I've now played the stories of all the main pigeons. The last four were Yuuya, Okasan, Kazuaki, and Anghel. Kazuaki's was fairly bland. A young girl falls in love with her teacher, but of course that's something that can't happen, so he lets her down gently. It might be more interesting if Kazuaki had any sort of personality at all, but he is pretty much 100% defined by his narcolepsy quirk.
Yuuya's story was more interesting, but I saw it coming back when I finished Shuu's. He's actually a spy infiltrating the school in order to investigate the doctor. Along the way, I learned that there is political turmoil in the world of Hatoful Boyfriend, as Yuuya's faction, the Doves wants to coexist with the remnants of humanity, whereas Shuu's faction (and the secret sponsors of St Pigeonation's), the Hawks, want to exterminate humanity. Much to my chagrin, when I declined to go into hiding with Yuuya, I experienced the wrath of the Hawks firsthand.
I guess the reason Hiyoko has such an attraction to birds is that she was chosen specifically as a goodwill ambassador, and all the while, behind the scenes, the Hawks were waiting. When it becomes clear that a human cannot be intimate (game's words, not mine) with a bird, they come in to put an end to the experiment. Yikes.
Anghel's story did not fill in any gaps, like I was hoping it would. It's more like an alternate universe, where instead of being a mad scientist, Shuu is actually a dark sorcerer, and by joining forces, Anghel and Hiyoko were able to thwart his plan to create an evil demon tree (your guess is as good as mine) and destroy the world.
Finally, that leaves Okosan. Maybe I'm supposed to view his obsession with pudding as something whimsically random, and his eventual ascension to be some kind of iconic immortal pudding god as delightful absurdity, but honestly I found it all kind of exhausting. This is already a game about a human girl in a post-apocalyptic world attempting to find love with sapient pigeons. Adding additional wackiness on top of that is just too much.
That said, the interesting thing about Okosan is that he is some kind of genetic throwback. He speaks only in coos (which are then helpfully translated in parenthetical asides), is much more impulsive and aggressive, and his "human portrait" (a feature I'd normally file under "why, god, why") is actually just a pigeon in a suit. Taken together, it implies that the evolution of the birds into the Earth's dominant intelligent lifeform is still an ongoing process.
From this vantage, I'm not sure I'll be able to get to the full twenty hours of Hatoful Boyfriend. There simply is not that much game here. And I don't mean that in the sense of something like Bad Rats, where I can see all the levels and be forced to repeat myself before the deadline is up. I mean that it is wholly deterministic, and thus once I've earned all the achievements, I'll have seen 100% of what the game has to offer. And while I don't normally mind repeating a game, I've already repeated the bulk of the game about a dozen times. I even had to do a full story, Okosan's (my least favorite), twice, just to unlock the extended ending. I don't know what I'm going to do when I get the last four achievements.
Still, that's likely another three hours at least, so there's no point worrying about it until the time comes. I've just unlocked what appears to be a new game mode (at the beginning, it's asking me if I want to "keep my promise," or "live a normal life" which is a new decision), so maybe that will take longer than I anticipate.
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