No Watch, Not too much Loss (2024)

Whenever I see a bad ending I tend to bitch and moan about it, so let's get that out of the way. I feel that that the writer has not even tried to prepare to write a 12 episode long miniseries. She just went through the motions almost exactly the same way as if it were a 16 epi long drama & then in e12 just quickly tried to wrap it all up, but -3 minute long happy ending aside- the finale is the worst episode of the show. It's just really messy & quite a bit stupid.


The Good
⌲ Most characters on the show are rather entertaining on their own.
⌲ The Kim Young Dae + Shin Min Ah pairing worked better than I thought possible! (not amazing, but good)
⌲ Frenemies to lovers done very well in the first 9? episodes. (lots of fun bickering)
⌲ The show is very entertaining until the messy stuff in the final episodes. (until secret identities are found out)
⌲ The cat
⌲ The sismance
⌲ The comedy early on


The Average:
⌲ FL's seconary love interest (cartoon tier plot with a divorce offer, but he had so little impact that this does not qualify to trigger my hate for love triangles)
⌲ This is probably Min Ah's worst acting performance I have seen thus far & I'm a fan btw.. (still good, but disappointing compared to her usual self)
⌲ The murderer
⌲ The sex toys


The Bad:
⌲ I'm fairly open minded about consenting adults doing whatever, but this polyamorous plot was increasingly bad all the way to the end. (what bothered me has very little to do with the free hippy love part, more with marriage etc etc)
⌲ For a kdrama romcom there is barely any fluff in the show, sorry but this is not enough sugar for me!
⌲ The stupid 6 month separation in the final episode
⌲ The ridiculous career choices in the final episode (Jeez!)
⌲ The chaebol dad (though the time pressure on the writer made some very predictable plot developments disappear, so this could have been worse)
⌲ Tobacco
⌲ Why just WHY did FL's mom have to die just one second before the finale?

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It's very momerable, but at the same time there are many significant negative points.

In my review I'll mostly focus on the negatives, since I'm late to the party & the drama's abundant positive reviewers covered everything else. Though let me just say the main couple's chemistry & their acting performances are unprecedented in a cdrama, I don't think I have ever seen another cdrama that had such lively leads, with so much raw emotion etc..
(It's not a criticism really, but I chuckled a little when I saw Lao Gao driving a Maybach, this is the real authentic Cwebnovel experience right here!)

Okay so the negatives in no particular order:
⌲ The drama is very long & there are some repetitive plots, it feels like I rewatched an extraordinarily good drama 4 times in a row, this shouldn't have been 36 episodes. (though I'm sure many people that watched it as the eps were released barely noticed this)
⌲ Zhu Yun should have explained many things to her mom, but that never happened. (+horrible mom with little plot relevance & screen time)
⌲ Lao Gao's character development makes no sense to me. (and the transition to crazed cartoon villain is especially jarring)
⌲ Why would Li Xun trust Gao with L&P? (Their friendship? is very poorly explained in the drama)
⌲ Why, just why would Li Xun a so called genius use brawn over brain to deal with Fang Zhi Jing?
⌲ I found Fang Zhi Jing's plot against LX's sister over the top silly.
⌲ Zhu Yun kept a so called childhood friend on the hook for years. (you are a bad girl ZY, though at least this is bearable for a triangle)
⌲ The misunderstanding about a certain marriage happening has never gotten resolved, despite there being a lot of tension about this for a while.
⌲ The English in the drama is just embarrassing . ("Lucky & Power", "Thank!")
⌲ Ren Di is such an underutilized character. (Her band was really cool for those 3 minutes)
⌲ Ren Di's briefly shown romance is rather horrible.
⌲ Zhu Yun pretending not to care for so long, even in her internal monologues makes no sense.
⌲ The storytelling and even the main romantic plot is quite jittery at times, there are also frequent twists of logic, though the latter could be attributed to the questionable subbing quality, I just don't know.
⌲ This drama features the ugliest breakup I've ever witnessed. Noble reasons or not, no self respecting woman would ever forgive this much. (and yes LX is rather toxic in the early episodes too)
⌲ There is an enormous shift in the drama's tonality where we go from a very serious twenteen startup attempt to a ridiculously silly situation at the Flying Network? whatever company.
⌲ Xu Li Na (Her plot is all over the place & then she suddenly cares about Gao in the final episodes following their super silly divorce)
⌲ The programming related segments are ridiculous at times.
⌲ I can accept LX being a wunderkind knowitall, but based on what I've seen of ZY's progress as a newbie, she is the (un)real genius here..

