WARNING this review may contain very slight spoilers, so if you're like me and you don't want to know anything about the drama before watching it, please reconsider reading it.

Watching this drama was truly a wild ride. For various reasons. For first five episodes I was questioning my life choices and wondering if it really is the drama recommended for me by a friend. For a moment there I was sure it was a cruel joke. Like twenty episodes of shaky cam kind of joke. Because getting through those first episodes was really difficult. I don’t know what happened there, who was to blame, but this drama really doesn’t start well. But for those who manage it, their patience will be rewarded. Kinda…

So first impressions. Camerawork is absolutely bizarre. And I’m not only talking about shaky on-hand camera. Using fish eye lenses and very weird angles in the most unexplainable scenes, it all adds up to very weird and sometimes hard to watch cinematography. Plus it makes the series look very outdated. Shaky cam may not be annoying all the time, but in a scene where two characters are running with cameras strapped to them and next on hand camera following them, I’ve honestly started feeling nauseous. The problem persist with the lighting, or lack thereof. We only have natural lightning, which really doesn't do it's job. Colours look very washed and a lot of unnecessary shadows appear. Sometimes it looks almost as those cheap para-documentary series.

Let’s talk about first impressions about the characters.
So we have couple of main characters. I’m not sure why does the trope of male lead being a total asshole at first even exist, but it does and needs to be talked about. I’ve seen it a couple of times already and male character making fun of female, being absolutely mean towards her of even openly ridicule her is just so bad. Why does it even exist when after scenes like that I never want leads to end up together? I understand character development reasons, I know that in couple of episodes those characters will fall in love with each other, but at this point it just seems so unrealistic, that even later on I had trouble coping with it. There are some things that just cannot be so early forgotten.
Villain in this series is absolutely exaggerated. Him and all his people is just such a weird bunch of characters that there’re mostly ridiculously funny rather than scary. It's really hard to treat seriously someone who's main character trait is eating chocolates in weird manner.
Overall characters sometimes seem so childish it just seem so unrealistic that their actions would be possible in the army.

So we get the main character, Lee Jae Ha, your average, everyday Korean prince. You know the type, right? I always assumed that being royalty means that from early childhood you’re being taught how to manage this life. Well I guess Jae Ha skipped some lessons, because his older brother was equally with me embarrassed with mostly all the things that he did. His greatest accomplishment in the early episodes was not being killed right away by the North Korean team and trust me, nobody would blame them. And I know that it was explained that he attended normal school to blen in with the plebs or something, but still it looks like the guy has no preservation instinct whatsoever.
Opposite him, we have Kim Hang Ah, lethal weapon of North Korean Army. Woman who can kill you with rolled newspaper or whatever there is. Her only weakness is that the moment she changes from her uniform, she becomes this annoying high school girl who only dreams of finding herself a boyfriend. I’m not kidding, the change was overwhelming and so comical that I just couldn’t believe it. At one point she’s this strong soldier and then she acts like a damsel in distress being absolutely childish. When she’s off duty she dresses and acts like a high schooler and it completely doesn’t fit her serious army demeanour.
One more thing about this character, or rather the actress portraying her. Ha Ji Won. I’ve already seen her in Secret Garden, and I don’t know what happened but here her acting in some moments was so off. Maybe it’s because of her North Korean accent. To be honest, I’ve heard genuine North Korean accent only couple of times, so I’m no expert, but for her it sounded so artificial that it was hard to watch some scenes. It looks more like she tried to make fun of the accent.

So after all of this, we finally get like eight episode and finally this drama can pass as watchable. I will try not to include any spoilers here, but beware. At this point we get some instant character development (like, you know, absolutely irresponsible child of a man suddenly decides that he can rule the country of something) and finally some minor intrigue (till this point the villain was mostly unintended comic relief). We’ve been served cliche amnesia and blackmail. But life seems back to normal and anthem is the biggest issue now. We discovered that casually listening to Flight of the Valkiries while chilling in the garden passes in Korea as something normal and news headline is absolutely valid piece of evidence in court. We’re being served harsh truth about life and some other weird ideas. Overall a lot is happening in this drama, but it’s mostly just a lot of minor events that barely influence anything since they’re rarely mentioned more than once.
Scenes related to politics and international relations were mostly ridiculous and thanks to English speaking actors exaggerated ad unintentionally comical.

And here’s a twist. After all that bickering, after pointing out all of those things and more, that I cannot write here, cause spoilers, I woke up one day and decided that I enjoyed this drama. I don’t know what kind of weird Stockholm syndrome that was, but at some point I’ve actually started liking the characters and the drama started to be even enjoyable. I still seen all those ridiculous motives, I still think that the villain here was one of the worst I’ve ever seen. But somehow after twentieth episode I decided that I’m going to miss this drama.

I’d say that this drama is like a pug. You know, this small, cross eyed, snoring dog. It’s a bit ugly, it’s somehow sad, but you still love it. It just grows on you.

And I want to explain the rating I'm going to give. 6.5/10 is for me hight for this drama. At first I was thinking about giving it 3, but second half of the series redeemed a bit the mistakes of poor writing and bad cinematography. This drama is not perfect, it's somehow good but only when it's not embarrassingly naive. Still, I'm glad that I made it to the end.