The plot had so much potential with the reincarnation trope leading the story, but it was never really used. While I enjoyed the beginning episodes quite a lot, at some point I was questioning myself for watching it. It wanted to be deeper, more dramatic and moving, but used all wrong directing choices to achieve it, and in the end, it did not work for me.

CHARACTERS/COUPLES
Truth to be told, I was far more interested in all side/past couples than the main one. I didn’t feel that much chemistry between them. Don’t get me wrong, there were moments when I found them as cute as possible, but I always thought it was more about good directing and not their acting. The romance scenes were simply well written and shot. I still believe Pharm and Dean’s first kiss was filmed in a fantastic way.

I truly loved the fun and entertaining chemistry going on between Team and Win and I wish we could have seen more of them and how they developed feelings for each other. We kind of knew they would end up together… and then they did. Not much of that development was really shown.

Earth and Kao were really good in their roles and I truly did feel the pain and desperation watching their scenes. Wish we could have a prequel telling just their story in greater detail.

Sadly, I felt like Ohm had the same facial expression 90% of the drama, with Fluke showing a bit more diversity: happy grin, shocked grin, massive crying (+ the quite well acted total meltdown in the last episode). While at the beginning I did not mind, at some point I was just bored by their scenes and performance.

Character wise, both Dean and Pharm were nothing special. I mean… Did Dean even have a personality? I did enjoy their relationship though, because, they played off of each other's characteristics well - Pharm being on a shy note and Dean leading the interactions, but as separate characters… they had close to nothing going on.

THAT SAID, I have to applaud the drama for one specific scene. We got some good representation of setting boundaries. When Dean gets a bit too touchy with Pharm, but Pharm quickly puts him back in place, clearly says it was unwanted and it must never happen again. We don’t see scenes like that a lot in BLs.
Also, justice for Manow. Poor girl was literally forgotten at some point of the drama.

DIRECTING
Oh boy. All the long, slow scenes of them doing literally nothing, like… looking at their phone, or cooking but without interacting with each other. The dialogues with way too many pauses. They literally took breaks every 2 or 3 words. There were many scenes that just felt like fillers. Few seconds here, few seconds there… but no content to be found. It made the drama look more aesthetically pleasing, but at the same time, I could not move my finger away from the right arrow on my keyboard, because I was sure there will be more than one occasion I will want to skip the next 5 seconds of them doing nothing.

As I was watching and the story progressed more and more, I could not wait for it to end. It dragged so badly and it was so amazingly slow. Everything was slow. They talked slowly, the shots were slow, the background music was slow, how they moved and walked was slow. I was honestly getting sleepy and tired after watching. The fact that, by an accident, I was able to watch 2 parts of an episode set on 1.5x speed and did not notice says a lot about the directing.

The violin soundtrack started to drive me nuts at some point. It made it seem like every scene was so profound and important and had deeper meaning… most of them did not. The overuse of it made it not an asset, but an annoyance in my eyes (ears?).

WRITING/STORY
I feel like the planning just failed. With the minimum of Team and Win scenes, they should just cut them out completely and make a sequel showing their relationship from the beginning. Focus only on Dean and Pharm and the past story of In and Korn. Show us in more detail how they slowly connected all the dots and accepted their past and current selves.

What’s most important, introduce a conflict AND NOT IN A LAST EPISODE. With the reincarnation trope, there are so many ways to go about it. Giving me Pharm questioning his love for Dean, not being sure if it's real or it's just reminiscence of the relationship In had with Korn, it’s awesome. What’s the point of shoving it in our faces in the last episode? It could have been gradually introduced. The more Pharm knew about the past, the more he would start questioning his feelings for Dean. This way you would have two driving forces for their relationship clashing in an interesting way - them being drawn to each other by the past connection, but also driven away by the fear it’s not real. I guess this isn’t the drama’s fault, since it is based on the novel, but it does not change the fact that there weren’t really any stakes presented. They tried to introduce some struggle by the end, but since the set up was not strong enough, it failed to move me and make me care.

The mental breakdown Pharm had at the end was so ridiculous too. He knew the story, he had flashbacks showing exactly what happened. It’s not like finding the box in the previous episode gave him some new information. He knew it all… And sure, we can argue that the reality of it hit him the moment he saw the photos and the gun, but it still makes no sense pacing wise. Make it happen at least two or three episodes earlier so we can actually feel the pain of then splitting/taking a break. Give me that emotional journey not some cheap emotional thirty second roller coaster with some bullshit “three months later”.

Overall, I guess I was simply not convinced by Fluke and Ohm’s acting so the scenes that might have been sweet, emotional, sad… were, for me, boring. I was not connecting to their feelings so I could not bring myself to care. The moment I started to care, the pace slowed down so painfully, I was getting distracted by the fact nothing was happening. Sad conclusion to the drama I was so excited to watch.