I've never seen such a useless female lead. Everything about her was annoying to me by the last episode. Other than that, thr plot became tedious and pointless, therefore the romance fell flat to me and it was very underwhelming when it could have been an epic love story. I keep trying to remind myself that it came out in 2012 and this is the way dramas were made back then but I've watched great quality shows that are much older, such as Coffee Prince, so even the fact that it's old doesn't excuse the bad execution. The high ratings are the most surprising part to me... I mean, I also really liked the first part with the children but after that everything kept getting worse and worse, even the acting, so 8.6 is a surprisingly high rating imo. Finally, I'm not the biggest Kim Soohyun fan but I liked his acting here. His crying scenes were good. But the character himself lost a bit of the charm he had when he was younger and was screaming all the time at everyone so it become quite annoying at times.
I really don't know what else to say about this drama other than it was long and disappointing, with caricature characters that seemed very one-dimensional.