by Ashley P, Staff Writer
I’m from the UK so I love a good pun title. So when I saw the demo for the new yuri visual novel Toxic Yuri by Yuri Kissaten I felt nationally bound to write about it.
Ol-san is, an… OL, working in a Kyoto based company. She’s in a bit of a slump, even office mixers feel like a chore. It is on the way back from one of these mixers that Ol-san runs into Doku-chan, a tiny woman made of hazardous slime that Ol-san decides to take back to her home.
What follows is the next first chapter of the full game ‘Toxic Yuri’ where Ol-san has to deal with the usual fantasy of saving a cute monster/monster adjacent woman but with the usual problems you might think of when you suddenly have to look after a tiny person made entirely of purple slime who has to eat soap to not smell like a trash fire.
Most of the choices in this early part of ‘Toxic Yuri’ determine how kind Ol-san is to Doku-chan. She can be cruel and controlling or kind and understanding. The demo gives you three rankings toxic, tepid, and tonic depending on your choices but there will be more than three endings in the final game. That said this means that right now the demo is mostly setting up flags for a later period that we don’t get to in the demo.
It is a sweet start to a story (depending on player choices) but it is difficult to root very hard for Ol-san and Doku-chan to get together. Doku-chan is naive to the point of it being farcical so no matter how Ol-san is portrayed it appears a bit like the fantasy of having a girlfriend falling into your lap and doing whatever you want while being hapless and adorable. I don’t want to make too many assumptions of the average Okazu reader but I don’t think that is really the kind of relationship we want to read about.
However I think this story is winding up to drop another, possibly half dissolved, shoe on the reader later. As I said earlier the story seems to be setting flags for a greater turn in the full game. Often those denouement in video games where all your choices come to a point can be very satisfying.
Looking at ‘Toxic Yuri’ as a demo; there was not much to make me want to read beyond the first chapter: except for Ol-san’s co-worker Fujino-san. Fujino is clearly the main character in a shakaijin yuri story happening off page and she actually is able to clash believably and entertainingly with Ol-san. Hopefully the full game will have much more Fujino-san.
Ratings:
Overall – 7
