VN Talk: Hatoful Boyfriend

In which I talk (write) about visual novels from a storytelling perspective...

Platform: Windows (also on PS4/PS Vita/Android/iOS/Mac/Linux)
Release: 2012 (original), 2015 (HD)

I actually marked Hatoful Boyfriend off as completed back in 2015 because I tried it, got a ending that wasn't the bad one, and then due to the completely arbitrary nature of some of choices (including stat raising), I ended up getting the same ending for my second playthrough even though I was aiming for different birds. Annoyed, I shelved it as done without bothering to play the rest of the game.

But, one of my friends is a big Hatoful Boyfriend fan and I knew that there was a lot of the game I was missing, so I decided to go back and give it another shot. This time, armed with a walkthrough, I went through all endings to unlock the Bad Boys Love route and see the craziest part of what most people call a "pigeon dating simulator."

And it's really not that you're falling in love with pigeons.

There are clues throughout the game that the world is our own, but set in the future after most of humanity has been wiped out. The teenage player character, default name Hiyoko, is a hunter gatherer and she even makes a reference to having hunted for her breakfast before the first day of class. She also lives in a cave, making it clear that her life isn't close to the present day human lifestyle we enjoy, and the birds currently participate in. (Oddly enough, and it's commented on, the sentient birds of the game have patterned a lot of their society off of humans, so they have things like high schools and school sporting events like the three-legged race that are so much worse for birds than humans.)

As you go through some of the routes, we learn more about the history of humans and birds, and that some birds aren't comfortable with the remaining humans. Hiyoko being allowed into the prestigious all-pigeon high school is supposed to be an experiment in whether humans and birds can truly get along (and if she doesn't find a love interest, then the bad ending plays, which results in the experiment being called a failure and Hiyoko is killed). She's also an experiment set up to fail as the birds financially responsible for running the school actually want a war between birds and humans so they have cause to wipe out what's left of humanity.

There's really a lot more to Hatoful Boyfriend than romancing birds!

But you have to go through most of the romances to unlock the BBL route, and you have to go through all of them (sometimes twice if they have multiple endings) if you want the epilogue to BBL. With nine birds, that's a lot romancing if you want to see everything, and it's not all that straightforward.

Oftentimes the player is confronted with a choice of where they'd like to spend their time, and there will be birds at those locations, but there's no way to know ahead of time that Ryouta will be in the cafe or Yuuya in the infirmary until the player actually goes there. Some characters require player stats to be at a certain level for their full endings, but it's not possible to know which is best until it's too late to make a difference. It's for those reasons I relied on a walkthrough, and thankfully the routes are short enough that I could do two or three in a sitting.

Though the romances are short and fairly tropey, the game takes the everything including the kitchen sink approach, so even if we have the devoted childhood friend and the pompous rich guy, we also have a student who's a secret agent, a ghost, and a pigeon who lives in a delusion thinking he's the hero of an RPG. Individually you might find one of the eccentric ones in another game, but HatoFul Boyfriend has all of them. The romance options might be birds, pigeons or otherwise, but they're all vastly different from each other.

It also helps that the translation is funny and doesn't take itself too seriously.

The BBL route (I've seen it called Bad Boys Love and Bad Boy's Love, neither of which are used by the game itself) was more interesting to me because it's a single storyline played over the course of a few hours that delves into the backstory of the humans vs birds conflict as well as mysteriously trapping most of our cast inside their school. Nearly all the birds' backstories (except Azami's) come into play in BBL, which is why it's necessary to play most of their routes to unlock it, and this second half of the game would not work if the player wasn't aware of them.

I'm not entirely sure playing all those routes was worth the price of admission, but BBL once I got to it, was very good and very suspenseful. You also play as Ryouta instead of Hiyoko, whose disappearance and subsequent murder kicks off the storyline.

In a nutshell, the world of Hatoful Boyfriend is one that was created when humans tried to genetically engineer a virus to kill off all the birds, because they had become carriers of a new strain of bird flu that in turn was decimating the human population. But the virus failed and instead made the birds, particularly pigeons, large and intelligent while the human population continued to dwindle.

Now there are only a few humans left and birds dominate the planet. There is peace between the two factions, but it's an uneasy one.

When BBL starts, the school enters a lockdown following the discovery of Hiyoko's dismembered body. All the students are herded into the gym with no sign of when they'll be free to leave. Ryouta, being Hiyoko's friend, doesn't want to leave her where she was though, so he goes to pick her up with the irritable Sakuya in tow, kicking off what becomes a murder mystery/thriller.

The tone of the game changes, becoming much darker as it becomes apparent that the students are intended to be a sacrifice for a war and Hiyoko's death is intended to rile up the surviving humans into demanding vengeance. A dome empasses the school, preventing anyone from leaving, and it will only come down after 12 hours, giving the humans outside time to muster and gather weapons for the retribution the birds agreed to provide them should anything happen to Hiyoko. And if that's not enough, there's a crazy robot running through the halls of the school that Ryouta and those with him have to avoid.

Ryouta is fantastic as a protagonist. He's not overly talented, and is normal enough to blend in with the background in the dating portion of the game, but that makes him a relatable everybird in a mystery. When he's in danger, it's bad, and we really don't know how he's going to get out of it. We know he can't fight the strange robot, he can't stand up to the school's shady doctor, but he cares deeply for Hiyoko and wants to make sense of his best friend's murder.

Sakuya, though he's a bit of a pill on most of the romance routes (being the pompous rich guy), is actually a great sidekick. His bluster keeps the edge off of what could otherwise be too horrific or depressing, and his character is further developed as well, allowing us to see his insecurity and that he can become just as discombobulated as anyone else. Sakuya also proves himself to be a great friend and keeps Ryouta grounded whenever things get really bad.

BBL, though it ends well enough for most characters, has a fairly depressing ending (only lightened by the epilogue.) Ryouta learns that a wish he made as a child became a catalyst for the day's events. He had wished for peace between birds and humans, and his unasked for wish giver concluded that coexistence was not possible, so the only way to attain peace is to wipe the humans out. This won't be through a war, but through a new virus which Ryouta was unknowingly infected with.

The idea is that after the 12 hours are up, the walls will come down and expose the gathered humans to the virus through Ryouta, and when they leave, they'll take it home and spread it to other humans. And Ryouta knows that it's effective, because he learns that Hiyoko was the test subject, and she died simply by getting too close to him in the school infirmary. (The dismemberment was post-mortem.) The wish giver chose her because when Ryouta made that wish she said she was willing to die for it.

Though Ryouta and company manage to stop the school doctor, he decides to remain in the hidden underground lab at the end of the route, so he'll never spread the virus to an unsuspecting him. This makes for a downer of an ending, and it's only if the player unlocks the epilogue that we see that eventually Sakuya finds a cure for him so he can leave.

It was pretty bonkers seeing how everyone's backstories were woven into the plot though. Just about every love interest has a role to play, even the ghost, and it's a bit of a shame that the best part of the game is gated by a completely different genre of play.