The Dating Games: Episode 01 - Hatoful Boyfriend

Cross coast woop woop

edit: one episode per game (Six Crazy Frights) isn't going to work for VNs oh well

You are a bird

Oh boy, if only it were that simple...

Edit: @benpack@ybbaaabby By disabling human portraits, you missed probably one of my favourite dumb jokes in this whole thing:

Very excited for this, even if it just gets them slightly closer to Doki Doki Literature Club...

EDIT: Oh boy Abby does a great job voicing Sky.

And wow, Ben has some range.

This is gonna be great!

Now this is exactly the type of series I'm interested in!

not playing all the way through this is just a waste of time. It goes places.

Most VNs go nowhere in one hour

Poor Ben with his choice of voices, he is going to wreck his voice.

Ben, best voice actor 2018.

"Wait, am I calling someone a ho?"

Literally playdate.

Oh boy this game.

@bollard: Its not a good idea to showcase the game without taking the disclaimer seriously.

It can be pulled off, but in an professional environment the content warning disclaimer has to be all over the place. Its not there for show after all.

Hoping to see you guys do Angels with Scaly Wings, it's on Steam. Dragons are better than birds!

32:56 is where it's at!

Okosan is best bird!

Where's Dan.

I really hope they're considering actual romantic Japanese Visual Novels and not just the joke/"deconstruction"/western takes. There's some really beautiful stories out there if you know where to look among the smut. Clannad is just one example, and that's even on Steam. The Otome genre is also worth spotlighting, those are aimed at women and traditionally feature a female protagonist with male love interests.

I've always been curious about Hatoful Boyfriend, this is truly a gift!

I need this

Would love to see Butterfly Soup in this feature! @ybbaaabby

WOOO! HOOOO

I feel like if this series is just going to be one episode per game, it's not going to be as interesting as it might be if they actually tried to finish one.

This is a great feature idea!

I really appreciate y'all diving into a genre. I think having this background would have made Dream Daddy's discussions during GOTY a lot smoother.

"I wish for a Doki Doki Literature Club playthrough on Giant Bomb"

A finger on the monkey's paw curls, as a new series on Giant Bomb starts up, where they only play through a very short part of a VN in each episode...

Yup. I was excited at first, but it seems like a monkey's paw wish for sure. They need to commit or we'll only get lengthy set-ups and shallow dives. Good effort, good idea, but the format needs to be revisited a bit.

I really enjoyed Abby really going for those "nooooo"s tho and the Ben and Abby combo in general. The only part I didn't enjoy was the realisation that they where not going to follow up on it and next time we'll get another game ( that they won't follow up on either).

Tho don't mean to sound negative, If I did.

@stordoff: omg we def picked the right love interest.

yay for new features on the site! So excited to jump into this and new this is the run.

This was great - more, please!

Hatoful Boyfriend has some incredible writing, but 1 hour isn't really going to give much of an idea. Between this and the sequel it took quite a few hours to get all the insane story threads for me. Frigging hilarious though, incredible send-up of the genre.

Danny's playthroughs are up in full on YouTube, well worth a(n often repeated) watch.

Abby and Ben's voice acting is better than many games' I've played in the past year tbh

@fireblend: I would watch a cartoon voiced by the combined talents of GB, Waypoint, and Polygon in a heartbeat.

Now this is a dating game.

yeah hard pass on this one

Ben's manic cooing has already sold me on this feature tenfold.

@dooley: So... you're swiping left?

It's a shame he never did a full playthrough of the OG Hatoful, but man, those videos on the sequel are crazy.

Didn't this game basically became a pigeon thing because the developer wanted to make a visual novel but he wasn't the best character artist? Easy fix for that, just take some pigeon photos and go for that, kinda cool.

Good point, I forgot about that. Probably not suitable for a video series now I think about it. It's a shame because I just want to hear their thoughts on it more than anything.

@bollard: Ben has played through parts of it and didn't like it. He said "It was not for me". Considering he knows quite a lot about VNs

We know because of the GB West charity stream they did mid december. They spend around 30 seconds or so talking about it.

I wouldn't worry about their opinion this much. You already know you like it and thats what matters most. Also Doki Doki Literature Club is way too serious for GB to play through it, but on the other hand Hatoful Boyfriend also is a troll game of sorts, with some rather super fucked up content later in the game as a way to criticise the player for even touching these sort of Dating Sim games.

Happy "valance time day" everybody!

I'm not exactly looking for their opinion critically on it as a game, I just want to see their reactions to it as an experience. For me it was less about it being "fucked up" more than it being a surprise, something I didn't expect. No other game has caught me as off guard as Doki Doki and I'd love to watch some of the Giant Bomb crew get caught by it the same way.

Voices are incredibly annoying. Can't listen to this. :/

Do Starless next.

Support the joy of virtual reality!

Also - having more of the team on would allow for an easier time with the voices.

Glad Ben found something to do during recovery!

Thanks for reminding me to cancel my subscription. Ya blew it, Jeff.

It’s a shame Abby hasn’t already started on her goal of learning Japanese because her pronunciation of Ryouta is so awful I can’t keep watching. And it wouldn’t take much study to learn how Japanese words written in English are supposed to sound. An hour or two, tops.

Yeah, I only really see this going two ways: They either play through a significant chunk of super-short VNs, or they get absolutely nowhere in actual dating sims.

Hatoful Boyfriend is kind of backwards on that, though. The bare-bones "dating sim" routes are super-short, but that's only because the game doesn't really start showing its hand until you've done them all.

I love that they've done this after the tantrums thrown at GOTY by some of the community. gg wp.