Love Game in Eastern Fantasy Finale Explained – Time Travel, Changes and Missing Kisses

Love Game in Eastern Fantasy 永夜星河 finale is all about “endings.” Miao Miao is unable to accept the ending where Mu Sheng dies in the battle with Yuan Nv. She makes a deal with the “system” to sacrifice herself to protect everyone and says she’ll wait for Mu Sheng in every “ending.” Mu Sheng finds her again to give them a satisfying conclusion together, BUT no—the final episode goes even more surreal, diving into funky time travel stuff that ultimately reveals both Miao Miao and Mu Sheng came from the present day—one with memories, one without.

Surreal Time Travel and Mu Sheng’s True Identity

There were many trending hashtags, one of which stated the show has a happy ending. I’d agree since the finale has the male lead, Zi Qi, back in the modern day as the author of Love Game in Eastern Fantasy. Miao Miao attends what should be his book signing. She sees Grandpa Bamboo and grandson Cui Cui in the modern day. Then someone calls her name—Miao Miao. We don’t see his face (seriously, it’s a cop-out that they won’t even show his face when they already shot the scene), but it’s kind of a given that it’s Ding Yuxi, especially since his novel excerpt mentions how he was saved twice. It’s revealed in the final episodes that Miao Miao actually saved Mu Sheng once already, and as the story progressed, she willingly sacrificed herself to save him for the second time.

The Chemistry That Hooked Viewers

Love Game in Eastern Fantasy had a super promising start, poised to be a huge hit, and it indeed drew buzz being among the dramas to break 30,000 on Tencent heat index. Many fell hard for the couple pairing played by Esther Yu and Ding Yuxi, especially the push and pull when Miao Miao had to “capture” the black lotus Mu Sheng by making him fall for her. That’s arguably the best part of the drama. And the chemistry among the four main leads was brilliantly captured by the director. However, midway through the show, there were a lot of negative voices claiming the plot no longer stuck to the fresh concept many fell for and how the writing was “weak” such as the forced angst with the “bracelet” and forced amnesia.

Why the Finale Divided Fans

The ending reveals that Mu Sheng, aka Zi Qi, was always Fu Zhou, the one who wrote the novel, except he didn’t remember. He was sickly as a child and was Miao Miao’s classmate. To him, she was a ray of sunshine. You could interpret this as Ling Miao Miao “healing” him and his outlook on life, which allowed him to give the novel he’s writing a good ending. Meanwhile, Mu Sheng from the first version of the novel could be interpreted as Fu Zhou’s inner self before he met Miao Miao.

Why do some hate this ending? Some feel this ending means Mu Sheng in the novel no longer exists since it’s as if the heroine fell in love with the main character of a novel but ended up with the author who wrote it. At some point, some netizens feared that the ending would reveal both Miao Miao and Mu Sheng were from the modern day. Turns out they were right. I’m very curious to know how the novel ending was because if book readers are against both being time travellers, does it mean Mu Sheng is his own person in the original(?). And as many fell in love with the character Zi Qi, it’s disappointing that “Zi Qi” doesn’t end up with Miao Miao.

Censorship on Time Travel Dramas?

So there you have it—you either love the ending, or you don’t. There’s also a theory about why the showrunners couldn’t just bring Mu Sheng from the novel back to modern times. You may have heard that time travel dramas were banned by Chinese censors due to lack of historical accuracy, so many shows work around it by going with the “everything’s a dream” trope.

Nonetheless, producers Wang Yixu and Bai Jinjin, who had a couple of flops following the big hit that was Love Between Fairy and Devil, are bearing the brunt of criticism for securing the rights to The Guide to Capturing a Black Lotus only to make drastic changes later on. There’s even a joke that Wang Yixu must be a “spy” from a rival platform since the ending for this drama, which basically has Esther Yu’s heroine meeting Ding Yuxi as the author of a novel, is literally the setup of their previous drama Moonlight, which aired on iQIYI.

Since we’re all about spoilers, Love Game in Eastern Fantasy may have had zero kisses from the main couple throughout the series, but the kisses happen in the finale, particularly in the ending credits.

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