Pigeon romance, war trauma and a cult classic: why Hatoful Boyfriend still lands

Hatoful Boyfriend asks a simple question: what if the only human at an elite high school was surrounded entirely by sapient birds? The answer, first released in 2011 as a Japanese dōjin soft otome visual novel for Microsoft Windows and OS X, is funnier, sadder and stranger than the premise suggests.

Trailer, via DevolverDigital.

St. PigeoNation’s Institute and the Only Human in the Room

Hatoful Boyfriend was developed by the dōjin circle PigeoNation Inc. and is the successor to a Flash game of the same name made for April Fools’ Day in 2011. A free demo built with the FamousWriter engine followed, then a full commercial version released on 30 October 2011 at Comitia 98. An English version arrived in February 2012.

The international remake from developer Mediatonic and publisher Devolver Digital, called Hatoful Boyfriend HD in Japan, landed on 4 September 2014 for Microsoft Windows, OS X and Linux, then PlayStation 4 and PlayStation Vita on 21 July 2015 in North America and 22 July 2015 in Europe. An iOS port followed on 25 May 2016.

The title is a pun: hātofuru, the wasei-eigo word for “heartful,” plus hato, Japanese for pigeon or dove.

Ryouta Kawara and Eight Birds Worth Knowing

You play a boisterous hunter-gatherer who lives in a cave in the wilderness — the sole human at St. PigeoNation’s Institute in the fictional town of Littledove Hachiman City. Her eight love interests carry the game. Ryouta Kawara is a sickly, hardworking rock dove and childhood friend. Sakuya Le Bel Shirogane is a snobbish fantail pigeon aristocrat. His older half-brother Yuuya Sakazaki is flirtatious and secretive. Nageki Fujishiro is a bookish mourning dove who never leaves the library.

Then there is San Oko, an athletic fantail obsessed with pudding, and Anghel Higure, an eccentric Luzon bleeding-heart who behaves as if he were in a fantasy role-playing game. Kazuaki Nanaki is a kind but narcoleptic button quail and your homeroom teacher. Shuu Iwamine is a creepy, antisocial chukar partridge who serves as school doctor.

Bad Boys Love and the H5N1 Future

The dating sim hides its real weight behind the jokes. Bad Boys Love, a hidden alternate story mode, opens with the discovery of the protagonist’s corpse. The player then follows Ryouta as he investigates her death and unravels darker conspiracies around the school.

That mode reveals the setting: a post-apocalyptic future where a mutated H5N1 strain nearly wiped out mankind in 2068. A counter-virus meant to kill the virus’ avian carriers backfired. Birds that resisted it developed human-level intelligence, war broke out, and birds became the planet’s dominant lifeforms. Remaining humans live in the wilderness under apartheid-like segregation.

What Hatoful Boyfriend Gets Right

Gameplay is standard visual novel: mouse or keyboard, click to advance, choose between plot branches, save anywhere across several pages of slots, and skip dialogue you have already seen. Reviewers praised the replay value, writing and characterization, while repetitive gameplay and the accessibility of Bad Boys Love drew a more mixed response.

That split is fair, and it points at where the game actually lives. The romance routes are thin and the clicking is thin with them. The conspiracy underneath is the reason to stay — a dating sim that turns out to be science fiction about genocide, delivered without warning.

A sequel, Hatoful Boyfriend: Holiday Star, arrived on 29 December 2011, with an English version on Christmas Day the following year.

7.5/10.

dating sim · Devolver Digital · Hatoful Boyfriend · otome · PigeoNation · visual novel