Lost Love in Times Sp Drama Review (with advice for subbers)

*Contains a few spoilers*

Synopsis:

A spinoff from the main drama Lost Love in Times, this drama focuses on the 11th Prince, Prince Che and his fiancee Cai Qian. Picking up from the point where Prince Che had been seriously injured, he is only alive due to the Lunar Corona stone. However no-one except the Mages know about this. During a visit to Prince Che’s grave, Cai Qian meets Ming Yan, a mage who is also Prince Li’s lover who tells her that the reason why Prince Che is in a coma now is because he had lose a part of his spirit. Only by entering Prince Che’s 3 dream levels can he wake up.

However, the Dark Mages are after the Lunar Corona Stone and they try and stop Cai Qian, upset the Prince Che in the dream to try and get his spirit to push the Lunar corona stone away so that they will be able to take it without harm.

Plot and Pace of story

Overall, there are distinctive parallels between the spinoff and the original drama, such as the female protagonist entering a new realm where no-one knows who they are, trying to help the male protagonist without a proper identity and then forced to leave that realm after their mission was completed. And if certain people die or were harmed, there were serious consequences for the female protagonist.

However, I felt that this was a more light-hearted drama compared to the original series, Qing Chen tried to push Yuan Li away for half the drama whereas Cai Qian had to gain Prince Che’s trust and stick close to him, which getting him to fall in love with her helps. Also, there was a bit of a misunderstanding of Cai Qian’s gender in the beginning which caused a bit of a comedy.

The pace of the drama was quite quick, it’s a fairly short drama with 12 episodes each lasting about 30 minutes and they had to get through quite a bit of content. I guess if you liked Prince Che’s character, this spinoff provides a different side to his character. Personally I prefer the original series in terms of the plot because there was a lot more plotting, political intrigue whereas this spinoff was more simple in terms of the plot and more action and romance based.

Because of this I would give it 3.5/5 stars in terms of the plot.

Characters

I really liked Prince Che, Cai Qian in the original series and this spinoff maintained some of their lovable characteristics. This drama fleshed out the characters that we see less of in the original series showing sides of them that we were unable to see in the original drama. There were not that many big surprises there.

Also, you could see the characters really developing through the drama, especially Cai Qian. The only negative thing is that the really evil mage Qin Bing Ling seemed a little flat and a bit like a 2D antagonist, you know she’s after the stone but you don’t really know much more than that, it seemed like she existed so that the drama didn’t end after 6 episodes. Although the things she does really does make you hate the character. But apart from that there were no really annoying cliche characters.

So, I will give this 3/5 stars.

Production 

Probably because of the limited budget, so there was less CGI and the scenery was not as beautiful as the original series. However, they did manage to keep a lot of things the same such as the clothes and the effects of the fight scenes. But I felt that they still need quite well and it felt like it was the same world as the original series.

In terms of production, I will give this 3.5/5 stars.

Personal opinion + advice for subbers

Because this was the first historical drama that I subbed entirely by myself so I struggled a little in terms of what sort of language the characters should be speaking in. In chinese, historical dramas usually have their own way of speaking and it’s a lot more poetic than the language used in modern chinese dramas. This also meant that there was a lot of sayings and chengyu involved. I think for the first few episodes I focused a little too much on trying to make the language of the subs closer to the language used from the past but at the end I think I managed to balance it out with the ease of understanding it.

For me, it’s one of those dramas that you’ll watch to relax and have a laugh. For a historical drama, this is an easier project to do compared to dramas such as The Advisors Alliance and is a good drama to practise on before attempting something more complicated where good english is necessary in order to understand and appreciate the drama.

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