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Katawa Shoujo
Katawa Shoujo (Japanese: かたわ少女, Hepburn: Katawa Shōjo; lit. "Cripple Girls", translated "Disability Girls") is a bishōjo-style visual novel by Four Leaf Studios that tells the story of a young man and five young women living with varying disabilities. The game uses a traditional text and sprite-based visual novel model with an ADV-style text box running on the Ren'Py visual novel engine. The game is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND.
The majority of the story takes place at Yamaku High School, a boarding school for disabled students, located in an unnamed city somewhere in modern, northern Japan. The player takes the role of Hisao Nakai, an ordinary boy whose life changes dramatically after a heart attack caused by his long-dormant cardiac arrhythmia. After a lengthy hospitalization, he is forced to transfer to a school specialized in providing education and healthcare for students with disabilities. Over the course of the narrative, Hisao has the opportunity to come to grips with his condition and adjust to his new life.
The gameplay of Katawa Shoujo is choice-based, in which the player reads through text and occasionally has the chance to respond to prompts with a variety of preset responses. The decisions made initiate possible events or dialogue within the story. Depending on the choices made by the player, the story branches into multiple forks. Each of these paths chronicle Hisao's deepening and eventually romantic relationship (or lack thereof) with one of the five main female characters; these may variously end well, poorly, or neutrally.
The concept originated in a sketch created in December 2000 by Japanese doujinshi artist Raita Honjou (credited in Thanks as RAITA). From January 2007, the sketch was discussed extensively on the 4chan image board, and a multinational development group was assembled from users of 4chan and other internet communities. The group took the name Four Leaf Studios (based on 4chan's four-leaf clover logo).
Most of the art, sound, and animation assets used in the game are original and were created for the game by a dedicated team of artists on the development forums. Background images used in the game were collected through an open call for background photos, from public-domain image collections, and by a dedicated photographer on the development team. These images were later filtered to match the art style of the rest of the game's drawings. Because real pictures were used, many of the locations in the game are based on real places, with Yamaku High School being constructed from images of Brown University. The city that the novel is set in, although unnamed, is based on Sendai and the school was written to be where Aoba Castle stands.
On April 29, 2009, the team released an "Act One" preview. Act 1 has since been updated for several additional languages; as of Act 1's fifth version, English, French, Italian, Japanese, Russian, German, Hungarian, and both Traditional and Simplified Chinese are included. The complete English-language novel was released on January 4, 2012.
It was announced that the French-language translation would be released July 4, 2013 as both a download and a limited-edition physical edition. The French-language version was made available for download on July 8, 2013. A separate, full-patch adding a completed Russian translation was released independently by its translation group on December 9, 2013. On July 27, 2014, the International Spanish version was released and made available for download that same day. On April 1, 2015, in lieu of their traditional April Fools' Day prank, Four Leaf Studios released the Japanese translation. Additionally, they announced that a second physical release would be sold by the Japanese translation team at Comitia 112 and Comiket 88 (May 5 and August 16, 2015, respectively, at Tokyo Big Sight). The full visual novel has been released officially in English, French, Spanish, Japanese and Italian.
On June 6, 2015, Four Leaf Studios announced the end of support and development for the visual novel and official translation projects, concluding with a final bug/typo patch. They released the English script files in full and instructions on how to patch in and distribute any future fan translations into languages not included in the final official version.
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Katawa Shoujo
Katawa Shoujo (Japanese: かたわ少女, Hepburn: Katawa Shōjo; lit. "Cripple Girls", translated "Disability Girls") is a bishōjo-style visual novel by Four Leaf Studios that tells the story of a young man and five young women living with varying disabilities. The game uses a traditional text and sprite-based visual novel model with an ADV-style text box running on the Ren'Py visual novel engine. The game is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND.
The majority of the story takes place at Yamaku High School, a boarding school for disabled students, located in an unnamed city somewhere in modern, northern Japan. The player takes the role of Hisao Nakai, an ordinary boy whose life changes dramatically after a heart attack caused by his long-dormant cardiac arrhythmia. After a lengthy hospitalization, he is forced to transfer to a school specialized in providing education and healthcare for students with disabilities. Over the course of the narrative, Hisao has the opportunity to come to grips with his condition and adjust to his new life.
The gameplay of Katawa Shoujo is choice-based, in which the player reads through text and occasionally has the chance to respond to prompts with a variety of preset responses. The decisions made initiate possible events or dialogue within the story. Depending on the choices made by the player, the story branches into multiple forks. Each of these paths chronicle Hisao's deepening and eventually romantic relationship (or lack thereof) with one of the five main female characters; these may variously end well, poorly, or neutrally.
The concept originated in a sketch created in December 2000 by Japanese doujinshi artist Raita Honjou (credited in Thanks as RAITA). From January 2007, the sketch was discussed extensively on the 4chan image board, and a multinational development group was assembled from users of 4chan and other internet communities. The group took the name Four Leaf Studios (based on 4chan's four-leaf clover logo).
Most of the art, sound, and animation assets used in the game are original and were created for the game by a dedicated team of artists on the development forums. Background images used in the game were collected through an open call for background photos, from public-domain image collections, and by a dedicated photographer on the development team. These images were later filtered to match the art style of the rest of the game's drawings. Because real pictures were used, many of the locations in the game are based on real places, with Yamaku High School being constructed from images of Brown University. The city that the novel is set in, although unnamed, is based on Sendai and the school was written to be where Aoba Castle stands.
On April 29, 2009, the team released an "Act One" preview. Act 1 has since been updated for several additional languages; as of Act 1's fifth version, English, French, Italian, Japanese, Russian, German, Hungarian, and both Traditional and Simplified Chinese are included. The complete English-language novel was released on January 4, 2012.
It was announced that the French-language translation would be released July 4, 2013 as both a download and a limited-edition physical edition. The French-language version was made available for download on July 8, 2013. A separate, full-patch adding a completed Russian translation was released independently by its translation group on December 9, 2013. On July 27, 2014, the International Spanish version was released and made available for download that same day. On April 1, 2015, in lieu of their traditional April Fools' Day prank, Four Leaf Studios released the Japanese translation. Additionally, they announced that a second physical release would be sold by the Japanese translation team at Comitia 112 and Comiket 88 (May 5 and August 16, 2015, respectively, at Tokyo Big Sight). The full visual novel has been released officially in English, French, Spanish, Japanese and Italian.
On June 6, 2015, Four Leaf Studios announced the end of support and development for the visual novel and official translation projects, concluding with a final bug/typo patch. They released the English script files in full and instructions on how to patch in and distribute any future fan translations into languages not included in the final official version.