By Mizuho Kusanagi
Tokyopop, 211 pp.
Rating: OT (16+)

In the first chapter, we meet Memori, an employee at the Fujieda Bodyguard agency who specializes in protecting young women, swooping in like a sparkling knight in armor to protect the female clients that hire him specifically. Memori doesn’t possess particularly chivalrous urges, and simply likes to be paid the big bucks by these women. In the first chapter, Memori meets Yuuki, an easygoing and mildly annoying guy that hangs around in hopes of being hired by the Fujieda bodyguard agency. During a case, the two keep sharing special (non-yaoi) moments that put this title firmly on the path of a boring “special partners busting crime and discovering each other’s dark secrets”-type series, but then… it completely shatters that when it turns out that Yuuki’s friendship was an elaborate ruse to mask the fact he was actually the assassin that had been hired to kill the young girl they were protecting. And so begins the assassin vs. bodyguard game.

The first chapter is really the best, and I couldn’t believe when a story that I was losing interest in with every page suddenly turned around and had the nice, jokey guy attempting to behead a little girl with piano wire. The series isn’t nearly as dark as that first chapter would have you believe, and truthfully, its only flaw is that the promised assassin role for Yuuki never really surfaces. But after that extremely creepy first impression, it’s fascinating to see Yuuki toying with Memori. The humorous, light mood of the series continues since Yuuki acts like a normal person and hangs out with Memori around people who wouldn’t believe he was a criminal. But each of the chapters also features an elaborate scenario where Memori struggles to stop Yuuki from killing someone. Frequently the person turns out to not actually be in danger, and the whole thing winds up being a joke (or test) at the expense of Memori. Yuuki occasionally loses it for real, though, and there are hints at the end of the volume about his truly dark nature.

The chapters have an episodic format, and while each has interesting character development for both Yuuki and Memori, there aren’t a whole lot of plot elements used to connect the chapters. My preference is for an overarching plot, but the episodic stories work quite well in this volume.

The action and psychological angle for the series are okay, but what really makes it shine is the sense of humor, oddly enough. Much like Otomen, it seems to delight in taking manga stereotypes and using them shamelessly for comedic effect. Otomen is a little more gratuitous about it, and Game x Rush walks a line where sometimes the stereotypes might not have been intended comically, but it’s hard not to laugh when Memori goes into business mode when he sees a potential client, quickly whipping off his glasses and filling the panel with sparkles. Lots of the jests and tortures that Yuuki comes up with are quite funny, and I laughed out loud at a subtle joke involving a preschool job and which character the children preferred in one of the later chapters.

Overall, I was really very surprised by how much I enjoyed this book. What starts off as an exercise in horrible predictability winds up being a clever cover, and I was also quite entertained by its interesting character dynamics and sense of humor. To be completely fair, it really does work out to be a kind of “friends who share deep secrets and work together”-type thing, but it’s easy to forgive after that first chapter and Yuuki’s persistently friendly/creepy behavior. I’ll definitely be picking up the next volume of the series.

Volume one of Game X Rush is available now.