Katawa Shoujo begins with our main character, Hisao Nakai, having a heart attack at the worst possible time, when his crush confesses her own feelings to him. What the real end result, however, is probably one of the most visually stunning games I’ve seen in a long time, one of the most well written games in the history of the industry, and without a shadow of a doubt, the most realistic portrayal of humans in the medium period. It is almost as wrong as judging others based on any disabilities they might have. Many people thought the game would fetishize the disabilities of the girls or it would be straight up raunchy porn scenes.īoth ideas, however, are gravely wrong.

This backstory into the creation of Katawa Shoujo, that it is about girls with disabilities, that it had its origins on 4chan, and that its selected genre, visual novels, have a bad track record of basically being porn with shoestring plots, didn’t give Katawa Shoujo the kindest of first impressions in the world. This attracted enough attention that people started to want to see this game come into being, and as a result a group of 20 or so people eventually banded together and got to work. In the late 2000s the page was colored, translated into English, and then posted onto 4chan. Katawa Shoujo, roughly translated to be “Disability Girls” in English, though “Crippled Girls” would be a more direct translation, started its life in the early 2000s when the artist Raita Honjou, also known as the character designer for the cult classic PS3 game Valkyria Chronicles, created a single rough sketch page for the idea of a visual novel based around five girls with disabilities. That is pertinent with this week’s subject because that is the running theme in Four Leaf Studio’s Katawa Shoujo. People with disabilities are still at the end of the day just people. The mind-blowing trick here is to not let their disability define them. I had never found someone actually “get” how to properly characterize disabled people. Well, for the longest time I have been searching high and low for a good representation of disabled characters in works of fiction, and I had not found such a thing until now. You might be wondering what bearing me telling you about a disability I have has on this article. I have epilepsy, had it since I was a child. Let me preface this by stating something not that many people know. Instead of looking at a manga this week I am looking at a visual novel. This week I am doing something different from my usual articles.

Lilly satou katawa shoujo h scenes