Katawa Shoujo intro

It has been an age since the last entry, although much has happened in that time, it has not and most likely will not be recorded.

 

The new conquest comes in the form of Katawa Shoujo, a free game made in the style of Japanese visual novels(also h-games, dating games, is there even a difference?) I say ‘in the spirit of’ because as far as I know it was an essentially open source endeavor, developed in English, and by a team of people from all over the Internet. Its interesting alchemical origin is what makes the title interesting, moreso than the content.

I have not played since last week, but the story so far is the milksop main character has a heart defect that manifests when a girl confesses her feelings for him. He spends a bunch of time in the hospital until everyone, even the girl, forgets about him. He gets well enough(with a bunch of pills) to go back to school, but his parents send him to a school for people with disabilities instead.

Through all of this, you get very few choices. I have had 3 so far in about an hour of play. Two of them didn’t feel like they mattered at all, and the third was a trap, which I failed.

As a new student, you are being shown around be a girl who I have no idea if anything is wrong with her(the only thing that has manifested so far was her mis-pronunciation of something, and a hint at a speech impediment) and a deaf girl, for whom the ‘normal’ girl acts as a sign language interpreter. I was presented an opportunity to ask about something, so I asked about the deaf girl, instead of asking about the library. This is one of those Mass Effect style things, where there’s ‘the dialog you selected’ and ‘what really happens.’ I got something like ‘you don’t feel familiar enough to ask about that, so you bite your tongue and finish lunch in silence.’ Such fucking bullshit. I wanted to punch the monitor, however I realized that this was a fine indicator that they had captured the obscene frustration of the genre so I let it pass. Click next for 20 minutes, be given one choice and fuck it up. I was probably supposed to ask about the library, because while in the hospital I developed a habit of reading to pass the time.

I tried to take a screenshot or three to include via the game’s screenshot keybinding, but it seems not to have worked; the directory where the files should write out to lies barren. Maybe I will take some images by other means.

There is a save mechanic that I think you can use at any time, but I don’t really want to save/load to determine what the ‘right’ response was to any situation. I am not interested in winning, really. I heard before playing this game that there is a rather hilarious ‘bad ending’ if you don’t manage to find companionship wherein your character essentially dies of loneliness. I am sort of interested in seeing this happen.