Katawa Shoujo, free adult visual novel

[Hipolito]

Katawa Shoujo ("Disability Girls") is a recently released freeware visual novel in which you play a male Japanese high school student who has been diagnosed with a serious heart condition and is sent to a boarding school for the disabled. As you adjust to your new environment and health situation, you develop friendships with other students that could lead to romance. The other students have varying disabilities, such as loss of limbs or disfiguring burn scars, and the story examines how their disabilities affect their outlooks and interrelationships.

As a visual novel, it's like an adventure game, but this one has no inventory and very little interactivity. In the 7 hours I've put into the game, I've made only a half-dozen dialogue choices and it's not clear how they affect the story. It's pretty much all reading. Fortunately, it's decently written, with good music and beautiful photographed or photorealistic backdrops. The characters are in manga form. I'm not a good judge of manga, but I suppose it's par for the course.

I find the game quite relaxing to play and have come to care a lot about the characters. The game takes its time with the story, so if you don't mind the slow buildup, you'll enjoy some big laughs and might find yourself drawn into the drama as well.

Though the game is a fairly lighthearted look at the ups and downs of high school life, it takes a serious and respectful, even admiring attitude toward the disabled. It also explores the main character's conflicted feelings of wanting to fit in with this new crowd while being uncomfortable around their disabilities. It's puzzling, then, that the word "katawa" is in the title as it's apparently an offensive way to describe the disabled. Maybe it's ironic or something.

Now, about that "adult" part you may be wondering about. I guess this would be considered pornographic or "hentai," though I only just got the first love scene. (EDIT: Do not look up "hentai" on Wikipedia, especially you, Smoove B!) The content is pretty tame so far, with just some toplessness. (There was a naked guy earlier in a comic interlude, but fortunately he was wearing Genesis leaves where needed.) There's an option to play without the adult content.

I'll keep playing and let you know how the game turns out. I recommend it if you like visual novels or would be open to trying one. I may even do an AAR of this game, though this would be a crushing undertaking. (Isn't it always?)

Edit: removed link to game's official website, katawa-shoujo.com, as it's triggering a warning on Malwarebytes.

[silverjon]

All hentai is manga porn (or anime porn), but not all manga porn is hentai. Hentai means weird or kinky, so if this is tame stuff, then it's just a form of anime erotica. Unless it's like amputation fetishes or something, in keeping with the disability theme. Doesn't sound like it though.

Sounds interesting. I get the impression that the title is ironic, in that the characters are far more than just their disabilities, even if that is the first thing you notice.

[Hipolito]

I've finished one playthrough of the game, getting into a relationship with one girl. (The one whose legs are amputated, in case you're wondering.) No hopping from one sex partner to another in this game, apparently. One and done!

This is a very good game, or interactive novel I guess I should say. The writing feels plodding at times, but it really gets into people's heads to show how they develop emotional problems such as becoming distant and manipulative. And it's wonderful to watch the main character discover his capacity to love another person, and his surprise at what he's willing to do for that love.

The sex scenes are written with quite a bit of detail but without language or art that would be crass and titillating. The focus on the sex is there because it's happening to the main character and it's important to him, not the player.

I'm no art expert, but the manga of this game has got to be considered at least pretty good. Here's an example.



Don't you find it impressively detailed, with its lines and folds and color gradients and shading ... er, anyway, I'm confident that it's quality manga.

Sometimes, though, the conventions of manga don't serve the story well. For example, a repeated theme of my first playthrough was the main character's admiration of his girlfriend's fierce look of determination. The camera slowly zooms in on that face for dramatic effect, but the scene looks really goofy because of how the face is drawn:



This is supposed to be an inspirational moment, but it's ruined by a generic manga expression. The art could stand to be a little more realistic and less manga, or perhaps the manga could be drawn to show more diverse and detailed expressions. It's not the first time I've had this problem with anime.

On to the next playthrough. I hope this time it's with the classy blind girl or the shy burn victim. Oh, and I've decided not to do an AAR of this game. That was a silly idea. The game is freely available and just a bunch of reading, so you'd be better off just playing it instead of looking at screenshots and transcripts of it. But I took 5,000 screenshots for nothing!

Edited to repair image links.

[Sabin Stargem]

Picked up a copy, and will try it out once I have cleared my current backlog of visual novels. Thanks for posting about this game.

[Hipolito]

I've finished this game and am ready to share my full thoughts about it. Before I do, I want to acknowledge that, in my previous posts, I used objectifying language by referring to the characters as "the blind girl" and "the burn victim." Even at the time, I realized that doing so was rude and went against the message of the game. I justified it to myself by thinking that it was the easiest and most natural way to talk about the game and, besides, I was talking about fictional characters, not real people. But I think differently now. Disabilities are real, and fictional characters represent real people. While I'll still mention their disabilities in this post, I'll refer to the characters by name and try to be less objectifying.

