Five years ago, a group of 4chan’s /b/ trolls announced Katawa Shoujo, or “Disability Girls,” a visual novel/dating sim set inside a private high school for disabled children. Oh, and it’s apparently also a little borderline ‘hentai’ – or perverted. It came about, in part, from a group of /b/ posters anonymously posting sexual jokes about amputees and other injured women, as the board is generally known for its offensive humor.
In 2006, a poster claiming to be a male nurse began writing stories of how he’d received a patient who’d lost an eye and all her limbs save one arm in a car crash that’d also left her orphaned. While as expected, the board quickly took the opportunity for pedophilic jokes and rags on the child’s injuries, but as the nurse posted more stories appeared, actual concern and sentiment began to appear as well.
The board dubbed him “Nurse-kun,” and the child as “ampu-chan,” and posters grew to become involved emotionally, however tenuously, over the stories posted. They were inspired by stories of the girl learning to play a Nintendo DS one-handed, with the nurse’s help. They felt their own indignation when the girl was faced with an aunt’s racism over her half-Japanese birthright.
Eventually, Nurse-kun adopted the orphan girl, and stopped posting. Though the board never stopped with the sexual jokes, some even fetishizing disabled women, there were those with whom the story had struck a chord. They assembled themselves into a doujin group calling themselves 4LS, or Four-Leaf Studios, and began developing a visual romance novel that celebrates that fetish, and in 2007 developed a rather polished demo.
Well, in 2012 the game is finally done. Hooray?
Back in 2010, Gamasutra editor Leigh Alexander developed an in-depth analysis of Katawa Shoujo as it stood at the time, taking a look at the game’s use of sexuality and fetishization, as well as its reception by disabled gamers.
“Even if this game ends up being some twisted view of having a disability, there is always hope that it may somehow inspire others to make games with disabled characters playing a prominent role, like Joker in Mass Effect,” he suggested.
Certainly, it’s possible. Give it a try for yourself.
Katawa Shoujo is free to download for Windows, Mac and Linux.
what
,
seriously
what
Do not want.
I'd read the full article but I just get this error message:
"Prefetching is not allowed due to the various privacy issues that arise."
I don't know what that is or what would cause it. I test the site in three browsers every few days. (Safari, Firefox, Chrome) Do you have any funky plugins installed?
So apparently people who are tethering will not be able to read the main site.
maybe you should stop trying to prefetch
sheesh
it can arise privacy issues
Just wrong.
Gonna be the creeper here to admit it (sorry for thread resurrection) but I've actually been playing this 'game' and enjoying it. It's got a good story, at least it's not my usual thing, but I liked it, but it isn't much of a game other than maybe 5 choices to you make through it. I'm not a fan of hentai crap, for lack of better words, I fucking hate it, but the game leaves a tiny bit of that near the middle to end of the separate character stories (multiple endings), but it's pretty minimal from what I've seen in the one playthrough I've done, so it's not really a detraction for me.
Say what you want, but it's actually not that bad of a "game". Just probably not for everyone. Actually, definitely not for everyone. But whatever. Figured I'd throw in my opinion for people who brushed it off.
That's cool you checked it out. I heard it was pretty interesting. No worries about the thread resurrection, happens now and then, it's not a problem around here.