If you're into visual novels, dating sims, or, er, girls with disabilities, it's likely that you've already heard of Katawa Shoujo, otherwise known as Disability Girls. It's been in development for around five years now, thanks to the efforts of the indie developers (and 4chan veterans) at Fourleaf Studios. The whole game got its inspiration from a single concept art piece by Japanese art circle Zettai Shoujo. Zettai Shoujo includes Raita Honjou, lead character designer for the Valkyria Chronicles series. Basically, what I'm getting at here is that Fourleaf's credentials are pretty legit as visual novels go.
Anyway, based on the title, you can probably make a lot of accurate predictions about the game's plot: You control Hisao, an otherwise healthy dude who has to go to a private school for kids with disabilities when he discovers that he has--wait for it--a bad heart condition. Aww! Hopefully, the ladies he meets at school will help mend his broken heart. They include Lilly, who's blind, Shizune, who's deaf (you have to learn sign language to court her), Emi, an amputee with two prosthetic legs, Hanako, who suffered burn trauma on her face, and Rin, who has no arms with which to hug you. Rin seems like the main face of the game; the initial concept art notes that she's a Thalidomide girl and the most "difficult" of the featured ladies. This is approximately the saddest thing ever.
Katawa Shoujo has the sad/cute combo down to a science. Now that I've had a chance to really think about it, I don't think it's as offensive or exploitative as my first contact with it might have suggested. Of course, playing it will be the ultimate test of its sincerity, but it seems to me that the game relies more on the vocabulary of visual novels than the apparent gimmicks of its characters. Can a game promote the beauty of an often overlooked population without fetishizing its members? We'll have to see.
You can download Katawa Shoujo free of charge from the game's website. Lemme know what you think of it.
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[Destructoid]
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