Now that I'm on the fourth show of this kind that I really wanted to like, but the writing prevented it AGAIN, I'm slowly at a loss for words.

Some shows like Healer and Black clearly run out of budget or time and have to rush the ending in a messy (& stupid) way.

Other shows like K2 and this just never really have a plot structure to begin with, despite a great premise. Every episode, some evil (or evil-seeming) person does something evil and has to be stopped, or some other challenge is to be overcome. The overall character relations are rather static, with most players looking to take a stab at one of their targets, but this rarely happening in a meaningful way.
After about half of Rugal, it even turns into what feels like endless filler episodes, one more ridiculous in plot than the next. The primary villain of the show is pretty much Chaotic Evil, truly over the top in his atrocities, and most other characters have the chance to end him and spare us the last ~10 hours. Yet they all somehow help him, or even rescue him, and as a result we viewers must endure.

The acting is passable, but most supporting characters are underused and rarely get to shine convincingly.
The music is not that far behind K2's in excitement but is used in comically unexciting situations.
There's a lot of action, yet it's sadly often sprinkled in to cover for the lack of anything else. Random fight scenes with an infinite legion of goons are all too common.

If a plausible plot is not among your requirements, you don't mind violence, and sci-fi tech plus hero vs horde fights sound good, Rugal is likely worth a watch. The same goes if you just really enjoy the kind of villain who could eat up any weaker character.


*SPOILERS FROM HERE ON*

Starting from the very beginning, several characters end up killed, except not actually killed. They resurface perhaps mostly dead, perhaps alive and well. Sometimes they're remote-controlled monsters, but with a bit of good will they can be healed. One has part of his head sucked out, but then he's fully intact later on. It gets so bad that it's actually more surprising when a named character truly stays dead.

Sometimes the antagonist can create incredibly potent living weapons, other times they're just failures of ruthless human experiments. Rules of physics may or may not apply depending on the scene, the current week's horoscope, or who is supposed to look cool at any given moment. There's occasional Wuxia moves, fighters' motions can make robot noises irrespective of them having any biomechanical body parts, and for a police force without the license to kill, Rugal engages in a lot of neck-breaking.
The antagonist's living weapons may be zombies, or have the same abilities as Rugal members.

The plot twists are built for shock value, but usually lack all logic. This includes absurd and implausible suicides.
Supposedly, the Big Bad has an incredibly long-winded plan for world domination, but the film crew obviously never know what it actually is, and so it fizzles away in favour of an obsession with winning the protagonist to his side.


Speaking about said main character, he is given an absurd amount of leeway. For no reason whatsoever, he essentially turns into the most magically powerful one of the four Power Rangers, and everybody else is constantly enchanted by him. He's not even the team leader, but in every group shot walks ahead of the team taking point, and otherwise takes the center of attention. Because he's the actual team leader, Strong Man Tae-Woong also gets to remain relevant throughout the show, while Mi-Na and Gwang-Chul fade away into complete obscurity. To really drive home that they have no meaningful roles, they're given injuries to recuperate from for the finale.
While his artificial eyes 'whisper' to him after a few weeks/months of use, taking control of his actions and eventually subduing his will with pain, he happily murders a bunch of people – some unarmed – in cold blood, but nobody really cares. The AI chip gets replaced with a fresh, untrained one, meaning it only buys time – yet even in the "several years later" epilogue that either never became a problem again or is handwaved away by having another character assist him.


Rugal starts as a somewhat simplistic yet entertaining show, before going all-out Dumb & Dumber. Sad.