The mix of romance, action, drama and comedy are excellent but slowly the plot bloats and pace slows . .

At the start, the romance with power games and the switching of who rescued who was a lot of fun. The main couple were fully fleshed out with clear motivations and back stories, and you bought the tension between them. In addition, who doesn't like the secret hero who is destined for greatness? By the end, though, the pacing seemed really off and bloated at 20 episodes. The older generation of mages got a lot of screen time and largely were boring and onenote. The villain also got a lot of screen time and was more annoying or slimy than compelling.

There were a few standout actors as the episodes went on. Both, Lee Jae Wook and Jung So Min were excellent at both the comedy and drama and had an endearing softer, buddy romance. In addition, there was a few standout side characters that did a lot with their roles mainly Seo Yul 'Autumn,' the Crown Prince, and Maidservant Kim. Shoutout to Master Lee as well.

The music was fine and worked well esp. with action scenes, there may be an occasional scene I'd rewatch esp. the more comedic or fun points.

I grade on other elements as well:

Complex themes: 7.5
Talented people can be motivated in different ways - don't hold talent back just because they can't learn steadily and linearly. No one is immune from greed - elders included. Being grounded in human relationships and human costs makes you less likely to succumb to fights of power.

Character Growth and Development: 8.5
By the end, the characters have to wrestle with whether they buy into the values they held at the beginning. Our main male character struggles with this the least, and fairly quickly realizes he cares much more for those who have helped and believed in him than any sort of ideological battle, but for most of the other characters it is a struggle.

Complex Women/Women centered plots: 6.5
This was abnormally bad for a show in 2022. While there were great women characters (indeed the female secondary villian was much more interesting than the male villian) none of them shared meaningful screen time with each other except to move plots forwards.

Cinematography/Production Values: 8.0
The fights scenes were thrilling and had an excellent musical score to them and were of high quality. There's a good amount of shooting outdoors by water or trees. The sets, costume etc. however were only average.