Very romantic and dramatic - I loved this! Queen for Seven Days is a beautiful historical romance. It's a great love story. After watching it through I read the history behind this and even though I'm sure a lot was embellished, it was even more touching and bittersweet to learn that many plot details actually did happen. The love story wasn't just made up for the drama.

The costumes and actors and cinematography are all really good looking. This is a very pretty drama to watch. There is some political intrigue and a little bit of adventure, but the main focus in this drama is the emotional tension and love story between the heroine and the 2 brothers - one king and the other grand prince. It's developed very well. It really hits all the right notes to make it a very satisfying watch for romance lovers. If you enjoy romantic sageuks like Empress Ki or Scarlett Heart: Moon Lovers, you'd probably really like this as well. Compared to those dramas, I felt this one was more pleasant, less emotionally wrenching and more satisfying overall.

The pacing was mostly good, but I think the setup was a little slow. Once the story is underway when the adult actors take over it goes pretty fast. The actors all do a great job - particularly the 3 main leads. There is a lot of praise for Lee Dong Gun as the king. He's an intriguing villain. But I think the main couple played by Park Min Young and Yeon Woo Jin are lovely together. It's a juicy love triangle. And I love that the main couple are given a decent amount of happy romantic screen time together. Even though there are plenty of tragic obstacles for them, at least their faith in each other doesn't get annoyingly dragged down by misunderstandings or false accusations. It is really touching their love survived all the violence and political struggle of that time. I had my mouth agape and tears streaming down my face during the perfect final episode.

The criticism I have for this drama is that it is peppered throughout with actions that the characters take or plot details that make you think "WHAT?!" or "WHY?!" and make you feel a little frustrated. Certain things seemed that they didn't have to happen that way and just happened for dramatic effect (especially towards the end) or came out of nowhere. But then later I read that most of those things or some version of those things really did happen in real life. So I think I would rate this higher if more attention was given to certain aspects of the story or the politics so I could appreciate what motivated certain characters or events better.

But still, this didn't stop me from really enjoying this drama. Historical dramas - particularly tragedies -tend to let me down big time somewhere along the line, but this is one of the more satisfying and touching ones that I've watched and highly recommend it.