VN Talk: My Sweet Bodyguard - Part 1: Overview

In which I talk (write) about visual novels from a storytelling perspective...

Platform: iOS (also on Android)
Release: 2013

My Sweet Bodyguard is a Love 365 title, which means that it's a part of Voltage's pay-per-route otome library app. Though I don't usually gravitate towards a particular trope in my otome gaming, on seeing this title I was actually surprised that the bodyguard trope hadn't already been exploited left and right, and arguably hasn't since. (Shout out to Variable Barricade's Nayuta though for being the one otome bodyguard I like who isn't in this game.)

With a title like My Sweet Bodyguard I expected a guilty pleasure sort of game, being in general the otome-flavored opportunity to live out Whitney Houston's The Bodyguard. The game even name drops the movie in one route, when the main character's friend finds out about her situation. And in that respect it delivers.

My Sweet Bodyguard does not take itself seriously. The villains are often cartoony, the situations unrealistic, but all the game really wants to do is give the player a good time that involves the main character and her chosen bodyguard falling in love. Normally I prefer heavier stories, but I found the irreverence charming, and even the more contrived situations (like the ever popular faceplanting into a kiss) are just right when in search of popcorn fare.

As I did previously, this blog post series will only cover the first of what Love 365 calls the "Main Story" for each route, which is the falling in love part of the romance. There is fandisc-ish material that follows the relationship as it progresses, but it's unequally distributed among the guys due to the modular way mobile content tends to get updated and My Sweet Bodyguard seems to have wrapped up. At the moment, I'll only be covering the first five love interests, though I may add others at a later date if I get around to them.

The basic gist of the story is that the nameable main character (hereafter referred to as the MC) is nearly kidnapped in broad daylight by unknown assailants when she's rescued by a crack team of bodyguards. They're in the employ of the prime minister of Japan, who turns out to be her long lost father. When he was younger, his girlfriend got pregnant, and rather than sit out the family drama when he wanted to marry her and his family didn't want him to, she packed up and ghosted him. The MC grew up thinking her father was dead, so finding out he's actually alive (and the current prime minister no less) is quite a shock.

Since word of his daughter's existence slipped out (the prime minister himself only discovering her a few days earlier), the MC is in danger from people trying to influence her father, so she needs 24/7 protection until the miscreants can be brought to justice. She meets the core team members in the prologue and then is allowed to pick who will become her primary bodyguard. After that decision, every route is different, including who the ultimate villain ends up being. It felt rather odd, since I'm used to otome games where there's an overlap between the different routes and you can see how the different stories are part of a larger whole, but each route of My Sweet Bodyguard is essentially a different universe, with the only connection being that somebody wants to kidnap or kill the MC.

I suspect the writers wanted to keep the MC relatable, which is why she discovers her father is the prime minister rather than having grown up in what would probably have been an upper class existence, but for a little while I was concerned about how they could justify her father not raising her while also making him a sympathetic character. He could easily come off a deadbeat or have some leftover drama involving the MC's mother (who has passed away by the start of the game), but in keeping with the lighter tone of the game, he holds no ill will towards her mother and is simply happy that he has the opportunity to be the father he couldn't be before. Though he is often busy and called away, he still shows up more than most parents in other games and they aren't prime ministers!

He's also pleasantly supportive about his daughter's choice in boyfriend, allowing her to date whoever she chooses as long as that's who she wants, so there's never any family drama before the happy ending rolls in.

I also like that the bodyguards are a team. There are four led by Daichi Katsuragi, and all five of them show up on each other's routes so even if the specifics of the threat change from route to route, the security detail itself does not. To a lesser degree this is also supported by the MC's cast of friends, who help ground the fact that she had a life prior to being put in mortal danger. She still worries about college classes (though depending on the route she may or may not go due to the danger) and wants to see her friends. Having multiple female characters in her circle who do not show up every route also made it easier to hide the villain in one of the routes since it was relatively normal for supporting female characters to get artwork.

