Review: Hatoful Boyfriend: Holiday Star

Those who’ve burned through the original, a Pigeon-Human dating sim, already know its brand of peculiarity. For returning fans, Holiday Star is more of the same, just less. Far less. For new players, it’s simply weird. Disjointed.

Frankly, it’s boring.

Hatoful Boyfriend was at its best as an interactive novel, putting your character in the midst of a bevy of feathered hunks. In it, you had actual choice, steering the story at various branching points. Holiday Star, on the other hand, essentially plays itself. Over the course of four main missions and three side-quests, I could count on one hand the number of times I was asked to actually do something other than go to the next bit of canned dialogue. Replaying one of the stories, I was pained to discover one branching point actually just immediately led to the same story beat.

There’s no rhyme or reason to anything.

Worse yet, Holiday Star does all this without really explaining what has happened in the world you’re thrown into. Knowing only a small bit about the franchise – I laughed at about twenty minutes of dialogue thanks to The Lame Game Marathon last year – I had to resort to Wikipedia to figure out just what the hell was going on.

Don’t let the Christmas-themed nature of Holiday Star draw you in; it’s an overpriced, fractured story that does little to capture the quirkiness of its predecessor. Sure, there’s probably a lot lost in translation, but that’s still no excuse for a lack of quality. Newcomers should skip this and concentrate on the original, and those looking to explore the genre a bit can do much better with titles like Coming Out On Top.

Hatoful Boyfriend: Holiday Star was reviewed using a promotional code on Windows PC, via Steam, as provided by the publisher.