Surprisingly good!

Fun and emotional! Im sure this isn't a show for everyone due to the comedy style thats very distinct to japan and more common in the early 2000's (from what i know) of japanese media, but if you like that sort of comedy or can look past it, it's just wonderful! I didn't actually expect this to be as good as it was, seeing as it was just some TV-show from early 2000's japan.

I think the comedy adds to this show a lot, but if it isn't something to your taste that you can still ignore, it's still very good. The characters and stories are very believeable, and the character designs/costume designs or whatever you call it is also very believable. The locations all look very good, for example, the main character, Makoto Majima, his room looks like the room of a typical guy around his age in that time, and the way he dresses and acts is also very accurate to him and his character, which is something that he shares with many other characters and locations.

Even when the reactions of characters seem a little exaggerated for comedic value, it doesn't feel out of place, which is a big upside for me personally, because with some shows, they make it extremely realistic and then suddenly break my suspension of disbelief just to make a joke because they might exaggerate it too much or make it seem out of place, but this is not a problem that this show has!

The characters are well written, both in the perspective of being enjoyable to watch, fitting into the show well, and making you feel emotions about them. When the show wants you to care about someone, it makes you care, when it wants you to really dislike someone (which isn't very often with reoccuring characters, where it usually makes you have more mixed feelings about them) it makes you really dislike them, and so on. I will say that remembering the names of characters is a little bit difficult, but i cant tell if that's just because im bad at names or if they really do just not say the names of some characters very often.

For the time it was written in, it is surprisingly progressive as well sometimes. A couple of examples i have are that it treats characters that work in the sex industry well and just as equal as other characters, it supports migrant workers, there's a trans character (female to male) who never really gets deadnamed on purpose or misgendered. This was a nice surprise in my opinion, but it still had its moments of showing its time and setting (such as the normalized perversion of some characters, which was a bit iffy but to be expected of an early 2000's j-drama, unfortunately).

Overall, very enjoyable show! personally, i would compare it to stuff like the tiger and dragon show, due to having a similar energy to it, and the yakuza/like a dragon games, because i feel like they have a similar balance between comedy and seriousness to them and both have that specific japanese feeling to them.

(Though i do feel that it is important to mention that this show handles mature themes frequently such as violence, rape, sexual things and death.)

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