Immortal Admiral Yi Sun Shin (2004)

Not quite there...

It started off with a big war and lots of action. Ships, canons, battles and massacres, but that was only for the first 5-6 before dialing back the clock to the very beginning of the ML's childhood days and turning the drama into a massive snoozefest. That was a massive bait to hook the viewers in. It took 1 singular eternity before the drama managed to pick itself back up. The entire first half was the admiral backstory with little to no action. You don't get to see the admiral in action and you don't get to see what the drama promised until the second half which is way too delayed to stick around for. The production value is acceptable when taking into account that this was made 20 years ago. It's a bit scuffed but they had to work with what they had. It wouldn't matter much because that only shows with the action/battle scenes of which there were only a few (out of the 104 episodes). One of the most jarring things that is holding the drama back, aside from the aforementioned points, is its characters. A lot of characters got benched regularly regardless of their importance, relevance and prior investment. Making emotional scenes less impactful and key characters less memorable. Which also takes away from every climax and transition period. This is due to a combination of uneven pacing, long runtime, and frequent transitions. By the end, it seemed everyone was expendable, other than the male lead of course. On the other spectrum, the drama had a lot of anime-esque villain moments that I wish we had a lot less of.

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