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.

Side Note: Comics

I have recently rediscovered my love of the good ol' American comic book and oh, what a love it is. My first comic book was Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles back when I was young enough to not be able to remember how old I was to recall this memory. In it there was an anti hero turtle and people died and were blown up. I also had a Transformers comic. Same scenario.

Just like that

That was my exposure to comics in the beginning, cool images with lots of colors and people died. It wasn't until much later when I started doing my own artwork and writing that I began to drift back into the way of comic books. The blossoming of my love took place in Groton, CT where I chanced upon a place known as Sarge's Comics in New London which was right across the river from where I attended sub school.

Notice the Green Ranger

New London was a charming and beautiful New England town and with Mystic right down the road I can tell you it was one of the most intriguing areas I had ever lived in. People were friendly, the nights were cool and the fog rolled in heavily in the morning. Old tall sailing ships could be seen in the harbor and the towns seemed to emerge from the thick evergreen forests as if it was one big painting planned for beauty and resonance. There is mysticism about New England that seemed to be everywhere you look, just under the surface. It's no wonder that Stephen King sets up most of his stories there and I can tell you you haven't lived until you've been in Salem on Halloween. Sarge's Comics was the biggest comic book shop I had ever seen with rows upon rows of comics of every genre and publisher and not to mention a basement devoted to board games and other nerd finery's. I was there looking for inspiration and dammit, I found it.

New England!

In between these epochs of my life I was big into Japanese comics and storytelling, an interest brought upon me by Cartoon Network with Tunami and various Japanese games I was playing at the time, most notably Pokemon for it's brainwashing of my young mind. The Japanese style of storytelling is as far away from reality as you can get, everything is amazingly exaggerated, there's lots of screaming and exuberant cuteness and melodrama and a horrible fascination with teenage girls that are useless and when I look back in it now I can see its appeal to my child like mind. Now, however When I compare Japanese and American style graphic storytelling there is simply no comparison to be made.

Every Japanese anything, ever

American storytelling is hard and real and at its best visceral in its presentation. It captures mainstays in American culture, violence, sex, hard truths, betrayals, the good guy doesn't always win and he's always faced with insurmountable odds and yet always manages to find a way and forge his own path. Even if he loses everything, he sucks it up and moves on. It's that hardness and realism that I crave in a good story. I tend to overlook the spandex costumes and sometimes cheesy plots that can happen. With the right writer and artist at the helm some great work can be done. It's been three years since I bought a comic book and now I get at least one a day while I'm on my lunch break at work and you know what? I'm glad I came back.