The success of My Dress-Up Darling has led to a wave of shonen romances where a flirty gyaru gal with a otaku-friendly interest gets together with an ordinary teen boy all while missing what made that series so good and appealing in the first place.
I WANT A GAL GAMER TO PRAISE ME (Gyaru Gamer ni Homeraretai), by Geshumaro. First published in 2022 and first published in North America in 2024.
PLOT:
Raito Sasaki wants to be better at battle royale games, so he figures he could hire a top-ranked player to be his coach. He never expected that coach to be a perky gal with a rockin' bod. Rion's advice is good and her perspective is always positive, but how can Raito focus when a hot girl is in his room pressing herself close to him at every turn?
STORY:
I want to pose a question to the straight men reading this review: Are your standards actually this low? Do you really want nothing more than a warm pair of boobs attached to a girl to pat you on the head and tell you how good you are at video games? I would like to hope that the guys reading this blog would have higher standards and more self-respect than that, but I Want a Gal Gamer to Praise Me thinks you're a hapless baby who needs an empty-headed ego stroking like this one.
Like so many characters before him, Raito is not so much a character as he is a blank space for the reader to step into. As self-inserts go, Raito doesn't exactly offer the most appealing power fantasy. He supposedly has social anxiety so severe that he can't attend school. He's obsessed with a battle royale game (which appears to be Fortnight in everything but name) despite being absolute dogshit at it. He's so bad at it that he requires an in-person coach to teach him things like "take advantage of high ground" or "hide behind cover while you reload." He never states the reason he wants to get good at it. Is he looking for a social outlet? Does he entertain fantasies of becoming a pro player? Is it purely ego? We may never know. All we do know for certain is that Raito spends most of his time being anxious not about his performance but about how close Rion's various squishy bits are to him during most of their interactions.
As much of a non-entity Raito might be, Rion is somehow worse. She's endlessly positive and patient, even when dealing with shitty guys leaving shitty comments after losing a match. She's a top-10 ranked pro player also goes to school and has a social life, but she can take all the time in the world to teach one shut-in goober the basics of shooters for seemingly no pay. She's always made-up and conventionally hot, even when she's playing deep into the night in her own room. Strangest of all, she seems to be charmed by Raito. She gives him a nickname, she's impressed by the most basic decencies, and even after their coaching sessions ends she still goes out of her way to bring him into her game parties, fix his social anxiety enough to lure him back to school, and generally serve as his unpaid life coach. She never has any messy opinions or thoughts of her own, she's endlessly impressed by everything he does, and she's pretty enough to serve as a trophy. In short, she's not a character. She's the Cool Gamer Girlfriend, an unintimidating fantasy of a girl that exists only for the sake of Raito (and by extension, you the reader).
ART:
Rion might be the most flagrant example of character design plagiarism I've seen in a good long while. Even just looking at the cover, you can see the details Geshumaro ripped off from My Dress-Up Darling's Marin. Hell, everything above Rion's chest is pretty much a carbon copy of her save for the hair color and texture. It was only late into the volume that realize he ripped off yet another notable gyaru character: Galko-Chan. The large chest combined with loose bow gives away his game there. It only gets worse when he introduces a new girl (a tomboy Childhood Best Friend (tm) turned gyaru) who is clearly just a knock-off of Ikumi from Food Wars. Clearly this guy has a type, but he simply can't be bothered to draw his own unique version of it.
The artwork really plays up the self-insert fantasy qualities of this series. The chapters here are quite short (almost always under six pages), and they all tend to climax in the same way: an uncomfortably close first-person panel where Rion thrusts her chest towards Raiton (and the reader), smiling attractively as she says something affirmative or mildly suggestive. This level of naked self-insertion is both laughable in its lack of subtlety and off-putting. The only thing more off-putting is the fanservice.
This manga objectifies Rion to an almost ridiculous degree. There's seldom a page that goes by without her thrusting her boobs, butt, legs, and sometimes feet into the panel like it's a 3D movie. It's as if her body simply cannot be contained be contained by the panels, as she's often spilling out past their very boundaries. These shots also clearly have much more work put into them. While the manga is not lacking in effort in general, it's clear that a lot more detail and shading get put into the panels where the reader is meant to be ogling Rion. If anything, it gets even more flagrant in its objectification as it goes on, incorporating more low-angle creeper-cam style panty shots. Taken all together, they make the book feel just kind of gross to read.
RATING:
This manga is published by Yen Press. This series is ongoing in Japan with 3 volumes available. 2 volumes have been released and are currently in print.
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