I'm sure most people, like myself, thought it connotated a Japanglish turn of phrase, "heart full", like these birbs' hearts are FULL OF LOVE. Even the title itself was ingeniously created. OP has already analyzed everything to perfection, so I'll just add the following things that impressed me: (And the fact that I first heard of it through Pewdiepie.) But then I kept hearing how amazing it was from people in the know.Īlso assuming that I don't have to spoiler-tag anything in HB base game since OP already made clear this post is chock full of spoilers. I took one look at the premise and the unglamorous graphics and turned up my nose. Whoo hoo, yes, this was a surprisingly awesome game. Supposedly a third game is in development! I'll definitely try to play it soon, after I get some of these projects out of the way. Thanks for the writeup between last night and this post, it's shot the game up on my list. I'm glad that, for a lot of people who've played Hatoful Boyfriend, that seems to be the case. Jokes are the most powerful tool an author has at articulating what they value, at what compels them, and I feel pretty certain that if you can in-joke about convention and land the punchline, an audience will follow you to the ends of the earth. Great satire is proud of the obsessiveness that bore it. I think a large part of why that's possible is, to paraphrase a friend who was talking about Undertale, that by establishing familiarity with the reader through comedy or satire, you earn their trust when for when you wish to critique a broader set of themes, play with genre tropes, or just straight up invert the tone completely. Not only is Hatoful Boyfriend apparently successful in juggling that on multiple layers - it's a game that operates well as comedic satire, as an earnest drama, as a psychological thriller, etc - it also seems to do so pretty effortlessly. It's super hard to be able to craft discrete elements that can handle both the scrutiny of the presented genre while also being able to survive the stressors of a tonal, multidimensional restructuring. cute thing actually horror really?" territory, and I can point to a only a few within the medium that really pull it off. It's not easy, either many videogames in particular really want to capture that, but those efforts almost always come up short for me, usually landing somewhere in the creepypasta-adjacent, "what if. I am such a sucker for the sort of atonal, dissonant genre shift that HB deals in. It definitely seems like it hits a lot of the right notes. During my ritualistic late night wiki surf, I ended up on the game's page and read the full, detailed plot synopsis: I've never been the type to be sensitive to spoilers, but I was so bummed out that I had unfairly relegated the game to some abstract "punches down on a genre already goofed on a lot" category in my head at some point. Hatoful Boyfriend was one of those games that I had figured I'd get around to checking out when I was in the mood for some light, surrealist satire.