Started off super well. Then it started to decline in the end. Still, this franchise continues to do what it has been doing for years now. It is still all about the nostalgia of the youth - and the people - in Korea during the time-period that the drama is set it. It still manages to make me feel very sentimental and nostalgic for a period that I didn’t experience on my own - being an Icelandic girl born in 1991 - and the approach of the material is still very mundane and raw. TvN know what works when it comes to this series, so changing that formula - as well as the who-is-the-husband-baiting-plot - isn’t probably that high on their list. Still, the Reply franchise is honestly not like any other drama series in terms of friendship and family-relationship. Or at least not out of all of the dramas that I have watched. In some aspect I found I think this series - the third series of the Reply series - to be better than the second series. It is just as long as the second one - with 20 episode per series and about 90 minute to almost two hour long episodes, twice a week - but it didn’t feel like it dragged as much as the second one did. The episodes are all way to long, but then again TVN isn’t always about quality over quantity when it comes to this show. But I still found myself having fun watching them. Some things really are just unnecessary fluff and fillers. It is just that I didn’t mind most of that unnecessary fluff and fillers. I got a lot faster frustrated with them in Reply 1994 than I did in Reply 1988. It didn’t go on and on and on about the love-triangle, since it focused more on the other relationships of the other characters. Sure, both Reply 1994 and Reply 1997 focus on the friendship between the main characters and their friends and the family-bond that exists there, but Reply 1988 does a bit more of that. We get to explore all of the families on this one street that Reply 1988 takes place, which gives us more stuff to watch over the 90 minute episodes. Much more than in Reply 1994 at least, where all we had was the family and friends of the main girl and guy. So more time went in baiting us with Chilbong and the love-triangle. Reply 1988 is the drama that feels most like a family drama in the Reply series and that is one of the best assets of Reply 1988. Seeing them all move away, after spending so much time together, at the end was very painful to watch. There is a lot of baiting in Reply 1988 with the love-triangle. But it felt more similar to the baiting in Reply 1997 than in Reply 1994. Just a whole lot more mellow than in Reply 1997. There was a lot more happened in the love-triangle there. Here we just had two guys pinning after this one girl and never really doing anything about it. They really could have done a better job with it. Sometimes it felt like they were taking some time that they could use on that on some cute, fluffy, filler with the other characters. Like Jung Bong and Mi Ok’s relationship. In the end I felt very indifferent toward the love-triangle. Which makes one of the main points of the drama - the husband-hunt aspect - kinda pointless to me. They should have made me care, but since no one really did anything, then I couldn't really care less about it. That made the Reply 1988 drag a lot toward the end for me. Sure, I didn’t feel like they were milking the story as much as they did in Reply 1994 and I didn’t feel as soon frustrated with Reply 1988 as I did with Reply 1994 - but Reply 1988 didn’t have Chilbong - but it still left me a bit unsatisfied. She is in some way better than Reply 1994, but not nearly as good as Reply 1997 or as good as it could have been. I also feel like I care more about Reply 1997 and Reply 1994 than I do with Reply 1988. It pulled more at my heartstrings, despite it all. Even if I felt like Reply 1994 dragged on for way to long and milked it’s story for it popularity - all of the Reply series do that to certain extent - and Reply 1988 told a better overall-story. I just cried more during the first two series. Not to say that Reply 1988 didn’t make me cry, because it did. The Reply series is made for sentimental and nostalgic-loving people like me. Of course it is going to make me cry. All of the warm-family stuff tend to get me teary-eyed. It just didn’t make me bawl my eyes out as much as the other two did. Maybe because I started to feel a bit indifferent toward some of the stuff in it. And the episodes could be a bit - OK, a lot - shorter. Reply 1997 was the best, when it was just 45 minutes per episode.