Not quite there...

It started off with a big war and lots of action. Ships, canons, battles and massacres, but that was only for the first 5-6 before dialing back the clock to the very beginning of the ML's childhood days and turning the drama into a massive snoozefest. That was a massive bait to hook the viewers in. It took 1 singular eternity before the drama managed to pick itself back up. The entire first half was the admiral backstory with little to no action. You don't get to see the admiral in action and you don't get to see what the drama promised until the second half which is way too delayed to stick around for. The production value is acceptable when taking into account that this was made 20 years ago. It's a bit scuffed but they had to work with what they had. It wouldn't matter much because that only shows with the action/battle scenes of which there were only a few (out of the 104 episodes). One of the most jarring things that is holding the drama back, aside from the aforementioned points, is its characters. A lot of characters got benched regularly regardless of their importance, relevance and prior investment. Making emotional scenes less impactful and key characters less memorable. Which also takes away from every climax and transition period. This is due to a combination of uneven pacing, long runtime, and frequent transitions. By the end, it seemed everyone was expendable, other than the male lead of course. On the other spectrum, the drama had a lot of anime-esque villain moments that I wish we had a lot less of.

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I had some expectations...

If you're looking for a historical drama about the foundation Goguryeo then this drama is NOT it. This drama was mostly about the in palace melodrama and conflict. Furthermore, it's important to know that this drama included a handful of fantasy elements sprinkled around all over it, so don't expect it to be grounded to reality. Han Hye Jin who played the female lead as Soh Seo No was a poor cast choice. Soh Seo No needed a more rigid and stubborn looking actress to better fit the character.

A weak incapable king, a greedy prince and an underdog illegitimate prince going aimlessly in circles. Wars, fights and action were surprisingly and disappointingly scarce for a never-ending 81 episodes historical drama about the founders of Goguryeo. Which is why we had little to no planning or strategy for these wars. That one big war at the end against another nation that we waited ages for, was condensed down to just 1 singular episode of utter disappointment. In fact, the entire last episode was extremely rushed and we were given a joke of a wrap up. They had all the time in the world and they couldn't make a decent send off. The last episode was absolutely stripped off genuine emotions. It robs you the wrong way after you had gone through 81 episodes. Speaking of which, they were trying too hard to reach the 81 mark with prolonged uncut full-scenes repeated flashbacks! You would lose your mind watching it serializing.

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Pain is temporary

A poor fantasy that failed to establish a reasonable foundation from the very beginning, it even did a worse job with its brittle world building. The low budget visual effects weren't helping its case either. The cast may seems to be fine on the surface but the characters were as one dimensional as they could come. Its second biggest selling point after fantasy is the romance, of which was the least appealing aspect of the drama. By the end, I couldn't care the slightest about either of the leads and their fate. A cheap Chinese knock off fantasy with gods and dragons would have been better than this.

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Modern-Day Delusional Liberation

The cinematography and visuals were great although they went overboard with tilted shots and angles, surpassing their creative limits. The drama had a decent melodic score that blended with the shots just okay but no particular track stood out. Enough technicality, no matter how I look at it, the drama boiled down to be a cheap mix between Thirty-Nine (2022) & My Mister (2018), lacking soul and a unique identity. The self narration bits were a hit or miss, some lines were brilliant and fit the mood, while others were just nonsensical pretentious scribbles. There was a good opportunity to give these narrations to other characters as well but these were mostly done by Yeom Mi Jung. The end of episode 2 made it seem like a tacky show in a fancy wrapping, signaling that it wouldn't stay grounded and would resort to impractical moves to progress the plot forward and grab attention. This is one thing the drama constantly kept contradicting itself with. I didn't like their approach for the ending; they should've just wrapped it up instead of sneakily dancing around it for way too long. Don't excuse its shortcomings by calling it a slow show. Both the writer and director have succeeded in creating slow shows before, but this one missed the mark and sacrificed other important elements along the way. Even with a very relaxed 16 episodes, most of the characters didn't get the development they deserved, but I guess some slice of life scenes were more important. That one major transition around episode 13-14 was embarrassingly poorly done and was a real cowardly move by the writer to escape the writer's block. It left an unerasable stain for what could've been a decent show. Although there were aspects to like and appreciate, the drama didn't quite reach its potential.

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The Queen for 7 Minutes

Realistically, the drama was mostly about the backstory, the queen for 7 days turned out to be the queen for 7 minutes. The spoiler/teaser introduction and that first episode in general left a bad taste in my mouth. There was no need to show moments from 18 episodes later this early, if their intent was to try to hook the viewers by showing spoilers then they failed. And don't even get me started on that loathsome love triangle that seemed to stain the entire drama. The pacing was all over the place—slow moments that dragged on forever and irrelevant sidetracking. The whole sibling rivalry angle was given a generic development. The not so good brother tried to justify himself but the writer didn't put an ounce of effort into that. Really frustrating writing towards the end.

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Nope....

One of the worst "old" kdramas, it went full old melo style which kdrama thought it was cool and trendy to do at the time. Other than the nostalgic feel, this drama is a failure and got nothing going on for it. Not recommended! At least you get to see the younger version of some familiar faces.

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Loveless Love

The drama presented itself as a lamentable example of melodramatic flop, failing to connect the trappings of its genre to deliver an engaging narrative. While the premise held promise, the drama often leaned heavily on dirt cheap emotional manipulation to spawn the dumbest and laziest old melo tropes with no rhyme or reason to their existence. The drama was the equivalent of a nothingburger, it's so dry and bland that they had to slap the most generic random displays of a terminal illness element just to fill some of its runtime. The first most important step for anything in this drama to work was to actually prove how deep their love was, which the drama absolutely didn't attempt to do. The characters' writing was generally bad, especially the female lead, not a single character had something substantial to offer. To top it all off, the writer was clueless and made whatever events for its climax.

