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.

Favorite Fictional Commanders

I haven't written one myself, largely because I haven't gotten to the point where I'm comfortable juggling an ensemble cast, but in honor of Attack on Titan's Erwin Smith and his valor in the most recent episode, I figured I'd run through a few of my favorite fictional commanders.

They're not leaders of countries necessarily, but likely leaders of soldiers. These are the people that if I was a kid again, I'd say "I want to be like them when I grow up!"

Interestingly, I could not come up with any commanders from novels, so the ones below are all from animation or games. I'm not sure why that is, but I suspect it might be because a lot of military fantasy and science fiction is pretty gritty, and I tend to not idealize those commanders as much, though there is certainly one gritty commander on this list!

Optimus Prime (Transformers)

He is my ur-example largely because of the age at which I was introduced to him as voiced by Peter Cullen (and seriously, bringing Peter Cullen back was the best thing the Michael Bay movies ever did).

Optimus Prime cares about the soldiers beneath him, but is willing to make unpopular decisions if it's the right thing to do. I liked that he was always level-headed, never irrational, and most importantly, he could admit when he was wrong. You got the feeling you could trust him, even if he was a giant robot from another planet.

I don't think that I ever viewed him as a father or big brother figure, even in universe, but he was cool character to look up to and my favorite out of all the 80s Transformers. I even had his toy.

Commander Hawkins (Voltron)

Most people are not going to remember Commander Hawkins because he was in the "other" Voltron, the Vehicle Team. It probably didn't hurt that he was also voiced by Peter Cullen, who didn't change his voice much between Prime and Hawkins.

Hawkins was an usual character for me to latch on to as a kid, because he wasn't one of the Voltron pilots. He stayed on the command ship and gave orders, so he would be the guy the team would argue against when they wanted to follow their hearts rather than his instructions.

But even if they didn't like what he had to say, you got the impression that Hawkins was fair, and he actually pranked his disobedient team leaders once after a mission that only succeeded because they didn't listen to him. They were willing to take any punishment he was willing to give them, and the punishment they thought was coming, was actually more of a reward.

Robin (Dark Wizard)

If Hawkins is obscure, then Robin is downright forgotten. Dark Wizard was an old fantasy strategy game for the Sega CD, and Robin was one of four playable army leaders. I loved her for being a kickass female knight in functional armor.

Back then, and even now, it's hard to find games with female protagonists, and here's Robin who serves as knight on horseback with better melee stats than magic ones. This lady was all about leading her army into battle to retake the continent from the titular Dark Wizard.

If she picked up a love interest along the way and agreed to marry in him in the ending, why not. It's a bonus. He asked her to marry him if he won the duel at their victory banquet. She kicked his ass and basically said something like "WTF, did you think I wouldn't like you if you couldn't beat me? I like you anyway, let's get married." Teenage me loved this. (Actual dialogue was much cheesier, but that was the take home message.)

Xander (Fire Emblem Fates)

Depending on which version of the game the player is playing, Xander might never take on a real command role, but along the Birthright storyline, Xander is very much a commander and unfortunately he becomes the enemy one.

I played Conquest first where I totally fell in love with Xander for being my favorite type of knight character, who is stuck between his principals and his duty. As the eldest of the Nohrian royal siblings, he is heir to the throne of Nohr and shoulders the burden of a temperamental, maniacal father as well as the future of his nation. Though not blood-related to the player's avatar, he is adamant that they are a welcome part of his family.

The worst part of starting down the Birthright storyline was turning away from Xander and fighting against him, because I knew that I would have to kill him eventually. When the battle finally happens, Nohr is practically finished and he actually has lower stats than a boss should at that level, because he doesn't actually have the heart to kill the player.

Erwin Smith (Attack on Titan)

Last, but certainly not least, is Commander Erwin Smith from Attack on Titan, who inspired this post. I won't mention anything exclusive from the manga, but Erwin hits all the right respect buttons. He's saddled with the unenviable job of leading the least popular branch of the military into gut-wrenching odds, and yet he throws himself completely into his work.

Nothing gets in Erwin's way. If the best chance to capture an enemy spy involves endangering civilians, he will take it. He might not be happy about it, but if you want a person willing to do anything to ensure the survival of humanity, Erwin's a good pick for the job and his soldiers know that. Erwin can ask the impossible of them and they'll do their best to deliver.

And particularly in the anime, when Erwin bellows for his soldiers to "Dedicate your hearts!" you want to follow the guy into battle, even though you know there's going to be a body count. The opening song for the second season is taken specifically from his words.

Shinzou o sasageyo!

Voltron Legendary Defender: Changing My Favorite Character was the Best Thing They Could Have Done

I was going to write a more general post about Voltron: Legendary Defender, because I've been a pretty big Voltron fan throughout my life and there's so much to say about the decisions the creative team made, and I still might.

