End of Summer

All Wataru wants from his final high school summer is simple enough — get closer to Mai, the reserved and quietly elegant girl he's been thinking about for way too long. Except life keeps throwing other people at him — Miho, who's already a little too attached; Misa, the athletic tomboy who's harder to read than she looks; Kurumi, sweet but hopelessly naive; and Satomi, the sharp-tongued waitress who gives him grief every time he walks into the restaurant. Four women standing between him and the one he actually wants, and the summer is running out. This 4-episode OVA from 1994 is essentially a drama built around the emotional messiness of young relationships — the push and pull, the awkward confessions, the gap between what people say and what they actually feel. It's adapted from a visual novel, so there's a branching-paths energy to how Wataru moves through these connections, even in linear form. The sensual content is present and upfront, so go in knowing what kind of show it is. If you've watched Kimi ga Nozomu Eien or Yosuga no Sora and appreciated how those series treat romantic entanglement with some emotional weight rather than pure wish fulfillment, this scratches a similar itch. It's older, the animation reflects that era, but the character dynamics hold up better than you'd expect. A decent snapshot of how the genre handled drama and romance before the modern mold got set.