Review of Love O2O / 微微一笑很倾城

For those of you who stumbled upon this website through the mysterious magical powers of the Internet, welcome! My name is Ashley, and I started this website to keep track of and archive all of the kinds of movies, books, and television shows I’ve come across in the years.

I used to work as a professional film and television critic at an online outlet, but because I wasn’t focusing on the kinds of films I wanted to, I eventually left that job behind and went to work on my own thing. That’s how I ended up focusing on this blog a bit more, then I temporarily entered an unemployed blip that was unexpected, so I had even more time to write about the movies I’ve seen while I was job hunting.

This blog post emerges from an ongoing project I’ve been working on with the blog. In the past, I would write little reviews of the movies and shows I was watching, but then I never put them anywhere. As someone who was always interested in tracking my thoughts and progress throughout the years, this was the perfect way to keep all of it together.

So some of the posts that are coming out in the next few months are older reviews that I’m updating to have them somewhere that can’t be lost easily. It’s a fascinating way to watch yourself evolve as a person, see how your thoughts changed in a decade or so, and evaluate how you’ve grown or stayed stagnant.

This blog post is dedicated to Love O2O, which is a show I watched back in college. I didn’t watch it live while it was airing, as I was in my phase where I was avoiding Chinese dramas. I studied Chinese in school formally for about four years, and when I was done, I was avoiding watching Chinese entertainment because my brain was fried. Then I almost minored Mandarin when I was in college.

This is probably going to be my last catch up review post for a bit, as I’m a little bit burned out of returning to all of these dramas I’ve seen before. I’m impressed with my memory though—I’ve remembered a lot of the smaller and finer details I wouldn’t have expected myself to recall.

Anyways, let’s get into the review! I don’t want to ramble too much before we get into the main part of this post.

A female computer science student falls in love with a guy who she was playing an online game with.

Our female lead in this series is Bei Weiwei, and we mainly get her perspective at first. She’s in college, studying computer science, and while she can be an academic weapon in the classroom, she spends a lot of her free time playing an RPG game called A Chinese Ghost Story.

In fact, she loves gaming so much she actually wants to become a game developer when she’s done with her schooling. A chunk of the series is like other e-sports and gaming dramas, as we have to watch the scenes in the game unfold on the screen instead of the actors.

I honestly found myself wanting to skip them the first time, and the second time I had the same urge. I don’t care for when Chinese e-sports dramas do this, and I find that half of the time the dialogue and the exposition isn’t even needed. It kind of just is filler content to me most of the time.

Regardless, it’s during Weiwei’s time playing that she befriends the top player: Yixiao Naihe. He proposes that they get married in the game so they can start doing couple competitions, and because Weiwei is intrigued by that idea, she agrees and they go off to do those challenges as a married couple.

Eventually, Weiwei realizes the person who is the character in real life: it’s the handsome and dashing senior Xiao Nai. He’s one of the popular boys at school, and he has a promising future ahead of him. She is slightly intimidated by this, but as the two of them meet in real life, they hit it off.

As the show progresses and they get through that initial hurdle of shyness, they do eventually start dating. But because there are a solid chunk of episodes to get through in this series, that means we have to have some drama spicing up their lives.

It manifests in different forms, such as people and the challenges of needing to find a job upon graduating, but I would say this was a fairly smooth ride throughout the series. Nothing major really happens to them.

Overall Thoughts

I think Love O2O is an okay drama. I’m starting to learn that I just don’t care for e-sports dramas, even though they can be pretty promising. Like Falling Into Your Smile really interested me, but then I found the actual plot fell flat throughout.

The chemistry between the two leads in this show is pretty decent, but I also wasn’t invested in them as characters. The male lead particularly was someone I didn’t care for, and he fell pretty flat in terms of characterization. They’re both static characters, but he especially was one.

I will say I liked this one a lot more when I was younger. I remember really liking it in college, but now, as an adult, my tastes might’ve changed more drastically than I thought.

If you like it though, kudos to you! Taste is so subjective, and neither of us are wrong for how we feel. That’s the beauty of art sometimes. Go watch it if you want to; don’t let some stranger on the Internet dictate your opinion.

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