This really has the elements to be good. Yes, good and bad acting, goof and bad costumes, so forth. As usual, money is put where it can be and this was a good proportion I feel considering budgets must be really hard to get for these shows. Where there are major *fixable* problems is with the subtitles and sound effects which make it hard to be willing to even stick with it: -subtitles aren’t spread reasonably--nothing nothing, nothing, one word, 2-3 sentences all together and disappearing quickly, nothing nothing, repeat --some things are not translated at all --subtitles and even Chinese closed caption disappear for 1/2 hr (from approx 2hr 25 min to 2 hr 55 min) -sound effects are annoying choices, overly-used, too loud in comparison to the show’s volume, and mostly misleading At 3 hr 11 min you hear a few snippets of music and you can see that this show would have been much improved with using music and not sound effects to drive emotion and understanding. While I understand the problems with music and copyright, I don't agree that randomly replacing music with sound effects solves the problem. Because I was having to work so hard to follow the story with the sound and subtitles, I was more irritable with the early impressions of the ML, and found him a bit unlikeable. I really really liked how the people who heard him (the Empress and the older minister) were for the most part trying to solve things with his (albeit unwitting) help instead of forcing him to do things with torture or threats, and that they were willing to bow their egos for the good of the country, rather than try to destroy him because he was a future threat. Two other things bothered me enough to make it hard to keep watching. First, the part of the Empress' guard was very poorly written. Her character was too emotionally and intellectually messy to bear the responsibility of protecting the highest power in the nation. Second--and this may seem petty but it was really distracting and also led to confusion about what the Empress is thinking because her expressions were muddled--her lipstick. It seems like they overdrew her bottom lip, but left her upper lip as it is naturally (just from what I could see in close up shots), but if they were going to contour her bottom lip to be different than her natural lip line, why not also the top--why not neither, or both? It was distracting to look at. So when all of the subtitles and closed captions were gone, and her character wasn't speaking or we weren't hearing her thoughts, her expressions were confusing.