I've never watching a live-action Japanese drama series before. In fact, I had never planned to until I heard of a J-Drama that was based on ice hockey. Yes, a Japanese live-action drama based on the brutal North American sport. As a ice hockey fan and player (Well, I used to. I want to get back into it soon), this immediately got my attention. Though I had to get used to Japanese in a live-action format (Hey! The girls do look different from one another! Amazing! That's not at all like anime!), the first episode provided a nice introduction of what is to come in this 11 episode series...

Period 1

Yes, this series seems to call each episode as "periods". Fitting, though I don't know of any hockey games going into 11 periods!

While not perfect (LOOK AT THE PUCK ON THE FACE-OFF! NOT YOUR OPPONENT!), the actual little hockey that's shown is portrayed rather well. Though I do have reasons to suspect that the lead actor doesn't actually know how to do a two-foot hockey stop, he does have some decent skating ability and he might prove me wrong in later episodes. I do think that a body-double is used for much of the hockey action involving him, though. 

In any case, that is a very unimportant part of what I see in this first episode. Totaling to an hour long, there's quite a lot of material covered in Pride. By what I can see, it's essentially becoming a romance involving an office worker named Aki and a star hockey player named Halu. But it gets complicated with the inter-relationships between Halu's coach, his teammates, Aki's boyfriend (Who may or may not be coming back), and her friends. It seems to highlight the difference between how men and women approach relationships, and Halu's proposal to Aki was quite amusing.

I did find a few scenes rather weird, like during a conversation between a group of girls at lunch, the camera would quickly switch between them during their conversation, which, because I cannot understand Japanese, would make me rather dizzy as I have to read the subtitles and keep track of which girl the camera is focussed on so I know what the heck is going on!  As such, this is a lunch conversation between a few female friends, hence I guess they would talk very rapidly.  Still, the episode had quite a few sweet points; one of my favorites is how Halu gets Aki's email address (As that's apparently how the Japanese trade contact information these days.  You can learn about different cultures by watching foreign media, ya know...).  Having Queen playing at that scene was just icing on top, though I'm not so sure how well "Fat Bottom Girls" really applies in this situation.

In anycase, I'm anxious to see more. Pride is shaping up to be a rather nice Japanese drama.