![]() for this project), and it was digitally released for Windows and Mac in July 2011. It’s the first game developed by the Hato-King doujin circle (who went by the name PigeoNation Inc. Hatoful Kareshi ~Kibou no Gakuen to Shiroi Tsubasa~ is one of those bazillions visual novels released each year in Japan. This particular instance definitely works in its favor. Each character has a different musical tune for their theme song, and some of the classics pieces that accompany some of the birds are laugh-out-loud funny in their own right, though the quality of the recording is like someone got some random instruments together in their bedroom and recorded on a cheap computer mic… an idea that does actually fit with the tone and aesthetic of the rest of the game, so I assume that’s exactly how it played out.The Internet is full of surprises, though the jury’s ultimately still out on whether that’s a good thing. You’ve got these weird pictures of birds that fill the screen during dialogue, and then the occasional cut to an actual photo of a bird for other, non-dialogue bits of narrative explanation. The art is so inconsistent that I gave up trying to understand it at about the same point I gave up trying to understand the narrative (almost instantly after starting to play). Each play through is surprisingly short, but with so many different endings, and with the knowledge of just how weird those endings can be, I found the replay value to be spectacular. Compared with many visual novels there are actually a lot of decisions to make in this game (though not quite as many as you might see in a proper dating sim), but it’s generally quite easy to tell what conversation path you need to take to end up with a certain bird’s ending. ![]() So unpredictable as the humour is that I found myself constantly surprised with the narrative that would pop up in response to the choices that I made in the game took me down a different narrative path towards a different ending, each more weird and wonderful than the last. The game constantly resists the temptation to point at itself and go “HAHAHA! Aren’t I funny because birdies?!?” Rather, it plays itself out more-or-less like a normal visual novel would… and then sticks pigeons and puddings in with a deadpan sense of comic timing for surreal kicks. Aside from the bits where, instead of saying “everybody”, characters say “everybirdy”, you would almost be able to read this game out to someone (who wasn’t looking at the screen, or was blind), and they’d assume you were playing a relatively normal game. They’re just static images of birds and almost perfectly normal lines of text representing dialogue. Characters don’t actually do crazy things (well, okay, one does, but the rest don’t). What is so incredibly funny about Hatoful Boyfriend is that it plays all this humour with an oddly straight bat. But let’s see how Hatoful Boyfriend handles this: Now we know that in visual novels and dating games that the pool scene means only one thing – hot bodies in swimwear. Take, for example, the inevitable pool scene. Every second line of Hatoful Boyfrind is weird humour in its most pure form, or some kind of devastating teardown of the aforementioned cliches. Or at least they’d stick you in the corner far out of sight of anyone normal (it was okay for me, my collection of Miku toys already had me in that corner…).Ĭomplete insanity inside, though, no game has quite managed to make me proverbially (and in one or two cases literally) shoot my drink out my nose. I mean, if you go to work on Monday, and your co-workers asked you what you did over the weekend, and you said “Hatoful Boyfriend” and then described the game to them, you’d probably lose the job. It’s not meant to be taken seriously, other than perhaps as a complete tear down of every cliche that has ever been thrown into a visual novel or dating game. It’s not Metamorphosis-like with humans becoming animals to make some grand, twisted, point about humanity. It’s as completely balls insane as it sounds. The truth is that I’m not even sure I can write any more about the game than that. Otherwise the game ends suddenly with your character’s death. Your classmates are pigeons and doves, and your job is to say the right things so that your chosen birdie falls in love with you. Hatoful Boyfriend is a visual novel/ dating game where you play as a human girl who goes to a school for the gifted.
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