This drama is very light-hearted, unlike most Chinese dramas. The romance takes until episode 15 until it actually starts to progress, but the first 15 episodes are with Bu Meng and her friends.

I recommend watching this drama if you are looking for something light-hearted. The bad news is that there are only a few episodes that have been subbed, so for those who don't understand Mandarin, you won't be able to understand; however, I still encourage people to watch it for fun and I hope that more subs will be out soon so everyone can give this drama a try.

** EDIT: The ending was kind of disappointing. It was a HAPPY ending though so I'm not completely dissatisfied with it but it was very underwhelming.

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Better Than Season One

As an original watcher of Idol Producer while it was airing in 2018, I had to see Youth With You season 2 as well. I really liked this season a lot more than the first season of Youth With You for several reasons:

1. There were" iconic" moments in the show like Esther Yu's "wow" and when Snow Kong's shoe came off when they did their group dance. I feel like this is especially important as it makes the show come off as more memorable.
2. There was no drama.
3. Although there is not enough screentime for every single one of the 109 trainees, they try their best in that aspect and ultimately do show somewhat fair amounts of screentime. Although maybe not as good as Idol Producer, their original Produce name.
4. All the debuted trainees are extremely talented and some of them would do especially well in variety shows because they are entertaining. This series is the ONLY survival show series where whoever ends up debuting in the group, I am satisfied with because they are all deserving of the spot.
5. I really liked how they invited over some of the Nine Percent members to do collaboration stages with the trainees. They're still so charming and funny and brings back a feeling of nostalgia. Although it's sad that they could not bring back the whole group together, I was happy to see at least three other Nine Percent members other than Kun.
6. The theme song is really catchy like "Ei Ei," although it took about 2-3 listens for me to actually start vibing with it. It took me a bit then I realized it's the theme song they've been playing this entire time and it clicked with me.
7. The songs chosen this season for the stages are all pretty catchy as well. (How Am I So Good-Looking, Ambush On All Sides 2, A Little Bit Sweet, etc.)

Although some of these reasons could be said for Youth With You season one, I felt that season one was more bland. Compared to the first season, the second season had trainees with very contrasting personalities that were able to mix well with each other and create more interesting interactions. I'm giving a lot of credit to all the girls in this season as they were able to make me stick with wanting to watch them till the end as did Idol Producer did to me.

A flaw that I found really disappointing since it could have been fixed is iQiyi translated the whole series and uploaded it on their website; however, the order of the episodes aren't in chronological order and you have to press around due to the order of the parts. Another flaw is that the editing for this season may be kind of awkward. They jump around here and there and it's sort of confusing. There were some scenes that should have probably been shown first rather than later, which can be shown through the ranking evaluations. The first evaluation felt like it took forever to take place. After the first evaluation, the second one occurred in a timely manner, but the third one came way too quickly and it left me wondering "didn't the second evaluation just occur?" What they should have done was put in the collaboration performance behind the scenes and stage first and then did the third evaluation. Speaking of the collaboration stages, the collaboration stages were very disappointing as Ella and Lisa were not even there to actually perform. They did their best in this aspect, but it still doesn't change the fact that it really sucks that the only two girl mentors were not able to perform with the girls. I wish they had a female rap mentor, rather than Jony J, no offense to him, but because it felt like he could not really relate to the girls as much as I would have liked him to.

Overall, I really enjoyed this series and I'm very excited to see what "The Nine" will do next. I hope they don't do the same as they did with Nine Percent and UNINE, where iQiyi literally did not give them much to do together at all, but inevitably, I feel the girls will end up the same as the other two debuted groups. Nevertheless, this show is amazing at giving all the girls the exposure that they need without the extra drama and negative attention like Mnet's Produce series.

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Only Good Because of Select A Few Episodes

Overall: I actually don't know where to start. Starting out it was okay and it got better in the middle, but then the ending was just disappointing and could have been wrapped up a lot sooner. If I were to be very honest, this drama could have just been around 40-50 episodes, I don't understand and don't know why it starting dragging out so much after 50.

Acting/Cast: I didn't really have much of an issue with the cast. The main cast, the two male leads and the female lead are suitable for their roles and they did their best to act out their characters, but their characters have issues and the character development was quite poor.

Story/Plot/Character: Most reviews that gave this drama a bad ending was because of Jin Mi's character and I honestly don't blame them. She IS extremely naive, airheaded, and perhaps ignorant as there was an episode that showed she didn't even know what gender she was. She's so clueless with the world outside because she was sheltered for about 4,000 years of her life so I completely understand why her character was the way it was so it didn't particularly bother me because I knew that. One thing that bothered me was how they overly dramatized how her mother got heartbroken. I completely understand because I've been there but I don't see how it could be such a huge deal other than the fact the Heavenly Empress tried to kill her.

My favorite arc was the mortal arc was where she finally snapped and told Fire Immortal that she liked him and after that, I felt that her character development was finally really starting to take shape, but then they made a twist where she suddenly doesn't know what love feels like anymore, that was very repelling and I felt like they did that just to drag the drama on even longer. There were one too many twists to be considered "good" for this drama. Another note to add was there were also way too many "useless" episodes in this drama. The little princess from the demon realm and her boyfriend was the least interesting part of this drama and I had to skip through those scenes because, honestly, I did not care. I didn't notice how many episodes were about these two until I skipped multiple episodes just to see the main lead together more. Another issue was that there doesn't seem to be any proper character development within the main leads if anyone had proper character development to begin with.

Personally, I could only stand to watch this drama with selective episodes. There are just too many episodes that dragged on for no particular reason and could have been a lot shorter.

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