Seeing as it is Valentine’s Day, I thought I might as well play a game I’ve heard a lot about and have wanted to try for quite a while. Katawa Shoujo is a bishoujo-style visual novel (in plainer terms, a visual novel with a focus on romance) set in a private school for disabled children. The full game is going to be an eroge, but from what I have played they will either be tastefully done or skippable. You play Hisao Nakai, a boy who is diagnosed with serious arrhythmia, meaning that serious stress or exercise can cause cardiac arrest.

But apart from the premise, there is something else unique about Katawa Shoujo.

History

In early 2007, an anon posted an omake page from a doujin on /a/. The doujin was by RAITA, aka Raita Honjou (character designer for Valkyria Chronicles), and the page showed five disabled girls with their personalities noted next to them. RAITA had also noted it would be nice to see these girls come to life in a game.

And so, with this unique idea several anons banded together to form 4 Leaf Studios, and to bring Katawa Shoujo to life.

So far they have only released the first Act of the game, but I believe that they are set on releasing the full game this year.

One Playthrough

Seeing as I had little time before Valentine’s Day, I decided to play through it just once before this post. I started with the basic idea of either following Shizune’s or Hanako’s path.

You start off in a snow covered forest, having been summoned here by a mystery love letter. The sender is revealed to be a childhood friend, who confesses her love. Unfortunately, the stress of the moment causes your arrhythmia to show itself for the first time, and you undergo cardiac arrest.

You wake up in a hospital, and over the coming months stuck their Hisao begins to feel anger and frustration at his recently discovered condition and how his life will forever be limited by it. Which may be exacerbated by the fact that even the girl who confessed to him stops visiting after a while.

Hisao’s outlook on life rubbed me the wrong way, perhaps because I have a fairly different mindset. I expect that if I were in Hisao’s place (which I may very well be, considering my gluttony) I would not be as down and angry as Hisao. But from what I played of it, it seems that his outlook may change over the course of the game depending on your decisions. It does also explain his thoughts later on, as he struggles to deal with a school where everyone has a disability and seemingly very few people share Hisao’s pessimistic outlook on their conditions.

Anyway, as expected you are discharged from hospital, but forced to transfer into Yamaku High School as they have the facilities to take care of you. Again, Hisao is somewhat hostile to change, though more as a result of his hostility to his condition. Still, he does change over the course of the first act.

From there you are introduced to the characters and heroines. The heroines are seemingly split up into pairs.

First up are student council members Shizune and Misha. Shizune is mute and deaf, so (non-heroine) Misha acts as her full-time translator. Shizune is forceful and demanding (despite her condition), but also fair and slightly cheeky. For some reason, the pair are the only members of the student council.

Second are the blind Lilly and shy burns victim Hanako. Lilly and Shizune appear to have a history and are openly hostile to each other, which makes things awkward for Misha, Hanako and now Hisao. Lilly seems to be a motherly type, though during my playthrough she seemed to betray a few signs that her personality was more than meets the eye. Hanako is extremely shy, and initially her only friend is Lilly.

Finally, you have the legless sprinter Emi and the armless and spacey Rin. Emi is your typical happy-go-lucky girl with boundless energy, and she’s a serious track runner on her prosthetic legs. Rin, meanwhile, is a somewhat lost girl who goes off on unusual tangents. The pair were placed in dorm rooms next to each other, as they complemented each other in terms of limbs.

I should probably mention one other character. While you also meet some staff members, the star of the extra characters is Kenji. Legally blind, his disability can be more accurately be described as paranoia bordering on schizophrenic levels. He believes that feminists are  biding their time for a war against man, and he has been preparing for the doom times. He is also somewhat odd in other ways and is the only character I’ve seen in the first Act that appears lacking their clothes.

Hanako’s Path

Once I’d gotten through the fairly lengthy character introductions, my choices ended up putting me on a path that excluded Shizune. That was okay though, as Hanako ended up being my favourite after the halfway mark. Extremely shy, it takes a while and some convenient circumstances to slowly gain her trust (and Lilly’s).

Apart from the awkwardness of the Shizune-Lilly war, Hanako’s shyness means that no-one talks to her in class, and she waits for Lilly before leaving class. As I (or Hisao) got to know Hanako (and Lilly, they are really tight knit), she slowly revealed her appreciation for Hisao’s little jokes.

Lilly was busy one day, leaving Hanako in the awkward position of being alone. However, Hisao went to find her in the library and hung out with her, which prompted a thank you from Hanako.

Finally, on the day of the school festival and a mere week after arriving, she trusted Hisao enough to be at ease when pouring tea for him. Small steps, but with Hanako they felt like a good start.

The Psychology of My Choices

Famous (or should I say infamous, if you listened to the Giant Bombcast E3 episode she was in) video game journalist Leigh Alexander once wrote a column on the game for Kotaku (I will not link it, because currently the Gawker Media network websites are undergoing a state of terribad, and they use hashbangs in their links for some reason that makes me fearful of hyperlinks containing them), and once I finished playing Hanako’s route I thought about it.

You see, in that column there is a point that the game might fetishise disabilities. It (and Leigh seems to think so) appears that this is not the case, at least what I’ve played of it so far. There is great emphasis on exposing the personalities of the heroines, and when the disabilities do come into play it’s to expose Hisao’s discomfort with his own disability.

But while the game doesn’t fetishise them, did I? I don’t think so. Disfigurement caused by burns in reality is tragically an unpleasant sight. Actually, I suppose that’s what prompted me to think about this. Hanako, for a burn victim, is perhaps too kawaii. Though I get that if Hanako were more realistically disfigured she wouldn’t be as nice a sight on the eyes of the target audience for such games, and would remain a fairly low choice for players.

But I probably chose her for her personality. The shy type who isn’t afraid to show a smile, just that it’s there’s rare opportunity for her to do that.

The Format of Visual Novels

Not too long ago one of the developers of Katawa Shoujo blogged about his frustrations with the visual novel genre, or rather the genre as it stands now. He believes that so far no game has taken full advantage of the visual novel genre to make a story and game that would evolve the medium of visual novels, and perhaps games.

Katawa Shoujo does seem to be fairly run-of-the-mill in terms of gameplay. Very wordy, with a few choices spread here and there.

But looking at that blog post, I would say that it seems that if the genre was to evolve, it would head towards a Heavy Rain-esque direction. Marrying visuals with the storytelling, allowing one to focus on both on the same time rather than the somewhat disconcerting separation of text and static images.

But for now, it seems there will be no evolution. And if you are expecting to read a light novel, then the genre seems to currently be a small step above that.

Conclusions

I enjoyed my time with Katawa Shoujo. As far as being an introduction to bishoujo visual novels it was a good stepping stone. I do want to try Clannad and/or Amagami sometime, if I can find an English patch for either. And maybe if I feel brave, I’ll try some of the critically acclaimed eroge, such as Yume Miru Kusuri, but that’s unlikely.