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Steve Jobs on Crack

Where would you even begin with this crazy hot mess? The first 3-4 episodes were acceptable despite moving too fast and creating many gaps. However, as the drama unfolded, it became clear that it was biting off more than it could chew. Right off from episode 5, the drama became an irrecoverable mess. The pacing was erratic, jumping between weak fabricated plot twists, jarring narrative and bloated segments with no sense of cohesion. The drama was throwing everything at the viewers to see what sticks. Action, thriller, fantasy, sci-fi, mystery, melodrama, the drama couldn't decide what it wanted to be nor it managed to mix any of them well. The characters felt like caricatures rather than fully developed individuals, and their motivations often seemed arbitrary, inconsistent and generally weak. If the drama wanted to go for stupid ridiculousness then why not raise the stakes to match? Not even the ending could measure up to its intent despite its "supposed" twist.

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Hyena and The City

Sex and the City is trashy in its own right, and this Korean spin on it was even worse. Their interpretation of Sex and the City was done mostly through raising the content rating and adding mature scenes here and there (mostly in the first half). There were a handful of stories split between each character, each one developed poorly and ended prematurely for the sake of ending it. Most of the cast members were fine despite being involved in this unfortunate project. On the other hand, Kim Min Jong proving once again that he is a dislikable main character and filling this slot remains an impossible task for him.

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Incomplete by design!

As per usual, such dramas start with abroad locations and a big budget just to serve us with whatever later on. While the drama had action later on but it wasn't on the same level of its earlier episodes. The plot itself couldn't compensate for that. There was a certain level of carelessness and ridiculousness in a non-comical setting from the director that's impossible to explain other than being intentional to maintain the dumb action vibes like a B grade action flick. It got progressively challenging to tolerate regardless of its "supposed" entertainment value. After what they had done in this 16-episodes runtime, they had the audacity to keep all threads as open as possible for a direct sequel, which will never happen! Was it some kind of a practical joke? Other than some of the action scenes and a handful of selected moments, I can't see much value in this drama.

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Now, I'm Breaking Up With This Drama!

There was something to be said along the lines of "it's about the journey not the destination" but there was no journey or destination to speak of here. At first, it seemed to be a worse version of Encounter (2018) but it turned out to be much worse than that with a stinky trashy tag engraved to its title. Usually Song Hye Kyo doesn't step this low but this proved to be otherwise, it was undeniably her worst project ever. The genius writer shamelessly adapted the deplorable trope of constant interruptions with any hints of a real conversation or dialogue at sight. I have no respect for creators who pull such moves. The drama was filled with the type of dialogue and cheesy one-liners that you would read in a fanfic, it was even filmed from the point of view of a one. Anyway, the drama was an unwatchable junk from a modern lens.

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The Lame Queen Seondeok

It would have been such a good show if they packaged it into 30 episodes. They had two subplots about Hwarang side quests that were a total waste of time, they paused the main story for them. While they might have served a small tiny purpose but the drama could've accomplished that without these easily. I read somewhere that the drama was extended from 50 to 62 episodes and I can't help but wonder if there was a direct correlation between extending the drama and introducing the character Kim Chun Chu at episode 36. Because both decisions were worse than one another. What made me more suspicious that this was the case was because it felt like someone has pushed the soft reset button on the story as a whole around episode 36 and everything took a big step backward. At this exact point I was about to mentally check out. Prior to episode 36, they had this Hwarang competition which was already the weakest checkpoint at this point so what came after only made things worse. Fast forward to the last chunk of episodes, all events post Lady Mi Shil involvement were clearly an unplanned afterthought which led to an underwhelming final climax. The is exactly at the extension gap between 50-62. Away from the poor pacing, the characters showed promise until they stopped. Guess what? It happened also after episode 36, the female lead who used to be a character full of characterization became a soulless blank of wood, boring, bland and dumb. There were many other examples of characters who went through the same downgraded transformation around the cursed episode 36.

The story had one major point of disconnect that the writer blatantly swept under the rug, it single-handedly broke the story apart. The female lead came from a hermit living in the woods into her position of power immediately without any regard to any other factors concerning anything. The only justification we were given is that she read books while growing up and was raised in the streets. Her parents had no role in the process despite being the king and queen, not even for emotional support. All I see is just poor storytelling. The background music mixing was trash. Every scene started with low-ish background music, got progressively louder and became unbearably loud and intense until the scene is cut. Repeat this 20 times every episode and endure the nausea. Around midway through I was thinking this is a good 7/10 drama despite the Hwarang nonsense but it turns out that this drama was the perfect example of a drama having a good 1st half and fumbling the 2nd half so hard. I wouldn't give it more than a pitiful 5.5/10.

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The Return of The illegitimate Thief

Watching a drama with so much narration was kind of weird. It didn't help it case when the leads were whispering all the time with this monotone voice, almost like they were just reading lines off a script. Moreover, both of their performance was quite poor in general, I know they have the talent but not in this drama. The story itself felt like it was dragging its feet endlessly. The ending was a weak attempt at redemption. It rushed major sections with too many skips to rush progression and conclusion but ended up creating even more problems, leaving major gaps to what could have been a very simple wrap up. Releasing another version of Iljimae within 1 year turned out to be a poor decision when they have had learned nothing from the previous one.

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