Katawa Shoujo
Katawa Shoujo is a bishōjo-style visual novel by Four Leaf Studios that tells the story of a young man and five young women living with varying disabilities. The game uses a traditional text and sprite-based visual novel model with an ADV-style text box running on the Ren'Py visual novel engine. The game is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND.
The majority of the story takes place at the fictional Yamaku High School for disabled students, located in an unnamed city somewhere in modern, northern Japan. The player takes the role of Hisao Nakai, an ordinary boy whose life changes dramatically after a heart attack caused by his long-dormant cardiac arrhythmia. After a lengthy hospitalization, he is forced to transfer to a school specialized in providing education and healthcare for students with disabilities. Over the course of the narrative, Hisao has the opportunity to come to grips with his condition and adjust to his new life.
The gameplay of Katawa Shoujo is choice-based, in which the player reads through text and occasionally has the chance to respond to prompts with a variety of preset responses. The decisions made initiate possible events or dialogue within the story. Depending on the choices made by the player, the story branches into multiple forks. Each of these paths chronicle Hisao's deepening and eventually romantic relationship with one of the five main female characters; these may variously end well, badly, or neutrally.
Creation
The concept originated in a sketch created in December 2000 by Japanese doujinshi artist Raita Honjou. From January 2007, the sketch was discussed extensively on the 4chan image board, and a development group was assembled from users of 4chan and other internet communities, who are of various nationalities; not necessarily Japanese. The group took the name Four Leaf Studios.Most of the art, sound, and animation assets used in the game are original and were created for the game by a dedicated team of artists on the development forums. Background images used in the game were collected through an open call for background photos, from public-domain image collections, and by a dedicated photographer on the development team. These images were later filtered to match the art style of the rest of the game's drawings. Because real pictures were used, many of the locations in the game are based on real places, with Yamaku High School being constructed from images of Brown University. The city that the novel is set in, although unnamed, is based on Sendai and the school was written to be where Aoba Castle stands.
Following the release of the full game, Four Leaf Studios announced that it had no plans for its members to collaborate on any new projects. However, in their celebratory 1st anniversary blog post, Aura had stated that there might be future projects for 4LS announced in 2013, though no major projects were announced. Four Leaf Studio continued supporting fan works officially, hosting selected artists at their Comiket booth while selling new content such as original artbooks and light novels based on the game, with the last attendance taking place in 2017. In 2020, Raide, artist and co-director of the game, passed away.
Release and distribution
On April 29, 2009, the team released an "Act One" preview. Act 1 has since been updated for several additional languages; as of Act 1's fifth version, English, French, Italian, Japanese, Russian, German, Hungarian, and both Traditional and Simplified Chinese are included. The complete English-language novel was released on January 4, 2012.It was announced that the French-language translation would be released July 4, 2013 as both a download and a limited-edition physical edition. The French-language version was made available for download on July 8, 2013. A separate, full-patch adding a completed Russian translation was released independently by its translation group on December 9, 2013. On July 27, 2014, the International Spanish version was released and made available for download that same day. On April 1, 2015, in lieu of their traditional April Fools' Day prank, Four Leaf Studios released the Japanese translation. Additionally, they announced that a second physical release would be sold by the Japanese translation team at Comitia 112 and Comiket 88. The full visual novel has been released officially in English, French, Spanish, Japanese and Italian.
On June 6, 2015, Four Leaf Studios announced the end of support and development for the visual novel and official translation projects, concluding with a final bug/typo patch. They released the English script files in full and instructions on how to patch in and distribute any future fan translations into languages not included in the final official version.
Downloads for the complete novel and Act 1 alone are available for Windows, Mac OSX, and x86 Linux, available both as direct downloads from the official Katawa Shoujo website and over Bittorrent. The soundtrack is also available as a direct download.
Synopsis
Main characters
;Kenji SetouPlot
In Act 1, as the story progresses, the reader may choose their reaction to prompts that pop up at certain scenes. These choices eventually lock the reader into a "path" that focuses on one of the five girls that the reader may take a romantic interest in. Acts 2-4 follow that girl's story where choices are prompted throughout the narrative until the reader reaches an ending. The endings vary from Bad to Neutral to Good. The bad ending ends the relationship on depressing terms or rather at a point where it would be impossible to salvage the relationship. The neutral ending is arguably the most bittersweet of the three as, while Hisao does not part on bad terms with his partner, their partings are more ambiguous and heart-breaking. The good endings all end with Hisao coming to a better understanding of his relationship to the girl in which the reader had been locked into and an optimistic outlook on the future. All endings end the story in each respective girl's in Act 4, with the exceptions being both Emi's and Rin's "Bad Ending" that finishes their stories during Act 3. Depending on the choices made in Act 1, the reader can also be locked into an early "Bad Ending", in which Hisao spends the act-ending school festival on the school roof, drinking whiskey with Kenji. The scene ends with Hisao falling off the roof and dying. Kenji's direct involvement in the fall is never made clear.Critical reception
Katawa Shoujo received generally favorable critical reception. Upon release, it was praised by some reviewers and fans, who most notably praised the game's sincere and respectful treatment of the setting. The game's sensitive handling of its eroge elements, instances of soft core erotic imagery on the relevant forks which were integral to its narratives, was also praised. Other critics were less warm, with Dave Riley of Otaku USA Magazine claiming the game had "bad prose and bad characters."Following Katawa Shoujos release, Raita, the artist who created the original image that the game was based upon, wrote a post in English on his Japanese-language blog, thanking the developers for creating the game. Raita mentioned that he had been "closely watch over" the production of the game and that he was "deeply affected" by the thought of the challenges that the development team had to overcome.