Story= 9/10: I feel like my rating may be a little biased because I love these detective/crime/mafia stories and thrillers are one of my favourite genres, so having a *bromance?* themed mystery drama like this was so exciting for me. The first thing I could pick out was that the plot was well established from the very first episode. They immediately laid out the events prior to the storyline which was established as the main reason for these future events, so from this, we can work out exactly what cases this whole series focuses on, and we meet and get introduced to our main characters including their connections straight away. This is important for me because they haven’t wasted unnecessary time establishing the plot, they got straight into it and I don’t feel like any scenes were dragged out for no reason. Although a connection is built between Ichiro and Shiro very quickly, I don’t feel like it was too rushed or sudden because they brought in a backstory that helped their connection both form and makes sense. There’s a lot of violence that may make some people uncomfortable, but it just made the series exciting and more gripping for me. There were several great plot twists, especially in episode 5 as more information about the sister was revealed along with Taguchi’s knowledge of this incident. As the episodes go on more information is revealed to us. While I don’t think this is a series with dramatic twists and turns, the few plot twists they have are minimal and well thought out, whilst still establishing a crime that is mostly realistic and believable. I often find when a drama has too many plot twists it ends up becoming unrealistic and cheesy. I think one of the main reasons I have been loving this series is because the crime they are looking into is not confusing and all over the place, we know the perpetrators pretty early on so the majority of this series is finding a way to catch them and bring them to justice. I only have one complaint so far which is about the time skips, mainly in episode 1. For one thing, we don’t need several flashbacks of the same moment, and in episode 1 it was sometimes quite hard to tell if a scene was a flashback or happening in the present time, which got a bit confusing at stages.

Acting/Cast:
—Suzuki Nobuyuki as Kunishita Ichiro = 9\10: I feel like I’m being a little harsh with the rating for Ichiro but there are times when Suzuki just feels completely expressionless and emotionless. I get the character he’s playing isn’t typically that emotional and I know how difficult it is to play an expressionless character without looking completely blank, but I think it could have been better. That being said we are only 1/3 of the way through this series so hopefully, this rating will increase very soon. Other than that he does a great job with the fight scenes and I love how much of a mother hen he turns into around Shiro.
—Inukai Atsuhiro as Hanabusa Shiro = 10/10: When I tell you that Inukai has RANGE I don’t think even those capital letters can convey just how amazing he is. I can hardly believe he is the same actor who was in Absolute BL and Grand Blue, which are just some of my favourite works of his. When he’s given a role he takes it over and makes it his own, the way he can manipulate his expressions and convey exactly what he needs to is just incredible. Although I’m still confused to whether this drama is going to be a bromance or BL, I love that his character is bisexual which is actually discussed in the show, along with his fear of coming out to his sister, it’s giving me hope that maybe there will be a romance between Shiro and Ichiro. I literally cannot come up with a single complaint with his acting and I will not be surprised if it stays that way.
—Kuriyama Chiaki as Nakaba Rion = 8.5/10: Although we haven’t seen much of her, after episode 5 I felt like adding her to my review. Honestly, I don’t know how to feel about the sister. On one hand, she’s clearly brave and caring, wanting to take her job seriously whilst still trying to take care of Ichiro and Shiro. However, are you seriously trying to tell me that she couldn’t send a single message with more information relating to this case before the events went down? Ichiro and Shiro basically had nothing to work from when she knew they would have tried to solve the case she was working on and she left next to nothing for them to work through. The actor herself is pretty good, but I’ll have to wait for further episodes before properly judging her acting.

Music= 8.5/10: OST was great, the background music isn’t that memorable though and there are very few sound effects which are a little disappointing but I’ll take that over the constant cringy sounds that get unnecessarily added in for “humour”.

Rewatch Value= 9/10: Obviously we’re only 1/3rd of the way through so this rating won’t be that accurate, but if the series stays consistent and the quality/plot doesn’t completely deteriorate then this rating could definitely increase further.