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Hatoful boyfriend shuu ending1/3/2024 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. 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.
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