Short and sweet. I loved the soundtrack of 80s Jpop which also fit the story. For a 26 minute less really its about 20 OVA the main characters and their central relationship felt really natural and charming. Just as much depth as you need for something this long. The early scenes do a good job at setting up the characters and their dynamic and subsequent scenes keep their personalities distinct without reducing them to entirely flat traits tropes. I love characters whove been friends for a long time but its easier on some levels to introduce characters who are new to each other AND the audience. They manage to avoid the common issue of having characters who already know each other just state personality traits or backstory out loud to each other unnaturally. For example the dreaded As you know I like/hate X. or Youre always doing Y. Nozomu Sasakis voice acting made Kazuya especially fun to watch although Akihikos voice also grew on me and I think Takeshi Kusao did a fine job. It wasnt what I was expecting for his type of character but it felt more natural as time went on. The art style was appealing and the animation wasnt bad either though Im not the best critic for that aspect. Some moments were surprisingly fluid and there were only a couple times mainly when Kazuya was performing when they defaulted to the pan zoom over still images. I didnt have any problems with the pacing and the story was fine. It didnt blow my mind but Im a sucker for stories that expect you to just go along with their wack internal logic or justifications so I did get a kick out of there apparently being an agency that regularly kidnaps promising talents who already have agents?? and forces them to sign a contract twhich may not even be a bad or abusive contract always then drops them after a year makes zero sense profitwise and if it is an abusive contract then it doesnt even ruin their career for that long AND this being a thing that theyve done enough that people KNOW about it??? And somehow they can still get away with it anyway? I love it. The tone stayed light which worked for me even during the villains attempted sexual assault of Kazuya which I want to mention here as a warning for those who may want to avoid even the implication or possibility. I was already approaching this OVA with the mindset that there would probably be some tropes I usually try to avoid since theyre pretty much ubiquitous to older works in the BL genre so one scene with the villain being the extent of it exceeded my expectations. Here its more like they toss the threat in with a wink and a grin so you know it wont get that serious while still giving our protags some higher stakes to overcome before finishing their story. The sequence with Akihiko escaping to save Kazuya set to a pop song startled a delighted laugh from me when it started. Instead of epic climactic music there was fun upbeat 80s Jpop and I realized I didnt know why I wouldve expected anything different. I just thought Thats so fun. Im having fun. Go save your man and I felt like I really understood the people who had fun making this and wanted me to have fun watching it too. In some ways it feels like this couldve been made less than a decade ago instead of three and a half. Im not promising a lifechangingly deep experience or even saying itll work for everyone but its worth giving a chance. Worst case scenario youve wasted 20 minutes which you could do in much worse and less interesting ways anyway. Personally Im gonna be introducing this to as many of my friends that I can convince for the next couple weeks in the hopes it lands for even one of them the way it did for me. Also I really really liked it when the villain who let Akihiko go said Love Rider in English near the end. A perfect cheesy note to end on.