Can anybirdie find me somebirdie to love?
Important note: If you have not played Hatoful Boyfriend and are planning to, do not read this post. I have not shied away from spoilers since I wanted to talk about the game’s full impact on me. This includes the plot twist. Experience the birdie love for yourself before reading on.
If you’re unfamiliar with Hatoful Boyfriend (website is mostly in Japanese), know that it is a dating sim visual novel that aims to be ridiculous and exists as an affectionate parody of the genre. Yes, the conquests are all birds. Moving on …
SPOILERS AHEAD (duh.)
I bought this game knowing I was in for something absurd: a dating sim with pigeons that had many, many hilarious Steam reviews. It was only natural that I bring it into my life as quickly as possible.
It was the best decision I made on that day, September 18th, 2014.
Note: all images are screenshots from my game.
Our story begins with the only human student at St. Pigeonation, a prestigious school for birds. You have the option to name her whatever you want, but her default name is Hiyoko Tosaka. She is frequently called primitive and being the only human is something that is brought up frequently by the other birds and by Hiyoko herself. In fact, her home is actually a cave far away from the school, where she runs for exercise and eats udon. What a charmer.
The candidates are introduced in true anime style: the slightly weak childhood friend (Ryouta), the shy underclassman (Nageki), the dashing senpai (Yuuya), the narcissistic student council leader with a hidden talent (Sakuya), your teacher (Kazuaki), the sketchy older man (Shuu – he’s obviously evil, just sayin’), and Okosan (the oddball/joke romance option). Other options include Anghel and Azami, though they require specific choices from the player to be included. Anghel’s path requires the game to be played at least once for his trigger to appear (it is the fourth choice for Hiyoko’s wish on Tanabata). The majority of the romance options have a “good” or “bad” ending, depending on your choices. Failing to romance anybirdie results in a bad ending, though I’m not sure why you’d play a pigeon dating sim and not pursue anyone.
We follow Hiyoko Tosaka through the start of her sophomore year, choosing the club she joins as well as her electives. These choices contribute to deciding which birdie you are going to romance and, often, one misjudged choice can send you down the path to a different ending or through the game’s sideplot. For the purpose of this review, I chose to romance Okosan (known as “San” on some title cards) as well as complete the Bad Boy’s Love (BBL) ending. The latter is very time consuming as I consider it the “real story”, so this post comes to you from several hours of gameplay and screenshot-collecting.
Okosan is probably the easiest to romance, in my opinion, as well as the most hilarious. He’s actually based on the creator’s (moa810) pet bird, though the real Okosan is not obsessed with pudding.
Mainly, the criteria for romancing each bird comes down to picking the correct extracurricular club, electives, and dialogue options. Additionally, the “Legumentine’s” event (if you make it that far) serves as a trade-in for Valentine’s Day where Hiyoko gives whichever bird she has the highest affection for a gift of beans, purchased as part of the event. Choosing the right kind of beans for your crush is integral to a good ending with them.
Aside from Legumentine’s, there are a number of events that occur during the course of the game. Regardless of the path chosen, you will always experience the Sports Day at school, Tanabata, the class hike, the culture event at school, and the summer festival. I think Legumentine’s is also regardless of your choices, but I feel as though there was at least one playthrough where I didn’t make it that far. Some paths include a trip to the shrine at New Year’s and/or a Christmas party at Sakuya’s (available on his romance path). Usually, the events that you experience (or don’t) are indicative of how successful your conquest of birdie-love is going. This is why it’s rewarding to play the game multiple times. Paths such as Anghel’s unlock after playing through the game at least once and completing all of the options is required in order to reach the Bad Boy’s Love ending – which is essentially the heart of the game.
In case you decided to keep reading despite spoiler warnings, this is where the real spoiler warning comes into effect. What follows is a description of the BBL path, which will include screenshots from the endgame.
This is your last chance to turn away and experience the BBL path for yourself.
You’ll know you’ve unlocked the BBL path when, after starting a new game, you are prompted to make a choice: do you live a normal life or do you fulfill a promise? Choosing to live a normal life starts the game off as it always does. Fulfilling a promise, however, triggers the BBL path. At first, it seems like a regular game. You can happily do whatever you want during this time – for the playthrough I did for this review, I opted to do the summer vacation subplot (which, actually, has two achievements attached to it, depending on which outcome you choose). This subplot features one of my favourite characters in the entire game:
Azami, a scooter-riding takoyaki salesbirdie (well, she’s a sparrow) encounters you while you are out for a run. This occurs regardless of whether you opt into the subplot or not. If you choose to take on a summer job during the break, you begin working at a café*. The regular customer happens to be an, *ahem*, old flame of Azami’s and with your guidance, you can bring them back together or ride off into the sunset with Azami.
This hilarious departure from Hiyoko’s storyline is a nice break when you’re dragging yourself through all of the paths over and over again during your quest to unlock the BBL path. You need to unlock the achievements anyway, so you’ll have to do it at least twice. Anyway, onto the special ending stuff.
During my BBL path, I decided (on a whim) to romance Sakuya. However, due to when the BBL path starts, I was unable to experience the extravagant Christmas party that you normally attend during a regular run of his path. The game continues as normal until, well, everything changes.
