And it felt fine to me to erase the protagonist because, as mentioned, her personality had already been so thoroughly whited out. Doing so elicits a lot of further information about the world, the past relations of the characters, and everyone’s motives: the mystery arc is much, much longer than any of the dating sim bits (though also, as far as I could tell, impossible to lose). This version of the game runs through the same initial choices and experiences as before, but then abruptly partway through the year the protagonist is brutally murdered, and the player takes on the viewpoint of other characters in order to investigate her death. It takes at least four or five playthroughs to unlock enough to get at the mystery storyline, codenamed Bad Boys Love. The cumulative effect, at least for me, was that the protagonist came to seem less and less important, even as my playerly understanding of the other characters increased.īut then - well, let’s give this a spoiler jump first. Otherwise, a lot of the potentially freighted moral choices dissolve with repetition and the fact that she has to take different sides of each issue depending on whom she wants to impress.
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There are only a few characteristics of hers that remain absolute, such as her vitality and love of running (and that proves to have an important plot relevance, eventually). With Hatoful Boyfriend, I felt that I was experiencing the opposite effect of this: the game expects you to play many times, and each time you must mold the protagonist in order to suit the tastes of the bird she’s pursuing. I couldn’t help thinking as I played about some of the arguments in Creatures Such as We, especially the idea that it’s hard to explore consent in a game in which all NPCs are prizes for the protagonist. In contrast with a lot of “ultimate ending” finales, though, the unlockable content in Hatoful Boyfriend is both much longer than the per-suitor stories, and of a different genre: a horrific mystery, rather than a romance, and one that does a lot to explain how a world of sentient pigeons has come about. As with many other dating sims, the game is designed to be replayed to unlock new content: you begin by romancing different suitors and finding out their secrets, which then allows you to access a different ending to the story. Quite a lot has already been written about Hatoful Boyfriend, often by people more familiar than I am with visual novel conventions - though the visual novel community, like the gamebook community, often seems so relevant to interactive fiction that it’s a little mystifying that there isn’t more communication. What initially seems like a whimsical premise gradually develops a bit more depth there’s even a website devoted to the writings of a prominent in-world pigeon blogger. You are a female human attending an otherwise all-bird school, and you have your choice of pigeons, quails, and doves, each possessing a characteristic personality.
![hatoful boyfriend human hatoful boyfriend human](http://www.playstationcountry.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Hatoful-Boyfriend_-Holiday-Star_20151218172558.jpg)
Hatoful Boyfriend is a visual novel of the dating sim genre(ish), in which all of the possible romantic leads are birds.