As my username might hint at, Hatoful Boyfriend is a game very near and dear to my heart, but believe it or not I'd never beaten it and honestly had barely played it until fairly recently. Up until now it was just a game whose style I really liked, but I'd never really put much time into it until a month or so ago. My girlfriend and I played through it together over Discord over the course of the past month or so, as she voiced the main characters and I gave voiced to all the other characters. A fun bonding activity that lets me indulge in making like I'm a voice actor X3. It took about 20 or so hours to get through all the routes.
Hatoful Boyfriend is a dating sim that began as an April fools joke around a decade ago that the authors were compelled to make into a full game by the incredibly positive feedback to the little snippet of the joke they'd made up until that point. The joke, of course, being that it's a dating sim where you're a human girl who dates birds. Not birds who turn into humans, just straight up talking birds. There are little splash-screens when you first meet them that show them what they might look like if they WERE human, but they're in actuality birds and definitely not humans XD
Silly premise aside, Hatoful Boyfriend is actually quite a well written game. The translation can be a bit odd at times (with numerous obvious spelling mistakes, including one character's NAME being misspelled everywhere but his splash screen), but that mostly adds to the quirky fun of it all. And just as it is humorous, it's also fairly adept at being serious when it's trying to be, with particularly the BBL ending having some very good plotting and buildup. Around the silly premise of dating birds is the question of exactly why and how birds and talk, use tools, and go to school, and the tidbits of smaller mysteries surrounding that intermixed with the personal journey of the main character finding love is quite well done.
There are 8 characters to romance in the game, with the HD version on Steam on PS4 adding another two endings during summer vacation (which are honestly one of the more weak parts of the game). In addition, once you've gotten an ending with every character in the game, you gain the option at the game's start to "fulfill the promise", which activates the BBL ending (Bad Boy's Love). The BBL ending is much more of a larger mystery primarily concerning the other side characters and not the main character you spend the rest of the game as, and you mostly play as the birds in this much much longer (it's like 6-7 hours long) route. In the original PC release it was more like an adventure game visual novel with choices that could kill you, but those have been streamlined into an un-failable straight VN. While this does remove the frustration of dying, it does make this part feel a bit odd as places where choices or even kind of stricter save system have textual remnants but no mechanical ones. That said, my girlfriend and I both agreed that the BBL route was by far the best part of the game, even if it stumbles at the ending a little.
Verdict: Highly Recommended. Hatoful Boyfriend is my no means a perfect story or a perfect game, but it's one I enjoyed a ton. It does a good job of balancing seriousness with silliness, and is far more than JUST a gratuitous joke about romancing birds (although let's not kid ourselves that that isn't a decent part of what it is XD). Granted I imagine very people will play the game like I did, I still recommend it if you're a fan of VNs~
Hatoful Boyfriend is a dating sim that began as an April fools joke around a decade ago that the authors were compelled to make into a full game by the incredibly positive feedback to the little snippet of the joke they'd made up until that point. The joke, of course, being that it's a dating sim where you're a human girl who dates birds. Not birds who turn into humans, just straight up talking birds. There are little splash-screens when you first meet them that show them what they might look like if they WERE human, but they're in actuality birds and definitely not humans XD
Silly premise aside, Hatoful Boyfriend is actually quite a well written game. The translation can be a bit odd at times (with numerous obvious spelling mistakes, including one character's NAME being misspelled everywhere but his splash screen), but that mostly adds to the quirky fun of it all. And just as it is humorous, it's also fairly adept at being serious when it's trying to be, with particularly the BBL ending having some very good plotting and buildup. Around the silly premise of dating birds is the question of exactly why and how birds and talk, use tools, and go to school, and the tidbits of smaller mysteries surrounding that intermixed with the personal journey of the main character finding love is quite well done.
There are 8 characters to romance in the game, with the HD version on Steam on PS4 adding another two endings during summer vacation (which are honestly one of the more weak parts of the game). In addition, once you've gotten an ending with every character in the game, you gain the option at the game's start to "fulfill the promise", which activates the BBL ending (Bad Boy's Love). The BBL ending is much more of a larger mystery primarily concerning the other side characters and not the main character you spend the rest of the game as, and you mostly play as the birds in this much much longer (it's like 6-7 hours long) route. In the original PC release it was more like an adventure game visual novel with choices that could kill you, but those have been streamlined into an un-failable straight VN. While this does remove the frustration of dying, it does make this part feel a bit odd as places where choices or even kind of stricter save system have textual remnants but no mechanical ones. That said, my girlfriend and I both agreed that the BBL route was by far the best part of the game, even if it stumbles at the ending a little.
Verdict: Highly Recommended. Hatoful Boyfriend is my no means a perfect story or a perfect game, but it's one I enjoyed a ton. It does a good job of balancing seriousness with silliness, and is far more than JUST a gratuitous joke about romancing birds (although let's not kid ourselves that that isn't a decent part of what it is XD). Granted I imagine very people will play the game like I did, I still recommend it if you're a fan of VNs~