I went into this drama eager, excited, and expecting too much. First, the Noona in me was over the moon at the idea of live watching a Noona Dongsaeng Romance. As we all know I’m a tad obsessed with this trope. However, I was also excited by the fact it was another installment in the I Need Romance franchise. I loved the first one so very much, but haven’t seen the second one. I had hoped that the third installment would have the same edgy, fresh, and realistic view of romance (with a healthy dose of intimacy/love/fun) that the first installment had. Thirdly, I really was looking forward to the story from having read loads of articles about the show. Sadly, this drama was a disappointment to me. On many levels. Don’t get me wrong, there were plenty of lovely things within the show, but those good points were not enough to save it for me. What did I want from this show? 1) Focus on relationships in all their forms. Friendship/Co-Worker/Employee/Lover. 2) A Noona Romance to blow away all other Noona Romances. 3) A fun story that focused on relationships in a real way like I Need Romance 1 had done. Unfortunately I didn’t get any of that. The relationship growth all seemed forced or nothing happened at all until the very last episode where the writers crammed it into a single conversation that made no sense to the rest of the scene. This Noona Romance is my least favorite Noona Romance that I’ve watched thus far. This show was not fun to watch, there was nothing of that vitality or edgy approach to story telling that I had loved in I Need Romance 1. I couldn’t connect to Joo Yeon, she was an unlikable character throughout the entire show. She was cold, robotic, and wishy-washy. I just could not find it in me to feel anything for her except annoyance. The second male lead was so boring and two dimensional that I could have slept through his scenes and not missed all that much. Wan was so shameless in his adoration and love for Joo Yeon that I felt embarrassed for him most of the time. There is a huge difference between puppy love and being disrespectful to yourself in order to love someone else. To me, it felt like Wan did not respect himself enough to stand up for himself and let Joo Yeon walk all over him for every episode except the last three. That isn’t adorable puppy love, that is just embarrassing. What did I like? Well the OST. I loved it so much that I will be buying it. Wow, the music was amazing. But isn’t it sad when the music is the thing I loved the most from the entire show? I also loved Min Jung and her lover. Their story was poignant and addressed some difficult issues, it was interesting and I looked forward to their screen time very much. Also I loved the Dongsaengs Hee Jae and Woo Young so much I could have watched an entire show about just them and been perfectly happy! Episode 16 was good, they wrapped up all the story tangents nicely and everyone got a happy-ish ending. Even though they closed the series well, I was underwhelmed emotionally. The last episode did not feel like a climactic finish, it was just another episode. But a slightly better episode than some of the episodes prior to it. In conclusion, I wasn’t impressed with this installment in I Need Romance. If I hadn’t committed to reviewing each episode for the blog I would have dropped the show around episode 8.