Bad Boys Love, a hidden alternate story mode, opens with the discovery of the protagonist's corpse, after which the player follows her best friend Ryouta Kawara as he investigates the circumstances of her death and unravels darker conspiracies surrounding the school.
Gameplay in Hatoful Boyfriend is similar to most other visual novels for the PC, with the controls limited to the mouse and the only interactions being clicking to forward the game's narrative or to choose between multiple plot choices. The keyboard can also be used instead of the mouse, with the 'enter' key serving the same purpose as clicking. The save button can be employed at any point during the game, which also features several pages of save slots, allowing gameplay to be easily picked up from prior to a choice the player made. An arrow button in the upper right corner also allows the player to skip dialogue and interactions they have already experienced.
The player assumes control of the protagonist, a teenage human girl. As the game follows a branching plot line with multiple endings, at various points during gameplay the player is allowed to make choices that determine which character's romance route the player will encounter. On weekdays, the player can also choose which classes to attend, which changes one of the protagonist's three stats depending on the activity chosen. Having certain stat values are required to obtain the good endings for each love interest and to otherwise advance along certain routes. There are thirteen (fourteen in the 2014 remake) endings in total: one ending for each of the main love interests, three extended endings for three of the love interests based on stat values, one ending for the gaiden-esque Torimi Café storyline, and one ending attained if the player fails to romance any character.
When routes are completed, documents are unlocked that provide insights into the game's overarching storyline. These documents can be viewed at any time in the game's archive feature, which is accessed from the title screen. After obtaining the four specific endings required to trigger it, the player is given a new prompt to either "fulfill the promise" or live "a normal life" upon starting a new game. Choosing to live a normal life will result in a normal playthrough, while choosing to fulfill the promise locks the player into the true route or scenario Bad Boys Love, or BBL (also known as Hurtful Boyfriend), which explores the full extent of the underlying plot alluded to by the documents and various points of foreshadowing in the dating simulation portion of the game. If the player chooses to fulfill the promise, aside from several dream sequences, gameplay at first appears to continue normally until the in-game date is 2 September. The player's perspective then switches from the protagonist to the protagonist's best friend, and the events of the scenario begin regardless of any other choices made by the player up to that point. If the player obtains all other possible endings prior to starting Bad Boys Love, an extended epilogue plays after the game's credits upon completion of the scenario. In a departure from the generally lighthearted romantic routes, Bad Boys Love is presented as a murder mystery psychological thriller, and is significantly longer than any other route in Hatoful Boyfriend, making up most of the game's actual length.
There are several changes to gameplay and the way text is displayed during Bad Boys Love in the original version of the game: saving is disabled except at certain points in the story, the function to skip dialogue and interactions is removed, and plot-important dialogue and narrative are highlighted with colored text; usually yellow, though text of particularly critical importance is highlighted in red. In the 2014 remake however, the option to save is available at all times, the skip function is retained, and text is no longer highlighted. In both versions, the game's interface and controls change from that of a standard visual novel to similar to that of a '90s-era turn-based role-playing game during certain segments of the narrative.
Plot
Setting
Hatoful Boyfriend is set in an alternate version of Earth in which sapient birds have seemingly taken the place of humans in society for reasons that are hinted at, but not fully explained in the dating simulation portion of the game. In Bad Boys Love, it is revealed that Hatoful is set in a post-apocalyptic, dystopian future—in which a pandemic of a deadly, mutated strain of the H5N1 virus, or bird flu, nearly wipes out mankind in the year 2068. The release of a counter-virus, cultivated to destroy the virus' avian carriers in a desperate attempt to stop the spread of the disease, ends up backfiring as birds who resisted the counter-virus instead developed human-level intelligence. War soon breaks out between the newly uplifted birds and the remnants of humanity, resulting in birds emerging as the planet's new dominant lifeforms as humans continued to succumb to the disease. Following several terrorist attacks by a human insurgency, all remaining humans have been forced to live in the wilderness away from civilization in a form of apartheid-like segregation.
The game's story takes place primarily at St. PigeoNation's Institute (聖ピジョネイション学園 Sei Pijoneishon Gakuen)—a bird-only high school located in the fictional Japanese town of Littledove Hachiman City (小鳩八幡市 Kobato Hachiman-shi)—long after open warfare between humans and birds has ended. Society has adjusted to the avian conquest, though with minor bird-related cultural changes—for example, while some holidays such as Christmas and Tanabata are celebrated much as they are in the present day, a major event in the game is Legumentine's Day, an amalgamation of the traditions of Valentine's Day and Setsubun. In a more grim case, the terms war dove and war hawk have been re-purposed as labels for two opposing political factions divided over the ongoing mutual hostility between birds and the human minority: the altruistic Dove Party, who advocate for cooperation and peace between the two groups, and the militant Hawk Party, whose goal is to exterminate humanity altogether. By the time Hatoful Boyfriend's narrative begins, the Dove Party, the Hawk Party, and their respective schools of thought dominate much of the world's politics.
Characters
The primary playable character in Hatoful Boyfriend is the human protagonist, a boisterous hunter-gatherer who lives in a cave in the wilderness. Her eight potential love interests in the original version of the game, who together form the rest of the main cast, are Ryouta Kawara, a rock dove and the protagonist's sickly but hardworking childhood friend; Sakuya Le Bel Shirogane, a fantail pigeon and snobbish French aristocrat; Sakuya's older half-brother Yuuya Sakazaki, a popular and flirtatious but strangely secretive fantail pigeon; Nageki Fujishiro, a quiet, bookish mourning dove who never seems to leave the library; San Oko, an athletic, hyperactive fantail pigeon who is obsessed with pudding; Anghel Higure, an eccentric Luzon bleeding-heart who behaves as if he were in some kind of fantasy role-playing game; Kazuaki Nanaki, a kind but narcoleptic button quail and the protagonist's homeroom teacher; and Shuu Iwamine, a creepy, antisocial chukar partridge who serves as the school's doctor. Azami Koshiba, a no-nonsense Java sparrow and takoyaki saleswoman, and Tohri Nishikikouji, a golden pheasant and Iwamine‘s long-forgotten work rival, became possible love interests in the 2014 remake.
While most of the characters are normally represented in-game with pictures of birds, if the player toggles on the ICPSS (Intra-Cerebral Playback Synchro System) feature at the start of the game, or NS3 (脳内再生シンクロシステム Nōnai Saisei Shinkuro Shisutemu) in Japan, each of the possible love interests is shown with a version of what they would look like as a human when first introduced. Although the ICPSS feature also lists voice credits for each of the main love interests in the original version of the game, the game itself is unvoiced; however most of the voice actors who were credited later signed on to actually voice their respective characters in the drama CDs based on the series.
