Bird Brained
Your best friend, the rock dove.
My best friend is a pigeon. That's fine because so are all of my classmates, my teacher, my boss at the cafe I work at, and everyone I interact with. They're all pigeons. Also, I'm in Japan and it might be the post apocalypse. There's pudding and ghosts and creepy rapist doctors.
Hatoful Boyfriend might be one of the weirdest games I've ever played.
You live in a cave and talk about your "Hunter Gatherer instincts".
Dumb Novel
Okosan.
Hatoful Boyfriend is... bizarre. At a glance it's a simple parody of the weird, often confusing sub-genre of games known as Visual Novels that are popular in Japan. These games range from well done and emotional stories to poorly disguised hentai sex simulators. My experience with them is limited at best, but I can tell that despite making fun of them Hatoful Boyfriend comes with a lot of experience.
People have all but forgotten how to make a proper parody, be it in games, books, or movies. The idea of a parody is not to simply point at the original and laugh at it, but rather to create an exact copy of the original in a humorous manor, accentuating the flaws and exaggerate the funniest parts of the original work.
Take, for example, the greatest parody film ever made: Airplane! Airplane is a comedy, and a damn funny one at that, but strip away the comedy parts and you're left with a really crappy but completely functional airplane disaster movie. That's because Airplane was written to be a crappy disaster movie, using an actual disaster movie script as the basis and just exaggerating what was funny about it.
In a similar vein, Hatoful Boyfriend is making fun of Japanese Visual Novels by being an almost exact copy of them. You play as a girl going through highschool life, taking test and meeting boys. It's a fairly common scenario, although usually played from the other side, that would fit right in with any normal Visual Novel.
Except for the pigeons.
Hatoful Boyfriend is constantly strange, and hilarious.
Our Feathered Friends
This happens too. Not sure what to make of it.
Everyone other then you is a pigeon, albeit extremely intelligent pigeons capable of speaking. There's about two seconds of back story to explain this, which is immediately ignored. You're going to have to accept that everyone is birds and just sort of move on.
There's your best friend, the rock dove. The teacher is a narcoleptic quail prone to falling asleep halfway through a senescence. There's mourning doves, fantail pigeons, and more, all with their own accompanying human portrait. Except the one bird seems to be an actual bird in a suit that's addicted to pudding.
This is a weird game.
Even the local punks are birds. Everybirdie is birds.
Each bird you interact with has their own personality and can be woo'd through repeated interaction. Hatoful Boyfriend is a game that, provided you can look past the weirdness, demands multiple playthroughs in order to see everything. To help this along a complete run will only take you ~90 minutes, but there's a staggering amount of outcomes that can be achieved.
I don't know if I can actually recommend Hatoful Boyfriend, because I don't really know what the fuck Hatoful Boyfriend is. It's a parody, and a damn good one at that. It's also an exceedingly funny game with strange writing and an almost alarmingly low budget appeal to it, including using Christmas and public domain music for most of the soundtrack. But it's still a visual novel, with almost no gameplay and a tonne of reading.
Beware of Blaster
Hatoful Boyfriend is a game worth playing if you're looking for something that's not only outside the box, but doesn't even live in the same neighborhood as the box's relatives. It's a game that spits in the face of everything else and looks damn weird while doing it.
image sources:
http://blogs-images.forbes.com/danielnyegriffiths/files/2014/06/Hatoful-Boyfriend-Logo_1402053849.png
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