One quiet pigeon you meet in the library has an especially tragic ending that makes you rethink every interaction you’ve had with him. The best characters open up as you try to do the same with them and eventually explain the context for their behavior throughout the story. And it wouldn’t be so bad if every conclusion was worth it, but some of the characters veer into melancholic or too-predictable finales.īut when they hit, they hit. These pacing problems only surface because you’re so greatly incentivized to replay the game several times. It’s tedious even if you strategically place a save point after the game’s lengthy opening, and the story shifts don’t happen enough that you want to slow down. The most important moments happen later in the game, which means you have to flip through the dozens and dozens of dialogue text to get to the meatier conversations. The usual high school story beats - anxiety, peer-pressure and the like –are replaced by the deeply personal and strange stories you glean from your fellow pigeons. ![]() After a few runs through the game, slightly eased with a fast-forward button, you learn to manipulate the variables in the way that lets you see that particular character’s storyline and ending. And making the right decisions during the few, crucial times the game asks for your input, where you can join clubs, increase your wisdom, charisma, or vitality, side with classmates, and ask questions. This means spending all the time you can between classes with the narcoleptic homeroom teacher, or the childhood friend, or the scheming doctor, or the superhuman (or is it pigeon?) track runner. The intention, or, at least the intentions of the player character, a human girl, is to start a relationship with one of them, but really it’s to see their side of the quickly-familiar story and to eke out more information about the game’s surprisingly-realized world. They’re a quirky disguise that hides a cast of damaged and emotional characters for you to get to know over the course of several, repeated playthroughs.Įach journey through the game is colored by the character, or pigeon, you chase. The photo-realistic pigeons on top of anime backgrounds are not the point. To actually play this text-heavy, dating simulator game is to reveal a carefully constructed tale that grows bigger than its high school setting. That Hatoful Boyfriend, a game about dating teenage pigeons, is one of these stories might seem shocking when you see it, but that’s the problem: seeing it.
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