Hatoful boyfriend sakuya route5/3/2023 As each of your potential avian suitors is introduced, a screen pops up showing what they would look like in human form, designed for easier immersion into what is initially a deeply bizarre world. You progress through your school year and eventually wind up with the bird of your dreams. (There’s also the sinister Shuu, who doesn’t fit cleanly into any of these roles, but we’ll come to him in a bit.) And they’re all, of course, birds.Ī quick recap: you play as a girl, default name Hiyoko Tosaka, beginning eleventh grade as the only human student attending the prestigious St Pigeonation’s Academy for birds. Hatoful Boyfriend leans on the shorthand of its genre by quickly establishing its love interests through well-worn tropes in a fairly vanilla high-school setting: there’s childhood friend Ryouta, aristocratic Sakuya, bookish Nageki, flirtatious Yuuya, hyperactive Okosan, overimaginative Anghel, and narcoleptic teacher Kazuaki. I’d argue that a typical romance game expects you to have cultivated a particular “type” or preference going into it, informed by other media, and thus can rely on very light character sketches to convey the nature of your romance options. There’s a strong sense of intertextuality in the medium, heavily informed by older tropes established through anime and manga as AM Cosmos points out, otome games have drawn on manga since the very beginning, and this has proven a pull factor for many women who otherwise wouldn’t try video games. It’s not uncommon for a lot of games, particularly those designed for mobile platforms and packed with microtransactions, to straight-up allow you to choose a romance option solely from a short introduction segment and knowledge of the bread-and-butter tropes of the genre. Most games take their romantic leads through incredibly predictable arcs, wringing the bare minimum of drama out of tired stock characters. (Major spoilers under the cut – yes, this game does have them.) This seems to me a fairly notable gap, since the way in which the game plays with expectations draws on the building blocks of the medium and goes well beyond “but then it gets dark”. Everything in the game serves as part of a very deliberate attempt to disrupt a genre which exists primarily in a sort of comfortable shorthand, and is largely complacent in being nothing more than simple wish-fulfilment fantasy. Rather than not being what it seems, Hatoful Boyfriend is exactly what it appears to be it pits the tropes of romance games against themselves and rounds out its characters far beyond expectations, which serves to critique the genre’s chronic self-absorption and, in doing so, manages to produce something with wide-ranging and genuine appeal. ![]() On the other hand, very little’s been said about its place within the wider tradition of the genre of otome games (romances with female protagonists targeted towards a female audience, usually with multiple endings) and romance games as a whole. To continue the cake analogy, the icing in Hatoful was an odd flavor, but the cake was SO GOOD that it didn't need any icing, or rather, it brought out those odd icing flavors in a uniquely satisfying and cohesive way.Most of what’s been written about infamous pigeon-dating sim Hatoful Boyfriend deals with the fundamental bait-and-switch of the game’s entire premise, namely the way in which it establishes itself as a jokey romance game and ultimately winds up as more of a psychological thriller. On some level, it doesn't matter what the character looks like, because that's just icing, not cake. Not sure if this is what the writers intended, but the way I interpreted is: When your story is engaging, you can throw up whatever image you want to represent a character, be it an ikemen or even a freaking pigeon. The true cake underneath is the unique narrative format of VNs and otome specifically - character-driven exploration of different aspects of the same universe/events. The hot guys with sexy voices are awesome and make otomes really fun and addictive, but that's just the icing on the cake. To me, the main thing I want out of a VN-style game is an engaging story. The pigeon sprites didn't bother me at all and I did some reflection on why. My husband (who doesn't play otome but listens to me talk about it all the time) aptly called it a "meta-otome" which I thought was brilliant. I am so glad I waited until I had been playing otomes for a few years to give it a try because otherwise I would have missed a lot of what makes the game special. ![]() ![]() Crazy story, I binged all of Hatoful yesterday and was coming here to make a post about it.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |