together. Don’t get me wrong, he and Qi Feng were a funny duo, but because they were both supporting characters they really ended up being pushed to the background once the romance development came into play, which was a pity. I would’ve liked to get a bit more background information on him as well.

Qi Feng was the typical brute force of the team, who had the build but – sorry to say – not exactly the brains. I couldn’t help but feel like he would be a perfect cast for Takeo from Oremonogatari, he was like the spitting image of him, lol. My main criticism with Qi Feng was that he really was just depicted as the dumb big guy who could only focus on whether Anna was around or not, since he had a major crush on her. In the beginning I almost thought they would create an unexpected romance between him and Anna, but that didn’t happen. That would’ve been a funny twist, just saying. But no, he was just a big brute with only thoughts of this one girl in his brain. Despite the fact that he and Xiao Qiang made a funny duo, here I also feel like they could’ve done more or at least elaborated on their friendship a bit more. Besides this, I honestly didn’t really like the actor’s acting – his expressions were all over the place, he didn’t really seem to know what he was doing when he said his lines and the awful dubbing didn’t help either. Honestly, his dubbed voice sounded like someone putting on a very typical dumb troll voice. It’s a shame, really, because in terms of physique he stood out so much, but compared to the other team members he really didn’t seem to have any kind of personality or individualistic elements that made him stand out as an interesting character.

All in all, I feel like they had a really nice group of characters in the basketball team, and as I mentioned before, it would’ve been nice to get to know each and everyone individually throughout the trainings, for example by introducing them all through a mini arc to get them to participate, like they did in The Big Boss – didn’t like that show at all, but at least they had proper character arcs. Since the team consisted of such diverse personalities, it would’ve been great if they could’ve tapped into that aspect more and at least highlighted them one by one, also to emphasize their respective strengths and weaknesses as a team. I actually liked the exercise where they were cuffed together to get more in synch, so maybe they could’ve done more one-on-one features of specific team members bonding or something.

Moving on to some characters outside of the basketball team, there’s Anna to discuss. As I mentioned before, Anna is the leader of Jun Ye’s fanclub who is initially established as the bitchy character who tries to put Nuan Xia in a bad light for “trying to steal Jun Ye” from her. However, I’m really glad they redeemed her character because she actually became a much nicer person throughout the show. It was refreshing that they didn’t keep her in as the token bitch girl who just wouldn’t stop pulling stupid pranks to try and make the FL look bad (looking at you, girl from Love O2O 👀). She actually wasn’t that bad, and I liked her dynamic with Lu Ye and how she started seeing him in a new light once he started helping the Qingmeng team out with their training. Again, it would’ve been nice to get a bit more backstory from her besides being from a similarly rich family as Jun Ye and being a possible arranged match for him. Still, as annoying as she was in the beginning, she really redeemed herself and I’m glad they chose to do that instead of making already typical characters even more typical.

If I remember correctly, Lu Ye (Liu Bin Hao) was a former player from Shenhua, but he was also a friend of Jun Ye’s and he at some point starts helping the team out by for example lending them an outdoor training space. He was a very mature character, and I liked his reasoning for both wanting to help Jun Ye out but also not wanting to overstep his boundaries because of his lingering loyalty to Shenhua. Still, it was really satisfying when he actually started assisting in their training and even ended up filling in for the Qingmeng team in the final match. His dynamic with Anna was kind of like the one between Nuan Xia and Chu Ran, they were childhood friends who ultimately came to see each other as more than that, and I liked how he suddenly started pursuing Anna at some point, they were a nice pairing. Although he only appeared occasionally, he brought a very welcome energy which made me glad to see him whenever he stepped in, so that was cool.

Finally, I’m just quickly going over the members of the Shenhua team, who for some reason are credited as supporting characters more dominantly than the Qingmeng people – the actors who played Shen Ying Liang, Zhang Xiao Qiang and Qi Feng aren’t even credited on MyDramaList despite being part of the main cast. Apart from Chu Ran and the coach Han Mo (Xu Peng), there was Xia Ze (Yu Kai Ning), Gu Yuan (Xu Hao), Bai Yin , Jiang Yi Chen (Zhang Hong Yang) and last and very least, Ding Lei (Feng Sheng Hao). Even though these characters didn’t get any significant backstory either, I did like that they at least had personality and exuded a certain sassiness in their playing styles. I actually liked Xia Ze, for some reason. He definitely needed to be more of a sport in terms of competition manners, but he had something cheeky and arrogant to him that I lowkey liked, haha. It was funny how they kind of linked two players from each team together like set opponents, and how Shenhua had a big guy like Qi Feng of their own. The only person I distinctly disliked was Ding Lei, this dude sucked. I didn’t like his attitude, he thought he was the shit but really had to throw a tantrum in order to get Chu Ran to include him in the official team. He also had the same emotionless face throughout the show, which annoyed me, so no, I didn’t like him. 😂 But yeah, even if Shenhua was literally the only team Qingmeng ever played against, it was kind of nice to have a solid set of opponents with their own strengths. It kind of reminded me of Haikyuu!, where you get introduced to players from different teams and their respective playing styles. Again, they could’ve done more with it, but the intention was there.

Now that I’ve completed my notes on all the characters, I’d like to address some final aspects of the series that stood out to me or bothered me in some way.
Something that kept coming back was the fact that this show had the tendency to really botch its character introductions. One main example of this lay with the character Yao Zhen. She was literally brought into the story as a new love rival out of the blue, without a proper introduction or any kind of established history with Jun Ye. She literally just showed up out of nowhere to greet him and I was like, “sorry, but who the f are you?” This in turn made it very hard for me to take her seriously when she went off at Jun Ye for not appreciating her efforts of going after him, like girl, you literally appeared ten minutes ago and you’re already saying things like, “I’m not leaving until you love me, I’ve put in so much effort, you can’t date Nuan Xia” etc. etc. etc. I thought the way they introduced this potential new love rival was super weird, also because she was literally gone again after two episodes.
Secondly, mystery player #21 or “Yang Kai” (Su Yuan) as was written on his basketball shirt. I have no idea where this guy came from. I first noticed him when he was standing around the team outside the practice hall at some point and I was like, “wait who is that?”. After that he was suddenly just sitting with the others in the locker room before matches. I guess he was a reserve player, but he was never even introduced by name. Like, if he was the only singular reserve player, they could’ve at least introduced him at some point, like “hey, this is Yang Kai, he’ll be training with us as a reserve”, but no. He literally just appeared in locker room gatherings, never even during the trainings or matches themselves. The only time he actually got to do anything was during the final match, when he was actually on the bench and got to fall in for Ling Xuan when he hurt himself. But even then, they only let him play a bit just to show that he sucked and missed all the goals before they substituted him with Lu Ye. Then he suddenly got a moment of acknowledgement where he moped in the locker room during break and they were like “Don’t let it get to you, Xiao Yang” and I was like “oh okay guess they did acknowledge him after all”. Seriously, what was up with that? It was just him, so it would’ve been no big deal to at least add in one line to introduce him as the reserve instead of just adding him in without any explanation, because I legit had to do a double-take to make sure there was an unknown random guy sitting amongst them. It’s kind of funny that DramaWiki credits him, because he was quite literally a ghost cast member who didn’t even speak.
And then finally, I’d like to talk about the heroine of the ever-confusing extra scenes saga, the mysterious Qing Zi (He Qian Ying). I already mentioned how confused I was about the extra scenes that were shown after each episode, but at some point the cute couple scenes of Nuan Xia and Jun Ye made way for scenes in which the Shenhua team got dating advice from this girl called Qing Zi. I have no idea who she was or where she came from, and it also didn’t help that the on-screen captions for these extra scenes weren’t translated in the subtitles, because that might’ve helped a little to at least make sense of the scenario that was being depicted. To me, it just seemed like she suddenly appeared as some sort of “love guru” that started teaching the Shenhua team members, including Chu Ran, about how the deal with girls. Why the Shenhua basketball team needed this type of advice when none of them was ever shown interacting with a girl, I have no idea. But yeah, she literally became the main protagonist of the extra scenes at the end of the episodes in the second half. In the end these extra scenes just featured her and Chu Ran, where she apparently, somehow, became his girlfriend and he kept getting into trouble with her because he could never answer her questions satisfactorily. To be clear, this girl didn’t even appear in the main story, ONLY in those extra epilogue scenes, and the situations depicted in these scenes also didn’t tie in with the main story whatsoever. It just made me super confused because I thought they established that Chu Ran had feelings for Nuan Xia, but then suddenly this girl appeared (who Chu Ran also seemed to know already) and I couldn’t make heads nor tails of it. How was she related to Chu Ran? How was she related to the Shenhua team? Where did she come from?! They literally just dropped in the dialogue somewhere that she was Chu Ran’s girlfriend and I was like “I STILL DON’T KNOW WHO YOU ARE!!” Seriously, what was the deal with this show’s tendency to just throw in new characters without even an introduction? What’s more, this girl is actually credited on MDL as a main supporting character when half the Qingmeng basketball team isn’t even credited, and she didn’t even appear in the main story. Make it make sense.

While I thought the animations in-between were a cute and original addition to indicate a little break in the episodes, I think it would’ve been better if the cartoon characters resembled the real life actors a bit more. Most of the time I couldn’t really tell who was supposed to be who in terms of appearance, and I had to memorize the numbers on their basketball shirts to figure out who was being depicted. They could’ve made them look more alike by giving them slightly more distinctive hairstyles or expressions or something.

