I'm torn with this one. I really liked the idea of the animals and the characters that represented them, there were a lot of likable young characters in this drama, and Yamada Ryosuke is an extremely talented actor, he can pull off comedy as well as drama and it's great to watch him. But the whole relationship between mother and son did make me feel rather uncomfortable at times. The mother's character is extremely problematic and she never fully faces her issues and how she manipulated her son throughout his life, that for me is a no. There were some sub plots that I found much more interesting than the mother's tribulations, like Taipi's career and his mother (A+ for Taipi in that last scene he was in, really great handle of drama) or both girl characters with their extremely opposite yet very interesting backgrounds (we never get to know the resolution of one of those arcs, actually). I feel I would have enjoyed it more if it had been either more balanced in content or if the mother had actually faced half the things she did as problematic. Everything that had to do with Daichi's school life, I loved: the classmates, the fights, the coming-to-age aspect, the problems his friends had to face (including Yuto's character, which was complicated to get through at times but it did pay off in the end), the friendships, the school loyalty, the troubles between schools, the prejudices, everything. But the family aspect, which is supposed to be the central part of this drama, that's where they lost me. I felt the connection between them was so strange and co-dependent that I couldn't quite feel their attachment as something I wanted to root for. Maybe that's the point of the drama, maybe they want you to want them to get it over with, but with the mother never fully accepting that she did wrong (she apologizes for things she had no control over, like being poor or not offering him more but never for using him to try to get a house and economical stability through constant "brainwashing", as she called it), I can't fully say I completely loved it. The acting, especially the acting of the young cast, is reason enough to give it a shot, though.