Go Go Squid! (2019)

Her Highness Squid goes on a hunting trip

I really liked this drama. It checks nearly all the boxes in the fluffy romcom genre. Despite the drama having 41 episodes the OTP's journey doesn't get boring for a second, almost every moment the two leads are on screen together is a joy to watch. Their chemistry is great & they have portrayed relatively unique personalities with a lot of charm. The female lead looks kind of like a chibi vampire, I found her visuals very amusing. The actor depicting the ML did a great job, Li Xian fits this persona well. It's also worth noting that the leads conveyed emotion superbly, they did not overdo what I call "super eloquent chill Mandarin speech", in other cdramas actors delivering their lines with almost robotic emotionlessness is a recurring problem..
There is no love triangle, which is always a huge positive for me. The way how Little Squid chased after HSY in the early episodes was really fun, albeit a little creepy.
The ratio between the Esports stuff & the romance is about 50/50 which feels just about right. There are fundamental problems with the Esports related content, but still it's hugely more interesting to watch than office politics, or God forgive court life in a Saeguk.
The drama is nicely wrapped up, the ending is fairly satisfying.

I've been super entertained, hence the 9/10 rating, however objectively it should probably stop at 7. The biggest problem with the drama is that there is only enough meaningful content for about 30 episodes. In the first half there are way to many flashbacks of past events and more than half of these are extremely boring, using the fastforward button is a must. In the second half the flashbacks become even worse, some of them are just 1:1 repeats of flashbacks we've already seen and some others are just present time scenes from earlier episodes.

There quite a few additional things I can quibble about, don't take these too seriously, but here we go. ⇊

Hu Yi Tian role in this drama is a bit confusing & meaningless. Other reviewers talked about how he is too big of a star for this role and I do agree, but to me it seems he spent less than 1 hour filming most of his scenes. He is not present in most scenes, not sitting anywhere on the bus, simply he is just not there whenever the camera is pointing at multiple team members. It seems like first they recorded the dialog without him being there & then later they just showed us a close up of him reacting with a similar enough looking blurred backdrop.

How the inevitable breakup occurred irked me a little. Specifically how ML promised mom that he would break off all relations & stay away forever, a conviction that only lasted at most like two weeks. I mean it sounded almost like he is making on oath and then.. In the comment section I saw recommendations that it's the best to just skip episodes 20-30. Personally I feel that would be a pretty big mistake. The official breakup only lasted from ep22 to 26 and there is not much angst there, I wouldn't even call this real separation. Arguably those were some of the better episodes and I did not even care about the YaYa couple's story all that much.

Product placements were a real problem, some of them were so separate from the flow of the story, that they can just be considered regular ad breaks. At one point the team went to some sort of luxury resort. The ML who is supposedly always low on cash stayed in a room that shared a transparent wall with a giant aquarium with sharks in it and later on he invited FL over to stay in the presidential suite. (they called it "her room") There is no way those were not honking product placements, right?

Every now and then there were some weird dubbed voiceover happenings. This did not bother me too much, but I'm mildly curious if it was related to some sort of microphone failure, or they just changed some of the dialog in post..

CTF is completely different from how it's described in this drama. Reaction time and APM are hardly relevant things, it's more like highly trained IT experts/programmers solve puzzles, some parts of CTF competitions involve speed, but it's hardly the deciding factor. This is related to another problem, how moms in the show don't see the value in what these kids are doing. CTF competitors can easily get prestigious jobs in the IT industry. To me it feels like the novel this is based off of is about gaming & the writers were just too lazy to replace the story and dialog that seems clearly League of Legends related. Like there is no way in hell that a top of the line CTF expert wouldn't "speak the same language" as Tong Nian.
People doing intense mouse movements in gaming chairs, while a group of commentators can barely keep up with what's happening makes no sense in the context of CTF.

There were a few cringy foreigner related scenes. People speaking Chinese in an environment that does not make any sense etc.

Lastly the Chinese patriotism was a bit too much, then again I've seen quite a few American sports movies where they went even further..

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