Ouroboros is a good drama with an excellent story and decent acting but unable to reach its full potential due to some problems with regard to storytelling. Hopefully this spoiler less review can help you decide whether this drama is worthy of your time. Story A policeman and a gangster work together to find the killer of their beloved teacher at the orphanage they grew up. Based on a popular manga (that I didn’t read), the story is both the best and the worst part of this drama. The main characters are interesting with regard to whether their personalities are ‘good’, ‘bad’ or something in between. The story uses good symbolism, raises some interesting questions with regard to justice and ‘doing what is right’ and the ending was above average. However, there are some problems to be found with regard to the way the story is told: -The beginning of the drama doesn’t really contribute to the overall story, whereas the latter episodes feel rushed. They could have allocated the story better over the 10 episodes. - There are a lot of characters that are named but not really explored until they are revealed to have some secret. These shocking revelations did not have the impact they were supposed to have, simply because I didn’t care for these characters I only knew from face. - Some secondary characters do not act logically but do what’s best for the plot, which often makes no sense at all and can be considered to be lazy writing. For instance, character X absolutely hates character Y and swears revenge, but when X gets the opportunity to take revenge he lets Y go without any good reason. Character W is trapped somewhere, but when W is able to communicate with character Z , W does not tell W’s location but haves some dramatic dialogue instead, which made no sense in that moment. There is an abundance of out-of-character writing that harms the great core story - The abundance of flashbacks. Seeing the same scenes over and over gets a bit tiresome. Moreover, sometimes there are flashbacks to scenes that happened only minutes before. The flashbacks were overdone and made the show a bit melodramatic (although I guess some people like this). Acting The show has two excellent main leads who gave a good performance. Especially Oguri Shun was able to convincingly portray the dark side of the gangster whilst still being a character to root for. Ikuta Toma is also a great actor, but in this role he sometimes tends to overact in the more emotional scenes. Ueno Juri played her character well in most scenes, but was also struggling in some of the emotional scenes. With regard to the large supporting cast I only found Hirosue Ryoko (the sensei) and the child actor portraying Tacchan noteworthy. Music Although it is normal for Japanese drama’s to use the same dramatic song in every episode, it was used to many times in this drama (sometimes three times in one episode…) and wasn’t that great to begin with. The ending song of each episode (Arashi – Sakura) fitted the theme quite well. Rewatch Value Because this is mainly a detective show, the rewatch value is low. Of course you could watch it again to look for clues you might have missed the first time, but many ‘subtle’ clues were hard to miss. To summarize, if you are interested in detectives/crime/bromance/drama than this is a very nice drama to watch, because it tells a very good story. However, the way the story is told is flawed and prevents this show from becoming great. It is still a good drama, but if you have high standards with regard to storytelling, you might want to consider to watch a different drama ?