In a not-so-distant future, a new trading card game designed to lead young men to a sexual awakening is taking Japan by storm... and its name is LuvSlave!

LuvSlave is the hottest new TCG on the market, where young men get to call themselves "masters" and battle it out using girls dressed in incredibly revealing outfits as their "slaves"! Yuto would love to play, but he's too nervous to ask a girl to be his slaveso it's a good thing his big sister Akemi knows what he really wants, and offers to be Yuto's slave herself! As Yuto navigates the sexually liberated landscape of LuvSlave with his sister at his side, he'll have to keep his eyes peeled for other players who want to take his sister for themselves...

LuvSlave 2 has story and art by Mizuryu Kei. English translation by Colin Crouse and lettering by Vladyslav L. Published by J-18. (March 5, 2025). Rated M.

CONTENT WARNING: Underage sexual acts and sex scenes

MrAJCosplay
Rating:

Oh yes, I'm so happy to return to the world of sex slave Yu-Gi-Oh!. I love my job sometimes. Volume two of LuvSlave picks up right from where the first volume left off as our main characters get trapped in an overarching conspiracy that uses this rather unconventional love slave card game to potentially take over the world. The first volume focused a lot on setting up the characters and the rules of the card game around an emotional drama. You could see a lot of the obvious parallels to other classic kid shows like Yu-Gi-Oh! and Beyblade. I didn't find it very titillating, as is the case when a lot of the males in the story are young boys and the sex acts are kept very vague.

Volume two just throws everything at your face with reckless abandonment and not always in a fun way. It feels like everything was cranked up to the point where it almost feels like we made a complete genre shift. The first volume leaned into a sci-fi shounen series, but the first half of volume two makes me feel like we were transported to the demon realm. We've got women being transformed into ravenous monsters that constantly need to feed on the vitality of young boys. I needed to double-check to make sure that I was reading the same series because we don't get into the card game element again until more than halfway through the volume. A lot of this has to do with the stakes seemingly being raised, so there's a lot more worldbuilding that randomly needs to be shown, but it's clunky.

The overall direction feels a lot messier with panel layouts making scene transitions and the overall passage of time much more confusing. There's still a lot of fun to be had here, and the series still plays with some of the tropes of the genre. However, there is a stronger lean on actual sex as a selling point, and considering the young age of a lot of the characters, it doesn't sit right with me as much as the first, where there is a little bit more of a tongue-in-cheek vibe to it. I don't think you're supposed to take things seriously, but my enjoyment was taken down a peg by this installment.