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 The birds could have easily been replaced by humans and it would have been just as gripping a story.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. The central mechanic of the previous Hatoful Boyfriend game is still at play throughout Holiday Star.

Hatoful boyfriend switch