The shift in plot comes with a switch in perspective. The BBL path is split between Ryouta and Sakuya. While some of the previous paths in the game–particularly Shuu and Yuuya’s–provide some semblances of explanation, the BBL path is what ties the plot together. Basically, it’s the serious path that no one expected based on the Steam store’s trailer for the game.
Ryouta comes to school late and discovers that Hiyoko is absent from school that morning. It just so happens that the lesson Hiyoko misses is about the bird-human conflict and the virus that can harm both of them–particularly humans. This information is integral to the plot of the BBL path, hence why it has been saved up to this moment.
After the class, Ryouta assists Kazuaki in bringing up a box from the staff room and, after finding blood on the corner of the it, open it up to reveal a grisly sight: Hiyoko’s severed head. Yeah, that’s where the game stops being fluffy and adorable (minus Shuu’s paths, of course). The protagonist you controlled for all those hours of gameplay has been mysteriously killed and dismembered, to the disgust and horror of everybirdie.
After gathering the students in the gymnasium, Ryouta discovers that other classrooms found body parts in their boxes as well. Hiyoko is quickly recovered and brought to the lab for an autopsy, where it’s discovered that she died from asphyxiation and was cut up hours after she had passed away. No one knows where or when she died and it seems like no one knew what happened to her after school. Ryouta and Sakuya begin their investigation to find out who killed Hiyoko and why. Their search takes them all over the school until they encounter …
When I first played the BBL path, this thing scared the shit out of me. It was also 4 AM, so that might have been why. I’ve heard that the original game required intensive saving during the BBL path as you could actually die. Thankfully, the HD remake (the one available on Steam) has done away with that. BBL takes around 2-3 hours depending on how quickly/slowly you read, so not having to worry about dying really helps get through it with more ease.
You uncover a lot of … interesting things during the course of this path and it all becomes a lot more sinister. Shuu’s paths gave a taste of the horrors to come, as in both his endings, Hiyoko gets killed rather brutally. Shuu is a very important character during the BBL path as he is at the centre of the main conflict. Other characters turn out to be even more essential to the plot as they are revealed to be political agents or even accomplices in the overarching conflict surrounding Hiyoko.
As Ryouta and Sakuya discover at various points during their investigation, the school was relatively new and had, at one point, a medical facility on school grounds that suffered a fire caused by the test subject that was kept within. Connecting the dots and finding a file labelled “Operation Hatoful”, the school’s true purpose is revealed: they were developing a strain of a virus that could be used to kill humans. Why then, was Hiyoko at the school? She was the “human representative”, chosen for her resistance to the influenza that killed so many humans before her.
We find out that her parents were bird mediators, killed during a particularly violent uprising at an orphanage – many birds and humans died. It is right after this uprising that Shuu becomes incredibly important. He is the one who made a promise with then-children Hiyoko and Ryouta – the promise of ending conflict between birds and humans. Of course, Shuu doesn’t exact this promise the way they intended, deciding that the only way to end the fight is to eliminate one side. So, he chose to study the virus and, eventually, destroy humanity with it. Solid plan, right? More horrible things are uncovered until, finally, the mystery of who killed Hiyoko is solved. It was none other than Ryouta himself. Shuu reveals that he had been conditioning Ryouta to be the perfect vessel for the virus so that, when the time came, he could unleash the virus on all of humanity with his very presence. Right after the live virus had been given to him, it just so happened that Hiyoko went to visit him in the infirmary and died.
I’m holding back an entire plot summary – I have a folder of screenshots I took for this review, but it’s been difficult to know what I should and shouldn’t include. After all, this game is better seen than described, really. The BBL path offers explanations for, well, everything and ties up all of the loose ends from before. It might sound weird, but, by the end I stopped seeing these characters as birds. Once the real story gets going, the birds stop being hilariously out of place. Maybe it’s just me, but as soon as the bird-human conflict came into play, the characters took such a serious turn (except for Anghel and Okosan, of course) and stopped being caricatures.
So much happens during the BBL path that writing out every detail would still not be sufficient. This is why I strongly encourage everyone to play the game and get to this point. It means completing every single path before it, but the real story is so, so worth it. It ceases being a silly dating sim VN (visual novel) and becomes something so much more. Well, maybe it’s still a little bit silly, but it’s definitely got a level of substance to it that I didn’t expect from the trailer alone. The characters are extremely loveable by the end (especially Okosan, but I’m biased) and this review allowed me to experience it all over again. Even if I didn’t play every single path this time around (it took me 7 hours to do everything the first time, after all). This game is truly a masterpiece hiding as a hilarious joke of a game and it’s the façade that allows the BBL path to be as successful as it is.
Well, I don’t think I managed to entirely capture my feelings about Hatoful Boyfriend, but it is such a difficult game to describe in full. Again, if you haven’t played it, you must. Hopefully by the time you’ve completed all of the paths and are ready to start the BBL endgame, you’ll have forgotten the details of this post and will experience it with the same shock and confusion that I did when I first played this game. I included a link to the Steam store at the top, but here it is again.
* remember? there was a note way back when. The café in the game is an actual place you can go to in Japan! (The website for the café is in Japanese.)
juliameadows 
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