I’ll start by saying that I have recently not been the most optimistic about where C-dramas are heading, it just seems to get worse and worse by the year. Never mind I’ll elaborate. At first, I never wanted to write a review based on the first few episodes because as you know things can change in the latter stages, and at the time of writing, it’s 10 episodes left on the entire drama but I just couldn’t keep these thoughts to myself and decided I’d share them at least on the spot. This is mainly because I expect no sharp turns or surprises ahead.
For a start, I see everyone going on about how this drama has been so intense, entertaining, and all that but for me, I just honestly couldn’t tell you what’s happened to C-dramas recently. There are a lot of people that shouldn’t have even made it to the latter episodes of this drama for me, a lot of plots should’ve been resolved much better and faster, the supposed villains were in all honesty laughable and now my narrative that Xu Kai only acts in the very best C-drama seems to be in the mud. CDRAMA HAS MASSIVELY FALLEN OFF. The character Xu Kai has to be dominant in some way shape or form whether intellectually, in terms of strength, or authority, as he has been in his previous successful dramas, he’s not just any actor as many previous dramas have proven, and by using him this way you extract his full potential but I just don’t get why some producers or even however is in charge of selecting actors don’t try and fathom this. Portraying him as a normal character just hasn’t worked with the likes of Snow Eagle Lord, Royal Feast and even this drama, and I really do hope many other dramas he features in take a lesson from this. I massively emphasize this because Xu Kai is my favourite actor at the moment, and I just cannot bear to watch a blatant decline right in front of my eyes.
The acting was decent and as it has been the theme recently, the storyline was average at best. Where’s the smart funny Xu Kai we all fell in love with? Where’s the meticulous planning? Why does the ML have to be slow to recognise danger and why doesn’t he seem to learn from mistakes? All these are flaws in the storyline which I’d say was WEAK and that’s with trying. The ML and FL were fantastic for me, Vincent He (Pei Yuan), and He Zhong Hua (Gu Xiang), just to mention a few of the fantastic support actors, were all just doing what they do best and that is acting their roles to their fullness. As for Gao Han (Liu Cheng Feng), it was a poor casting that’s all I’ll say.

I personally wouldn’t recommend this drama for the above reasons because I think they were just trying to extend it for as long as possible. Each pretty much after the around 15 episode-mark felt like the drama was reaching the climax only for the actors to, for example, ignore the priority, turn a blind eye to something crucial, do something absolutely irrelevant or even add an unnecessary scene just so it could make up the drama episodes.