Hatoful Boyfriend: Two Bi Men Play Dating Simulators 2

Jon: Hatoful Boyfriend is a game about romancing birds. That’s a frankly incredible premise that on paper sounds amazing. You’re at a private school, you’re the only human, it’s a ridiculous premise that appeals to me almost to the level of pandering. It pays off, too – I definitely enjoyed this more than Coming Out On Top, I was much more enthusiastic about replaying. What about you, Justin?

Justin: I liked it A LOT more than Coming Out on Top. My first run through felt like I was playing a game! Something free of the oppressive rules of society! I was just dating birds and ghosts and ghosts birds! It was a lot of punny, silly fun – but of course, but the time you’ve been through four different story lines it does become a bit hard to not think about some of the material in the game.

Jon: I definitely was aware of the bones of it as I was replaying. A downside that the visual novel genre shares with most other video games is the strict delineation of gameplay. There’s always a hallway that you’re running down, even if some games make that hallway seem bigger. Hatoful Boyfriend definitely didn’t do much to hide those strings – my first playthrough differed only from my second with plot scenes related to my chosen birdfriend, which says a lot in a game that’s meant to be replayable with a focus on text. Other games tend to mask it with the ability to change your focus early on (cf. replayable sandbox games that let you drop the story whenever).

Justin: Yeah and I was in no way expecting this to be some sort of flexible sandbox game but the game does suggest its going to go the way of RPG by showing intellect, stamina and charisma points. Which sadly turn out to be a bit of a red herring.I think they where part of the games fourth wall breaking techniques but it did (for a second) think I was going to get more than I did.

Jon: I still don’t quite understand those points. They never seemed to show a reason for being other than being scolded by the teacher for not maxing out my WIS(dom). Even as I wrack my brains about checks I might have accidentally passed, it’s still got to be a low bar to pass which seems almost redundant.

Justin: I was an amazing student when I hung out at the library but I seemed to fail when I tried out more for the track team. I assume this was the games way of shutting off story lines.the only time it seemed to matter was as a way to make the rich snooty bird admire me at the end of the year If it sounds like I’m damning with faint praise I’m not. I really loved the games sense of humor and I appreciate anything that prods at the fourth wall.

Jon: Now Justin, I romanced the snooty bird and I seemed to pass all of his checks with reasonably limited failure. I didn’t even make it to the end of either year I played, as the game’s endings popped in almost prematurely as our ‘romance’ bloomed. Which, you know, fair enough, since my first boyfriend was a ghost. Again – that was unexpected but a thing that appeals greatly.

Justin: I knew we were kindred spirits Jon; I did the ghost bird first as well. “HE LIVES IN A LIBRARY! I KNOW WHAT HE WANTS” I said to myself. But even then the game did feel like it ended suddenly. It’s definitely a game meant for multiple replays, I think. There are 24 endings to get and I only saw four. I did want to see more weirdness though, the other two story lines I played were (including the rich kid pigeon) frothy and very “Mills and boon” romances. I suppose I was hoping for more weirdness. In saying that, the game does seem to have a rich lore that is only hinted at. That lore and the slow referencing of it kept me coming back.

Jon: The other ‘ending’ I got, since we’re on that subject, was the female bird, Azami. It’s a joke ending all the same, but I found it to be almost startling in that it highlighted the one thing I wasn’t expecting – for a game about fucking birds, it’s very straight. You play a female character, and there are references to your gender enough that you can’t even pretend your character is male. When Azami popped up, I was sure that at last a same sex option was rearing it’s head. “Great,” I thought, “Let’s do that.” I did that. I set her up with a kinda awful guy. I romanced a ghost afterwards because I was on that path. It definitely felt like a big flashing light over the game, that the one female-bird was also aggressively straight.

