I came across this drama in Feb 2022, during the pandemic, after watching a dozen or so C-drama, including Joy of Life, Evernight, Untamed, Imperial Coroner, Good Bye My Princess, World of Honor, and more recently Novoland-Pearl Eclipse & Sword Snow Stride. To my surprise, I had not seen most of the main casts in this drama, except for Hao Shuai (Hua Yun Fei) whom I had seen in Ancient Detective. Of course, I had seen most of the veteran actors in various productions, including Liu Pei Qi, whose acting in 'Nothing Gold Can Stay' was truly amazing.

Story setting and costume *****

The story started very light, in a rather comedic scene, but it gets more serious with each episode. I have to say it was very well written, well-paced, and quite different from most historical/costume C-drama I had ever seen. I read that the writer is a university professor. I really like the setting of the story with many minorities tribes, very different from the majority of C-drama. The tribal costumes were a delight, though I suspected the tribal costumes were made shorter in this drama to show more legs. I also like the beautifully embroidered costumes worn by many of the supporting characters, as well as the female lead. The costumes of the male lead are mostly simple, but I like the combination of colors and pattern, it gave a very vibrant feeling.

Cinematography & scenery ****

I like the way they do the scene transition (turning it into painting-like) and the different characters they featured in the last part of the intro (sort of foretelling us who will be the focus in the episode). This drama spares us from annoyingly repeated flashbacks. Flashbacks were mainly used to tell us something we didn't know before (which had not been shown), except for one particular very sad incident, but even for that flashback the repeated scene was not lengthy and justified the mood.

The sceneries in this drama are beautiful, too. I know some of the scenery was CGI, but they were beautifully done. After watching too many C-dramas shot in Hengdian, and getting too familiar with the same town setting, canal, etc, it is nice to see something different. They also use adequate numbers of people as extra/background/crowd, unlike in some productions where the number of people in the scene didn't correlate to the story (e.g. Untamed).

Some of the scenes, especially the dances were a bit too revealing and seductive, but I guess that was to show the decadence character of Yang Yinglong, the chieftain of Bozhou. The battle scenes can be quite gruesome, and some scenes (master & servant/maid scenes) were rather sadistic, though I understand it meant to show us the real characters of the masters. How you treat your servant/maid tells a lot about your real characters. I also find one particular scene (rape) rather disturbing, but I understand later that this scene was very important to set the mood for what is coming. It was basically the pebble that started the huge snowball.

Acting*****

All the actors were extremely excellent! I truly love all the main actors, especially the two main leads. I'm going to search for more drama where they were involved. Even the antagonist Xu Bo Yi was very well portrayed. I also love the Lady Ya character, portrayed by Chen Zi Han (Xi Sang Gui in World of Honor). One unusual thing in this drama was, almost every character has their own comedic moments, sort of making a joke of themselves. As one reviewer mentioned, the comedy part helps to balance the darkness in the later part.

Overall*****

I can relate the incidences and a lot of the conversation/dialogue in this drama with our modern life, where you meet jealous colleagues, incompetent managers, back-stabbing, framing, merger, acquisition, hostile take-over, etc.

All in all, I highly recommended this drama, perhaps to a more mature audience. It may not be suitable for teenagers or young adults looking for a light-hearted fluffy romance story.