Katawa Shoujo

[Sakunyuusha]

This announcement is brought to you courtesy of a friend of mine on another webforum. Otherwise I probably would not have even known that this game existed.

Katawa is a compound word from 片, kata, which means incomplete or partial, and 端, wa, which means near or close to. I had to look it up, I confess, and the WWWJDIC reports that the combination of these two familiar kanji creates the specific English meaning of "deformed" or "crippled". So basically, a Katawa Shoujo is a deformed/crippled girl. She is an imperfect specimen, an incomplete human being. What a sad, sad title! ;_; I think it's clear that everyone who plays Katawa Shoujo will be playing to prove the Katawa part wrong. ^_^

http://katawa-shoujo.com/about.php

Katawa Shoujo is a bishoujo-style visual novel set in the fictional Yamaku High School for disabled children, located somewhere in modern Japan. Hisao Nakai, a normal boy living a normal life, has his life turned upside down when a congenital heart defect forces him to move to a new school after a long hospitalization. Despite his difficulties, Hisao is able to find friends—and perhaps love, if he plays his cards right. There are five main paths corresponding to the 5 main female characters, each path following the storyline pertaining to that character.

The story is told through the perspective of the main character, using a first person narrative. This game uses a traditional text and sprite-based visual novel model with an ADV text box. Katawa Shoujo contains adult content, and is created using the Ren'Py scripting system.

Katawa Shoujo is under development by an international team of amateur developers, and will be released free of charge under the Creative Commons BY-NC-ND License. There is currently no release date set.

http://katawashoujo.blogspot.com/2009/05/some-short-questions-some-short-answers.html

 

[Sakunyuusha]

Personal thoughts:
Here's a picture of Hanako as a child. (Click me, I'm a link!) She's probably the first (and maybe only, lol) girl I'll go for when I play this game. You can read about the characters by clicking on this link. Hanako looks like she'll be the classically-cynical tsundere who gives you the silent treatment because of her traumatic experience and her jaded opinion about how judgmental people are. She even has the long purple-gray hair and purple eyes of Tsugumi from Ever17!

I wish the girls were all a little older and had more physical development, but I'm sure that fans of normally-proportioned or flat-chested high school girls are going to to gaga over this. Maybe if they were college-age and even then were either average or above average in college-age cup size I'd be going gaga, too.

But I'm still pumped to see what the finished product looks like. I can't believe this was done by an international (read: non-Japanese) team of artists and coders and storyboard writers. Viva la Western Hentai Revolucion! ;D Good GOD would it be fucking amazing if by 2015 there was such a thing as Comiket in the United States. ~~~ *gets lost in his fantastic daydreams*

The sad thing is, I can't touch this till June! XD See my 40 Days thread in Adult Discussion for more info on that. So ... yeah. You guys have fun playing Act 1. I'll catch up with you in June, or if the full game's not out by then then whenever the full game comes out. I probably won't play Act 1 other than for the first five minutes just to see.

 

[reingiolt]

i came acroos that game before too. its kinda strange that it took the non-Jap otakus this long to make their own doujin game. pretty bold of them to choose these kind of chars though, there's never been a game ( that i know of ) with just girls with disabilities. i'm curious to see the reaction of the Jap otakus to this game.

 

[Sakunyuusha]

As am I. For the longest time, on both sides of the ocean, there has been a stigma associated with non-Japanese attempts to reproduce Japanese otaku products. Anime, oekaki and other fanart, and manga are the ones that come to mind, but even the idea of an American trying to start a hentai circle was ridiculed by the 2chan and 4chan cultures alike. And now? This team is helping to tear down that wall. And that's fucking awesome. Because it means my dream of maybe someday starting my own circle may not be a total pipedream after all. Having a dream is a lot different from realizing it, but it's still a step up for me to go from having what seemed like an impossible dream to having a dream that seems within reach.