Justin: Oh I didn’t even get the Azami story line, but I totally get what you mean by aggressively straight. There’s a point in one of the story lines where your character applies for a job at a cafe but then gives it up so the bird of her affections can have a job and help his sick mother pay the bills. After a couple of days you see the male identifying (and I say that only because that’s how your character identifies him) on the street dressed as a woman. It turns out the cafe is a “transvestite cafe” (their unfortunate words) and when you drop by and see him at work you have to call him “Cooleen”. It was played for laughs I guess but it was odd and flippant and (though I didn’t see all the endings) it did feel a little weird. It’s not mentioned again and just seems out of place.

Jon: Now that’s what I didn’t get. The Azami ending is slightly… off, in that the gender politics are skewed entirely in favor of making romance ‘happen’. It’s telling that you almost stop being friends with your life-long pigeon friend if you’re not trying to romance them. The Azami ending definitely gave me flashbacks to Coming Out On Top in that it had that same problem hidden away in the core of itself – neither game seemed particularly interested in the lives of their characters outside of finding dick, but in this case it seemed particularly egregious to take one of two female characters I’d met in both of my playthrough and awkwardly force her into a heterosexual romance for comic relief.

Justin: Like Coming Out On Top this is a game where you are either dating or not and everything in the game is geared towards finding that sweet sweet tail feather. Last month we talked about how the coming out in Coming Out On Top was an old trope that maybe we could move beyond, with this game I guess its almost a step back to “representation is important/would be great”? I suppose one of the highlights of the game is that, if played casually it does create something akin to “gamer water cooler chat”. Discussing what paths you did and didn’t get is pretty fun and because of the sudden changes of tone in some of them it can totally feel like a (slightly) different game from one to the next. However in the end those paths are limited to, “I am a girl with very … particular (heterosexual) tastes”.

Jon: And boy, what particular tastes they are. I (didn’t actually) appreciate how given the breadth of tropes it used for its characters and how there was plenty of diversity in the birds, even the fancy ‘human’ versions of the birds were skinny-ass pretty boys. Even the scummy doctor portrayed by a fat bird was a cute waif. I realise the birds are the canon, but even so, it threw up a lot of those self-same red flags that Coming Out On Top did for very different reasons. Like you said, here representation was sorely lacking, there it was throw-away to the point of gross excess. It seems like the Visual Novel is a ripe breeding ground for this kind of thing – we’ve already had so many games throw in token representation in the past 10 years, to the point where a single cis-female bird being thrown so bluntly into heterosexuality seems like a huge waste.

Justin: Look, I liked Hatoful most of the time. There was a lot of talk around its English release about how it was well received in Japan because of its parody of the VN/Dating sim genre. But surely you can diversify a game just a little? Surely the art style doesn’t have to be so limited EVERY TIME? and I know we’ve talked about how gameplay isn’t a thing but after playing the truly exceptional 80 Days (a mobile Visual Novel retelling of Around the World in 80 Days) I was really hoping for a game with a little more to do other than just pressing the enter key. Bird puns (no matter how great) can’t sustain me through a game which is just the same hetero love story with a different bird everytime.

Jon: It’s hard not to enjoy Hatoful Boyfriend most of the time. It’s just the right kind of ridiculous. I can’t offer a solution here other than the simple reality that representation is the only solution for a lack of itself. It didn’t detract from the gameplay experience, but given the nature of our playthroughs here it’s very difficult not to be drawn to it. Like so many things, I’ll recommend it to people I know, but I’m not sure it’ll be enough. As a good friend said to me a while ago – “I just can’t care about these kinds of stories anymore”. It’s a real stumbling block, and I wonder how I’ll feel in 6 months looking back on this as a memory. I hate to say it, but there was almost too much cock in this bird game.

Justin: So is this one bird in the hand or two in the bush, Jon? Did you see what I did there?

Jon: I did, and honestly, I rate it seven fat birds out of ten big ol’ titmice. Fun, but limited.

Justin: Yup, I’d go with seven patridges in a pear tree because I am really great at jokes.

Jon: Eh, agree to disagree.

Mediatonic’s Hatoful Boyfriend is available now from Steam and GOG.com

Jon tweets at , Justin tweets at .