However, if I was looking for an otome game to play for this Weebsmas, I might pick up the Mystic Messenger Holiday special instead. But it’s still a really entertaining game–like, I played through the whole thing for sure. Like it’s labeled as such, but it’s pretty far from dating and also far from true holiday activity. Overall, Hatoful Boyfriend: Holiday Star was not really a holiday otome. The primary playable character in Hatoful Boyfriend is the human protagonist, a boisterous hunter-gatherer who lives in a cave in the wilderness. Kinda wished that there was more of that and less of…army tanks and strange fights…but then again what do I expect from Hatoful Boyfriend? And those were like less than five minutes each and kinda random. There were short New Years specials for each of the boys–err, I mean birds. It was a ride alright with a lot of strange reveals I would not expect–then again, I had thought that I would get a LOT more holiday content or dating content but this game is filled with a lot of…not that. They are on like a ‘holiday star’ but it has little to do with the holidays and actually becomes this really dark story about death and murder and at one point it does make me feel like I want to tear up over it.
The main draw, of course, was that the characters in the game were all birds except for the protagonist, who is a human girl and. This game came out with minimal fanfare last month, a remake of a Japanese dating sim from a few years ago. All the birds and the MC go to view the eclipse and end up in a dream they can’t wake up from. I spent several hours with Hatoful Boyfriend last night and I seriously need to get something off my chest. The last two episodes are about a dream sequence.