This is certainly evident in the original game and something my good friend Drew noted in his review, when he stated “if you’re not much of a reader, stay away.” To be fair, Hatoful Boyfriend doesn’t hide the fact that its emphasis is placed on visual storytelling. I simply found myself asking what, exactly, the point of this choice was, other than being a completely arbitrary placeholder with absolutely no meaningful impact on the story whatsoever. Even these choices seemed entirely redundant: while at a department store investigating the whereabouts of the Christmas Thieves, I was prompted at the end of the dialogue sequence to choose whether I wanted to leave the store, go to the furniture section or go to another part of the shop. In the first episode, other than facing a mere two or three choices to push the narrative on, I spent thirty minutes simply clicking my mouse to progress through screen after screen of dialogue. In addition, the interaction is so sparse that it is difficult to judge Hatoful Boyfriend: Holiday Star as a ‘game’. Instead, the plots and musical cues of each episode simply feel forced around this theme and as a result, seem poorly executed. The festive theme isn’t as ‘fun’ as is probably intended, either. Everything has a sense of absurdity about it, and not in a good way – especially given that the player’s prior experience with Hatoful Boyfriend is taken for granted. I found the episodes I played to be quite tedious, and they didn’t really capture my attention. Maybe partly because of this very reason, the stories struck me as being relatively boring. The game simply assumes the player’s familiarity with each and every bird a miscue that really undermines their characterisation as it relates to the stories being told and, indeed, the overall accessibility of an already-established narrative world. Having not played the original title, my ability to understand each of these distinct characters and their interactions was a real struggle. However, with this positive comes a ‘but’, and that but is this: Holiday Star is extremely confusing for new players. Holiday Star does do a decent job of establishing characters that feel distinct through the game’s use of dialogue. The story follows the investigation into these thefts, an attempt to lure the thieves by planting a Christmas tree as bait, and the final showdown between the thieves and Holiday Star’s pigeon heroes.Īll of this is essentially navigated by the player in the form of a visual novel progressed via standard text-based gameplay in which the player clicks along with the images and makes decisions at certain points in the narrative.
The first episode, for example, tells the story of some renegade Christmas Thieves, who have been flying about stealing Christmas trees from all over town. The episodes are relatively compact, clocking in at around thirty minutes each. Hatoful Boyfriend: Holiday Star is an episodic journey, containing four main stories and six short stories. With the precise nature of the pigeon presence in Hatoful Boyfriend firmly established, developer Mediatonic decided the time was right for Holiday Star a festive-themed sequel. Instead, it’s merely everyone else who is a pigeon, so that’s totally fine. This is a smart move on the part of the developers, as it would probably have made the game a little too far out for most. There is one caveat to this concept: the player, as the central character, is not actually a pigeon. A Japanese dating sim with pigeons which debuted earlier this year on PS4, Hatoful Boyfriend puts forward the romancing of pigeons as its central narrative concept.
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