Just finished watching this, the artwork and animation was mostly great, and it did have an engrossing storyline with interesting characters but I've still got a few niggles with it; it's a fairly short series, only 24 episodes long, this isn't normally a problem but when over half of those are flashbacks it does lose a lot of focus from the main story, not that it's a huge problem in this case becuase the older characters and story were mostly more interesting than the newer stuff.

Another problem is the fact it's kind of hard to really warm to any of the characters, something that's essential in any anime imo, just as you'd start liking one, they'd do something extremely irrititating/stupid that'd put you off them again.

Final problem is the extremely abrupt ending, this is a problem again caused by the fairly excessive use of flashbacks and there were so many loose ends when the series finished, which is a bit of a shame. Oh, and the sound track sucks.

Still, I feel a little guilty concentrating on just the negatives since I did enjoy this a lot, again, the animation and artwork are great, the voice acting is great as is the storyline mostly. I'd definately recommend this to people. 8/10.

EDIT: Just watched the OVA, goes someway to clearing things up but still a shame it doesn't show you how the preliminary matches turn out!