But instead, I'm going to write about Shiro.

This guy.

When the original Voltron came to the US I was in elementary school and it was one of my favorite TV series ever. But being a kid with homework and piano lessons, I didn't always get to see every episode after school, but I knew most of the show. Four guys and a girl piloted robot lions that formed a big robot every episode. But there was one character who I knew very little about.

That guy, on the left. In the opening credits of every episode was this one person wearing the striking black and gold uniform. Because of a coloring book my mom bought, I knew his name was Sven, but for a long time I didn't see him in the show (because it turns out that I'd never watched the opening six episodes).

Sven took on a bit of a mythic quality for me. When I finally watched far enough, I saw the episode where he came back after having been a prisoner on Planet Doom. I was thrilled to finally meet him and as a character, he didn't disappoint. Sven had a lot more development than the rest of the cast, due to being a fusion between older brother Takashi and younger brother Ryou from the original Go Lion anime. The American adaptation probably didn't intend it, but they created a character who changed over the course of the series.

Voltron eventually went off the air, but when my family would go rent movies, I'd ask for whatever Voltron I could find, which eventually included the first five episodes, letting me see the character for the first time as he was originally presented. Looking back, his faux Scandinavian accent was atrocious, but even after I entered middle school it was still magic.

Which brings us to Voltron: Legendary Defender.

The showrunners were making an active effort to avoid having a show starring five white dudes, and as part of that, they replaced Sven with Shiro, taking the name from his original Japanese one, Takashi Shirogane.

When I first heard this, I hoped they meant to do more with this childhood character I had come to love, and not simply kill him off or remove him from most of the show just because that's what happened to the original. Sven, despite his name and accent, had scanned as Asian to me, and as a Chinese kid growing up in the US I was starved for Asian protagonists. I grabbed on to just about any I could find and came up with ways to justify how this clearly Asian character could have such a distinctly non-Asian name.

I mean, look at him. Black hair, dark eyes, and when you see his full outfit it resembles an 80s Japanese high school uniform. His character design doesn't scream Scandinavia.

So Sven reverted to Shiro in Voltron: Legendary Defender, and the creative staff talked about pulling in a lot of Takashi Shirogane's traits from Go Lion that never really carried over to the American Voltron.

It sounded good, but until I saw it play out it would only be good intentions, and I'd seen good intentions before.

There's a lot to like about Voltron: Legendary Defender, but for me personally, I was most happy to have Shiro, whose full canonical name in the show now isTakashi Shirogane (you can see it on the news in the flashback when Pidge is learning about the Kerberos incident).

It is so rare to have an Asian team leader in an American-produced show, where the series isn't about being Asian. Shiro's heritage never comes up and I'm happy. The focus is on fighting an alien tyrant and becoming a team, none of which requires that the team leader be Japanese.

Which makes it all the more important that he is.

A character shouldn't be defined solely by their ethnicity and this is a role that Asians seldom get.

Shiro doesn't fall into stereotypes. Though he knows martial arts, everyone on the team does so that's no big deal. He doesn't speak with a funny accent. He's not the nerdy Asian boy. Character design-wise he's broad-chested and the tallest member of the team. Those are not traits commonly assigned to Asian characters!

This confident guy in the middle? The obvious leader? Totally Asian.

And I'm admittedly a sucker for guys with a strong sense of duty, so as a character Shiro pushes all the right buttons.

He's not entirely the Sven I remember from childhood, but I find I love Shiro just fine.

Okay, maybe there are some things about him that haven't changed.

I have to admit, then when I saw Shiro crossing his arms and leaning against the wall, I immediately thought of Sven, because he did that so many times in what few episodes he was in.

Considering how much Asian media gets distorted and changed when adapted and brought to the US, it's amazing to actually see a previously adapted character restored and made closer to the original.

They could have named him anything when they changed his ethnicity back to Japanese, but the fact they specifically chose Takashi Shirogane means something, and I appreciate that.

This New Voltron Thing...

Everyone has that childhood show, where even though it hasn't stood up to the tests of time, it's still full of fond memories.

For me, that's Voltron. It aired at 3:30 in the afternoon, so I could watch it if I got home from school in time. It even aired in the mornings at 7am, and my mother would tape it on VHS if I was diligent about my piano practice (though I was disappointed to find out the morning Voltron was the vehicle team rather than the lion one).

At Wondercon this year, a lot of information on the latest incarnation of Voltron was coming out, and having been a long time fan, it's hard being upbeat about any new Voltron media. It's had a terrible track record updating itself.

