This started out as a pretty decent drama, but I had a pretty hard time getting into it. More specifically I just couldn't easily ship the OTP in this show. I'm not adverse to age gaps at all, but the leads are just too far apart not in age, but in maturity and the production team made this even more extreme with making Moon Ga Young's character and visuals as juvenile as possible. It was kind of like watching a cartoon about the romance of a polar bear and an alien robot, I could only follow the story with detached amusement. (At least there was no love triangle)

With that said I have eventually gotten into it just fine and I felt pretty entertained, unfortunately the writer felt the need to ruin my fun almost right away. The three hours preceding the finale were pretty much garbage tier. First they broke up due to noble reasons, then they made up for like 5 minutes & finally the writer proceeded with the mandatory 2 year separation plot. I'm sick and tired of bullshit separation plots and the one in this drama felt especially bad. At least the final episode offered a pretty decent, but short happy ending.

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This show is fantastic! Out of all the kdramas I've seen this is the closest to the Reply series (especially 88) in presentation & characterization, but at the same time this show doesn't push the love triangle in a stupid over the top way, which is a huge plus. I mean sure this one is set in present day Korea and it's not a 1-2 women + many guys setup, but the vibe is very similar.
All the characters, including the minor ones are interesting. All the sub-stories are cool. It's great how the drama starts, it's great how it ended and the quality stays consistent throughout. Normally I prefer dramas like WWwSK, or Fight for My Way, but this was a nice relaxing experience without the epic/cathartic moments that those kinds of dramas are known for. It was very funny, but not embarrassingly funny, It was just unreal enough to be interesting.

The casting is basically perfect, even more so than in R88. I hope that I'll see more of these actors in the years to come. The OST was good, though it could have been a bit less repetitive. +

Just to say some negative things: They took the fart jokes way too far and there were some dramaception moments that felt a bit immersion breaking.

Overall it's an easy 10/10, I hope it becomes a cult classic outside of Korea. Looking at the ratings leaves a sour taste in my mouth, I hope it's not because of the gay character, but with Korean viewers you never know...

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There were a few things that I wasn't comfortable with, while watching this drama. I really did not like their portrayal of autism, Koreans seems to have a stereotypic (more often than not)misconception how a mentally ill person should talk, walk and hold their gait, however this was borderline offensive for me to watch. Most characters were treating Shion as a child the entire time just like in a children's show, many supporting characters had lines such as "he is really like a grownup now" "he progressed so much" and yet their behavior remained the same, as if Shion was a patient in this pediatric hospital.

Moving on to the drama as a whole, obviously it was not preproduced and that really shows. There are multiple odd shifts in the story, character personalities change out of nowhere, probably based on audience feedback. I feel that up until episode 17-18 not even the writers knew what they wanted to do with their main loveline, once they've decided on a path they went for in a rather abrupt manner. I think originally they wanted to go all in with their love triangle with Dohan, but then they've gotten cold feet & the second couple's relationship got mended in a flash.
Episodes 2 - 10 ~ are nowhere near as good as what follows afterwards, I considered dropping it very early on, because the medical cases were not that interesting, the story dragged a lot & even though the angst was expected with a story like this, I felt that it was without merit. Thanks to live filming they completely shifted the mood of the series around e10 & what followed was a lighthearted medical drama that for the most part oozed of hope. At times I have really loved it.
There is no romance in the first half at all and there is very little of it up until episode 17 or 18, I'm not sure if the romance tag is entirely warranted. The way how the main couple got together feels forced & their happy ending feels like a nonending. Yun Soo's parents weren't shown. The writer's idea of a solution for the parent issue was a 1 year timeskip, something along the lines of "They are still together after a year, so dear audience fret not the in laws were convinced somehow"
There was a lot of hospital politics & scheming in the show, however it was not fun, nor interesting, nor a crucial part of the story, so I recommend skipping all the scenes involving hospital politics.

The supporting characters were awesome and there were some awesome parts later on, for these reasons the 7/10 rating seems fair, despite all the negatives that I've listed above.

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This show has many of the worst kdrama plot devices. It starts out as a somewhat fun romcom, but already in the first few episodes it's not really above average in any way. Even the chemistry between the leads is not that great. The drama has one of the absolute worst love triangles that I've seen and that's not all, we even go into full on melodrama quite quickly, but not the good kind. (perhaps the tragedy tag shouldn't be missing)

To mention some positives too Nara did a great job portraying her character and at least we were given a long and a sufficiently satisfying happy ending.

