There’s a character with an all-consuming obsession with pudding (amusingly, the only bird whose ‘human version’ portrait is still a bird) and liberal use of the term “everybirdie.” Yeah.Īs if the posh pigeon is ever going to eat food from a stall. Not that Hatoful Boyfriend is afraid to play smartly-dumb when necessary. The prospect of a (nearly) all-pigeon dating game got me interested, but those gags about agrarian social strata in Marxist-Leninist Russia really sealed the relationship. It’s a smart game too, making off-hand jokes about Kulaks within minutes of the opening scenes.
It allows the game to pass off both over-the-top situations and crazy plot twists as part of an overall campy charm, while also sneaking in several genuine, sweet moments of storytelling. It has it’s share of outlandish moments, but Hatoful Boyfriend’s premise of a woman pursuing bird romance during an extraordinary school year is played almost entirely straight. But the two games share a serious tonal approach to the utterly absurd. I’m not saying I enjoyed Hatoful Boyfriend as much as Barkley, because that level of human enjoyment can only be achieved with a deft blend of basketball, Ghost Dad references and Shrekmonos. Rather like Barkley: Shut Up & Jam: Gaiden, which was a terrific RPG as well as terrific piss-take of RPG conventions and melodramatic plots. Hatoful Boyfriend is one of those joyful parodies which has such an obvious love and knowledge for the workings of its subject that it also manages to exemplify the genre.
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