Katawa Shoujo: A Review

I would like to start by saying I generally dislike anime, manga, cuteness, big-eyed, crazy-haired anything. It does nothing for me. When I approached this "game" I knew I would nitpick and do my best to not give it a chance. I came to terms with this before I got started with this review and made it clear to myself that I would finish this game despite my feelings towards the genre and be a man about this review. This is what I took away from it.

Ugh.

It fucking SUCKED. Okay, that was a bit rash. For the target audience of people who enjoy generic romance and high school drama it's gaurunteed to pluck the heart strings and leave the "player" with a sense of coming away with something rewarding and... good. I guess.

Pretty much.

What is Katawa Shoujo? It's a Japanese style visual novel dealing with dating disabled girls created by members of 4chan (don't let that fool you, it's legit and free to download and play so that's something). What is a visual novel? Think a choose-your-own-adventure book with a lot more text and fewer choices. You play as Shithead (I don't remember his name) who has a heart attack because he has arythmia and didn't know it and a girl asked him out causing Call of Duty blood to fill his eyes and his heart to explode. As a result you wake up in the hospital and find out you can't go back to normal high school because you're different now and get sent off to cripple camp. Sorry. Cripple High. Anyway, everyone there has some sort of disability or what have you even if it's not completely obvious and it's up to Shithead to go out there and bless one lucky disabled lady with his cripple dick. Think of it as a school for super heroes except instead of super powers they are missing their legs or blind and there's no laser fighting, just talking and drama and romance and crap.

Expect things more nonsensical as this, i.e. "time is a gooey mass"

The first act of the game determines exactly who the recipient of said cripple dick will be. Don't expect to be able to directly control who the lucky lady is, the games handle choices as indirect and vague questions dealing with your opinion on certain things and how you spend your time rather than how to approach a challenge or situation. With visual novels it's all about the placement of the protagonist rather than how you would solve a problem so you're forced to view the world through Shithead's eyes (the guy is as exciting as a dead cow). Your choices in ladies are Armless, Legless, Deaf, Blind, Burnt, and a dude who looks a lot like Harry Potter.

Well at least it's not obvious.

Anyway, the games dialogue is very repetative and cute and you take away from it what you will. Expect to be told the trees are green a lot. I went down the path of Legless and got to have weird cripple butt sex at one point. That was the highlight of the story. This was only after 6 hours of reading about Shithead's feelings and boring developing romance and how protective Legless is about why she's Legless but she pretends to not be legless so... yeah. Anyway, somewhere along the way I screwed up and Legless never spoke to me again and the game ended.

Stupid BITCH! You broke my HEART!!!

Think of the choices as kitten cannon, where you aim and shoot and hope you don't land on spikes. There isn't a real target you're aiming for or anything you're just hoping for the best, at least that's what it felt like to me. Normally I would have been content with Shithead's failure and the game ending but by this point I admit I kinda cared about Shithead and what happened to him. I felt like his conscience and somewhere along the way I failed in guiding him to sweet cripple heaven. So I opened up my last save and made sure he got his happily ever after.

Facesole

In short, if you've got some time to kill and you're into the whole high school drama thing with a sprinkling of disabled girl hentai then go ahead and give this "game" a shot. If you would rather enjoy an intriguing story with tons of action and twists then go pick up A Game of Thrones.

*SPOILER* This guy DIES.