Rewatching for me is absolutely out of the question. Seriously though how is this show rated at 8.3? It's one of the worst dramas that I have managed to struggle through and usually my opinion is not that far off from the average reviewer either..

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So here is the drama i've been waiting for the most for a long time now. So far the story did not progress anywhere, we pretty much only had world-building (and some banter) in the first two episodes that I've seen. I feel that there is no hook for me, other than the writer's name. I remember, when I watched the first episode of Goblin & I was already hooked by the birthday cake scene. Very pretty people are not enough by themselves to entertain me..
I'm pretty neutral about Minho, but I don't feel that he was ever a good actor & I really hope that this drama has more substance than his face, his acting so far has not been very convincing. I like Go Eun quite a bit, but I'm not yet sure about her character in this one.

Anyhow I'm hoping that things will go up from here, a 9/10 final review is still on the table. It's not going to be another Abyss, right!?

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edit: After seeing episode 3-4 I'm really hopeful. The story is finally on track & I'm kind of hooked, I'm genuinely looking forward to episode 5. MinHo's acting seems to have improved, perhaps he got more into the character as the filming has progressed. The world building stage seems to be over and I loved the teaser & how episode 4 ended.

edit2: I enjoyed episodes 5-6. I guess the only thing that's really lacking is humor, there is not a whole lot of it, but nonetheless I'm still excited about next week.
Here is me being nitpicy >>>
The writer is not the best at writing realistic warfare scenarios as we have seen in DoTS, we had some of that in ep6, probably it was an effort to jab at Japan due to their ongoing trade dispute. It's not great when real world politics have an effect on the entertainment industry like this, but I've seen much worse in Chinese works, hopefully there will be no more of this in future episodes. The second Jung Tae Eul detective Kang Shin Jae childhood origin story was completely unnecessary, feels almost like a byproduct of live filming/live writing. The drama had to be preproduced due to all the visual effects, but it's possible that the script was only written week by week as the filming went along, I hope that I'm wrong, because weekly writing almost never leads to a coherent script and that is pretty important for a high concept series to work.
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Final edit: "next week" came a little late, I had the time to binge the last 10 episodes over the course of a week. I'm disappointed overall. The romance got serious really abruptly, but Minho's acting was probably the worst it has ever been. Kim GoEun makes all these really lively animated faces & cries a lot, but Minho has no emotional range what so ever, their most epic scenes are completely butchered by Minho. I think it's safe to say that his bad acting killed the drama for me. The story goes real slow in between e6 & e12 and that would have been fine, if we had some cool romance, but Minho sort of ruined that, what else remains from the drama doesn't amount to very much.
I guess Kim Eunsook kind of borked the script, but objectively the script wouldn't even be that bad. With a better director & without Minho we could have reached the level of W, well too bad..
I heard folks discussing that the OST was really good, very similar to Goblin. Well, I'm not saying it's bad or anything, in fact is perhaps slightly above average, but to me this comparison doesn't make any sense. I feel that the 15th best track on the Goblin OST double cd is more valuable than all the soundtrack that TKEM has. It's pointless comparing them.

I just finished watching the last episode, which was probably the best episode of the drama and because of that I decided to give a final score of 6/10, but it's probably too high..

I almost forgot, good God the ad placements were terrifyingly bad. At times it felt like the entire drama was just an advertisement. There were some product placement scenes that straight up made no sense. I mean FL drinking something & then praising it is something that could actually happen, but Nari's supercars..

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It's neither a good xianxia or a good romance drama.

(Disclaimer: I have read countless xianxia novels & I like the romance genre)

This is quite possibly the most overrated cdrama I have ever watched. Love Between Fairy and Devil is -unfortunately- neither a good xianxia story or an entertaining romantic comedy.

Xianxias typically have various elements that I like, for example cultivation, action scenes & a large number of bads either dying or getting some serious face slapping etc etc.
Here most of that is not really there. The character I hated the most is basically not dealt with (Heavenly Emperor? guy) at all. The strong ML is also getting constantly nerfed for really stupid reasons. The xianxia main plot is a watered down version of other stories i've seen/read before, It's really not very good, though there is very little of it overall. Had the romance been better on the account of the plot being so string thin, then I could have still enjoyed the drama..

