This is a drama that lives up to the hype. I think around episode 5 or 6 was where I started crying every episode, but in a good way. I felt so attached to all the characters and I felt personally invested in their stories.

The character development in this drama is top notch. And I don't just mean the leads and the second couple, I mean every side character got at least a little development too. There were some tropes in the story (that I didn't mind), but when it came to tropes in characterization, there was pretty much nothing. I was especially impressed by the female characters, since they often get shafted in favor of the female lead, but there were no one dimensional evil exes or MILs. All the characters had realistic and understandable motivations. There were a couple I wish we got to learn a little more about, but even the villain's motivations were touched on in a way that made me feel very sad for them.

There are only a couple songs in the OST that I would recognize and listen to again, which is why I took a half point off, but overall the music complemented the show well and I have friends who would give it a perfect 10.

In some ways, it's a typical melodrama romance, but it's also practically perfectly executed, so I would still recommend it to anyone who might not usually like romance or melodrama.

The setting is also very interesting and even though I don't know personally, I've read that North Korean defectors were very impressed by the show's accuracy (except the romance but we should all know that level of romance is kind of unrealistic anywhere lol). The most interesting thing about the show for me was that it made me realize that I don't really think about the people of North Korea very often, I just think about the country's government. I think it did a great job of humanizing the North Korean characters while still not glossing over hardships that face people there.