According to a gaming podcast I heard in which a disabled gamer was interviewed, one in three people become disabled at some point in life. So it's high time we had a game that features disabled characters. The only other game I can think of that has disabled characters is Killer 7, which is a fine game but not exactly the role model I've been looking for.

The game succeeds in teaching that we should not think of the disabled in terms of their disabilities, but as individuals for whom disability is just one aspect of who they are. As the player-character, Hisao, struggles to accept his life-threatening condition, he observes how his new friends at the school deal with their disabilities in different ways and to different degrees. This inspires him to find his own way to do the same.

For some characters in the game, the disability is central and affects everything they do. For others, it's more in the background but can have a subtle effect on their worldview. Quite notably, for Rin, lacking arms is rarely mentioned and has no significant impact on the story. On the other hand, for Hanako, having burn scars does not disable her in any physical way but profoundly influences her personality. Ironically, of all the characters, she may be the one most affected by her condition.

The game offers five paths, each for a different romantic interest. In my opinion, two of the stories are good (Emi and Hanako), two are okay (Rin and Shizune), and one is poor (Lilly). As a whole, that would seem to make the game average. But Hanako's story is so good, I can recommend the game based on that alone. I was drawn to Hanako more than to the others, and the game rewarded me with a rollercoaster ride of emotions, by turns heartrending and heartwarming to overwhelming degrees, every moment perfectly scored. Transcendent and daring, Hanako's story is one of the best I've read in any medium.

Not that you shouldn't try the other stories. You might have a different reaction. If you're a weird, artistic person, you may have a better time of relating to Rin, a contemplative painter with whom having a normal conversation is a major challenge. If you don't mind some off-kilter pacing and half-written scenes, you may enjoy the story of Shizune, the student council president whose deafness does not prevent her from bossing everyone around.

You may not even be disappointed by the story of Lilly, though I think most people would be. Lilly is serene, thoughtful, mature, and gorgeous, making her a very intriguing contrast to the other characters when she's a part of their stories. But in her own story, we see no depth or conflict until the final act. The sex scenes happen too early and feel gratuitous. (Though, admittedly, Lilly's blindness adds a certain something to them.) It's as if the writers were so intimidated by her character that they didn't know what to do with her. If you do read Lilly's story, make sure to read Hanako's first because the two have some common scenes that are much more powerful from Hanako's perspective.

The art is more sexually explicit than I previously reported. It may not cross the line into hentai, but it would certainly earn the Adults Only rating from the Entertainment Software Rating Board. To someone who is used to entertainment that yada-yadas past sex, this is a little jarring. But this is probably how it should be done. Katawa Shoujo is about complex emotions, relationships, and people. To show how sex changes these things, it helps more than hurts to show the sex as well. In fact, it would be dishonest and incomplete not to.

And the game doesn't depict sex as a fun fireworks show. It's as awkward, confusing, and painful as any other part of a relationship. And when it's over, the participants don't know where to go from there.

It's quite a wonder that this game exists. It's full-length, professional quality, richly insightful, and it's ours for free! I hope that at the end of 2012, when gaming websites are tallying the best independent games of the year, this one isn't overlooked simply because it's an erotic visual novel.

[gbasden]

That's an excellent write-up. Thank you for taking the time! I'm going to need to pick this up soon.

[Hipolito]

Thanks! Hope you enjoy the game.

And for those not intending to play it, you may still want to download the soundtrack. It has a lot of nice piano-centric tunes. But if you will play the game, do that first before listening to the soundtrack. That way, you'll mentally associate certain tunes with certain scenes and characters in the game, enhancing the overall experience.

Also, this developer blog post and this Kotaku article go into this game's unusual genesis. I understand now why they named the game the way they did. Though the name is controversial, I think they did the right thing in sticking by it.

And I think this forum post is an excellent defense of Lilly's story, and has me reconsidering my negative opinion of it. No major spoilers in that post.

[MonkeyFinger]

I downloaded and started this back in March after reading your posts. Played it on and off (mostly off) since then but hadn't made a ton of progress. In the last couple of nights decided to "finish" the game because I'd forgotten the whole multiple (five?) story arc thing in the interim. Ended up with Emi and the 'good ending' and after checking the Extras and seeing all of the missing content remembered that I need to go through this again several more times to see how the other possible relationships work out.

This was my first Visual Novel, I don't know how this one stacks up against others but I found the writing very interesting and didn't mind basically just sitting there, clicking and reading. Glad everyone had gone to bed last night before I started, wouldn't have wanted to explain some of the scenes with Emi.

Thanks for bringing this to my attention, don't think I would have even considered it otherwise.

[Hipolito]

Thanks for trying the game and sharing your experience. Your post reminded me that I still hadn't seen the alternate endings, which I particularly wanted to do for Hanako. So now I've done so. It's amazing how calming this game's art and music are for me. The writing still impresses me with how it captures the rush of thoughts of a person in love. And my "feels" and waifu complexes are back. Sniff.