..However the romance doesn't work very well for me at all. The whole thing makes no sense. Forbidden love is a popular topic in fiction, but it's really hard to justify it here for a number of reasons. We could talk about how Orchid is basically a baby in immortal realm terms, or how from her perspective ML is not only ancient, but also the manifestation of pure evil, also openly plotting to destroy her home, but ultimately I don't care all that much about these. The main problems are the following, the progress is super slow & jittery, there is very little excitement in their relationship and the show is lacking in comedy as well.
To add insult to injury we barely had any happy fluff content in the 36 episodes.
For example "Eternal Love - Ten Miles of Peach Blossoms" has a similarly uninteresting Xianxia plot, but oh my gawd it's like 30 times funnier & there is so much more emotional impact overall. I could only describe the romance in this drama as lukewarm.

There are more genre independent script-writing problems. For starters the whole drama feels rather boring, because the storytelling is not only excruciatingly slow, but also the presentation is too juvenile for adults to really immerse themselves. Furthermore there are a very large number of insane plotholes & contradictions. As often is the case the writer is counting on her audience forgetting the minutiae of what has happened 2-4-6-10 episodes ago. Disrespecting the audience like this is not cool! There is also the ending, if I had to rate the final 2 episodes I think I would go with 2/10. It's not the worst ending I have ever seen, but it's in the bottom 10.

To talk about some positive things too, I think the drama had superb visuals in this genre. Also the acting is wonderful. It's annoying how much talent & effort went into creating a grand production from a script like this, it's a tremendous waste that's what it is.

As for Esther's baby voice? Well, this is what the production team wanted & she did a great job.

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It's a fairly amusing romcom, but that's all.

The Good
⌲ Actress Guo Shu Yao is even more amusing than her MDL page, awesome!
⌲ Michael Zao - Ellie couple up until they started dating (top comedy)
⌲ I really enjoyed the hand drawn anime special effects. (well other than the shiny stars one)
⌲ Up until the final 5-ish episodes the comedy is very decent across the board.
⌲ As unrealistic as this office workplace is, I really enjoyed all the wholesomeness & the plethora of cute characters.
⌲ The liveliness of a Taiwanese production, especially compared to mainland Chinese shows (though it's not outstandingly lively compared to some other Tdrama romcoms I've seen)

The Average
⌲ The chemistry between the leads felt a bit unnatural.
⌲ The Cupcake Couple
⌲ Michael Zao - Ellie couple after they started dating (Too over the top, I had difficulties with second hand embarrassment)
⌲ I'm not completely sold on the main couple concept of the show, especially the hating money bit. That made it very difficult for me to empathize with the ML & accept his supposed `intelligence`.
⌲ Keke's parents (fun early on, but unbelievably weird in the second half, I don't know)
⌲ The plot beyond the romance and fluff is barely anything, to a fault. (I agree with MDL reviewer Chelsea Black, it's "string thin" indeed)

The Bad
⌲ In the final episodes all toxic parents had been very suddenly forgiven. (though I can see how Asian audiences following Confucianist values could maybe!? appreciate this.)
⌲ Adding to the previous point, It's really crazy how Keke pushed ML and his dad into reconciliation, especially considering earlier plots.
⌲ The mandatory & arbitrary breakup (My big problem with this is not how it happened, or that it did, but rather FL's indifference to it made me feel like she planned the whole temporary breakup thing to teach ML a lesson, being confident that she would get him back, not cool!)

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Increasingly awful nearing the final episode

The Good
⌲ The FL actress is incredible. (11/10 pretty, 11/10 chic, 11/10 acting ability)
⌲ The cast overall is quite good. (though the ML seems outclassed to me)
⌲ In the early episodes, despite the makjang premise It's been a pretty chill drama with a lot of fun bickering between the leads.
⌲ No -meaningful- love triangles

The Neutral
⌲ The chemistry between the leads is not bad, not amazing.
⌲ Lee Do Han (the actor did a good job, but it's a weird character & the whole premise of coming home from America makes no sense, if I were gay I would have never done that.)
⌲ The romantic progress between the leads is not very natural, it's like the writer decided to follow the episode 8 formula & then just kind of made it happen with a sledgehammer.
⌲ While the writer obviously did not do a good job, some of the dialog -especially early on- is quite amazing.

