The Japanese remake of Chinese drama LOVE O2O

The Japanese remake of Chinese drama LOVE O2O has been criticized by Chinese netizens.

Netizens in China and Japan once expressed high expectations for the Japanese version, Cinderella is Online, starring Japanese actresses Riho Nakamura and Toshiki Seto, as many Japanese anime series and other dramas have high popularity with Chinese audiences.

But Chinese netizens were disappointed after the drama was released on Japanese TV station Fuji TV and Chinese streaming platform Youku on Tuesday. 

China has released both TV and film versions of Love O2O, both of which were based on the novel of the same name by writer Gu Man. The drama was one of the most watched modern Chinese dramas in 2016, earning more than 25 billion views online. The show tells a love story about a college student who falls in love with her handsome senior schoolmate through an online game, according to reports.

The film version starred Yang Ying and Jing Boran, while the TV show starred Zheng Shuang and Yang Yang. The latter also aired in Japan in 2017, where it earned high compliments from Japanese netizens.

The hashtag for the Japanese version of LOVE O2O has earned 250 million views on China's Twitter-like Sina Weibo. Many netizens who have read the original novel and the Chinese drama version said on Weibo that the protagonists in the new version are too different. 

"Please show respect to the original work! This drama just doesn't work anywhere - in its props, costume, plot or the protagonists' personality. The female main character was originally a smart and beautiful college student, but the one in the Japanese version is just like a silly girl, and I do not think the two main characters match each other," Paris, a fan who has the read the novel and watched Love O2O, told the Global Times on Thursday. 

"It is hard to believe that this is a Japanese remake of LOVE O2O. it's more like Ultraman Tiga that was released in the 1980s and 1990s," one Chinese netizen wrote on Weibo.

LOVE O2O has both novel fans and drama fans in China. The setting of the Japanese version is different from the original novel and set in a Japanese school, which many fans of the novel could not accept, while fans of the Chinese drama were also unimpressed," Shi Wenxue, a cultural critic and teacher at the Beijing Film Academy, told the Global Times on Thursday. 

Media reports on Thursday said that South Korean broadcasting network JTBC will remake Chinese hit drama Nothing But Thirty, but Chinese netizens are concerned that it may be just as bad.

"Even with a new adaptation, you still need to find the 'soul' of the work and the emotion that keeps pace with the times," said Shi.