This Week In Retro (belated): Hatoful Boyfriend

July 31, 2011: Love is not love which alters when it columbidae finds

by Diamond Feit

I don't think this news will surprise anyone, but I had an extremely lonely adolescence. My circle of friends was rather small and all male, which means my formative years were spent coveting company with girls. This proved to be a self-defeating pattern, as the last thing a teenage girl wants to do is hang out with a quiet kid whose entire approach to dating is "why won't anyone date me." If desperation existed in the visible spectrum, high-school-me would have radiated with the light of a hundred suns.

Given my circumstances, video games were all the more attractive considering my friends and I all liked them and I welcomed any opportunity to experience a reality other than my own. Yet despite meeting all the usual criteria, I was never a fan of dating simulators. Perhaps toxic masculinity convinced me the genre was too "feminine," or perhaps I was worried that struggling to meet virtual romantic partners would only serve to remind me of the miserable state of my real-life love life. Whatever the reasons, I ignored the entire genre for many years, filing it next to sports games and racing games as Not For Me.

Having stacked the deck against indulging my curiosity, it wasn't until last year that I put any serious time into exploring dating sims, but thanks to PlayStation Plus I discovered that I had access to several choice examples at no cost. As luck would have it, the one I played and enjoyed the most happens to celebrate its 10th anniversary this week: Hatoful Boyfriend, a surreal, absurd entry in the genre that nonetheless stands as a sterling example of it.

Hatoful Boyfriend takes place at an exclusive high school and over the course of an entire academic year. The player's avatar is never seen but is, canonically, a teenage girl. When she's not in class, she's free to engage in extracurricular activities, get to know her teachers, or just spend time at home in her cave. Depending on the choices she makes, she may find herself smitten with one of the many guys in her life, or she might meet with a cruel fate. It rarely takes more than 30 minutes to see one of the games' many endings, with the idea being that players can try and try again to see all the potential storylines play out.

This is all standard in the dating game genre, but Hatoful Boyfriend has a twist: The protagonist is the only human being in a world populated by birds. There is optional in-game art to present an idealized, anthropomorphic vision of these potential partners, but to her they are all ordinary birds. Well, "ordinary" is relative, seeing as how these birds can all talk, learn complex tasks and concepts, and generally act as if they were people. It's all a pun reflected in the game's title: hato in Japanese sounds like "heart" but it's also the word for "pigeon" or "dove."

Considering that the player may only engage in romance with birds, there is an impressive amount of variety amongst the cast. Sakuya is president of the student council and very proud of his French heritage. Ryuuta is a sensitive lad who loves to cook but is in poor health. Anghel behaves as if he is the hero of a JRPG, while Shuu, the school doctor, might very well be a villain responsible for many students disappearing without a trace.

If Hatoful Boyfriend sounds like a silly game, it is, but it's not one that constantly winks at the audience or belittles the subject matter. A lot of "funny" games are anything but, relying instead on cheap gags or empty mockery. Comedy at the expense of the medium doesn't land when the work itself presents the same tired tropes to the player. It's like having a comic book character complain about the sexism of "women in refrigerators" but then the plot dictates that a woman must die in order to motivate a man anyway.

Hatoful Boyfriend uses its all-avian cast as a means to satirize the premise of falling in love with 2D characters, but still delivers everything that a dating game should with sincerity. Better still, the player learns small tidbits of lore and information surrounding the fiction of this world through repeated playthroughs, culminating in a grand finale that unites (nearly) all the characters. I got a kick out of Hatoful Boyfriend's weirder side-stories, but to see it all pay off with a conclusion full of genuine surprises made the entire experience better in hindsight.

As a niche work with a hyper-focused parody concept, Hatoful Boyfriend sprung from the mind of one person, an Osaka artist named Hato Moa (no doubt a pseudonym). The project began as-what else?-an April Fool's joke. In a 2016 interview, Moa described Hatoful Boyfriend's genesis as "I like RPGs, especially JRPGs and I noticed that there are a lot of games with twists in them, so I wanted to try that as well. But mostly, I just love birds."

The original Japanese freeware version of Hatoful Boyfriend launched on July 31, 2011, but within a few months a commercial version as well as an English-translation patch went public. The game gained a cult reputation worldwide, leading to a 2014 HD remake which has since been released on Steam as well as various consoles. Sony gave away free copies of both the PS4 and Vita ports in September 2017 via PlayStation Plus, so longtime members of that service may already have this game sitting in their library.

Dating sims have been around for decades, and I imagine my past skepticism regarding the genre is not uncommon among gamers outside Japan. If my reservations sounded relatable to you, or if you simply never heard of Hatoful Boyfriend before today, I strongly encourage you to give it a try. A satirical entry isn't always a great way to experience an unfamiliar genre, but in this case, I think the strangeness accentuates the comedy and makes the denouement all the more unexpected. Fair warning: I will not be held responsible if you find yourself checking out random pigeons in the wild. Carve it into your soul!

Diamond Feit lives in Osaka, Japan but is forever online, sharing idle thoughts on Twitter and playing games on Twitch.