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This drama indeed has some amazing characters, but the story feels aimless and unfinished. I loved the two noona romances, although Tami's in the last 1/3rd of the drama was quite annoying. The interactions of the 3 main women were also quite entertaining, it's quality bromance. Having binged this in 3 days I feel that writers did some pretty obvious character personality adjustments in between episodes, which seemed to have made the flow of the story inconsistent. Also there is quite a bit of repetition, some scenes and issues are brought up & discussed in a way that reminded me of time travel dramas. This show is first and foremost a procedural drama, but the happenings in the Search Engine industry were not all that interesting, especially in the second half.

Had they've given me a proper happy ending, or at least an open ended ending that shows some hope I would have rated this a point higher. To reiterate on the ending, none of the 3 women have a real hope to keep their current partner. Tami reconciles with Morgan in the last episode, but realistically nothing is resolved and they are doomed to fall apart again. Song Gagyeong's happy ending is a successful divorce with a husband she clearly had a strong bond with..
As for Scarlett, what are the odds that after one month of being together her relationship can survive another 18 or so months of being apart. I guess the Melodrama tag on Wiki is completely justified. :)

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Tiptoing around forbidden puppy loves, jiā yóu!

I enjoyed watching this drama, but I cannot help but feel that it's perhaps overrated a tad. All the glowing reviews are not wrong of course, the bromances, the slice of high school life were up there. The entire cast was great, the leads had great chemistry & looked wonderful together and there is more than enough fluff and sugar in the drama for my liking.

So why is this not one of my favorite cdramas? Well, the high school episodes (1>14) were certainly decent, but I feel that the high school years were perhaps dragged out too much. In China puppy loves are frowned upon & I'm sure censorship also comes into play and so the end result is that the leads were crushing on each other real hard from very early on, but due to the aforementioned limitations they kept tiptoeing around the issue. Doing that for 2-3 episodes before graduation would've been okay, but it was more like 10 episodes here. There was perhaps a repetition problem too, with some recycled plots. The bigger problems surface in episodes 15-20. I always hated the rejection/separation due to noble reasons trope, but that's minor compared to how annoying the leads had acted in that period. "I will keep chasing you, I will never give up"proclaimed FL, fastforward 1-2 episodes & FL's resolve immediately faltered due to an extremely minor misunderstanding. Considering how much shit FL went through to finally stand in front of ML this could not have been going any more against her character, that's just sloppy writing. I must also mention that one of the biggest reasons behind said noble rejection makes zero sense, since it was revealed later on that ML's family still kept their pretty luxurious apartment from before.

As for minor annoyances, there were quite a few of those as well. It's like the writer couldn't decide if the main character should be poor or upper middle class. Following ML having to work to pay his father's medical bills we reach a point where ML & FL kept throwing around hundreds of thousands of yuan, but later on once again we reached the poor phase, where Si Yue could not afford a proper wedding ring. Using arbitrary writing like this just to activate that not so great double proposal trope does not sit very well with me.
It's also mildly annoying that almost every single obstacle the OTP had to overcame in their adulthood was something really annoying & cliche. (plagiarism, copyright X2 etc)

The love triangle is frustrating too. Luckily there is not a whole lot of it, though it gets PRETTY DAMN ANNOYING at one point. The main issue is that the second ML is once again the usual kind senior/childhood friend character. It's equally annoying every time how the FL pretends for 20 episodes that she is completely dense about the whole "being courted" situation & once she is confronted with his confession(s) she keeps ignoring the situation for quite a while more. Unnecessary plots, unnecessary character and he has gotten a mini redemption ark even.

