This weekend, I played Hatoful Boyfriend. I found it for a very cheap price on the PlayStation Store, so I thought that I would finally give it a try. It's certainly a rather interesting game, but I didn't really feel like writing a full post on it. Instead, I thought I would just briefly share my thoughts on it, because why not?
Hatoful Boyfriend originally interested me because it was about pigeons. I absolutely love pigeons, although I only appreciate them from a distance. (I'm scared of birds, especially dead ones because when I was a child I almost stepped on a dead seagull lying on the beach) My Blogger username is even "strangepigeon". I had a very weird fascination with the pigeons by my primary school as a child, and how they'd breed with the doves and create this weird looking white bird with dark speckles. I should probably stop talking about pigeons, because you'd probably be here for hours then. As you can tell, a dating game about pigeons and doves is obviously something I'd be very interested in. So I downloaded Hatoful Boyfriend, and it cost me little more than a pound. In the past I had almost bought the game using leftover giftcard money, but I ended up buying Sweet Fuse instead, which I don't regret because it was an awesome game.
I didn't actually play every single ending in Hatoful Boyfriend, because after a while the super-slow skip function was starting to get on my nerves. It was really slow and sometimes I accidentally skipped over dialogue that I hadn't read before. Luckily I still managed to get the "good" endings for each character and the BBL ending, or whatever it's called. Apparently, I'm missing out on some epilogue for the BBL ending, but that's alright. Maybe I'll try and get it another day.
At first, I was like "This is a good game, but it's nothing spectacular. Just another one of those meme games." Even though I had heard things about the BBL ending and how good it was, I was getting tired of using the skip function to go through the story and unlock everything. What also frustrated me was that I couldn't go back to read the text that I had accidentally missed. The game also crashed once and some of the background music (this may have been intentional, I don't know) sounded a bit glitchy. This made me almost give the game up and save it for later.
The first ending I got was Nageki's, and although brief, it was quite sad. He ended up being my favourite character at the end. The other ending I really liked was Anghel's. Shuu also had a very strange ending which I enjoyed. Really, I enjoyed it all. There was a PlayStation exclusive ending somewhere but I never got that one. I don't think I'll be missing out on much of the plot by skipping it.
I am very, very glad that I played until the BBL ending. That was when the game transcended from "haha lol funny meme game" into something that was really interesting. I began to notice that a lot of the details from the rest of the game foreshadowed things that would later come out in this story. It was a lot better than I had expected it to be. I thought it was going to be a simple short ending, but it took at least an hour to read through. There were a lot of interesting twists and turns throughout the story. For once, I started to take the game seriously.
I don't really want to spoil anything more. I know it came out years ago and I'm very late to the party, but who cares? If you haven't played Hatoful Boyfriend yet, I would highly recommend it. Even though some people may question whether or not it really counts as an otome game, it's still worth a read. Actually, multiple parts of it reminded me of other otoge titles. Unlike some of those other jokey dating sims, it didn't feel like it was making fun of the genre at all.
There is a sequel/fandisc to the game, but I don't know if I'll play that. I don't really have much space left on my memory card... Maybe if they improve the skip function, I might give it a try.
So, yes. I played Hatoful Boyfriend, and I loved it. That's all I have to say.
UPDATE: I managed to brave the skip function and get all of the endings (except the PlayStation exclusive one) to unlock the BBL epilogue, but it's not showing. Either it glitched or I'm too stupid to figure out how to read it. Oh well, I can always try again another day! Hopefully the epilogue doesn't have too many unmissable plot details in it...
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