Produced By: TV Asahi

Main Cast Members: Ishihara Satomi, Yamamoto Yusuke, Kimura Ryo, Nagayama Kento

The Story:

Misako Ayukawa (Ishihara) a woman in her 30s, is an English teacher with ironically poor English skills. She values herself over her students, and money over love. She displays arrogance in front of her students, but acts pleasantly around her peers and family. However, Ayukawa possesses a brilliant mind for solving puzzles. She ends up tackling various cases around the school along with her 3 top students (Yamamoto, Kimura, Nagayama).

My Thoughts:

Like some high school based live action dramas, Puzzle has the ability to make you smile (and occasionally laugh out loud) with their silly antics and funny dialogues. You just gotta hand it to the Japanese for constantly coming up with interesting & fresh ideas for TV and mangas (and will eventually be used as 'reference' by other parts of the world). Ishihara Satomi played the annoyingly money-crazy, hypocritical teacher Ayukawa perfectly, until you feel like smacking her on the head for being so greedy. And although I prefer Yamamoto & Kimura's acting better in Hana Kimi, their performance in this series (together with Nagayama) should still be given applauses. Yes, you will feel as if you're watching a broken record (SPOILER ALERT! The beginning of each episode is exactly the same; with bright-but-hormonal Yamamoto being tricked by Iwata Sayuri & co to chase after treasures) but once you get familiar with each cases & how they solved them, you'll forgive them for giving you the (exact) same side story in each episodes.

My Ratings: * * * 1/2