So my favorite things in the world: BL, Anime, Manga, Japanese Rock. My kids, political Twitter, and BTS might be in there too, but mostly, just those things, so for obvious reasons Given is one of my favorite Anime and Manga stories. When I saw a live action was coming, I was curious but kept my expectations low.

Making an anime come to life is hard, for obvious reasons, Manga characters are not always easily converted into real people. In this case, the casting was not terrible. I thought they cast Uenoyama perfectly, he was also the focus of the LA more than Mafuyu, who got more back story in the Manga and anime. I understood why they cast Mafuyu the way they did, because they wanted to use the actor's voice, but he wasn't quite perfect. Kaji was not well cast, I was so annoyed he was one of my favorite characters. The rest were OK.

The drama follows the manga/anime pretty closely but had to cut out a lot due to being only 6 episodes. So the story goes only up to their first live (episode 9 in the anime, Mafuyu's Song). Because of the compression, Mafuyu doesn't get a lot of back story exposition, there's really not much character development around Haruki and Akihito, it's mostly just Uenoyama and the preparation for the first live.

It's hard for me to judge this as a drama on its own because I already knew the story. I felt like the compression and loss of back story made the final song less dramatic. Also, tbh I just liked the song from the anime better. But overall the drama exceeded my expectations by being well acted and produced and staying pretty true to the story.