I'm not sure exactly where I first heard about katawa shoujo, although I'm fairly certain that it was somewhere in the sea of weeb-sites on neocities. From whenever that initial discovery was, I feel like I've seen it a weirdly high number of times since then. Recently I decided that I would try and actually play a VN for once (I'm not really counting the fact that I've played class of 09' and DDLC. Those are about as culturally ubiquitous as it gets) and katawa shoujo came to mind so I headed over to their website and downloaded the slightly sketchy unsigned binaries which at first refused to run thanks to the extreme averseness of macOS to strange and unrecognizable software. From what I can gather, this game was actually developed by a team which was assembled on 4chan (hence "4-leaf studios") which isn't concerning to me at all..
I'd like to quickly address the fact that this game seems like it'll have corn in it. Normally I try and stay away from things that are too gooner-coded - ok full stop. I just called porn "gooner coded", I think I really need to recalibrate and take a moment to reflect on my position in life. This can't be right... ok let me try this again: Normally, I would not allow myself to consume media which is blatantly pornographic or otherwise sexually explicit; however in this case I'm making an exception by virtue of it seeming to be innocent "for the most part". I by no means expect to think highly of it, if anything this is just another one of those pieces of degeneracy that I'll consume guiltily and then crap out as many scathing remarks on as I can come up with, albeit while still quietly harboring some secret enjoyment of it.
wow. what a refreshingly basic menu screen. Or is my installation missing assets?
On to the game. I immediately felt something weirdly charming about it - I'm probably just falling prey to the seemingly ever-present nostalgia fever that modern culture has so readily infected itself with, but something about the color choices, the reserved UI, the aspect ratio, and playing it windowed rather than in fullscreen feels nice. Maybe it's just this still fresh-to-my-eyes macbook display working its devious magic again. Whatever it is, I'm somehow already enjoying myself which is good. It's been a while since a game made me feel like that.
Some time later or something #
So... the premise here is pretty fascinating. I'd already read about it on the website, but now that I've actually played the game for a bit and had some time to think about it I feel like I need to... formulate an opinion (the most cursed of human tendencies rearing its head here lmao). The character you play as, Hisao Nakai, has recently been made aware of the fact that he has crippling heart defects and needs to go to a school for disabled children after a four month hospital stay. He's of course pretty sad and all but he seems to make peace with it. Once you get through the intro and into the school, you get an initial sweep of the classroom and we see a few people with visible disabilities and others for whom the disability isn't yet apparent. This is where I started to think - about what exactly this game exists for. Is the disability thing a gimmick, to drive up interest in it? Or worse, is it actually the expression of some kind of twisted fetish? Or maybe it's neither of those and is instead an honest attempt at "representation". If that really is the case (which I doubt but who knows, 4chan has shown its ability to be "benevolant" in the past), then it's one of the worst attempts at "diverse media" I've ever seen, and I've barely seen any of it, yet I'm still pretty sure of this off-the-cuff assessment.
To elaborate on that, there's the obvious fact that the MC's disability was clearly chosen so as to disable the player as little as possible, which just right off the bat is so ironic it's hilarious. I've barely gotten through a single in-game day yet, and I'm sure they'll work his heart problems into the plot somehow (they already gave him a heart attack from a confession in the intro), but still. They could've made him mute, or blind, or deaf, or paraplegic, or paralyzed, or horrifically asthmatic or autistic or ANYTHING ELSE, but of all the most common disabilities they chose to give him arrhythmia and let it sit in the corner of the plot where it'll likely do and contribute practically nothing, probably until it becomes mechanically significant (when it'll undoubtedly serve as some kind of sympathy-garnering device).
As for the disabilities present in the rest of the class, their relative mildness once again gives me the idea that they don't actually care about people with disabilities. This sounds kind of crass, since I'm essentially saying "they didn't make their characters suffer enough, therefore this must be disingenuous." To be honest, I'm trying my hardest to avoid saying "they're all too normal", but that's pretty much the gist of what I'm actually trying to say. I really may be incredibly out of touch, who knows, but I'm just gonna roll with my possibly bad judgement here.
The above leads me into what I believe the true nature of Katawa shoujo will reveal itself to be: It's something between gimmick and fetish. They clearly don't care about inclusivity, I've already convinced myself of that much. So what did they create katawa shoujo for? For the purpose of having characters that are more interesting and endearing than fully-abled ones. That makes it sound like it's just a gimmick, but I believe it goes further than that. The key word here is "endearing" - they're using the disabilities as vehicles for the inspiration of feelings of affection in the player. Their inclusion is simply to make the girls more "lovable", and nothing else. If the characters were too "weird", this methodology would simply fall flat, hence everyone being just normal enough. For the average gooner/VN enjoyer, disabilities will likely walk a fine line between "cute" and "off-putting", so four leaf studios carefully calculated out where they could and could not tread, leaving only the paths which they surmised would be most effective in letting the player feel the strongest "love" and "sympathy", sort of as if they're doing something "special". Basically this is looking like it's going to be pure degeneracy, can't wait.. ahaha..
This VN could yet show its true colors as something wildly different to what I'm envisioning it as here. Everything I just said about it after all was based on an extremely short beginning segment, so I could be super far off the mark and not know it as I confidently spout these stochastic evaluations. Hopefully I turn out to be correct... otherwise I'll feel really stupid. Maybe even █████.
Slightly more time later #
Somehow we end up literally being led by the blind on the second day.
When I got back to the dorms on the second day, Kenji started talking bout' some "Have you noticed the strange and unexplainable disproportionate presence of women here", and I thought holy shit is this some kind of subtle fourth wall break acknowledging how strange the premises of anime dating sims are?
Turns out that our boy kenji is just an incel, but I guess this doesn't exactly preclude it being the subtle declaration of self-awareness I thought it might have been. Watching (in this case playing) romance slop is always more enjoyable for me if it auto-administers little homeopathic doses of clarity, admitting to itself and more importantly its audience that yes, this is lowbrow but that's the point.
Anyway I guess I'll push on here. I probably won't update until I finish the game, so there's that.