There are a couple things that kind of bother me about the translation though. It's relatively error free, but it's pretty clear that the bodyguards are really more like the US Secret Service and not simply guys for hire. So most English language players might find it strange that Ishigami from the police force is willing to antagonize the bodyguards when you'd be hard pressed to find an American police officer throwing his weight around when the Secret Service wants to keep him away.

The thing is, in Japan the security detail for the prime minister and other high ranking VIPs is provided by the Security Police, which roll up under the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department, so Ishigami and the bodyguards are part of the same agency. While they're in different arms of the department, it becomes much more plausible that Ishigami has the ability to smooth things over (or make them hell) for the Security Police when you know they all report up to the same people.

I suspect when the title was changed to My Sweet Bodyguard for the English release (it was originally My Lover is a Dedicated SP), the "bodyguard" moniker was chosen to invoke The Bodyguard film. Calling them a Secret Service officer wouldn't be quite right since that isn't what they're called in Japan, and Security Police wouldn't register for English speaking audiences. And that's fine, but it would have been nice if it was clearer in the narration to foreign players that the bodyguards are part of the metropolitan police, so Ishigami's constant needling wouldn't come off so strange.

The choice that probably bugs me the most as a result of the bodyguard moniker is that the MC is referred to as "the client." This makes sense for private security, but as government agents, they are not being paid directly by the prime minister or the MC to do their jobs, so it feels really weird. The US Secret Service generally uses "protectee," but if that sounds too clunky, VIP would have worked just as well (and I think that's the term Kei uses in the Collar x Malice localization, which is the only reason I knew what an SP officer was before playing Bodyguard).

The rest of the translation is mostly fine. A lot of characters use "Oi!" to get someone's attention when I'd usually expect "Hey!" leading me to believe the translator was British, which isn't necessarily incorrect, but a bit jarring since as an American I hardly ever hear someone using that, and it feels like half the cast does it in My Sweet Bodyguard. (Arguably Subaru and Katsuragi should not use "Oi" since they both studied in the US, so translating their Japanese to English should really be using the American vernacular since if they were to translate their dialogue themselves that's what they would use, but at this point I might be getting too picky.)

Getting back to the game itself, since there is no central villain, most of the stories follow a basic pattern of the MC getting to know her new bodyguard while villains are foiled towards the end of the route, but about half the stories have what I consider false endings, where something big happens, but it's actually not the end. Unfortunately I played those routes first, setting me up for some disappointment later on when I didn't get that same dramatic go around in later routes.

While I didn't mind that the villains changed each route, I was less fond of the MC and various details of her life changing. Though she is always a college student so any information revealed in the prologue is static, her extracurricular activities can change from one route to the next. Two of the routes involve her being in her college's drama club and I love the drama club (Kosugi is hilarious), but in other routes she's taking a hula class or working a part-time job. Some routes she's mentally very strong and willing to face danger. Other times she is probably curling up in a fetal position. And it's not that the same person can't do both things, but it doesn't make much sense why she's freaked out about the same situation on one route when she was perfectly fine in another.

I think this is probably to play off the love interest she is currently with, but I had the most fun with the thirsty and smartass incarnations of her, especially since it's rare in Otomate titles (the bulk of what ends up on consoles) to see a protagonist actually using the word "sexy" to describe a man. She spends much of Katsuragi's route wanting him to be inappropriate to her, and I found it both entertaining and refreshing. The longing for a guy she can't have because she thinks he's unavailable or in love with someone else are things I've seen enough of before.

The routes can be played in any order, given that they can be purchased separately, but I feel like Katsuragi was intended to be last (even though I played him first) because he's the only love interest not depicted in the title art, and the start of his route plays out a little differently.

As usual, the posts covering the individual love interest routes will roll out in the following weeks in the order I played them, so Katsuragi will go up next week.