This one gets you by refusing to make its loser cool. Fuguno Masuo is hopeless with women in the unglamorous, secondhand-embarrassment way, and the OVA parks you in that discomfort instead of cutting away from it. Three episodes, about ninety minutes total, and it sets up Masuo, Nagisa Shiozaki and Miho Hamaoka and the whole tangle between them without a single wasted scene, which is more than the TV version can say. Yes, the beats are stock, you have seen this romantic geometry before, and it still lands because the show is patient and quiet rather than loud. No spectacle, no fantasy escape valve, just a guy who keeps saying the wrong thing at the wrong volume. It actually finishes, too. You get an ending, not a shrug, and that is rarer in romance than it should be.

Fuguno Masuo is hopeless when it comes to women, with nothing resembling a successful romance to his name. His story centers on two girls, Shiozaki Nagisa and Hamaoka Miho, and on how this unlucky guy fares with them. The premise is simple, and the three-episode OVA from 1998 plays it for laughs, mixing comedy, drama, romance and ecchi elements.