People in the comments kept comparing this to You Are my Glory, well that's a pretty weird apples and oranges comparison, but if I ignore the obvious differences in genre, I can only say that Glory is a hundred times better. Even as high school dramas I cannot help but feel that A Love So Beautiful(the cdrama, not the newer kdrama) and Lovely Us resonated with me a lot more..


All things considered I feel the 7.5 rating is more than generous.

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The first 5-6 episodes were incredible. I have fond memories of the anime "Ano Hi Mita Hana no Namae o Bokutachi wa Mada Shiranai", but this show has a more mature story and a better sequencing of events, up to the half way point at least. The actress playing Jisoo did an amazing job, I really felt drawn to her & later on even as a voice actor she was phenomenal. Feels weird that she is supposed to be a supporting actress, however Lee Hana is credited as the second lead. It's not like Lee Hana did a bad job, it's just that the writers were not kind to her character. After episodes 7-8 the writing has become aimless. I mean I get it, the ratings were bad & international audiences don't matter, so they tried a bunch of haphazard ideas to improve ratings, but I don't think that ever works, but it kind of ruins it for the rest of us. (same thing happened to When The Weather is Fine) They focused on Kang Inwook's character way too much to up the conflict, but I don't think anyone cared about him at any point in time. Ultimately the ending is reasonable (not great) and they did deliver on the sad boy meets sad girl & then they heal premise. The title of the drama is "A Piece of Your Mind", to me this means that if the writers have had the chance to develop their original concept we could have gotten a lot more focus on the AI devices. I'm thinking that the old lady that tuned the piano would have had a lot more screen time as well..
We had stunning audio-visuals and good acting performances, but then again there are quite a few side characters that had meaningless storylines. Other than Jisoo & the OTP I did really not care about anyone else, which is a shame, because the cast was great. As for the main leads, they had average chemistry, but their acting performances were great.
One big plus is that even though the "final confrontation" was dragged out, things didn't devolve into full on makjang..

Overall the 8/10 rating seems reasonable for a show this memorable despite the numerous shortcomings.

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I wanted to watch something without love triangles & forced melodrama, so picked up this drama having read comments & reviews about SA1%. I ended up being mildly disappointed, the light romcom part lasts for the first 10-11 episodes, but the comedy isn't very strong, nor is the romance that interesting by itself. The leads have chemistry, but the whole dating situation felt, for a lack of a better word odd. The contract kept generating unnecessary tension all "Sword of Damocles" like and following the inevitable breakup we had 90 minutes of pointless melodrama, I'm sure the writers wanted to conjure some onion ninjas there, but I just wasn't invested enough in the characters for that to work. At least the ending was nice, although grandpa giving away his fortune like that made the entire plot semi pointless.

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The first 12-15 episodes were fantastic. There was so much humor, that I had a hard time watching the episodes in a single go, because my brain just couldn't take all the positive stimulation, it was just perfection in the romantic comedy genre. (even the gossipy coworkers were fun)Unfortunately what followed up until episode 25? (the episode, when FL got hospitalized) had barely any humor, quite a bit of boredom & many only slightly melodramatic, but still extremely frustrating scenes. The second female lead's character was one of the worst I've seen in a drama. The story felt repetitive & it also crawled to a near complete halt until that really stupid moment when SS found the bookmark and 2 minutes later she saw the second FL's "move". I mean come on, even for a romantic Cdrama this was rather terrible. After the reconciliation in e26? I expected to return to the fun times of the early episodes, but unfortunately I was disappointed once again, because I had to witness one of the most unreal plot twists in a drama with that 10kk RMB debt thing, the resolution of that was kind of acceptable I guess & the last 2-3 episodes were also okay, but nowhere near as satisfying of an ending as it could have been.

I will definitely rewatch the first half of the drama though, those early episodes were very memorable.

