Got all that? No? Too bad! The game moves ahead. The game, originally designed as a April Fool's joke, sets up the love interests to spear high-school stereotypes in bird form: the loyal best friend, the rock dove Ryouta Kawara, the snobby French transfer student, the fantail pigeon Sakuya Le Bel Shirogane, and his half-brother, the ladies' man (as it were) Yuuya Sakazaki, also a fantail pigeon, the shy kid, the mourning dove Nageki Fujishiro, the jock and star of the track team, the aforementioned San Oko (so dreamy!), the narcoleptic math professor and button quail Kazuaki Nanaki, and the creepy staff doctor, the chukar partridge Shuu Iwamine. The first part of the game takes no mercy in throwing a ton of characters at you right away, many of which will serve as your romantic marks throughout the visual novel. This is just one of the many “What the hell is going on here?” moments players will experience in Hatoful Boyfriend. Why would a human choose a high school filled with sapient birds? Well… they are gifted birds, if that helps at all… okay, it doesn't really help at all. So it goes to figure that you, as the female player-character, are also a bird, right? Not so fast.
![hatoful boyfriend okosan hatoful boyfriend okosan](https://media.pocketgamer.com/artwork/na-zynam/hatoful_boyfriend_-_ps_vita_-_01.jpg)
![hatoful boyfriend okosan hatoful boyfriend okosan](https://vignette2.wikia.nocookie.net/steamtradingcards/images/2/26/Hatoful_Boyfriend_Foil_2.png)
Your player-character is, indeed, female, and yes, you need to romance one of several males in the game. It's at this juncture that I should point out that Hatoful Boyfriend is not your average otome game. Hatoful Boyfriend is a port of a 2011 PC/Mac game which the Japanese categorize as otome, which describes games primarily targeted toward a female audience, usually with one of the goals being to wind up in a romantic relationship with one of the male protagonists. Such is the way of true love in the game/visual novel Hatoful Boyfriend, and like this visual novel, the way of true love is just plain weird.