The Bad
⌲ The makjang-ish setting
⌲ E11 is one of the worst kdrama episodes I have ever watched.
⌲The finale is just a kindergarten tier fanfic fantasy. (normally I wouldn't mind so much, but following E11 it's straight up jarring)
⌲ The writing is really random in the second half, to the point that it's intelligence insulting.(I heard the comic is far better & more consistent)
⌲ The grandpa character (though I never really liked this senior actor in anything, but that could be on me)
⌲ The cartoon villain half siblings
⌲ The awful and I mean AWFUL seperation/breakup plots
⌲ The random time skip

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This felt like watching a shortened family drama. Most of the side couple content has been removed & they focused on the family conflict and the main couple, but it still had that family drama presentation. I think this could have worked better in the 50 episode format as well. Not because I would have wanted more of the same, but rather had the side couples each gotten a couple episode's worth of screen time I think the annoying things could have been far less pronounced and we had so many sidelined characters with immense rom-comedy potential, or I don't know we could have watched the younger sister training as a haenyo..

The biggest problems I've had with this drama are the absurdity of the old breakup & the absurdity of the decade long unrequited loves. Of course I found the toxic dad extremely annoying & his sudden change of heart ridiculous as well, but that is ultimately just one bad episode of 16, so that would not have been a deal breaker.

Overall I would say that this drama has been a bit sloppily executed. The cast is absolutely amazing, but many of the actors did not take this very seriously & immersion breaking performances were not corrected. In case there is a problem, it's the director's job to call out the ng, in this drama they settled for "barely acceptable" way too many times. This is very common with family dramas, but those are typically far lower budget, so the lower production values are to be expected.

The writing is all over the place & there are countless problems with character motivations, personality adjustments and just nonsensical stuff, even for this genre.

Can Triangle haters watch this drama? Well, I'm not sure. The second ML does not really do anything, there are no three way handgrabs and whatnot, but I found his character to be extremely annoying. (It's a poorly written character, doubt any of the triangle lovers would be able to feel SLS for him)

To say something good as well, I found the non-gloomy parts of the drama quite funny & it's nice how it's relatively low on product placements. Jeju Island is the product placement, but this is the best kind there can be :-)

Ah, I almost forgot. While this drama is not very tropy, it's really annoying how 30 somethings who have dated in the past for many years acted like preteens in love & we have even gotten two typical sleep together, but do nothing scenes.

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Based on this review it may not seem like it, but there really was a lot of wasted potential here. They had most of the ingredients to cook a great meal, but unfortunately the cooks were drunk.

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It's okay.

The little over four hours have a lot of educational content, a big chunk of that is sex ed. that Asian women desperately need. (I had relatively recent interactions with an Asian girl and It was shocking to hear how little she knew about her body & sex despite being experienced..) My problem with this is that I think many of the scenes the intended audience will find jaw dropping and very interesting have a lot of commercial intent behind them. The net effect is still very positive, but gosh if only they could've dialed down the greed just a little bit more..

As for me, I'm more than well versed in this topic. I have learned -almost- nothing new, so of course for a normal adult from the western world much of this would be very boring. Outside of education the romances were very simple, but at least refreshingly spicy and somewhat entertaining, but there is not enough time to really get invested. The show is very well acted though, Hani was absolutely amazing in this role and everyone else too. As for chemistry, I'm not sure, but it's certainly not the best for either of the couples.

Still the fact that a show like this not only managed to air, but also featured relatively big stars is great for progress, which Korea desperately needs. Not only the country, but the entertainment industry too, because I think the sale value of deadfish kisses & 30+s shy hand holding is not doing it for many anymore.

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meh

The first 5-6 episodes were overwhelmingly strong, sure there was not much innovation there, or things I have not seen before, but the mostly excellent casting & the fantasy elements offered solid entertainment. However the second half of the drama just fell flat. The focus shifted from the fantasy romance to other far less pleasant things and some of those make very little sense too. Also why would there be a need to give the father personality adjustments in a pre-produced drama. To me it seems like the screenwriter was really not prepared for this, but even if this were live filming, the pacing would still feel far below average. I have read the webcomic after finishing the drama & in my opinion that one is far better. Yes the ending is still very bad, because I always hate it when "superhero" characters get a normie ending , but at least throughout the comic the author focused on the right things and there were some nice epic moments after all the buildup, which cannot be said about the drama.

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Fantastic, no scifi fan should miss this!

