Some choices yield fairly clear and immediate consequences, but many take time to play out, increasing suspense and replayability.
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In Katawa Shoujo (which was written in English), the choices generally feel credible, and decisions are usually made difficult by apparent tradeoffs between options rather than lack of clarity about what the options are.
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This is especially true of games translated from Japanese, where differences in degree of politeness are hard to convey. In many visual novels, choices are either head-smackingly obvious or impossibly vague. If you treat other characters as invalids to be taken care of or broken dolls that Hisao must “fix”, you won’t get far in Katawa Shoujo.įor all its strengths, Katawa Shoujo is still prone to the flaws common to visual novels, like decision points where reasonable actions are not available and occasionally some lack of clarity about where a single choice will lead the conversation or action. Sometimes the “obvious” decision, an attempt to get closer, pushes the other character away. The name of the game is “the hedgehog’s dilemma”. Even the teachers at Yamaku Academy (who are, as far as we can tell, not disabled) show some emotional scarring. If Katawa Shoujo has an underlying theme, it is that we are all disabled and “normal” alike, walking wounded. The real challenge in the game – and it is a challenge – is emotional trauma. Kenji is a kind of dark and distorted mirror of what Hisao could become if he lets himself wallow in his own misery. He alone, out of all the characters, has completely failed to adapt, and lives a small, pathetic life of isolated paranoia, characterized by extreme gynophobia. There is an exception: a nearly-blind social phobic (hikkikomori) named Kenji who lives across the hall from Hisao. Each one lives with their disability, taking blindness or armlessness the same way you or I take the fact that we can’t fly – when was the last time you worried about that? The first thing that Hisao, and the player, starts to see is that the people around him aren’t charity cases. None of the girls in the game need or want a helper or caretaker. Hisao is the only character in the story who is learning to live with and accept his handicap.
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The thing is, though Katawa Shoujo is painstakingly detailed and accurate in its representation of different forms of disability, it isn’t about disability. Each of the girls that Hisao can wind up falling in love with at Yamaku Academy has a different disability, and that, combined with the fact that there is (semi-)explicit sex in this game, is the reason some people have dismissed it, unplayed, as a fetish-fest. This is a relationship/dating sim game, but it is closer in feel to Evangelion than any of the “harem” anime and manga (Tenchi Muyo, Love Hina) that it may seem, on casual inspection, to resemble.
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Thus the game’s logo, a yellow heart criss-crossed with bandages: wounded and frightened. His first episode occurred when a girl at his school confessed to him, setting the tone of heartbreak, isolation, and the difficulty of human connection for the game. The game’s protagonist, Hisao, arrives there reluctantly after a long hospital stay for life-threatening arrhythmia (irregular heartbeat). Katawa Shoujo is a visual novel that takes place at a school for the disabled. “Everyone wants someone there to pull them up, out of their self-pity.” -Hisao Nakai Review: Katawa Shoujo By: Derek Yu On: February 8th, 2012