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I don't even know why I started watching this. The subject matter is really far outside of my comfort zone. Typically I don't like Joseon era dramas (hats, politics, hats again)& I especially loathe oriental medicine as a whole, I think that it's a 50 billion dollar scam industry. This drama too often feels like a paid advertisement for that industry, oriental doctors & real doctors coexisting/cooperating harmoniously, how nice!

Why did I give it 7 stars still? Well, the humor is pretty good, albeit it brings nothing new to the "oh no I found myself in the age of Camelot, or knight of the round table in modern London" genre. It's full of embarrassing jokes, that are almost difficult to watch at times. The romance is good, there is more than enough chemistry between the leads & there is no love triangle. The story could have done without the trivial & typical hospital politics stuff. I'm not entirely satisfied with how the show ended either, first we had the typical noble, let's separate, because I'm needed back there & then the story concludes with a 5 minute long happy ending.

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How old would I have to be to enjoy this, 13?

It's normal for romantic comedies to not be well written, or have a large number of cliches, as long as the romance is fluffy and fun & the rest not too bothersome, then it's not very difficult for me to enjoy them & write a positive review. With Mobster though even the romance is very lacking. Maybe part of it is me having kdrama fatigue, but good gawd this whole very shy elementary school tier romance involving middle aged people is really not doing it for me. It was enjoyable until they started dating, but after that it has gotten really bad. I'm sure the writer thought it would be fine, since the second couple's romance is more mature, but in my view the second couple barely had anything built up before their relationship shifts..
The triangle ends relatively on time, but the second ML is a really annoying character in the first 66%~ of the drama and all of his scenes are very skippable..

As for the rest outside of the romance, it's very very sad. It's super silly and immature, way more so than what we see in an average kdrama that is. Calling this whole mobster / not mobster shebang trash would be perhaps a bit uncalled for, but it's close. Most importantly, all this is not very funny.

The emperor penguin thing is cute, but that's like the only thing..

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It's not my cup of tea!

I understand why someone would like this show, but I could just not get into it. Whether it's the strange, borderline crass comedy, or the obnoxious ML character, the meaningless flashbacks, or just the story in general, I found it very difficult to reach the end. Also the portrayal of art in this show is mildly infuriating, even the romance is not that great, despite the leads having great chemistry & looking great together visually, some of their dialog is just too much to bear. I mean I usually like it, when in a romance the people involved have a significant difference in intelligence, or education, but here it's just too over the top. Then again over the top would have been fine too, but unfortunately the show tries to alternate between serious and silly content without settling with either in a natural way.

I've read in the comment section how happy many people were about the "lack of" a breakup. Personally I don't think editing the last episode this way & then trying to make it right retroactively makes it any different than what we usually get. Despite the twist, in my perception it's still just the usual separation followed by a 5 minute long happy ending. I'm not impressed.

Park Gyu Young was truly outstanding, I'm looking forward for her next drama...

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Before picking this up I saw many reviewers mention how they preferred this over Goblin, but unfortunately that comparison does not make any sense. At first I thought that it could be the nostalgia, but GFB is not that old. This drama came out in 2013, 3 years after Secret Garden.. Maybe it could be popular because of Seunggi's fangirls?

I like Suzy, she seems to be always typecast to act as the same character she is portraying here. At the time of filming this, she's been 19 years old and to me her acting seemed pretty amateurish compared to her later works, but she is still probably the best thing about this drama. She was pretty cute & had some funny moments. I never liked Seunggi and I especially did not like his character here, nor did he have great chemistry with Suzy. (that could be hugely different in Vagaband, I don't know, yet)
Despite all their issues I guess they had their moments, their romance is the reason why I managed to somehow suffer through these 24 episodes. That's right this is one of the longest kdramas ever.

