Origin story
The Japanese doujin artist RAITA created that one page illustration about his odd idea for a dating sim visual novel game where all the heroines are disabled. Deaf, blind, missing limbs, fatally sick, and so on.
Later, people on 4chan teamed together to make the idea into an actual game which they called Katawa Shoujo. After years of work the game was successfully released.
The game is available for free at https://www.katawa-shoujo.online/
The heroines in the game, faithfully adapted from RAITA’s design. The last and new one, Misha, initially serves as translator for Shizune, as the main character does not know sign language.
See official character intros at: https://www.katawa-shoujo.online/characters
Replay notes
I started playing again Katawa Shoujo. I originally played the game immediately after the full version came out, but only completed the Rin route (this game doesn’t have “best girl” unfortunately). I’m playing again in English since that’s the original language. And on Linux of course — need to mention how this is probably the first VN ever with a native Linux version from the beginning.
The beginning idea is very nice: Hisao (the MC) gets confessed by a girl he likes but unfortunately it sends his heart racing and and triggers an underlying condition which collapses him. A true “hNNNGH” moment. After some hospital visits, the girl never to be heard of again.
He lies in bed, bored of TV, starts to read books. Echoes my thoughts that people forcibly cut from their normal lives or passions will rather quickly find some new things to do — nothing in life is too precious to lose really, if you look at it positively. There are endless number of things you can do even if you can’t do the things you used to, and the chances are that the new things are about as captivating. The sudden change in perspective might be positive even, at least in stories it usually is.
“People with your condition often live quite long, you need to plan for your future”. Yeah, that’s how it’s with most illnesses and disabilities, no option but to endure.
That they decided to use 4:3 resolution is quite authentic for visual novels… but really?
I don’t really like the comic-sans-esque font they chose, should have been a bit more serious.
Since it’s a game made by entirely non-Japanese people, one might wonder why did they set it in Japan and use Japanese names for everyone? For example the homeroom teacher upon meeting the MC struggles to pronounce his name — a thing that only makes sense in Japanese. But the game was written in English. Don’t get me wrong though, I would’ve done it exactly the same way. The essence of Japanese media is intertextuality, and a work like this needs to tap into that. This game is not a western visual novel, it’s an English “Japanese VN”. But to be honest, I think most of the creators just really wanted it to be like Japanese so their starting point for every idea was to copy the Japanese things they knew from anime and manga.
It’s known that the art in this game is a bit amateurish at places, I don’t mean to poke fun at the artists who probably have improved since. But pointing out the issues, this image of the classroom that Hisao enters is drawn from too high perspective. Fitting all those characters from normal perspective would also have been difficult, and probably the artist should have done something altogether different.
He claps his hands and so does everyone else, expect one girl in the first row who has only one hand.
I always thought sign language seemed like a very interesting thing to learn. I like diverse languages and what’s more different than communicating with your hands? But every spoken language seems to have their own sign language so it doesn’t seem very practical to learn one without anyone particular to use it with. Also my language learning method relies heavily on immersion so I doubt I could actually learn much sign language without extreme pressure to do so.
This dynamic between Misha and Shizune is certainly interesting, you won’t find such in any other game or media. But it’s a bit too much for me I guess. Misha’s personality is so overwhelming that I can’t really read Shizune. I suppose on her route things will change gradually, but still I wonder if I would have written a deaf person and her interpreter with different kinds of personalities (points to them for following RAITA’s design though).
Since Shizune does not speak at all, they made her sprite move a lot, which looks a bit weird. I wonder if they should have instead made sprites with different hand movements. But maybe then the base sprite would have been too static. Not an easy problem I guess.
About Japanese VN tropes, the creators really nailed it with the male sidekick, Kenji. Blind and insociable conspiracy theorist he is a foil to Hisao and warning of what could have happened to him had he not adjusted to his new surroundings. In fact I recall the BAD END revolves around Kenji — not an uncommon choice to use the sidekick for that.