I enjoyed watching this drama, but I cannot help but feel that it's perhaps overrated a tad. All the glowing reviews are not wrong of course, the bromances, the slice of high school life were up there. The entire cast was great, the leads had great chemistry & looked wonderful together and there is more than enough fluff and sugar in the drama for my liking.

So why is this not one of my favorite cdramas? Well, the high school episodes (1>14) were certainly decent, but I feel that the high school years were perhaps dragged out too much. In China puppy loves are frowned upon & I'm sure censorship also comes into play and so the end result is that the leads were crushing on each other real hard from very early on, but due to the aforementioned limitations they kept tiptoeing around the issue. Doing that for 2-3 episodes before graduation would've been okay, but it was more like 10 episodes here. There was perhaps a repetition problem too, with some recycled plots. The bigger problems surface in episodes 15-20. I always hated the rejection/separation due to noble reasons trope, but that's minor compared to how annoying the leads had acted in that period. "I will keep chasing you, I will never give up"proclaimed FL, fastforward 1-2 episodes & FL's resolve immediately faltered due to an extremely minor misunderstanding. Considering how much shit FL went through to finally stand in front of ML this could not have been going any more against her character, that's just sloppy writing. I must also mention that one of the biggest reasons behind said noble rejection makes zero sense, since it was revealed later on that ML's family still kept their pretty luxurious apartment from before.

As for minor annoyances, there were quite a few of those as well. It's like the writer couldn't decide if the main character should be poor or upper middle class. Following ML having to work to pay his father's medical bills we reach a point where ML & FL kept throwing around hundreds of thousands of yuan, but later on once again we reached the poor phase, where Si Yue could not afford a proper wedding ring. Using arbitrary writing like this just to activate that not so great double proposal trope does not sit very well with me.
It's also mildly annoying that almost every single obstacle the OTP had to overcame in their adulthood was something really annoying & cliche. (plagiarism, copyright X2 etc)

The love triangle is frustrating too. Luckily there is not a whole lot of it, though it gets PRETTY DAMN ANNOYING at one point. The main issue is that the second ML is once again the usual kind senior/childhood friend character. It's equally annoying every time how the FL pretends for 20 episodes that she is completely dense about the whole "being courted" situation & once she is confronted with his confession(s) she keeps ignoring the situation for quite a while more. Unnecessary plots, unnecessary character and he has gotten a mini redemption ark even.

People in the comments kept comparing this to You Are my Glory, well that's a pretty weird apples and oranges comparison, but if I ignore the obvious differences in genre, I can only say that Glory is a hundred times better. Even as high school dramas I cannot help but feel that A Love So Beautiful(the cdrama, not the newer kdrama) and Lovely Us resonated with me a lot more..


All things considered I feel the 7.5 rating is more than generous.