Scholar Who Walks The Night

밤을 걷는 선비 (Scholar Who Walks the Night) is a South Korean drama series that was aired on MBC from July 8th to September 10th 2015. It consists of 20 episodes and is based on a webcomic.

Story: When the Goryeo Dynasty collapsed vampire Gwi helped the first King of Joseon to build his new empire. In return, he was promised to be honored by the King's descendants but 200 years later, Crown Prince Jung-hyun tries to get rid of him. Jung-hyun visits a guardian vampire with his best friend Kim Sung-yeol in order to stop Gwi with a secret plan but the evil vampire finds out about it and fights the guardian vampire while imprisoning Jung-hyun. Trying to help his friend, Sung-yeol gets to the place where the guardian vampire lives - and is turned into a vampire by the guardian to fight Gwi. While the guardian passes away, Sung-yeol is going through the process and wakes up 3 days later only to find himself turned into a "monster" and his best friend to be executed along with his father. Gwi also captured his fiancée and first love, Myung-hee and Sung-yeol goes to find her but is too weak to beat Gwi. In order to let him live and fight against the evil vampire controlling the kings of the Joseon dynasty, Myung-hee choses death in the underground palace.
For the next 120 years, Kim Sung-yeol goes into hiding and tries to find Crown Prince Jung-hyun's memorandum that supposedly has the secret plan in it. In order to find it he asks book seller Jo Yang-sun to search for it. Yang-sun, a girl who dresses as a boy for reasons she herself doesn't know for sure, starts to look for the book in any place but can't find it at first - instead she finds herself falling for the good-looking scholar who happened to save her live quite a few times.
To be honest, this is just a summary of the beginning as I don't want to include too many spoilers but this whole story has way more to it than I expected at first. I'm not the biggest fan of vampire romance, and this is also paired up with historical things (I'm still trying to figure out when exactly the story is set but I assume episode one plays around 1592 or 1600 (since the 200 years were probably not exact) so the main story takes place around 1820) but I found this story to be surprisingly interesting. Yes, it is a lot of cliché but at least the vampires are not sparkling in the sun (sorry, no offense meant, I used to love Twilight when I was younger until I realized that a huge part is actually rather funny). Of course the good vs evil was obvious and to be honest this is highly what this drama is based on. Surprisingly the love triangle was not as bad as I thought - in fact I suspected there would be one but in the end there wasn't anything. I liked a lot of elements of this story after all, especially when Hye-ryung was brought in. Also the political issues and curruption which definitely existed. After all it was a solid storyline to me and I liked it for that reason.

Cast: Lee Joon-ki as Kim Sung-yeol. I know this guy is in a bunch of historical dramas even though I did not watch many so far but I actually quite liked him in this drama. However, it sometimes shines through that the character is from a webcomic/manga because some expressions were overacted to fit the description from the illustrations. I still quite liked his acting though.
Lee Yu-bi as Jo Yang-sun. If I ever saw her in any drama before I definitely don't remember her but I think her acting was actually not bad. She looked really young to me though so I spent half of the time trying to figure out how old her character might be. Anyway, I found her acting to be very good in this role even though the character was by far not my favorite.
Shim Chang-min as Lee Yoon. I think the character really was something Chang-min did well. While many people say he can't act I didn't find this bad at all, rather a reserved Crown Prince who couldn't show his feelings because he had to keep a certain emotional distance. As a character, there was one very quick.. development about his future wife that confused me. While at first he didn't really know her it seemed that he definitely loved her just a few episodes later and I was really confused because of that.
Lee Soo-hyuk as Gwi. When I first saw him in a drama before I was sure he would make a good vampire. Holy crap, I was so right with that. I loved him as Gwi even though I also have to admit that sometimes the webcomic villainish feel came through for me. Still he did really good in this role of the vampire thirsting for power.
Kim So-eun as Myung-hee/Hye-ryung. I actually quite liked her as Myung-hee, a kind-hearted young female just in love with a scholar. As Hye-ryung, her acting was cold for reasons but I couldn't really believe everything about that.
Jang Hee-jin as Soo-hyang. Overall I found her acting good but towards the end I did get the feeling - just a little bit - that she had enough of her character for some reason. However, she still delivered a solid enough performance for me.
Choi Tae-hwan as Ho-jin. Oh that poor thing broke my heart in the end! I loved the character and I think Choi Tae-hwan did a good job portraying him, especially the loyalty towards Kim Sung-yeol. I can't really criticize anything about him.
Yeo Eui-joo as No Hak-young. I absolutely loved his acting, too. He was for sure one of my highlights in this drama and I hated Gwi for doing that to him! (don't mind me, I'm just weird). In all honesty, he makes the drama even better.
Lastly, Han Jung-soo as Baek In-ho. The more I think about it, the more I feel like he definitely was made for historical dramas because he really seemed like someone who could've lived during that time (to me). I adored his acting even though he didn't have enough screentime by far but he was just a side character in the end.

