Hatoful Boyfriend: Holiday Star isn't a lump of coal by any means. It loses a great sense of agency and, as a consequence, most of its appeal. And while Holiday Star acts like a collection of unreleased Hatoful Boyfriend stories, it loses something in its compiled presentation. The art style is the game's biggest highlight, particularly in the latter episodes when it transitions to a beautiful storybook style. Hatoful Boyfriend was such a pleasant surprise when it first released, but that same joy just isn't present in Holiday Star.

(Although I will admit that the cheeky reference on one of the actual fail messages was good for a laugh.) There are no real consequences to any of these choices, with the exception of a fail state that will actually end your story and force you to start the story completely over, which is the infuriating kind of consequence. Much of Hatoful Boyfriend's charm was in dialogue choices affecting the ultimate outcome and in getting the school's denizens to like you, but Holiday Star is strictly about going from one point to the next. Even the dialogue choices (as few of them as there are) feel far more inconsequential here. Holiday Star is less about a coherent, heartwarming story and more about fractured ones that don't lead to anything substantial. Hey, those birds are driving a tank! Isn't that wacky? And without spoiling the major twists of the four stories, there's a major tonal shift over the course of the game that feels jarring. Instead, it attempts to mask its brevity by spotlighting the game's gimmick. In changing its style, Holiday Star rushes through its standalone stories, taking little (if any) time to define its characters. The characters were still well-defined that it was easy to get invested in them. The birds could have easily been replaced by humans and it would have been just as gripping a story. And while that's great for the season, it removes a lot of what made the original Hatoful Boyfriend so interesting.Īs gimmicky as it felt, the reason that the original game worked so well was that it was a genuine high school drama that actually had a surprising amount of heart. Holiday Star removes the single overarching story that takes place over years and replaces it with four episodic holiday tales. The draw, of course, is that the narrative happens to feature a high school of actual birds. The story unfolds more like an interactive novel, with players watching a narrative unfold. However, if I was looking for an otome game to play for this Weebsmas, I might pick up the Mystic Messenger Holiday special instead.The central mechanic of the previous Hatoful Boyfriend game is still at play throughout Holiday Star. But it’s still a really entertaining game–like, I played through the whole thing for sure. Like it’s labeled as such, but it’s pretty far from dating and also far from true holiday activity. Overall, Hatoful Boyfriend: Holiday Star was not really a holiday otome. Kinda wished that there was more of that and less of…army tanks and strange fights…but then again what do I expect from Hatoful Boyfriend? And those were like less than five minutes each and kinda random. There were short New Years specials for each of the boys–err, I mean birds. It was a ride alright with a lot of strange reveals I would not expect–then again, I had thought that I would get a LOT more holiday content or dating content but this game is filled with a lot of…not that.

They are on like a ‘holiday star’ but it has little to do with the holidays and actually becomes this really dark story about death and murder and at one point it does make me feel like I want to tear up over it. All the birds and the MC go to view the eclipse and end up in a dream they can’t wake up from.

The last two episodes are about a dream sequence.

Hatoful boyfriend holiday star review