Is Miyuki a Tragic Villain who deserves another chance at happiness, or a Karma Houdini who received no comeuppance for her crimes in the end?
Is Aoi being a Shipper on Deck for Shinichi and Miyuki depressing or heartwarming? On one hand, it's depressing because she genuinely believes she isn't worthy of love and knows she only exists to obtain CGs. On the other hand, after learning the truth and getting the Golden Ending, it's heartwarming because this frees her up to get a happy, if not bittersweet, ending with you, and also ensures Shinichi and Miyuki can have a happy ending together too.
Common Knowledge: It's sometimes described by people recommending or reviewing it as the visual novel that inspired Doki Doki Literature Club! (or, less charitably, as the novel that DDLC "ripped off"), but Dan Salvato confirmed that he had the idea for DDLC long before learning of Totono and only saw a clip of it before deciding to deliberately avoid it so he wouldn't be unconsciously copying it, meaning it's a complete coincidence that the two works have quite a few similarities.
Ensemble Dark Horse: Yuutarou, despite only having a secondary role in the story, is beloved by fans due to his Hidden Depths and providing many of the funniest moments in the game.
Fandom-Enraging Misconception: Mixing Aoi up with Super Sonico. While Aoi implies she might become Super Sonico in one of her next lives, they, conceptually, aren't the same character and have nothing to do with each other.
Fandom Rivalry: With Doki Doki Literature Club!, given that their basic plots are very similar despite creator Dan Salvato having never even heard of Totono while making the game: One of the girls in a Cliché Storm romance game gaining sentience, realizing she's in a visual novel and will be doomed to unhappiness if the player/player character doesn't choose her, going cuckoo crazy, and hacking a Hostile Show Takeover and brutally murdering her competition to be with the player, before being stopped when the player hacks the game itself in kind. Arguments range from if the Japanese did it better to if Totono doing it before DDLC did means the latter's themes are undercut. With that said, there is a fair number of crossover fans between the two due to the similar themes.
Since the reveal of Aoi's design during development, she has been compared endlessly to Super Sonico for having a hairstyle that looks similar to the latter and sharing the same illustrator. Come the game's Golden Ending, Aoi actually implies that she'll be reincarnated as Super Sonico.
Years later, Doki Doki Literature Club! wound up accidentally covering the same ground Totono did, all with Dan Savalto only being vaguely aware ofTotono: an apparently normal romantic visual novel full of the usual clichés, such as the Unlucky Childhood Friend, the Tsundere, the Shrinking Violet, every love interest having her own route and love scenes, only to subvert them all: One girl is shown to have a dark secret that threatens her very existence, and a sweet and normal girl becomes a Medium Aware yandere who's driven insane by the revelation they're a fictional character, leading them to obsess over the player after realising their love interest is a Flat Character meant to represent the player. She then brutally murders her competition before rewriting the game to be only about her, disabling saving and loading, and leads the player into a false ending where the girl locks the player into a location outside the story proper where she comments on her own fictional nature and begs the player to stay with her, reacts badly to being left too long, rants about how the other rival(s) are crazed psychos and accidentally gives the player the key to return the game to normal. This did not go unnoticed by Nitro+ themselves, as Totono's writer did a playthrough of DDLC and spoke positively of its own spin on the same themes.
Similarly, the game also calls out the completionist mindset by requiring the player to do awful things to the characters that also makes the happy ending permanently unobtainable just to get all the endings, two years before Undertale famously did the same thing.
It Was His Sled: Most contemporary players come to play this game to see Miyuki freak out in the Aoi route and go meta, and/or because of comparisons with Doki Doki Literature Club!/recommendations from that game's Friendly Fandom. There's way more to the plot than just that section, but this often leads to complaints about a Slow-Paced Beginning since it takes 8-10 hours to get to that part.
Misaimed Fandom: Due to Colbert Bump, even amongst those who know the story, many players assume the meta horror part is the main content and everything before then are just character introductions. Unlike Doki Doki Literature Club! where the Genre Shift occurs in the second act and reveals the true state of the setting, Totono's horror serves as the third act in response to the player's actions, and until then operates like a normal romance game with two endings. Indeed the novel explicitly calls out players who want to skip to "the good parts" without being invested in romance.
Slow-Paced Beginning: A somewhat frequent complaint, particularly among those who came for the meta horror, is that the game takes way too long to get to that part. The average length is about 15 hours, and before getting to the meta horror part, you have to go through the 5-6 hour Miyuki route, a normal dating sim scenario which some fans enjoy, but others find to be a mostly bog-standard Childhood Friend Romance story driven by a frustrating case of Cannot Spit It Out. Following that is another 4-5 hours doing the Aoi route, and only at the very end of said route, about 9-10 hours in, does the meta horror begin (though Aoi's route at least introduces a curveball in the form of a Netorare twist).
Her true Tsundere personality and insecurities about herself are meant to be endearing, but they also make her come across as a Fetishized Abuser more often than not - especially considering she expects Shinichi (and by extension, you) to accept her, unpleasantness and all, but will leave him should he even hint at having some self-esteem issues himself, ramped up to eleven once she performs a Hostile Show Takeover in Aoi's route. Some of her dialogue suggests she's aware of what a horrible person she has become, but she quickly justifies her actions by claiming this to be the only way she could ever be happy. She's meant to come across as a Tragic Villain but some fans have trouble sympathizing with her.
After the end of Aoi's route, Miyuki is shown to constantly lie, manipulate, and resort to violence and murder. Although, it should be noted that many of these elements were already present at the beginning of the game, albeit in a less extreme form. Miyuki pretends to be someone she's not so that other people will like her. She tells Aoi that they can be friends, but then proceeds to repeatedly blow her off. She hits Shinichi with a bat numerous times (which is Played for Laughs at the time). Later in the first route, she also tries to physically attack Aoi after she sees Aoi half naked in Shinichi's bedroom. Keep in mind, Miyuki and you were not even in a relationship yet at that point. From the start of the game she is shown to be two-faced, deceptive, self-centered, and even violent. These negative attributes of hers were always there, they just got ramped up in the second route.
Not only does she repeatedly drug Shinichi in order to prevent you from acting through him, she does everything in her power to sabotage your relationship with Aoi and even erases Aoi from existence just so she can truly have you all to herself. All the while she complains that you refuse to get back together with her and guilt-trips you for pursuing Aoi after completing Miyuki's route, completely ignoring all the reasons why you would want nothing to do with her at that point.
The Woobie: Aoi. From the initial set-up, she's a completely friendless girl with No Social Skills who is subject to rumours demeaning her as a slut. Then it's revealed she's not even that, she's actually an avatar of an intelligence designed to gain CGs from sex that, through a glitch, ended up developing genuine feelings and emotions for others, while knowing full well that eventually she'll disappear completely and that no one will remember her. In her desperation, she's driven to thus cheating on the person she loves just so to satisfy "God" and stay alive, even though the entire thing makes herself and everyone around her miserable. And her actions leave the girl she considers her best friend despising her and actively trying to delete her from existence because she considers her a threat.
Alternative Title(s):Kimi To Kanojo To Kanojo No Koi