This review contains spoilers
The comparison to Doki Doki is tacky and overdone considering this predates it by about 4 years, but unavoidable.
When I played DDLC in 2017 I heard the ~whispers~ of this ~other game~ that ~wasn't officially translated at the time~. I saw some screenshots from a certain happy birthday, and moved on with life.
Now 6.5 years later with more VNs under my belt, more life lived, and with memories hazy enough to have not quite remembered being spoiled fully, I rounded back onto reading Totono.
It was certainly an experience worth that wait, and a great of example of using the meta of your genre to tell an extremely effective story. Totono builds its main heroines wonderfully over the course of normal play, making the choice between them feel hard to make even before the curtain begins to get pulled back. Being railroaded into Miyuki naturally makes you feel bad for Aoi, which leads you into her route, which leads to abandoning Miyuki's, which leads to everything falling apart as it does. Despite me pushing in Aoi's direction as hard as possible as soon as I had the ability, they still brought me back to almost picking Miyuki in the end. The emphasis placed on your choice really did make it hard to make in a wonderful way, no saves, no reloads, just a binary with no right answer capping off an extremely memorable commentary on the genre.
When I played DDLC in 2017 I heard the ~whispers~ of this ~other game~ that ~wasn't officially translated at the time~. I saw some screenshots from a certain happy birthday, and moved on with life.
Now 6.5 years later with more VNs under my belt, more life lived, and with memories hazy enough to have not quite remembered being spoiled fully, I rounded back onto reading Totono.
It was certainly an experience worth that wait, and a great of example of using the meta of your genre to tell an extremely effective story. Totono builds its main heroines wonderfully over the course of normal play, making the choice between them feel hard to make even before the curtain begins to get pulled back. Being railroaded into Miyuki naturally makes you feel bad for Aoi, which leads you into her route, which leads to abandoning Miyuki's, which leads to everything falling apart as it does. Despite me pushing in Aoi's direction as hard as possible as soon as I had the ability, they still brought me back to almost picking Miyuki in the end. The emphasis placed on your choice really did make it hard to make in a wonderful way, no saves, no reloads, just a binary with no right answer capping off an extremely memorable commentary on the genre.