Hatoful Boyfriend - 17/20 hours

Man, that alternate game mode took longer than I thought. And I wound up having to play it twice. All through this experience, I've assiduously avoided using the fast-forward button because I knew Hatoful Boyfriend was a slight game that didn't have enough content to justify playing for 20 hours, and I figured I might as well draw it out for as long as possible. That wasn't such a big deal for the regular mode (though, by the twelfth time through, it was starting to get a little tedious), but this new story was so long that towards the end it started to feel like a slog.

I think the problem is that the story front-loads its energy. Alternate mode starts just like regular Hatoful Boyfriend, but after the summer break you go to the infirmary to find Ryouta . . . and die. The game then does one of its sudden genre shifts and becomes a murder mystery with heavy science fiction elements (unknown parties lower a giant iron dome of St Pigeonation's, trapping all the students inside and giving the whole story a huge sense of urgency). From there, Ryouta partners up with the most appealing version of Sakuya (basically the same as he's always been, but now a take-charge "bad cop" to play against Ryouta's milquetoast boy-next-door "good cop") to figure out the how and why of these events, eventually uncovering a deadly conspiracy at the heart of the school - the terrifying Project Hatoful, a biological weapon developed by the Hawk Party to wipe out the human race.

And of course, Shuu is behind it, so they chase him into the basement . . . and all the momentum goes out of the plot as we learn huge amounts of backstory. Like, it was kind of chilling to learn that Nageki was the original Hatoful test subject, and thus killed himself out of grief for killing humans and to prevent his tissues from being used as a weapon, but then to find out that he was Kazuaki's adopted brother, and that Shuu was good friends with Ryouta's father, and that the whole game was really about grudges and relationships from half a lifetime ago, and the only thing I could think was "when will this end/"

But I did it twice, because once you've unlocked every ending in the game, the alternate mode gets an epilogue. The actual epilogue itself was completely not worth it due to its shortness and the fact that it undoes an affecting and dramatic death from the main story, but whatever. The alternate mode was worth it, if only because I was able to learn the answers to several nagging questions. The year is 2187. Humanity was mostly wiped out by the bird flu. The intelligent birds are the result of an extremely ill-conceived attempt to halt the epidemic (a bioengineered virus that was meant to kill all birds which is like - is not the very problem you're trying to solve a deadly virus that made the leap from birds to humans).

At this point, I basically have no reason left to play the game, but ending after 17 hours would so mess up my nice, neat symmetry that I can't help but soldier on. I never quite got the bean gifts right, and I'm sure there are at least a few interesting lines to be had from giving "wrong" answers, and there's a part of me that wonders if it's possible to keep Yuuya alive in the Shuu storyline (though I'm pretty sure the answer is "no"), so while there's not a lot to discover, I'm sure my last three hours will not be entirely wasted.