14 DAY TRIAL // Hatoful Boyfriend might explore some weird themes and star pigeons, but the game is, at the core, a dating simulation that plays in many ways as a very traditional title in the genre, although it is tamer in terms of content than the other titles launched in Japan.
The actual gameplay is very limited, with players asked to only click in order to push dialog and scenes forward and sometimes choose between activities or characters in order to decide which path in the story they will follow.
This simplicity, coupled with the content heavy opening day of school, means that the game is sometimes hard to replay and pretty annoying for players.
The same feature of the game might also explain why the idea is not more prevalent in the West and why more indie developers do not try to tackle the genre.
More reaction, more violence
There’s little in the way of straight up action in Hatoful Boyfriend and even less direct violence, although some pretty criminal actions are implied, and that is one of the reasons why most gamers in the United States and in Europe do not love the concept.
We prefer to have clear control over the fates of our characters and to have the tools that enable us to stop those who would harm them.
In the pigeon dating sim, there’s no way to stop your own assassination and the event actually serves as a way to justify playing the title more than one time.
A typical Western player probably feels that he has too little control to make Hatoful Boyfriend interesting in the long term and will only interact with it enough to see the pigeons and experience some of the humor.
More than an oddity
The good news is that the video game is more than the sum of its parts and can deliver interesting commentary on the nature of video games and on the way we perceive the dominance of the human race over the natural world.
Getting all of this from the experience requires some time, and more important, patience, and that’s another thing that Western gamers tend to sometimes lack.
We’re bombarded with so many releases that we do not have the hours we need to see everything and to play everything, and unfortunately, the weirder experiences are the ones that get the least time, even if they deserve more.