Fun Games You Aren’t Playing - Hatoful Boyfriend

Dungeon Dame here, showcasing my collection of oddities, indies, and forgotten favorites in the gaming world. Everyone, I’ve got a real oddity for you this week, and one of my most treasured guilty pleasures. 

There have been several Japanese visual novel games washing up on American shores lately, but none quite as peculiar as Hatoful Boyfriend, a dating sim in which you play a lovestruck human girl in a school full of assumedly attractive pigeons. 

Yes, you read that correctly-- it’s a pigeon dating game. A really entertaining, fun, engaging pigeon dating game.

Hatoful Boyfriend is a play on the words “heart” and “hato”, the Japanese word for “pigeon.” The game makes it very clear that yes, you are a human, and you are at a school full of birds. Birds that you want to date. This game is clearly one of those jokes that gets taken way too far and is all the more awesome for it (I’m pretty sure this is how Sharknado happened as well). The best silly jokes are the ones that are played straight: the creator of Hatoful Boyfriend never skimps on the drama, the romance clichés, and the well-loved elements of the visual novel genre, adding further absurdity to the bird characters.

Each potential love interest is introduced with an optional “human” portrait to give you an idea of how our protagonist might fall for these gentlebirds (one character noticeably does not have a human-like equivalent: he’s all bird, baby). Other than that brief moment at the beginning of the game, all the characters are images of birds-- a mourning dove, a quail, a particularly sinister partridge.

****more after the break****

The story is surprisingly well-written for essentially a joke game; each birdy has a unique backstory that unfolds as you pursue them. This game is deeper than you think, with some of the plotlines revealing that there’s far more going on at this pigeon school than meets the eye. I won’t spoil the fun for you; it’s much more exciting to go into it blindly.

One of the best parts of this game is its cult status and enthusiastic fan base; just searching “Hatoful Boyfriend” on Google Images brings up a staggering amount of fan art, cosplay, and other geekery. If you’re having trouble seducing one of the characters, there are plenty of guides to help you unlock story elements. I’m assuming there is also fan-fiction, but I haven’t been brave enough to seek it out yet.

Hatoful Boyfriend was just released TODAY for an international audience; I purchased the Japanese version, but I’m buying the game again-- it really is that fun. If you enjoy campy B-movies, romance parodies, or birdwatching, you owe it to yourself to give this game a try.

Coo! Coo! (My favorite pigeon is Oko-san)

-The Dungeon Dame