Soundtrack: The soundtrack was good but not entirely great. Of course they featured quite a lot of good and famous singers but some songs were overused. I still like G.NA's "Don't Cry" but it will forever be connected to this drama for me. Is that a bad thing? Not really. And it's a nice thing to remember her like this as she probably won't have a comeback anymore due to a certain scandal.


8.5/10
As you can tell I quite enjoyed the story and most of the acting in this drama. I didn't really have high expectations because usually I don't like historical dramas a lot, and vampire stories that are not about crime are totally not my cup of tea anymore (actually) but this drama still was quite good and could become my favorite vampire romance drama. Yes, it did have a few WTF moments, especially during the action scenes because it lookes so overdone but it was okay in the end and I still enjoyed it even though I think the final fight was just.. too fast? I don't know.
Recommended to vampire love story fans and fans of fantasy meets historical. And of the actors, you won't be too disappointed.

Liar Game

라이어게임 (Liar Game) is a Korean drama series that aired on tvN from October 20th to November 25th 2014. The series itself is based on manga.

! I do not know the manga or the Japanese version of this series so I will write this review without comparing the plot and actors. !

Story: Nam Da-jung, an innocent young woman, is asked to help an elderly woman one day. After that woman disappeared leaving her alone with a bag full of money, Da-jung takes the bag home but her conscience tells her to take the money to the police station the next day though she could pay back her debt. By returning that bag filled with money she gets pulled into a TV show called "Liar Game" hosted by Kang Do-young. Since Da-jung is too innocent to win that game and the 10 Million dollar the final winner will receive, loan shark Jo Dal-goo tells her about a smart guy he met in prison - Professor Ha Woo-jin. Since she desperately needs help, Da-jung starts looking for Woo-jin the day he gets out of prison, and though he doesn't want to help her at first, the two of them become a team. Innocent Da-jung learns about people betraying her and that, in order to win, those who betrayed her need to be punished so she finds a circle of players joining her team. But is it right for her to trust all of those people when in the last round 10 Million dollar can be won? And why of all people was she chosen for the show? Was it a plan to get Ha Woo-jin to participate in the game as well?

Cast: The first character to name is Nam Da-jung played by Kim So-eun. While I really liked Kim So-eun since Boys Over Flowers I still liked her - but not that much in this drama, her acting was alright but her character horrible. While I heard people say she's not innocent enough (compared to the Japanese version, that is - found the statement on Mydramalist.com) I wonder how she could be more innocent and even more DUMB. It's not even naive anymore but sometimes I started wondering whether she was just left out when brains were given out for free. Seriously, the one thing that was horrible in this series was how stupid and naive Nam Da-jung was.
Luckily, the main antagonist Kang Do-young played by Shin Sung-rok was awesome. Talking about the actor, can we please talk about his role in You Who Came From The Stars? He was a great villain in a rather basic rom-com series but this time he was even better, maybe because of the setting. I got scared of him in front of my laptop. Kudo's to Shin Sung-rok for creeping me out though I'm still 8000km away. As a character, I enjoyed watching Kang Do-young and Ha Woo-jin caught up in their battle with Woo-jin protecting Da-jung.
Lee Sang-yoon as Ha Woo-jin is someone I've seen for the first time ever in a drama so I might not be able to tell you much about his other series and that is not necessary either. He had this kind of.. aura around him in this series that made me forget that it's actually a K-drama and as I stated above, I loved watching him and Shin Sung-rok in a dangerous battle. While I feel his acting itself was pretty good the combination of two main characters with incredibly charismatic actors made it perfect.
Of course there is a great number of actors involved mainly because of the number of participants as well as the people involved in the production of the show "Liar Game". For example we have Cha Soo-yeon as Lee Yoon-joo who is responsible for the program. At first everything's about the rating for her but she changes and suddenly finds her self under pressure to safe the TV station JVN. Choi Jin-ho as Director Jang is responsible for the pressure and he tends to manipulate what's going on to keep the show interesting.
Among the participants are Lee Si-hoo as Choi Sung-joon, Jang Seung-jo as Kim Bong-geun, Jo Jae-yun as Jo Dal-goo, Lee Cheol-min as Bulldog, Park Jae-hoon as actor Goo In-gi and Lee El as Oh Jung-ah or Jaimie, a character I never thought I would come to like as the series progresses.

Soundtrack: The soundtrack for this series wasn't too special. As far as I remember there was only Dear Cloud's "Liar" that really caught my attention and that is not much but at least that song even made it up to my list of my personal favorite OST songs of all time. But since this drama is filled with suspense I would've wished for something slightly more mysterious. I don't know if you get what I mean but bands like Nell or Hlin would've completed that soundtrack perfectly..

