Progressing through this game is going to be slow, I can tell. I've completed another story and I still have seventeen and a half hours to go. According to the Steam Achievements, there are fourteen endings total, so I still have to play through at least another dozen times. In the short term, this is not much of a problem. By choosing a different bird to romance, I opened up a great deal of content, but the repetition was non-trivial, and I worry that by the time I'm in position to complete the game, I'll be swamped under the sameness of it all.
Although, to be totally fair to Hatoful Boyfriend, diversity of experience does seem to be the watchword of the game. The two storylines I've pursued thus far could not be more different, and neither were what I'd have expected from a "dating sim" (though when you qualify that as a pigeon dating sim, having any expectations at all becomes at least a little ludicrous).
As I mentioned before, my first time through the game, I pursued the shy boy who hung out in the library, and turned out to be the ghost of a student who committed suicide. The fact that he was a pigeon notwithstanding (it took me about a minute and a half to write the first part of this sentence, due to repeated head-desking, but still . . . notwithstanding), it was a melancholy tale with a bit of redeeming sweetness. Through patience and care, Hiyoko was able to help the troubled spirit find peace, and move on to the next life.
One would think that this would be the outlier story. That through sheer chance, I picked the one story that indulged the supernatural in an otherwise grounded high school romance game (pigeons notwithstanding, damnit). But that is not the case. On the advice of Baffle Mint, from the rpg.net forums, I next pursued Shuu, the doctor who ran the school's infirmary.
If I thought things were creepy and weird before. . . Shuu is a bit of a mad scientist with a serial killer vibe. He's constantly joking about dissecting you or performing experiments on your various parts. For Christmas, he gives you a quill pen and a roast chicken, and my god they're made from the body of the popular kid who was snooping around, investigating the mysterious disappearances, and why is he hanging around the incinerator, and what was he disposing of in the park so late at night. And holy fuck, he kills you and then keeps your severed head in a jar of preservative, taking it on the run with him as he flees the bird police and/or the possible conspiracy of bird scientists that wants to study the human race and to which your mummified head is a valuable classified sample, and then in a final act of defiance, he breaks the jar. And what the hell is happening, they're all birds, you'd think that would make it easier, more abstract, but that fat partridge body, with those soulless alien eyes, and it's like being trapped by a horrifying monster dredged from your darkest nightmares.
So, horror accomplished, I guess. I'm reminded of the difference between the movie Silence of the Lambs and the tv show Hannibal. In the former, when Anthony Hopkins talks about eating a liver with some Chianti and fava beans, the reaction is "geez, what a freak." By contrast, when Mads Mikkelsen cooks one of his exquisite gourmet meals, you think "wow, that looks good, oh my god, is that human." Not saying one is better than the other, but the latter is a much more visceral reaction, because it makes you part of the horror. Which is to say, I've had roast chicken before, so I probably would have "helped" to dispose of poor Sakazaki Yuuya.
Speaking of which, this playthrough does raise some questions more questions about the nature of this bird society and their relationship to the apparently vanished human civilization. I learned about Brian, the first intelligent bird, who suggested that the Olympics be changed to the Pigeolympics, and is apparently a blogger and Pulitzer Prize winner, which suggests some overlap between human and pigeon society of which Hiyoko is only the lingering remnant. Additionally, the fact that Yuuya could be mistaken for a chicken might mean that these birds have other physiological differences, in addition to the fact that they can speak and attend high school. Finally, on Legumentines, Shuu noted it as the anniversary of the first human embryo transfer, which may be a science-fictiony hint towards something (though he was probably referring to the real-world medical event and mistakenly attributed Feb 3 as the date of the transfer when it was actually the date the baby was born from the first successful transfer - thanks wikipedia).
There's definitely something weird going on (again, pigeons notwithstanding), and I'm sure that future playthroughs will give me more information about this mysterious Pigeonation Project, and its sinister goals. (Though, saying that, I honestly feel like my sense of reality is hanging by a fraying thread).
No comments:
Post a Comment