Hatoful Boyfriend is a visual novel for the PlayStation 4, Vita and PC. It is unique in that apart from the protagonist, all the other characters are pigeons. It is set in a world where pigeons, or birds in general, have evolved to have complex intelligence. You play as the female protagonist, with a name that you set, although the default is Hiyoko Tosaka. Hiyoko decides to attend St PigeoNation’s Institution, a prestigious pigeon school by the pigeons, for the pigeons. Hiyoko herself is a hunter-gatherer that lives in a cave, so there’s nothing usual about this world.
This is a romantic visual novel, with ten love interests and their various routes. The gameplay is limited to reading the text for the story, and specific points where you make a decision in order to progress. These choices will dictate which route you will go down and which ending you get. There are normal endings, bad endings and of course, the true endings.
The characters are very unusual. Having pigeons talk is normal and accepted, and they have their own normal problems like the death of a family member or the expectations of others. Their personalities are quirky and exaggerated. Each route is short, which is surprising, since it’ll only take 30 minutes to an hour to complete each route depending on how fast you read. These routes feel kind of generic and normal. The story takes place over the course of three school terms but it doesn’t leverage off the school setting too much. The stats and classes you pick are superficial since they only play a part in getting a particular ending.
As you’re expected to go through the various routes, each of them naturally share a lot of common events and text. This gets quite repetitive by the time you’re on your third playthrough or so. It takes all the way until the end of a route before you get a substantial chunk of unique content. You’re able to skip text but it stops every time you’ve transitioned to the next scene and need to press the button again. It doesn’t differentiate between text you’re already read and text you haven’t, so you have to pay attention while skipping otherwise you’ll skip past new content.
Each route naturally focuses on a particular pigeon and their own story. Some are okay while some are decent. The best ones evoke a sense of longing and melancholy for the sadder endings, as well as a touch of sweetness at some of the happier endings. Some routes are absolutely ridiculous and you’re not sure where it’s even trying or not at that point. As you play through more of the routes and see more of the characters’ viewpoints, you can start to recognize plot points that cross over each other. Some are actually quite intriguing, especially when that particular route digs deeper into it. This gives you new understandings of what happened in others.
There are fourteen endings in total and if you complete the thirteen endings from the original version of the game, you will unlock a new alternate story route. Don’t be fooled, this “Bad Boys Love” is a long route that is longer than the main routes themselves. It takes on a completely different tone. Even if you were expecting a massive shift in atmosphere and changes to the story direction, it will still take you by surprise.
Bad Boys Love will begin by setting the darker atmosphere. Over the course of the approximately 1.5 hour playthrough, it wraps various elements from the other routes into a net package. The tonal shift can be hard to get used to but the way it handled the content and themes were surprisingly good. At times, it does feel like it dragged things on, especially during the climax where it resolves one thing after another as if going through a checklist. Having it all come together like this is an impressive feat but hard to say whether it was worth the while going through all the other blander routes in order to get to it.
The performance of the game on the Vita is not the best. Not only is the game over 2GB in size considering that it’s only a visual novel with limited gameplay and graphics but it is not optimized well. Screen transitions always have a jitter, there seems to be a small delay whenever you advance to the next scene. Play for too long and the game is at risk of crashing or become buggy with the sound. The game has a fan-made feel to it, from the basic UI to the simplistic artwork, character portraits and music. This isn’t surprising considering its origins.
Overall, Hatoful Boyfriend is an odd mix. It kind of fools you with its cheerful and quirky romantic dating sim story. Push through all the routes to unlock the alternate story and that’s where the meat of the story lies. It can feel slow paced but the payoff is pretty decent, leading to an engrossing and surprisingly detailed story. It manages to wrap even what you thought were useless information about the various characters into a believable motivation for the events. If you have the patience and will to spend around eight hours, six of which are fairly repetitive, then Hatoful Boyfriend is worthwhile.
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