Content Warning: Game -Between the Suits- contains explicit sexual content and scenes depicting dubious consent/sexual assault. Please refer to The Spice section for more details.
At a Glance:
Spice Level: 4/5
Mosaics: N/A
Recommend: No
Content Warnings: dubious consent/sexual assault
Sayo Fujii is the type of woman who is serious about her work. Serious enough that it has interfered in her relationships and ended her last one because she answered a work call while in the middle of having sex. Despite her calm and serious demeanor, these relationship troubles are starting to get to the twenty-seven-year-old.
After her latest breakup, Sayo’s company assigns her to train one of their new hires, Ryoichi. Early on it’s obvious the man is nothing short of a playboy, and soon enough he proves it by overtly and aggressively flirting with Sayo. This career-driven woman isn’t having any of it, though. She brushes off his advances with a straight face, not letting the womanizer or his actions affect her. Until it does.
After dealing with his incessant flirting for a few days, Sayo finally gives in. She sets down some conditions, though. First, their relationship will be purely physical. They will not be in a formal relationship since she vowed not to date anyone unless she’s in love with them after her last breakup. Second, if either of them fall in love with someone else, their ‘game’ will end immediately, at which point they will pretend that nothing ever happened between the two of them. It’s only if they fall in love with each other that Sayo will recognize them as an actual couple. Ryoichi is more than happy to play by the rules, and so their game begins.
The Good
With all of the 18+ josei manga coming out centered around fantasy settings, it was refreshing to read a more contemporary volume where the stakes concern two people and their personal and professional lives rather than, say, an entire kingdom.
Sayo’s character is interesting and thought-provoking. She’s got the personality of a robot on a mission–never stopping until she’s finished the job, executing her tasks perfectly, and dropping everything as soon as anyone needs her, even if it’s to ask stupid questions. She’s calm and serious every hour of the day and hardly anything phases her. She’s a typical Snow Queen with resting-bitch-face syndrome.
Ryoichi is cut from the same cloth, though he takes a different approach. Instead of the cold seriousness that Sayo has, he appears open and friendly, and is always sporting a winning smile on his face, yet it’s easy to tell that his smiles are as shallow as a shower. He’s a playboy through and through, and Sayo knows it. Sayo is only the most recent woman who’s caught his attention, and his determination to get her is fueled by her denials.
The secret office romance plot is interesting, and the volume as a whole is well polished. The art, though simplistic, is wonderfully detailed and unique. There’s great attention paid to the more emotionally driven scenes, and the pacing of the story was really solid.
The Bad
Though I think Game -Between the Suits- is objectively a solid manga, the story took itself too seriously and was too static for me to get into it. Neither Sayo nor Ryoichi seemed to have much in the way of emotional maturity and instead it came off with one acting like a robot learning what it means to be human and the other pretending to be the model man/worker/boyfriend with a permanent smug smile plastered to his face because he knew it’d get him whatever he wanted. Both characters were incredibly flat and were the number one reason I couldn’t get into the story. Even the scenes where Sayo showed emotions other than “focused worker” felt meaningless to me because nothing substantial was there to support those short-lived moments.
The Spice (Contains Minor Spoilers)
Game -Between the Suits- is heavily spiced with around eight different sex scenes sprinkled throughout the volume. In all of the scenes, nothing more than boobs and butts are shown as, instead of using mosaics, the art tends to tell and not show.
There are two scenes in particular that stand out as potentially problematic: one where Ryoichi presses up against Sayo while they’re in a car after she makes it clear his flirting is meaningless to her, and another where Ryoichi presses Sayo against a wall and attempts to kiss her, knowing that she doesn’t like his advances. Nothing more happens in either scene, but both show how sexually aggressive Ryoichi is even when the receiver has stated plainly that they are not interested.
The Verdict
By the end of the volume, it felt like I was watching two people who couldn’t care less about each other get into a relationship of convenience because one desperately wanted sex and the other was too tired to keep saying no. As a whole, the manga is good. The art is nice, the lettering and translation are great, the plot and pacing are well thought out. I just found the characters to be so incredibly bland. Game -Between the Suits- isn’t a volume I would discourage people to read if they were interested, but it’s definitely not one I would think to recommend either.
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You can purchase volume 1 of Game -Between the Suits- on Amazon, Bookshop, Crunchyroll Store, and Barnes & Noble.
Credits
Story and Art by Mai Nishikata
Translation by Jess Leif
Lettering by Kai Kyou
Cover Design by H. Qi
Proofreader Dave Murray
Editor Claudie Summers
Production Designer Christina McKenzie
Production Manager Lissa Pattillo
Prepress Technician Melanie Ujimori
Print Manager Rhiannon Rasmussen-Silverstein
Editor-In-Chief Julie Davis
Associate Publisher Adam Arnold
Publisher Jason DeAngelis
Published in English by Seven Seas Entertainment
The Good
- Interesting plot that's unlike other Steamship titles
- Great art and is well polished
The Bad
- Characters are flat and boring
- Romance feels forced
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