Not gonna lie, I vehemently dislike Playful Kiss. I adore It Started with a Kiss, but you'd guess wrong if you guessed which one I saw first. I usually give my heart to whichever version I saw first too, but I actually put off watching ISWAK for years because of my utter hatred of Playful Kiss.

Hana Yori Dango v. Boys Over Flowers... that's a much more... complicated... relationship.

I tend to love the first version I watched. I love Hana Yori Dango to pieces, all of it~ But I like Meteor Garden too tbh. BOF, not so much because it annoyed me how KHJ playing korean version Rui. The stark contrast of Oguri Shun and KHJ in terms of talent is just...to wide. And to think that at that time, talent actually didn't matter that much to me~ so...~

For some reason this makes me think of all the Jane Austen movies and tv adaptations that have disappointed *shakes head* except, of course, for the perfect BBC 1995 P&P 😁

In all adaptations I have watched in those you have mentioned, I have always disliked the Korean ones. Playful Kiss, Fated To Love You, BOF were all mediocre for me.

Thanks for the write up! I’m so glad I found someone else who liked Fated to Love You. As in, I reality liked it except for the noble idiocy part.

I'm glad someone talked about Fated to Love You - I rewatched it recently, and I really do love everything about the first seven or eight episodes.

I have no problem with remakes if they keep the core of the original story. The remake of Hana Kimi, To the Beautiful You was very bad because they didn't keep the friendship between all the 3 dormitories. They focused on the love story and forgot to develop the other characters. I think it's my issue with korean remakes. They take off some parts to add triangle love story, richer characters, useless drama. There are good ones like Life on Mars, The Good Wife, Solomon's Perjury, etc.

I didn't like the Korean drama Full House but I really loved the Thai one. It was really a good adaptation :)

ISWAK was the first drama that I watched in its language, no dubbing just subtitles and in youtube by parts (Episode 1 part 1 of 3 format). That's why I cannot watch the other adaptations or remakes, it has a special place.

I'm a little bias when it comes to Meteor Garden/Hana Yori Dango/BoF though because Matsumoto Jun and Oguri Shun and Inoue Mao!

Remakes and adaptations can be really hard to pull off specially if it is of a manga/mahwa/other country live action version that is dearly loved and followed. There have been cases where it has worked beautifully and some where it hasn't.

Apart from the ones you mentioned another that comes to mind is Nodame Cantabile. I watched the Japanese version and fell in love! Juri Ueno is the literal incarnation of Nodame. She embodied the character in a way that I am pretty sure noone ever can.
The Korean version was ... interesting.
The music was well done (I mean it is literally about classical music, they better make sure that is perfect).
That drama did introduce me to Park Bo Gum who was adorable in it.
There were some aspects of the K-version that I liked and some that I disliked. It did have it's own flavor.
It kept a lot of the same story but changed some key aspects (which I shall not say for spoiler reasons).
One of my main gripes with it was that the last episode seems a bit off in terms of character interactions. I read somewhere that it was because it was filmed along with the first episode and thus the actors/characters did not (yet) have time to 'settle' into their characters.

The Japanese live action was very much a manga adaptation and you could see that in the directing/special effects style, while the Korean version was very much a K-Drama and you could see those elements shine through.

Overall I try to go to adaptions with an open mind because more often than not they will have their own existence outside of the world of the previous version. Will there be comparisons? of course!
But if a drama is well made, just the fact that it is a new adaptation that may not have some aspects from the original should not cloud the enjoyment factor.

I loved the cracky first 8ish episodes of Fated to Love you and then had to drop it when it lagged forever. But for an adaptation it managed itself pretty well-at least in the first half

I guess it depends on the adaptation. For instance, I loved the Jdrama Legal High and it took a while to warm up to the kdrama version which, of course, is not streamlined and one-character focused as jdramas are. I liked focusing on the court cases and not the characters. But I also didn't quite like the Jdrama version of Signal because the humanity was all taken out of the story because it was too streamlined. Right now I'm finding the Banker a bit confusing because of all the characters whereas the jversion was so in the Japanese mode of teaching us how a particular business worked. Here, having all those extraneous characters humanizes the drama but it waters down the lessons we are learning about banking. I've only seen the first few episodes and i will definitely watch it but i think i would like the korean drama tendency toward heart to be a little less present.