I have read the book & partly because of that I found the early episodes very repetitive and slow, I'm convinced that the book delivered those concepts far more smoothly! This is pretty much the only big negative of the entire show. I mean sure I could nitpick a lot if I wanted to about some silly TV innovations near the final episodes, but I enjoyed those too I suppose. If memory serves the fake science in the book was far more digestible, they have made some things a WEE BIT crazy in the show, but even those were quite fun, adding some action scenes to liven up the experience a little is acceptable to me. ("After a long time, life and civilization will begin again" Right!)

Everything else is pretty great. This is the best scifi show I have watched in a very long time. I have kind of given up on Scifi television, because Hollywood stopped making quality content & no one else had the budget to even try, but somehow China did it & it even passed censorship, which is a miracle in itself. Honestly though, the production values are VERY GOOD. The fact that most CG happens in the game world helps a lot with the magic. The OST is fantastic & so are the non CGI visuals. The main actors also did a more than commendable job.

So while this is obviously not even close to a perfect adaptation, I think it's more faithful to the original than the Lord of the Rings films, just to put things in perspective..

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If I really wanted to attack it from a political perspective, there are some very legitimate points others have brought up, but if you care too much about those things, would it be even possible to peacefully watch ANY scifi show?

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¯\_(ツ)_/¯

This is probably the most mediocre kdrama romcom you'll ever see, except three things.
1) There is no love Triangle
2) It has come out in 2022.
3) It's trying to educate the audience a lot.
The first one is rather obvious, the lack of love triangles is always a huge plus for me. This drama is many things, but boring it is not, so I can only applaud the writers for this choice.
The second one needs more explanation. In my opinion 2022 had been a really bad year for kdrama romcoms, there were only like 3 really good ones and quite a few rather bad attempts. At the very least Law Cafe is an enjoyable easy watch, once.
As for the third one, I sense a lot of blatant -progressive- educational intent & this largely reminds me of TVING dramas. Progress is of course good and Korea could for sure use some, but social engineering works better, if it's not so much in your face..

To elaborate more on mediocrity, the romance is average, the comedy is average & we have a crazy cartoon villain alongside an incredible amount of silliness.

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Spoilers ahead, careful..

This is a great slice of life school drama, heavily inspired by the Reply series. Though if Reply 1988 is Empire Strikes Back, then Lovely Us is Lego Star Wars, if that makes sense. This drama doesn't take itself nearly as seriously as the Reply-s and there is quite a bit of of overemphasized juvenile humor too. Overall the drama is quite easygoing and wholesome & it has much fewer annoyances than 1994, but the immersion is not quite up to that level.

I have taken off two points due to the following reasons. Firstly I feel that a 16 episode long mini series shouldn't be this episodic. Whenever the characters had any significant progress in their relationships, the next episode sort of washed it away immediately, as if nothing has happened. As a direct consequence the last episode of this drama feels a little like episode 8 of a typical kdrama, sort of excluding the last 10 minutes. I mean sure, I can get onboard with the main couple only getting together in the last episode, but I cannot help but be wanting more. As for my biggest gripe, it's the second couple's story. At the midway point their impromptu appearance on that TV show was perhaps the best moment in the series, that really gave me the feels etc & then boom come the next episode and as if that never happened and in the finale the writers decided not only to not bring them together, but it's even heavily hinted that she flew straight into that Oyang's arms. I'm extremely displeased about that, to say the least.

The cinematographer overused background obliteration, so the rather well made sets had very little opportunity to shine. Though admittedly this did not bother me too much.

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This is basically like 4 regular kdramas in one, 2 really sweet guilty pleasure romcoms, 1 really juvenile show that's somewhat annoying to watch & one that is really boring. Considering that this is a 50 hour family drama targeting families -including children and the elderly- it's the best outcome one can really hope for. All things considered Once Again is possibly the best family kdrama ever produced. The content that was meant for different audiences is bearable. The makjang stays just below my nerve threshold. I'm sure you all know how the typical kdrama recipe is like, where everything goes to shit around episode 14-15 and then we get a happy ending in the last episode. Despite the 50 episodes the ratio of conflict is very similar to a regular kdrama, but while binge watching this the "bad" episodes can be a bit taxing since there are 3 times as many of them due to the overall length of the show.

Overall I'm happy that I watched Once Again, but I ended up skipping many of the annoyances.

edit: My Father is Strange is a very comparable family drama.

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