I just hope that the game focuses on liking the girls in spite of their disabilities rather than liking them because of their disabilities. I'm not trying to judge fans of those fetishes! -_-; I'm just saying that if the game turns out to be nothing more than a thinly-veiled approval of disfigurement fetishes like amputation, mutilation, and scarring that it could turn away a lot of potential supporters. In other words ...
- I hope they don't show anybody becoming disfigured in sex scenes
- I hope they don't make too many overt references to the "advantages" or "unique fun" of having sex when you've got no legs or no arms or when you're blind, etc. Like ... hopefully the game will be polite and delicate when focusing on the blind girl's heightened use of sound and touch during sex, feeling the man all over his body, and will not have inappropriate dialogue like "Man, blind girls really are the best!" or something. >_> It's okay for a fetishist to think it, but if they come out in the game and say it then it'll sound like they're celebrating disfigurement itself rather than celebrating the girls who live with it.

Also, I hope the main character does NOT die during the final sex scene of the game because of his congenital heart defect. That would be both too obvious and too awkward. >_> Please impress us, writing staff!

 

[xeruel]

Ummmmm, there're 2 things killed my boner in this game :XD: the girl with no legs and the girl with no arms mg:
Muted/deaf girl : A OK
Disfigured 1/2 face girl : still alright
No legs girl : Holy shit !etrfied:
No Arms girl : ........:murder:

still have to give credits, the idea is quite original although I better off with sickly/weak girls than disabled :attention:

 

[redrooster]

Ummmmm, there're 2 things killed my boner in this game the girl with no legs and the girl with no arms

did you ever watch Desert Island Story X? No hands, no feet, no eyes (anymore)...

 

[Sakunyuusha]

Well, I mean, I look at it this way:

Do I like amputee girls in hentai? Not really. I'd say it turns me off. It definitely turns me off when it's guro, like if they show the girl becoming amputated by a mad scientist or something. I think it's unethical and dyserotic both. If it's a picture like the one I'm about to attach (got this off of /d/ a long time ago), I'd never jerk off to it.

But does that mean that I couldn't find a woman erotic in spite of being an amputee? I don't think so. I mean, I think that I could find the parts of her body that she still has to be very erotic! Like her breasts or her butt, let's say. And I could fall in love with her personality, too, both romantically and sexually. In other words, I wouldn't fall in love with an amputee because she's an amputee, but I might fall in love with an amputee despite her being an amputee. Does that make sense?

I hope you feel the same way. I hope you've got an open mind ('cause you've certainly got a very intelligent one!) and could imagine yourself maybe, possibly falling in love one day with a girl who has no arms or no legs. And falling in love doesn't mean that you feel you're settling for less -- falling in love means that you feel you've met the person you want to spend the rest of your life with.

So yeah, while there's definitely going to be a whole bunch of people downloading this game to jerk off to Hanako's scars, I hope you realize that there's also going to be tons of people downloading the game to cheer Hanako and the other girls on and, if they do jack off to her , to jack off to her moans, squeals, quiverings of delight, to her shapely breasts or squirming tush, and not to her disfigured face.

tl;dr I hope you don't think these girls are on the same level as the praying mantis from Iris. ;_;

EDIT: Shit, I just realized, I can't attach the picture! 40 days! XD Well ... I can show you it later if you want. It's just a picture of a girl in a swimsuit but she has no arms and no legs. @_@

 

[HENTAIBEN]

Maybe I missed this part, but I'm pretty sure this is being developed by a group of 4channers. With that said, I always sort of chuckled every time I heard about this game because it just seems par for the course for like a group of /d/viants who do in fact have a fetish for disfigured girls.

However you've provided some interesting points, perhaps this really could be a game about loving the girls for who they are despite their crippled state. Perhaps this is supposed to be a serious attempt at breaking into a hentai circle in the western market.

In any event, I've been interested in checking it out for a while now, so I might as well do that now.

Also, yeah - I'd go for Hanako too.

 

[Sakunyuusha]

I'm not much of a chan-goer, but a friend of mine who was a regular on /a/ back before moot had created /jp/ told me that these guys were talking about this project even back then; and that back then most of /a/ ridiculed them and said it would never happen, etc. So while they may technically be a part of 4chan and may have some love for the community where they first met -- and may even dedicate the finished product to 4chan for all I know! -- I don't think that they're your typical 4channer.

