ESC to close 4^{.12 (by 2320 users)}maou 魔王

• 2008
• TV
• Japan

Mawang (The Korean original) is one of my all time favorite dramas, so I was pretty excited to see this being remade to see how Japan would handle it.

There are so many wrong things with this show, they turned an otherwise well paced, provocative story into a comedic almost laughable plot with stale, storied acting.

The casting is horrible for every character (As much as I like Oono), the writing was slow and they tried to cultural link too many things together and it doesn't work and feel cohesive.

I felt the soundtrack was weak as well (I'm also an Arashi fan, and I like Truth solo as a single, but in terms of this show was bad), and it drew away from key plot points to being completely out of place most of the time.

The filming was ok, but lacked intensity and polish, sometimes shaky handi-cam feel came into play on character close-ups.

The dialogue was rather dumbed down from the original, and it's been made more accessible losing all the appeal that made the Korean version great.

If you have the chance to watch this, don't, watch the Korean version first, then watch this. This version is a very bad remake on virtually lower level.

I would've dropped this drama if it hadn't been for Oonos amazing acting and I have to say I'm glad I didn't drop it in the end!

In the beginning I was very thrilled, because I found the story and characters extremely interesting, but I soon realised that Touma wasn't up to his role and there were many other flaws in the rendition. Touma's acting skills weren't good enough to play a person with so much sorrow and depth. Then, for the first few episodes the story was just dragging along. There were so many people to be killed and so many mysteries and secrets to solve that I felt kind of annoyed when after several episodes still nothing had really happened... and Touma was still just shouting and running around senselessly.

After the 7th or something episode things got more exciting, but in the end the one thing I'd feared happened - they scrammed all the murders and secrets leftover in the last few episodes, which made everything seem hasty and took a lot of tragedy and depth from the story.

Nevertheless, thanks especially to Oono, this drama was really good. He played his part so perfectly and his acting skills were so stunningly amazing that the Drama got me hooked despite all of its flaws. But honestly, Touma's acting really seemed ridiculous next to Oono's. With one glance Oono could convey all of the sorrow, grief, bitterness, evil and self-hatred that Touma couldn't.

Then, even though things dragged along in the beginning, the story got more exciting in the end and finally THE end was really touching. They hurried through the deaths leftover, but they took enough time for the last scene between Serizawa and Naruse in which even Touma played really, really well. Even though I was expecting something like this, the ending made me cry.

Still, they could've done better with some changes in the cast and some difference in the plotting.

Now I've got to watch the Korean version to compare!