Road to the Top is an emotional and heartfelt experience of 3 Kemonomimi horse girls, TM Opera O the loud, obnoxious, and comedic relief power house. Narita Top Road, a horse girl that is sweet, kind, but plagued with self doubts. And Admire Vega, a horse girl who is distrustful, determined, and the lone wolf of the show. All three characters are well written and well developed for an OVA you get just enough screen time for each character and learn their motives for wanting to race. It's a show that touches upon genuine human experiences that everyone can relate and understand--the thrill and excitementof winning. Winning something that you train your entire life for. What you dream about and fantasize how amazing that huge accomplishment will feel. But for every winner there must always be losers and it's not often that you see the losing perspective in the way Road to the Top displays.

My only gripe is the short length means you do feel rushed through the story and some races are even fast forwarded which is unfortunate. I would have enjoyed seeing the main characters training more, running more races against each other, and getting more character development for TM Opera O which was just comedic relief. It's difficult to complain about short lengths for OVA's as they meant to simply be short extras but if this was a fully fledged 13 episode series it'd be at least a 9/10. It's still quite good it's just lacking more.

Being an OVA only having 4 episodes it's not got the wow factor of animation quality as the movie "Beginning of a new Era" or the longevity of character growth and development of the longer running animes series like "Cinderella Grey" which are all apart of the Uma Musume world. I would not recommend it as a starting point if you are just starting to get into the animated media because of the gacha game. I would highly recommend either starting with the first season of "Pretty Derby" the anime that focuses on an easier to understand introduction, or starting with the "Cinderella Grey" anime for something more modern that still describes the world quite well.

I would recommend it to anyone who enjoys watching sports animes, Uma Musume fans, and anyone that likes a good balance of slice of life and drama.