I watched this fucking show only for Greg Han Su ("Li Tsu-Wei" in the story) and the first impression it gave was so diabolical I cannot overstate how asinine the first two episodes are (all episodes are an hour long), considering how there are some lingering plot issues down the line aside from a quick fix ending with some loose ends this pacing decision irks me even more than it should, which brings me to my first point of complaint

NEGATIVES
(-) Pacing
The show, even with it's literal theme of time looping, felt like it kept looping and reusing the same romantic/thematic beats again and again, "Huang Yuxuan" (Ko Chia-yen) can only come back to the past and have touching moments with her soulmate THIS many times before it becomes an egregious hairpulling annoyance, it's cute until it feels like the story is freezing up because the person at the receiving end of the feelings can feel conflicted to reciprocate the same feelings again and again and again and again

I love Greg and but the screentime that's given to their budding romance almost feels like the only thing the romance ever does is keep budding, the feelings will pace forward but pseudo-reset when she travels again to the past (the momentum of the plot kind of forces them to not COMPLETELY repeat this weird romantic tug of war of loving/not loving)
Despite how I put this issue here at the start, this actually is to be expected, for some reason this does fit Taiwanese show-making it's this really weird pacing that makes different scenes feel the exact same because they are meant to DO the exact same thing, anyways the fact that this is a noticeable issue even though I watched this show at 2x speed just shows how much downtime there is

(-) The ending
The story wrap up is bad, there's always a copium case to be made for "it's not about the end it's about the journey" and that kind of applies to this show because even with my grievances they actually did a lot of effort into the sequence of events that shape it all up,

That being said it's just such a letdown, the actual conflict resolution for the time-based murder mystery plot kind of happens in the last 10 minutes, insane that this is how little time they give to it after 13 hour-long episodes, THAT'S 13 HOURS of set up with 10 minutes of pay off

(-) Loose-ends
The first loose-end is actually related to Wang Chuan-Sheng, him being gay is dropped in here OUT of the blue, there's like a short introduction to the episode where he's shown to be a gay guy who confesses to his crush, gets rejected, outed and bullied........ then proceeds to drown himself, the show genuinely never uses this AT. ALL.

By the end even Chen Yun Ru gets to repossess her body and have a final arc dedicated to her (which I actually liked), but Wang Chuan-Sheng whose body is paraded around for the entirety of the plot, a person who much similar to Chen Yun Ru decides to take his life is not extended the same courtesy of finding peace with himself, given the outcome of the show Wang Chuan-Sheng actually ends up drowning himself.... a not so happy ending I assume

How do they resolve the paradoxical time loop? They kind of......................... don't? The sophistication of the mechanics of the time loop are irrelevant to the plot it's just moreso just in-place for the sake of the story if anything, they never explain what the conditions really are for making it work (idk if the track glitching/skipping is what causes it I could NOT tell),
But then afterwards we don't really understand WHAT happens, the story hints a lot in different episodes that Mo Chun-Chieh and Chen Yun-Ju would end up together but aside from Chen Yun-Ju abandoning the idea of suicide out of the blue (which is just....... wow that was easy), how does Chen Yun-Ju fall out of love with Li Tsu-Wei? What actually informs her change of heart? The "don't kys" speech by Mo Chun-Chieh? (I'm reading these names from imdb god forbid i remember them)
Also Li Tsu-Wei meets Huang Yu-Hsuan when she's a kid, how the hell do they end up together? Don't they have like a generous age gap, they just DID NOT try for the ending it's such a bad send off (don't tell me to watch the movie version)
What actually happens to the class-monitor turned psycho villain? I guess the crime he commits are only possible when the music recorder allows him to go back in time and commit the crime but.... does he then NEVER commit any crimes? What are the logistics of his psychopathy is he a persona that ONLY existed due to the time loop? It's a very strange loose-end

(-) Mo Chun-Chieh
The mistreatment of Mo by the plot feels genuinely outrageous, he's just a TOTAL cuck, he gets cucked and re-cucked so many times it just felt like why was he even there? Just to get cucked into oblivion? He walks on a cuck carpet to sit on his cuck throne with his cuck crown with his cuck scepter adorned with cuck jewels and with a flick of his wrist he can summon a legion of cuck slaves just my god the show HATES this guy.

The way he's put on the poster makes you believe that he has valuable significance to the plot, and not to say he doesn't but his significance is just stamped with the word CUCK, EVEN IN THE POSTER HE ISN'T HEARING FROM THE EARPHONES HE'S CUCKED OUT OF THAT ARRANGEMENT, neither Huang Yu-Hsuan or Chen Yun-Ju want him (until the very end where it's implied Chen changes her mind)

Just some hateful shit

POSITIVES-ish?
(+/-) Plot
I like and hate the plot at the same time, time looping is a saturated genre but elements of the show are able to stand out, there's come crumbs in the distance that made me just want to keep watching, there's a lot of eyerolls, like how many times will Huang Yu-Hsuan spot Wang Quan Sheng on the street before she has to stop the bus only to miss him again and again COME ON,

But despite some of the corniness the idea of this youthful friendship and these 3 friends having these moments in the summer of 1998 just feels right, Huang Yu-Hsuan patching a lot of the issues Chen-Yun Ju experiences by stabilizing her family and social life and then having that back fire when Chen-Yun Ju repossesses her body and cannot fit the mold that Huang Yu-Hsuan left behind, this way Huang Yu-Hsuan leads Chen-Yun Ju to her death the more she effortlessly fixes her life in small ways throughout the show is GOOD writing, the delivery felt too short by the end but it still works,

The romance is repetitive and drags but it still feels juicy every now and then when the setting freshens up, Lee studying up the ladder to get into the same university as Huang and stealing her heart as he originally did, them re-telling the same horrible joke to each other in different timelines, it's this youthfulness that it captures that is really captivating to watch

The mystery is decent and some revelations such as Lee actually being the guy Huang ends up dating in the future are great, the idea of the villain time travelling is interesting on paper but SO poorly delivered it's outrageous with him straight up nonchalantly visiting Huang and just time travelling casually and then we don't even get why he puts Huang to sleep instead of killing her but decides to kill Lee.... well I guess that would end the plot right then and there

(+) Acting
With some glaring misses, I think the main case did a pretty good job and it was pretty easy to tell who was in whose body and at which time because the actors did a good job of channeling some mannerisms that set their personas apart from one another which I actually thought was cool

(+) Greg Han Hsu is insanely hot

(+) Production is actually surprisingly good, there's a lot of different shooting locations, there's some scenes that are repeatedly shown with different new smaller insights and perspectives, some dream sequences that aren't even real are fully shot and put in that really enhances the experience (I particularly love the one with the psycho hall monitor's backstory where they show that he was behind the curtain when Lee came to visit Huang after the "car crash" even though it looks comically stupid it just makes the scene a little bit more sinister than it originally was)

Conclusion
Even with how much critique I've packed into this review, I watched it till the end because I do think there's elements of the show that are very compelling, but the ending is just NOT even there it's such an afterthought and the show feels like it's constantly rehashing thematic beats throughout