VN Talk: My Sweet Bodyguard - Part 3: Kaiji

As I mentioned in last week's My Sweet Bodyguard post, I was leaning towards choosing Kaiji as a love interest for being a similar age to the MC, and also being a childhood friend, which I thought could make for a more interesting dynamic than the other characters who are all strangers.

I thought it was off to a promising start. People who knew each other as children and then separated as they went to different schools, only to randomly meet each other again later in life is a thing that happens. So I wasn't bothered by the MC not remembering certain aspects of their childhood friendship, and though their romance does include a childhood marriage proposal, that's pretty much par for the course. I expect to be running into tropes in this game, so there's no harm in feeding the player the candy they're here for.

But even though I thought we were off to a promising start with the two getting reacquainted after an uncertain number of years (I think the MC moved away when she was about eleven, but the exact age is unclear), I found I didn't like their dynamic that much. Kaiji has a lot of fun teasing her due to their shared history, but otherwise spends a lot of time telling other characters how he's not interested in her. And meanwhile the MC spends a lot of time noting evidence that supports her theory that Kaiji hates women (he actually never says anything of the sort).

This leads the MC to spend a chunk of his route falling in love with him while telling herself she shouldn't because he doesn't think about her the same way. While I can understand second guessing herself about how he feels, especially when he's loudly proclaiming he's not interested (all while acting like a guard dog if the other bodyguards so much as suggest they might be interested in her), it just made me want to grab both of them and shut them in a room to sort things out. Perhaps if it wasn't so obvious that Kaiji liked her, the self-doubt would be easier to roll with, or if she recognized Kaiji's possessiveness for what it was, but it just didn't work for me.

Fortunately it doesn't take them the entire route to confess to each other, so we get to spend some time with them as a pair after all the tension is gone. And I do like that Kaiji is looking for a girl with a backbone. He likes all the bickering they do and tells her that he doesn't want her to go easy on him.

The rest of his route is a bit uneven though. I wasn't expecting a lot, but I thought the early villain Mariko (who disappears about halfway through) was uncomfortably dated. No one makes a jab at him specifically for being a man dressed in women's clothing, but there was clearly a compare and contrast between him and Sora, who also crossdresses, and it's clear that the good guy is the only one that can pass.

Also, when Mariko leaves the country, it leaves Kaiji's route oddly without a recognizable face to their enemy until almost the very end when the main antagonist is suddenly introduced as an ally and reveals himself as the bad guy all in the span of a few minutes. Ogata probably could have been a fine villain since the concept was sound. He and the prime minister were formerly close, but Ogata wants to remilitarize Japan, while the prime minister wants to pursue peace, which I found surprisingly topical for a game set in modern day. In Kaiji's route, most of the random non-Mariko assailants are actually men from the Japanese self-defense force that Ogata has radicalized to his cause.

That could be good stuff, except that Ogata comes in so late that there's no sense of betrayal. It doesn't help that he and his followers seem oddly inconsistent about whether they want to kidnap or kill the MC, which is weird because you'd think that killing her would cause them to lose all their leverage to get the prime minister to stand down.

Like Katsuragi's route, Kaiji's also has a couple fake outs when it looks like the route should end, but it doesn't, one of which happens after Ogata has been taken into custody. I'm a big fan of the love interest getting a shining moment during the climax, and they shouldn't be upstaged by another character, but unfortunately that doesn't happen on Kaiji's route. Perhaps because his route puts a lot of emphasis on his willingness to die for her, he doesn't get to be an asskicker in the penultimate chapter right before the happy/good ending split. (Voltage doesn't really do bad endings. They're all good. It's just that some are happier than others.)

Instead Kaiji bodily protects the MC as they're surrounded by rogue soldiers, and Katsuragi swoops in to save the day. The man single-handedly saves not only the MC and Kaiji, but the rest of the bodyguards and Ishigami's team. I'll be honest, it made me want to go play more Katsuragi material (you better believe I bought all his sequels), because if you're in danger he's clearly the better bodyguard.

Aside from robbing Kaiji of a final chance to show off, Katsuragi's return following his suspension earlier in the route was not telegraphed at all, and had nothing to do with Kaiji's actions. Subaru was the one that gave Katsuragi the heads up, and we only find out after the rescue. The scene made me think of the rescue post-kidnapping in Katsuragi's route, but worse because we couldn't see the setup beforehand. In fact, the route goes out of its way to portray Katsuragi and Subaru as being of differing opinions so it can be more of a surprise that Subaru would call the boss he always argues with for help. (Though if the game didn't write it out in dialogue, I wouldn't think their working relationship was dysfunctional at all.)

The last element of Kaiji's route that didn't seem to know what to do with itself was his relationship with judo. It's clear he's skilled at it, but the game kind of dances around the Olympics calling and Kaiji planning to quit the sport, and not wanting to talk about it. Eventually it comes out that the reason he's thinking of quitting is to dedicate himself to his job even though he's "this" close to making the Olympic judo team. After the MC chews him out for being afraid he'll fail at being a bodyguard and an athlete if he tries to do both, he decides he really will do both, and they move on.

While I don't mind the game fleshing out what Kaiji does in his spare time, it felt a bit random that he's an Olympic hopeful and it just didn't mesh with the rest of the story. Sure, he used his judo to fight, but he didn't need to be Olympic caliber to do that. The Olympic question just felt like a weird bit of trivia that was given too much importance.