Beyond Light Years (2018)

Although many say this drama is like Love O2O, I would like to disagree. The only similarity is the gaming concept. Other than that, the pace and chemistry between the characters are completely different. The main character guy slowly reveals himself and they slowly fall in love while in Love O2O, it's meet up and bam, true love. In my opinion, though this drama's [character] visuals are much lower than Love O2O and the plot isn't about these 2 popular kids, the way this drama is played out creates a much more natural scenario which I'm not mad about.

Zeng Lei is so underrated in this drama but I guess everyone just loves a cute and innocent girl T_T

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The premise certainly sounds a lot like Love O2O, and a lot of parts were similar (friendships, gaming), but the dynamic of the relationship and the plot was VERY different. Love O2O was a lot better for multiple reasons.

Firstly, I cannot get past the acting of the main female lead. It always felt like she didn't know what to do with her hands, and whether she was pointing, shrugging, or crossing her arms, it always looked SO unnatural. The same could be said for her "shocked" and "sad" facial expressions. Honestly, the personality of the main female lead was really boring as well. This drama did what fanfiction often does, which is make the main lead chosen for all the important roles and win the competitions when realistically that would never happen. The FL had no good comebacks to being teased or insulted, ever—her response is always to huff and pout. After the college years, I hated the main lead even more than I did already because she became the most annoying and moody person ever, for no good reason.

I loved her friend, Zheng Lei's personality ten times better, and I wish she was the main lead instead. Mo Xiao Lin was a pretty good character as well. I couldn't stand Pan Qi either, and I know that in real life I'd also be annoyed to death by someone who was as boy-crazy as her that every other sentence out of her mouth was about dating. Every time she did something wrong, she never apologized either, just threw a tantrum until everyone else came to her instead.

The visual cinematography in this was kind of bad. The gaming graphics were worse than Love O2O, and at the start it just looked like the actors were running around in front of a green screen. During actual scenes, the camera would move around and tremble, making me feel like I was getting motion sickness. During the last few episodes, what we got was basically 80% flashbacks, 15% characters talking to one another about the flashbacks, and 5% actual things happening; I honestly just skimmed through it because I had watched it all before. Speaking of that, there were SO many voiceover narrations, and they happened at the weirdest parts that needed the most detail, basically cutting the most important plot points down to a few minutes of brief explanation.

The plot was okay, but there was never really an overarching plot or direction. The drama felt like sub-plot after sub-plot, and it was painfully obvious when another sub-plot was being introduced because the main character would be like "Oh! I spy an issue! Let me think of a solution!" Having one plot after another meant that characters would come in and out of the story randomly. There finally seemed to be a more comprehensive plot at the end, but it was all stuffed into two episodes and by that point it seemed rushed, messy, and out of the blue.

Overall, I still liked some parts—mainly near the start, during college, and when the game actually played a big role. The last ten-ish episodes were definitely messy and not worth watching.

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