Overall I did enjoy this series a lot but it still only gets a 9/10 for mainly two reasons. I was really bothered by Nam Da-jung's stupid and naive behavior and I just cannot look past that fact. The other reason is indeed the soundtrack. I explained it before in the post regarding my favorite soundtracks I think and the OST can in fact save a series - or kind of destroy it. Now the music did not destroy this but it's a minus for me.
There's only a hint of romance in this series - if you want to see it like that so I think you can very well ignore it if you don't like it.
Some people said that certain aspects of the games were hard to understand without knowing the Japanese version - but I do not agree with this. Yes, I sometimes needed to rewatch a scene because I didn't really get the explanation but as soon as examples were shown it made sense.

As far as I've heard many fans of the Japanese version didn't like the Korean version and that's okay but standing for itself the series is definitely worth watching. It's interesting, suspenseful and will keep you excited if you like this kind of series.

I'll just leave you wiht some gifs you will understand after watching the series - the last one was one of my favorite scenes in the whole 12 episodes.

Boys Over Flowers

꽃보다 남자 (Boys Over Flowers or Boys Before Flowers) is the Korean remake of the Japanese dram Hana yori dango (花より男子) that aired originally in 2005 and 2007 in Japan. The Korean remake first aired from  January 5th to March 31st 2009 on KBS.
As far as I remember it's one of the most famous Korean dramas internationally and I think I haven't met anyone who didn't watch it.


Story: Oh, if you hear about the story now - believe me, it'll seem quite familiar to you. Why? Uhm, well, that's simple. In short a poor girl, Geum Jan-di, is delivering dry cleaning for her parents shop. One day she saves a student of the prestigious Shin Hwa High and gets a scholarship because of being good at swimming. Being the poor girl surrounded by rich students she has to deal with some issues. Soon she gets terrorized by the leader of the F4, Gu Jun-pyo. He and his friends are the most popular and richest boys in school. While bullying her Jun-pyo begins to realize he's attracted to Jan-di, but Jan-di has a crush on his best friend, Yoon Ji-hoo. And so the drama starts.
If you're looking for THE typical K-Drama - well, congrats, you've found it, though it's actually based on a manga and the Japanese series. Don't believe me? Well, look at this:

Please pay attention to.. well, almost all of those points explained on there. You'll understand when you've finished this drama.
Don't get me wrong, talking about Boys Over Flowers as THE typical K-Drama makes it sound worse I think. Because actually I really adored this one. I remember I had trouble with the first episode and had to wait a few.. well, weeks, until I started the second. But after watching the second episode I've finished the drama in around three days (which is a lot considering I've watched 23 episodes in three days, makes about 8 episodes per day.. now you can guess what else I did during that time except for sleeping and eating and watching this drama).
I admit there are a lot and I mean a whole freaking lot of misunderstandings and after some time you might feel like it's just a strategy so they can produce more episodes and therefore make more money - which might be true up to some point - but everything actually makes sense.

Cast: When I started watching this I didn't really care about actors at all. Sure I knew that Kim Hyun-joong as Yoon Ji-hoo was in it but that was basically everything. Oh, and I've heard about Lee Min-ho who took the role of the male lead Gu Jun-pyo here before but couldn't really connect him to any popular drama. However, this drama was the first one I've watched with Kim Bum who's my absolute favorite actor. As So Yi-jung his smile made my heart melt like.. icecream. This sounds weird but it IS actually really weird (and I'm embarrassed to admit that I was really squealing like a 12-year-old back then). Anyways, the last member of the F4 missing on here is Song Woo-bin played by Kim Joon. Sadly I couldn't find that much info on Kim Joon, the last thing I've heard was that he went to the army after his group T-MAX disbanded (they were good, I remember I've downloaded some songs).
Well, after mentioning all of the F4 now we can't leave out our Geum Jan-di played by Koo Hye-sun. I admit I've also become a fan of hers, I like those princesses who can protect themselves. Don't get what I mean? Watch the first few episodes of this drama and you'll understand that.
The last one I'll name on here would be Kim So-eun who took the role of Jan-di's best friend Chu Ga-eul.

Soundtrack: Well, the soundtrack.. While I sincerely loves some songs like Lee Jung-sik's Saxophone instrumental "I Know" and Kim Bum's "지금 만나러 갑니다 (I'm Going To Meet You Now)" there were some songs that seriously pissed me off after hearing them about 15 times per day just like T-Max's "Paradise" which is the title song. Listening to it now it's actually a good and cheerful song but used way too often. And that's weird because the actual soundtrack consists of two CDs with a total of 26 songs PLUS there's an F4 Special Edition which includes 10 tracks as well. Why did they have to overuse one song that much? I really don't know and I'm not sure if I'll ever find out.


So in total I gave 9/10. Like, come on, I've already told you how fast I've finished that. If that doesn't qualify as being addicted to a drama then.. I don't even know.