And the point I was making earlier was that on 4chan's /h/ and /d/, whenever I visited them anyway, I always saw people really getting upset with other anonymous posters who posted Japanese-style hentai drawings that were known to be drawn by Canadians, Russians, Americans, Brits, or even Chinese and Koreans! Ludicrous, maybe, but I remember it was a huge point of contention in /d/'s whole "no shitty western art" routine. People wanted to know if "shitty western art" meant "western art which is shitty" or "western art, which is shitty". Oh, the importance a comma makes! And they wanted to know if "western art" meant "western-styled art" or "art drawn by westerners." Again, semantics.

Edit: Oh, I don't doubt that most of the team partakes in these fetishes. I'm just saying, I wonder if they made the game for the community as a whole (and to promote love of women even if they're disabled) or if they made the game for their fellow disabled girl fetishists (and to promote love of women especially if they're disabled). I'm sure they're turned on by women who are disabled: I'm just hoping they made the game for all of us -- and for those women!! -- and not just for themselves. 'cause the latter could really hurt a lot of men and women's feelings who otherwise would have applauded this game. Hell, if this game does attempt to promote love of disabled girls in spite of (rather than because of) their disabilities, we could even see disabled citizens' groups heralding this game outside of otakudom, i.e. I could see Matt Lauer and Katie Couric talking about this on the Early Show. lol

But if the game applauds women who are disabled because they're disabled, then it's only going to come across as creepy, closeted, and weird to the mainstream Western audience. It's going to beg those same, tired questions mainstream people ask hentai fetishists, like "if a man likes r*** hentai, does that mean he'll r*** a woman in real life?" --> "if a man likes disabled girl hentai, does that mean he'll go around mutilating real women to make them conform to his image of beauty?" Shit like is one storm this fan does not want to see a-brewin' in the US of A.

 

[Ceewan]

I'm not a big 4chan fan myself, however there is also a thread at Hongfire on the subject:
http://www.hongfire.com/forum/showthread.php?t=94462

Personally the game sounds interesting, if they finish it.

 

[Sakunyuusha]

I couldn't help but notice that the person who responded saying his fiancée is in a wheelchair ... had an avatar that looked like Tsukasa from .hack//SIGN, which made me think of Subaru ... who was the girl in the wheelchair. ^_^; Just pointing it out 'cause he wrote a post that made it sound like he's not a disabled girl fetishist, but it's kinda coincidental that his avatar is like the .hack//SIGN who temporarily dated the wheelchair girl (before he discovered towards the end that

Spoiler

was also a

Spoiler

... although I guess they COULD have had a

Spoiler

relationship, lol).

 

[Ceewan]

did you notice the demo link?
http://katawashoujo.blogspot.com/2009/04/katawa-shoujo-act-1-preview-released.html

 

[Sakunyuusha]

did you notice the demo link?
http://katawashoujo.blogspot.com/2009/04/katawa-shoujo-act-1-preview-released.html

The sad thing is, I can't touch this till June! XD See my 40 Days thread in Adult Discussion for more info on that. So ... yeah. You guys have fun playing Act 1. I'll catch up with you in June, or if the full game's not out by then then whenever the full game comes out. I probably won't play Act 1 other than for the first five minutes just to see.

*cough*

 

[Ceewan]

uhhhh....
ooops....
sorry about that.

 

[Sakunyuusha]

I'm sort of used to it. I write a lot, and people don't read everything because it does admittedly take way too long unless you're REALLY into the topic.

 

[HENTAIBEN]

Hate to break this to yall, but I don't think theres any sex in this version of the game. At least not that I saw and I got two of the girl's endings and the (or possibly one of) the bad endings. Maybe I'm missing something, not sure. There's certainly a lot of story though, it took me three hours to get through all of that.

 

[Sakunyuusha]

It's only Part 1 of 3, and they said that they're not planning to release Part 2 (or Act 02, as they call it) independently. In other words, Act 01 is all you get for now, and the next time we hear from these guys it's either going to be never (which at this point thankfully seems unlikely!) or it's going to be when the entire game is uploaded to the Internet for free courtesy of these amazing dudes.

My guess? Act 01 is all about meeting the girls and making the decisions which land you on certain girls' paths.

Act 02? Probably introduces the sex.

Act 03? Ramps it up and brings closure to the character development. It's probably in Act 03 that you discover the tragic nature behind each of the girl's disabilities. (For example, Hanako's housefire is an obvious one, but I wonder if the girl who is blind might not be psychologically blind, for example, if she experienced something very traumatic and it made her go blind.)