Yeah, this show was somehow at once a great disappointment but also a very pleasant surprise. I was dreading watching this because literally everyone and their mothers seem to be comparing it to Sweet Home, a K-drama with a similar apocalyptic concept that I ended up loving to bits. What if its similar and I hate it because I've already seen it? Thank goodness the similarity is exaggerated, because Imawa no Kuni no Alice is completely its own drama. The more I watched it, the less and less it was like Sweet Home. That doesn't necessarily mean I still totally liked it.

To start off, I'm really surprised at how good an actor Sakurada Dori is. Admittedly, I've only ever seen him do boring shoujo male lead roles like in Good Morning Call and Coffee and Vanilla, and never really gave him a second glance. Here, it took me a solid 2 episodes to squint and twist my head whenever his character appeared on screen to finally figure out who was, and I was s-h-o-c-k-e-d! Man's brilliant. A quick run through of his theatre experience and its clear that the Japanese drama industry is short changing him, 'cuz this man can ACT!

Tsuchiya Tao, my queen, great as always. Yamazaki Kento surprisingly was decent as well, one of the rare times he's not a cold shoujo love interest or whatever, though Yamazaki Kento is Yamazaki Kento in all his roles, which can be a great thing if you're a fan of the dude himself, but ultimately makes his acting style kinda boring.

My main gripe with this drama, and the reason I rated it a 7, is how the viewers eventually stop caring about characters because literally everyone except the leads die before we can form any serious bond with them. I know certain deaths were supposed to be really gut wrenching, but because we got so little time to get acquainted with the characters, I literally felt nothing. Whenever the main character agonised, I fast forwarded. I want a little bit of unpredictability in my deaths, and honestly I don't want the good guys to live and bad guys to die in a world where fair is fowl and fowl is fair. I want to be angry and outraged. This was just eh.

Plus, the extremities in this show are almost comical: Mr. Evil Evilini is super Evil, Ms. Good Goodman is super Good and Evil People do Evil Things because they are Evil. Yeah, alright, TV show. The brief attempts at making them complex falls flat because its not sustained or explored deeply. By the end, I grew kinda tired over how Good the main characters were because...BOOORING.