My final main point of criticism has to do with the issue of coherency throughout the story. I honestly felt like, after they lost that first official match with Shenhua, the story completely dwindled and I had a hard time keeping up with what was happening. Even though they lost, they ended the game with a victorious feeling because of Jun Ye’s final great shot, but then suddenly it seemed like the team lost all its motivation again. Maybe it had to do with the incomplete subtitles, but I couldn’t put my finger on this sudden switch in vibe. Not only did they use this sudden slump period to focus more on the romantic development between Nuan Xia and Jun Ye, but then they also added in that side story of Nuan Xia planning to go to Beijing, which wasn’t clear AT ALL. She just suddenly started acting distant and hired Lu Ye as a substitute coach and muttered things like “I won’t be seeing you for a while”, but her plans remained unspoken until she finally told Jun Ye. Like, Nuan Xia was the main character; we should be following her train of thought most out of everyone, right? The story just took a very confusing and incoherent turn there, also because it suddenly kind of seemed to abandon the whole initial “bring back the basketball team” plot and instead focussed completely on the main couple’s love. Nuan Xia’s mission for her dad suddenly became like a side quest and only returned to its former importance in the very final episode when they went up against Shenhua for the last time. The team members were literally just left hanging around at practice with nothing to do, and then suddenly Nuan Xia didn’t need to go to Beijing anymore and everything was restored and I was like, “so what the heck happened?!” It was so hard to follow. Again, it might have to do with the bad subtitles, maybe it was conveyed clearly in the original dialogue, but it completely went past me. The final episodes leading up to that last match against Shenhua were really just fillers that were all over the place and didn’t tie in with the main story whatsoever.

In practical terms, I would say there was a lot left to be desired in terms of the quality, both in the budget and the acting. I can overlook the budget-thing mostly because it was established as a short and simple story that didn’t pretend to be more than it was, like for example Road to Rebirth. Despite clearly having a lower budget, they still were able to make it a fun enough story with what they had, so that wasn’t particularly an issue for me. As for the acting, I’m going to be brutally honest and say that I really only liked the acting of the two main characters, Nuan Xia and Jun Ye, since they seemed the most natural and actually knew what they were doing with their facial expressions. I specifically had an issue with the acting of Tu Tu, Chu Ran, Qi Feng and Ding Lei because it seemed like they really only had one expression and were quite stiff and one-dimensional in portraying emotions.
I’ve already complained about the subtitling, although that of course doesn’t really have to do with the show in itself as much as with the translators, but one thing I do want to mention – final criticism, I swear – is that the dubbing in this show was also very annoyingly present. I know that it’s common for Chinese shows to be dubbed over, although I still don’t fully understand why, but in this case it was kind of distracting because it was so obvious that these weren’t the actors’ real voices. Especially for Qi Feng, it literally sounded as if someone was just doing a funny voice, and it only made it harder to take stuff seriously.

Before moving on to my conclusion I’d like to briefly discuss the title of the show. When I first looked it up I thought it was quite a generic name, like Love Under the Moon, but while watching the show – and partially thanks to the awful subtitles that started translating the characters’ names into English – I realized that the title is actually a wordplay on the main characters’ names, Nuan Xia (暖夏, lit.: “warm summer”) and Jun Ye (君夜, lit.: “your night”). The title combines the first and last characters of their names (夏夜, lit.: “summer night” and 君暖, lit.: “your warmth”). While I appreciate this hidden wordplay (I love witty wordplay in general), I can’t help but feel like it’s completely lost on a non-Chinese audience. It doesn’t translate into English, and therefore it doesn’t really make sense for people who don’t catch the wordplay because the story has nothing to do with “summer nights”. It would work if it was a love story that occurred specifically in the summer, but that’s also not the case. I personally like the alternative English title “Basket Loveball” under which I watched it on Dailymotion, since it at least incorporates the themes of romance and basketball from the story. While the original title is definitely witty in Chinese, I personally think it’s better to choose a different title in English that has a more direct connection to the story.

As I’ve already commented on the majority of the actors’ performances in my analysis and I don’t really have anything to add to that, I’m going to skip the cast comments this time. As I’ve made clear, I wasn’t very impressed by the acting overall, and it was only made worse by the bad dubbing and subbing. Still, it wasn’t all awful and some people were better than others, but it definitely underlined the quality of the whole thing. I still rated it with a 6.0 because I thought it had potential. The story in itself was interesting and promising and I liked the basketball theme as a framework for the romance plot, but at some point it just felt like the writing team lost sight of their original goal and started adding all sorts of different and confusing side stories (like the extra episodes) that distracted from that. I think I would’ve liked it way more if they’d added a bit more substance to it, especially in terms of the characters’ backstories. It would’ve helped create a bit more empathy and interest for everyone if they’d just given everyone some more solid characteristics and motivation. Still, it was a fun story and the romance between Nuan Xia and Jun Ye was actually cute. I’m curious to see them in different shows now, just to see different sides of their acting. I found out Nuan Xia’s actress Wang Zi Wei was in A Love So Beautiful, although it’s been a while since I watched that and don’t remember the details about her character. I didn’t know any of the other actors, so who knows when I might come across them again – I’ve got enough Chinese dramas left on my list.

I’m going to leave this review here. If you’ve reached this point, thank you for taking the time to read my ramblings. I will be back soon with a new review, can’t wait to see what my next watch will be!

Until then, bye-bee! x