The main problem here is the absolutely terrible writing. In a cheesy a romcom the terrible writing is excusable, but I have the impression, that this was meant to be some sort of epic Sageuk saga and considering how much effort/cost was spent on the sets & the costumes, calling this an ambitious production should be fair, right?! Frankly the romcom parts are just too infrequent and flawed to carry the rest of the drama along. So yeah the terrible writing, it's just difficult to put into words how many problems the writing has and it's not even just the ubiquitous eyeroll inducing scenes. The pacing is off, it takes far to long for the actual plot to start rolling, considering that the first 2 episodes were the best part of the story, while only being a sort of a prequel is saying something. It's often praiseworthy when writers deviate from the typical kdrama plot progression. (kiss in ep6-8>>happiness till ep13-14>> conflict >>finale) However what we had here is far worse, it took absolutely forever for the romance to get anywhere, but forget happiness, they never even had a shred of hope really.
So much time is spent on the gisaeng house and yes initially I thought those gisaeng related happenings were rather interesting, but ultimately what did those women amount to in this show? It feels like a plot device that was nicely set up, but never used in a meaningful way. Let's not even get me started on Yubi's character, sister crazyeyes. All the scheming & war related subplots were really poorly executed. The fighting scenes are badly choreographed, but that hardly put a dent in my impression of this drama. (hypnosis, illusions, ninjas)

I don't like it, when the main force driving the plot is the main characters wanting to lose their cool magical powers. I also strongly dislike it, when the mundane wins over the magical in general. I really shouldn't have started this..

I could go on and on about the aimless writing, one big thing I noticed is that one moment the drama takes itself very seriously and in another it devolves into some sort of slapstick comedy show. Comedic relief is fine after some tearjerking melo, but this just doesn't work here all that well..

TLDR: Don't bother watching this, it's a mess.

~~
Watch Goblin if you haven't watched it yet.
If you want a cheesy historical drama that's actually good, I can recommend Ten Miles of Peach Blossoms, Eternal Love instead. That cdrama is nearly as cheesy as this one, but EVERYTHING about it is hugely better.

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I don't regret watching this, but it wasn't a great experience. The first 25 episodes could have been summed up in one - typical kdrama-like - episode. So yeah that's 25x40 minutes of my life wasted. After that the show turns into an enjoyable romance drama that made me smile occasionally, but the comedy isn't very strong here. The writing is bad, there are many eyebrow raising moments, the master Miyagi-like Shifu's antics, or the fire scene in the last episode. Gotta give it to them though, at least they delivered on the whole "boy meets girl" thing & the show reached an acceptable, albeit rushed conclusion. There are some other positives too, such as the chaebol dad, the entertainment CEO & the second leads never really pass the annoyance threshold for melo & angst, the picture is pretty and also the tunes are kind of good too. I mean one shouldn't expect jaw dropping melodies, but some of the vocal performances were really one in a million. (heard some high tones, that reminded me of the aria scene from the 5th Element, but perhaps even more impressive)

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I loved IU in this, she was great, Yeo Jin-goo on the other hand not so much. As for the other characters it's a mixed bag really, there were some great ones & some really weak casting choices. I loved the audiovisual experience, whenever beautiful cinematography meets music this amazing is always a treat.
I did not feel the chemistry between the leads, Yeo Jin-goo's bad acting perhaps? To me it feels like the Hongs tried to recreate the goblin experience, but their writing just did not live up to the task. This is their worst work so far I think. Don't misunderstand it's not bad by any means, but it's like an empty shell compared to Goblin. Even though I think the last episode was pretty good, I just wasn't emotionally invested enough in the characters to really feel the melo, so to say.

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I have conflicting feelings about this one. Obviously the drama is great, there is no denying that, but I'm a bit disappointed how predictable & cliche the 2 main elements of conflict/drama were and how much time they've wasted on them. (Oh no your mom, oh no my mom .. & reverse love triangle with autistic brother) Ultimately I'm happy how they resolved these things, but it was somewhat draggy both times. The first 4-5 episodes were absolutely top tier, it had one of the best openings that I've ever seen, but then the ball dropped quite a bit. I've heard the production team received many complaints about two scenes in episode 3 (what a great episode it was btw). They could have dialed things down a bit to avoid further controversy, oh well live filming is the worst :-)
The drama received praise for the authentic portrayal of Autism Spectrum Disorder. Yeah sure, the actor did a phenomenal job, way beyond what I have expected of him. (I did not like the actor before) The main problem is I don't like how every time a person with a major disability shows up on korean TV, they would make the actor keep bowing down perpetually. It's like they want to convey a message to the Korean audience, he has a disability, but he is extremely sorry, forgive him, he is bowing down so politely, all the time. Sure, people with this disorder would not meet your eyes in a conversation, but this whole bowing thing is at best stereotypical.

