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[HanCinema's Drama Review] "Prince of Prince" Episodes 6-10

The first half of "Prince of Prince" certainly had its charms, what with moving so outrageously quickly that I could barely keep track of what was happening. Here though, the story goes the more traditional route of having good guys and villains. And in this regard the lack of serious buildup is a much more serious problem. For all practical intents and purposes these story points come out of nowhere, and the flashbacks don't offer much of a convincing reminder as to who these basically crazy people are.

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For all the more generic absurdities of "Prince of Prince" I was willing to entertain the idea that a video game company could have some ridiculous occurences like this in the regular working week. But when this progresses to straight up violent confrontation, especially in locations where we'd expect to see security guards on duty...well, the willing suspension of disbelief just gets to be a bit difficult to maintain at that point.

On a more existential level I'm having trouble figuring out what the story of this drama was actually even supposed to be. Yoo-na (played by Seo Yuna) is character who seems important but doesn't quite have anything that could really be called a story arc. The male leads are similarly very unresolved as personalities, and the lack of a significant runtime is such that every decision than any character makes comes off as extremely sudden.

The sheer quantity of plot compressed into such a small runtime is what gives "Prince of Prince" this rather strange effect. I rather suspect that the actual intended audience for this drama is mainly just fans of the webtoon, who are more likely to understand the larger context in which all of this scenes take place. Or maybe it's just the novelty of seeing these people onscreen wearing cosplay and arguing about otakus. It's hard to tell.

All I can determine for sure is that "Prince of Prince" is a very short drama that feels very abridged, and is more about sudden jolts of shock value than it is a more coherently defined overall story. In a format like this it's probably not reasonable to set expectations too high. Even so, a short web drama should at least be able to maintain viewer attention, and I frequently found myself more bewildered than actually entertained by the occasional appearance of a decent joke. The micro-episode nature of the story is such that "Prince of Prince" isn't really that big of a timesink, but even then it's not really worth the effort.

Review by William Schwartz

"Prince of Prince" is directed by Choi Hyeong-joon, Shin Joo-hwan, written by Jaea, Kim Min-hye and features Choi Jong-hoon, Im Yoon-ho, Seo Yuna, Son Se-bin, Woo Hyuk and Lee Soo-kwang.

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