Not bad! Katawa Shoujo review

Out on a date with the burn victim.

The amount of visual novels made outside of Japan is still rather small as they don’t exactly have a very big audience. What has probably become the most well-known exception to this is Katawa Shoujo which after 5 years in development has seen a rather large amount of coverage since release. It’s no wonder as it emulates the Japanese style of visual novels closely while delivering an all-round surprisingly high quality in almost all aspects of the game. It still has issues, but as a freely available game of this size and scope made by people who previously had not written anything it is quite an achievement. Oh and of course it has attracted attention because it’s a game about dating disabled girls. Actually it might have attracted attention mostly because of that.

It all starts with the main character Hisao having a heart attack while confessing to a girl. After spending several months in a hospital and learning that he has a heart condition he is sent to a school for disabled students for his last year of high school where he will have to learn to live with his new condition, get some new friends and probably get a girlfriend as well. The whole setup of being a new student in the school and gradually being introduced to all the girls will be familiar to anime and manga fans even if they haven’t played/read any visual novels before. Right here is where some people might already not be terribly excited about the story as it takes a little while before it gets going and even with the novelty of the setting and characters it just might be a bit to clichéd for some.

I'm sad to report that you can't date the milf.

The pace of the story is without a doubt the weakest part of the game for me. At times it can be gripping and will reach emotional highs, while it at other times it can feel tedious and dragged out. All the least interesting bits in the game are at the start when you’re first being introduced to the new school and characters. After picking some choices that will put you in one of 5 character paths in the game it gets a lot more interesting as the story focuses on Hisao’s relationship with whatever girl you picked. As you’d expect there are plenty of issues to deal with before anyone gets to live happily ever after and I think the overall quality of all the stories in the game was pretty high, even if it has the dull bits at times. All the paths were written by different people and feel like it as well. If you don’t like one of them you can be sure that the next one you try will be very different in style and direction. Some Japanese visual novels are written by several authors as well, but they tend to try to have a more cohesive style across all the stories. I quite liked the way Katawa Shoujo was produced as it did make the different characters feel more distinctive when the writing was noticeably different for them all.

What will give the indie origins of the game away immediately is the backgrounds. Characters are all well drawn, but the backgrounds are photographs with some filters on them. They all fit the scenes they’re used in, but to me it just looks a bit too real at times. Maybe it’s because I have played too many visual novels and just expect backgrounds to be fake or something, but there were a few times when I looked at the background and was taken out of the story for a few seconds. On a more positive note though I found most of the event artwork to be excellent. Since those pictures are used to give extra emotional impact for certain scenes they could almost be seen as a reward system for players. It’s the developers saying “thanks for getting here, enjoy this lovely scene”. Given the nature of the development and the amount of artist involved of different backgrounds and skill, some of the event pictures don’t quite match the character designs during conversations. I found that to be a bit jarring, but it all still looked pretty good so I didn’t mind. It just felt like the kind of stuff you’d expect from a project like this.

I'm missing a third "screw you" choice here.

The indie roots are obvious from the audio presentation as well. The music has some nice songs, but there are also some that grated my ears. I wouldn’t describe any of the tunes as crap, but there was something off about a few of them and it made the game sound cheap. There’s some ambient sound at times, but not very much of it. The audio package is in general the cheapest part of any VN whether it’s Japanese or not and I’ve heard a lot worse from Japan for sure. It doesn’t have any voice acting, but I’m just fine with that. Given the lack of money involved, the voice recording quality would most likely have been bad, not to speak of the quality of the acting itself.

I enjoyed playing through Katawa Shoujo and would easily recommend it to anyone who thinks it looks interesting and maybe hasn’t played any visual novels before. It’s nowhere near the best I’ve played as I could list 10+ titles which are better than it, but it’s still a good game and way above average as I could also easily list 20+ titles which are worse than it, and that’s when I compare it to commercial titles made in Japan. As an indie title, I’m impressed with what they achieved. What I hope is that it inspires more people to make visual novels, because if this collection of people from various places all over the world could come together and produce a game this good, why can’t you do the same? It takes a lot of effort, but it is without a doubt doable. Katawa Shoujo is free and available here for Windows, Mac and Linux.

I thought all blind people were like Zatoichi. This game proved me wrong.