My Butler

Genre: Visual Novel

Players: 1

.

Review:

My Butler is a Visual Novel released on PC in 2016 and brought to Nintendo Switch in 2020. This game casts you in the role of a woman whose wealthy aunt hires her for an unusual job that involves being served by numerous attractive young butlers for three months. Yeah, so this is one of those “reverse harem” sorta’ things.

The presentation here is good. The artwork for the characters and backgrounds is wonderful, and the game’s piano solo soundtrack is quite nice. There’s nothing here that’s outright impressive or super-memorable, but it’s all overall well-done.

As for the story… I can’t get over how ridiculous a concept this is. Okay, picture this – you’re a young lady who is suddenly dragged off the street by a few attractive young butlers and more or less forcibly brought to your aunt’s mansion, where you are informed that the job you agreed to do for her (without being told any details, mind you) involves living at her mansion for three months and being waited on by three butlers, all models or movie stars being made to go through this process so they can “learn how to treat a lady”. You’re told that your job is to rate their performance.

So much of this comes across as incredibly contrived, and it’s made worse by the fact that all of these butlers are, in their own ways, alarmingly handsy in ways that would be just begging for a lawsuit. And look, I get that this is a silly fantasy, there’s supposed to be some suspension of disbelief, but incredulity can only stretch so far before it snaps. It also doesn’t help that the localization here isn’t very good, resulting in some pretty stilted dialogue.

As for the gameplay, well, as I mentioned, there’s very little in the way of choice that seems to matter all that much. At the very least I can say this game makes good use of touchscreen controls, though it works perfectly fine with normal gamepad controls too. However, the menus here are unnecessarily confusing to navigate.

In the end, My Butler has a nice presentation, but I just cannot get over how absurdly dumb the story is. Maybe you can just go along with a story that has your wealthy aunt essentially forcing movie stars to be butlers for her niece for three months and then not telling her niece about it until after some of those butlers have dragged said niece off the street but… yeah, just writing that has me shaking my head. I just cannot take the story of this game seriously, and since that’s the focal point of this game, I simply cannot recommend it.

tl;dr – My Butler is a Visual Novel that has players in the role of a woman who finds herself suddenly whisked away to be served by attractive butlers in an anime-style “reverse harem” situation. The presentation here is good, but the story is so absurd it’s impossible to really get into the game. Even as a silly fantasy, this game just doesn’t work.

Grade: D+

^{You can support eShopperReviews on Patreon! Please click HERE to become a Sponsor!}