Voltron: The Third Dimension made a good effort to reach out to fans in those early days of the internet, but good intentions and even the presence of half the original cast and one of the original writers couldn't fix a clunky script or the fact that computer animation was just not ready at the budget they were willing to work with, resulting in characters who were wooden in both personality and movement. (I specify the budget because by the time it came out Square had already released the ballroom dance scene for Final Fantasy VIII and it was light years ahead of what The Third Dimension was doing, so the tech definitely existed.)

Voltron Force was better. I could tell the writers really loved the original, and they likewise communicated with long time fans, but the addition of the three teenage sidekicks, one of whom was a bona fide Voltron fanboy, resulted in a show that was perhaps trying too hard to bring a new fanbase up to speed on the original. While I loved seeing Sven come back for an episode, listening to Daniel info-dump everything (and more) that a new viewer needed to know was tiring even for me. It was a precarious balancing act that never quite found its footing.

Dreamworks' new Voltron: Legendary Defender is going to be my third ride on the "Let's bring Voltron back" merry-go-round (not counting comic books), and I have to wonder, is it even possible to bring back that feeling from when I was a kid again?

Certainly enough people are trying.

One of the problems is that the original material hasn't aged well. Outside of major story arcs (beginning, end, and maybe two or three multi-parters in the middle), it's a very by the numbers show. Zarkon or one of his followers hatches a plan, a robeast shows up, Voltron is formed, and then the robeast dies on the blade of the Blazing Sword. All in under 25 minutes.

I am a bit hopeful for the Netflix/Dreamworks version for a couple reasons though:

1) Unlike the other series which have tried to be sequels to the original, the Dreamworks version is going to be a reboot. This allows new fans to get in without the burden of getting up to speed on the original. After watching the previous two series try to accommodate existing canon, I think this is the best option.

2) The producers and the animation studio previously worked on Avatar: The Last Airbender and Legend of Korra, which played very well to both older and younger audiences. They might be able to better bridge the gap to engage older viewers without alienating kids.

The one decision that stands out at me though is what they did with Sven.

In the original Japanese GoLion, Sven is killed off early in the series, but in the American dub, he's shipped off to another planet to heal and returns later in the series as a scavenger who eventually falls in love with Princess Romelle and helps lead the ground forces in the attack on Zarkon's castle (the returnee is actually his younger brother in the Japanese version).

For someone who is absent most of the series, Sven is a rather popular character. For both The Third Dimension and Voltron Force the common question that came up while the shows were airing is "What happened to Sven?"

Since he's no longer one of the five pilots it's understandable that sequel shows did not have an easy way to accommodate him as a recurring character without also bringing Romelle into the picture (since Sven went to live with her on her planet rather than return to the Voltron Force in the second season). Voltron Force managed a guest appearance with him and without Romelle, but then awkwardly gave him a son, which brought up the question of who the mother was. (One of the scriptwriters later confirmed it was Romelle, but that they didn't have room to introduce her as well.)

Rebooting everything changes this, and I am cautiously hopeful that they do intend to do more with Sven.

It would have been hideously easy to have cropped Sven out of the reboot. Or to kill/incapacitate him again. But oddly enough, they renamed him, which seems an odd measure to take for a dead man walking.

He's Shiro in the reboot, after his original name Takashi Shirogane (Shirogane being the last name), and news sites are reporting that the story will focus on "Keith, Lance, Hunk, Pidge, and Shiro" which makes him sound like he's part of the main cast. His voice actor is in the same promo shot as the VAs for the other four pilots and Allura's is not, even though she is the Blue Lion pilot for most of the original series.

It's encouraging that the production staff seem to have consciously rolled him back to Japanese to avoid having a bunch of white dudes. I have no problem with this, no matter my childhood fondness for the American dub. Of all the original pilots, Sven always came across as more Asian than the others. If you watch Sven's duel against Haggar in the original episode 6, his concentration sequence is very much out of a martial arts movie.

Less encouraging is that reboot makes him the team leader. On the one hand, yay, there is an Asian dude as the team leader, but on the other, everyone knows Keith is the leader of the Voltron Force, so it likely means bad things in store for Shiro to make that hand-off happen. This is not the first time Sven's been placed in charge of the team (Brandon Thomas's Voltron Year One comic also makes Sven the team leader), but that was a prequel. People are going to expect to see Keith in the driver's seat and I'm not sure how long he'll be second fiddle.

My hope is that due to the name change and extra attention paid because of it, Shiro will not be killed/sent off to heal where he disappears the majority of the series. Perhaps he could be incapacitated long enough that Keith has to take command and they eventually leave that as the status quo, but this is an opportunity to do more with a beloved character.

I realize that keeping him on the team would also make it an all dude Voltron Force, which is not ideal either, but he doesn't necessarily have to be a pilot. Just keep him around. Give him other things to do. He's a capable guy. And if there's a season 2, let him meet Romelle again. It'll be fun.