Akai Ito

This was a good surprise to me as well. None of the actors is really famous yet, yet all of them did a very good job. The storyline is quite conventional, and some twists are predictable, but not all of them, and all characters are enjoyable.
This is a classic teenager romantic comedy with 2 high school students who are destined to be together but keep missing each other for all the wrong reasons. Some serious elements are included in the storyline, such as drugs, suicide, divorce, etc, but not for the purpose of writing a serious story, only to give the story some new twists. The dorama is never dark though, some moments are sad (but is there a romantic dorama without its sad moments?) but never dark.
I recommend it for fans of romance in the teenage years.

I was skeptical about watching this movie at first but I am glad I did because it was great and one of a kind. There wasn't much said in the synopsis part about the drama except that it was about Mei and A-kun dealing with trials they had to face in their life.

Well the drama is about destined love. Mei and A-kun were destined to be with each other but there are a series of unfortunate circumstances that prevent them from being together. Whether it be parents who objects to the relationship or rivals, these two had to deal with it all the way to the end.

There are a lot of twist and turns throughout the drama but each character introduced did play a significant role in bring the entire plot of the drama together. I just didn't know why everything had to be so tragic before everybody became happy. There are so many characters wanted to kill themselves or turned into drugs after being dealt a bad hand in life/love.

As far as the actors themselves, they did an ok job playing each character. Nobody really stood out except for Kimura Ryo who played "Taka". He went from being the comic relief in the beginning, the hated boyfriend in the middle, and then just like that he met a tragic end.

Drama was quite sad all the time. It seemed that there was rarely any moments of happiness. Plot was going on nicely and all the side characters were deepened enough. Maybe even too much at some points.

Watching this series really gave me lots of moments of desperate 'cause nothing seemed to go OK. But the ending was happy and made it all worth watching :) Cast was ok for main parts and some unexpected plot twists happened even though there was lot of predictable ones also. Though the predictable ones were always sweet ones, so it doesn't matter so much :)

2 points away from perfect come from telling a bit too much. I think its nice to deepen side characters, but it looked like they were having too much trouble to take focus of the main plot.

I recommend this for everyone who likes dramatic love stories and are not afraid of brutal reality of modern days, like drugs, bullying and suicides.