You’re standing in the snow, gazing at a small note in your hand telling you to meet someone in this exact spot, at this exact time. You wait for a minute or two before- yes! The girl of your dreams stands right in front of you. She smiles the smile you’ve been dreaming of for the years that you’ve known her.

Little does Hisao know: It's a note of DEATH! or Arrhythmia

 

“Hisao” she says sweetly, the condensation from her words hanging loosely in the air. “Will you go out with me?” So, what’s your reaction? You run over to her and hug her, you stammer, speechless. Or, if you’re Hisao Nakai, you trigger off the Arrhythmia that’s been sitting inside of you from birth and keel over.

 

And so starts Katawa Shoujo. You play the protagonist, Hisao Nakai is thrust into the isolated Yamaku High School after he suffers a near fatal heart attack and it’s your job to help him to fit in, make some new friends and maybe even find love.

 

Katawa Shoujo is more of an interactive novel than anything else. It thrusts you into the life of Hisao Nakai, an average student in Japan with a very un-average problem. This unfortunate misshap causes him to be transferred to Yamaku High – a school for disabled children.

 

Katawa Shoujo is probably the sort of thing you would expect from a Japanese influence on a game. The characters look bubbly and cartoony and the whole premise of the story seems simply odd for a novel, let alone a videogame. The entire experience is extremely linear and requires only slight interaction from the player to be completed. However, it’s these interactions which define the entire route that Hisao takes throughout his time in Yamaku as he ponders over whether to go to the library, continue running on the race track, or even inquiring about a feud between two classmates. All these choices have a direct and immediate impact on the story that pans out infront of you, and quite frankly It’s extremely refreshing for a game to bluntly go out of its way to say “you f**** up, you pay the consequences”, the consequences being broken relationships and possibly broken hearts.

 

First encounter with classmates Misha and Shizune

 

The characters look great. It’s pretty clear why each and every one of them are in the school, but I felt myself looking past their ‘problems’ and more at their displays of emotions, thought processes and general actions throughout the game. It’s extraordinary how connected I felt towards some of the characters, something I wish other games could pull off. And just to give an example of how I felt towards the characters this novel/game portrays, in my complete and honest opinion – it outdid Mass Effect in making me feel engrossed in the characters habits, problems, hell even their favourite past-time. It’s so bloody odd to be sucked into a story about different character’s lives as effectively as Katawa Shoujo has.

 

I guess to put it simply (and to quote a youtube.com video) Katawa Shoujo is about girls with disabilities, not disabilities with girls latched onto them. It’s a refreshing concept, focusing more on the characters you interact with than the situations they find themselves in every day.

But to clarify on that Mass Effect tangent, ME always made me feel like I was steering Shepard into things that I wanted him to do, not what he felt he should do. Hell, you even tell Shepard how he feels about other people. Hisao, however feels like he has a mind of his own and you’re observing his journey from a lonely kid with Arrhythmia to a knight in shining armour (or maybe not, depending on what you choose). I guess the fact that the story is more structured but still somehow flexible just baffles my brain, it’s pretty hard to explain why it’s so engrossing.

 

The image that spawned it all

 

Of course, this being a game with a budget to only pay for this week’s shopping, there are some niggles. The backgrounds are obviously just pictures taken at a bland old place with cartoony filters stuck over them and the ‘animations’ are few and far between. That said though, the backgrounds kind of force you to focus more on the characters in front of you and some of them actually succeed in showing Yamaku High as an abnormal school. Even Hisao describes the front of the school as more of a park but the corridors bland and plain, whilst the classrooms are generally well kept and mostly empty. It’s a little confusing at times, but really it was never enough to put me off the stories of the characters. 

If I were to make a positive from the negatives, it’s that the clearly low funded ‘animations’ and bland but strangely familiar backgrounds  actually accentuate the actions of the characters the story’s focusing on. I know it sounds crazy, but that’s honestly how I felt. If there was a way to describe it, I would say that the novel is giving examples of Hisao’s surroundings but not showing details such as him walking outside or him doing his homework. This means that the reader needs to have a healthy bit of imagination to get the most out of the story. Sounds like work, but really I think it helped in hooking me into the story.

 

I've seen people relating Katawa Shoujo to a dating sim and even a “Sex sim for middle aged teenagers”. Well, there are sex scenes in the game (even though they are rare and seem important to the story) and yes, they are entirely skippable. But let’s be honest, the story is about Hisao Nakai and his journey through a new school trying to find love. It really wouldn’t make much sense if he’s in a serious relationship with someone and never actually engages in sexual contact with said person. It’s just healthy. Yet I still see people saying the game is just for sex fanatics or people with anime fetishes. Two words that describes people like that:

SIMPLE MINDED

 

Never ceases to amaze me...

 

Anyway, I’ve been ranting about how good this game is without actually giving many facts about it. There are 5 stories focusing around 5 girls (and one minor character) and each offers different paths to choose, different events and generally the whole game plays out entirely differently each time. It’s quite extraordinary how much the game changes from one storyline to the next. To compare it to ME again (sorry butthurt fans) you don’t just chose who Hisao interacts with through a structured storyline, you actually choose the entire storyline from the first act (4 acts in total). So, in ME you still save the world from the reapers but you choose how to interact with others whilst going through the story. Katawa Shoujo more gives you the rains and lets you steer your own story. Again, refreshing.
 

“But wait, you ignorant bastard!” you yell at your screen “Mass Effect is about the main story whilst adding characters on the way, you fool! You have this all wrong!” But you see, Katawa Shoujo is a story about Hisao’s life in a new school first and whom he comes to share his loins with second. That’s what makes it a novel instead of a dating sim of course!

So, yeah. Katawa Shojou. If you’re interested in playing it, you should probably download it for free at http://katawa-shoujo.com/

If you’re not interested… go play Mass Effect 3?

~Dan

PS: My blogger account is http://gamebyters.blogspot.co.uk/ - All the work I ever do will be on there.

PPS: Sorry about the images being a little off, It was hard to incorperate them into this client!