The acting performances were great, the leads were incredible. I have never thought that one day Kim Soohyun would show off the charts chemistry with any actress, but he was really awesome. I think the military did him good, his acting improved a lot, his performance in emotional scenes especially was hugely more convincing than before. I did not really know Seo Yeji before, but I have only praises for the actress. She reminded me of Jennifer Lawrence's best performances. (not Hunger Games). The supporting characters were all extraordinarily good as well, at first I was a bit miffed about seeing 2 out of 5 of my least favorite senior actors in the show, but I guess the casting was spot on, since I got used to them pretty quickly, as opposed to being being super annoyed seeing them in every other drama.

The story despite being a bit draggy at times is certainly above average, the writer successfully delivers on wholesomeness, healing & romance. Sure there are quite a few problems, such as the show could have deserved a lot more depth, it absolutely sucks if I try to judge it as a medical drama.
The comedy is off the charts good, although there was a lot less of it nearing the finale. I have been feeling a bit down lately and I had hard time laughing, I started to doubt whether I can still appreciate humor as I had before, but in this drama there were quite a few moments, when I ended up laughing out loud, or spitting tea onto the carpet, it was sensational and still bittersweet at times. The last episode was great too, thank God it was a sufficiently long happy ending, the kind that I like best, long, but not too long. There was even a major plot twist, that I should've seen coming, but ended up surprised.

Product placements have been becoming increasingly immersion breaking in recent years. This drama has many very clever barely noticeable placements, kudos for that writing interns, but good God those car ads were just too much. There are several scenes specifically purpose written, where we are shown how incredibly good the brakes are on that specific car brand & to top it off all the older unbranded cars kept breaking down.

The deer! The first time I heard the deer making that sound I was like OMG, what the hell is that, but after going on Youtube I had that TIL moment, yep deer can really make a sound almost identical to that. I've seen thousands of deer in my life, but I have never heard them making any crying sound like that, but it seems to be real. For more information check out this YT video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAkgkyeHpOc

The audiovisuals were spot on of course. The OST had quite numerous tracks, it's nice when we don't hear the same song playing 6 times in every episode. There were some really cool lens flare effects, perhaps they used vintage lenses to film some of those bike riding scenes?

Overall 8.5/10 seems fair. This is the best 2020 drama that I've watched so far. I'm sure I will eventually watch it again and I might end up adjusting the score too, who knows. (I liked it a lot more than Crash Landing)

edit: 2020 is over, but thinking about it now I think Hospital Playlist is the better drama, though it's not nearly as fun..

edit2: I decided to up the score a little, nitpicking is fine and all, but this is really a great drama.. :-)

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So I was really hyped about this drama. I couldn't wait for it to start airing. What a letdown..
It started out a bit interesting, but as the plot progressed the entire story turned into a mess. (not that virtual-real interactions were realistic from ep1 onward) Almost nothing makes sense in any way. It reminds me a bit of the disappointment I felt, when I watched The Matrix Revolutions, it has similar, but more pronounced problems. To summarize the script is just bad. People criticize Park Shin Hye for bad acting, but honestly I think she was fine here, it's not her fault that the writer made her character a 2d persona with very little substance, sure I admit that she isn't the best when it comes to crying in kdramaland, but come on .. Technically this is a tragedy/melodrama, but it's difficult to take it seriously, so the melodramatic moments lack impact for that reason. As I said the story is a jumbled mess and I cannot take it seriously despite me being rather tolerant for nonsense, I loved SaO season1 for example.

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