While Hisao is initially quite reluctant to leave his old school, he eventually realizes that things aren’t as bad as they seem, and he meets a handful of other students that help him ease into his new environment. The doctor mentions the name of a private school called Yamaku Academy, which specializes in educational facilities for disabled students, with a 24-hour medical staff on site, and many specialized classrooms for the deaf and the blind, among others. Hisao learns that he has arrhythmia, and can’t go back to his old school due to the need to keep a close eye on his condition. While meeting a girl from his class at the park in the middle of winter, Hisao’s heart begins pounding – assumedly due to nerves – and he eventually collapses. Katawa Shoujo places the reader in the role of high school student Hisao Nakai. These sorts of things happen so rarely that it’s already pretty impressive that this game got made and finished at all, let alone that it’s actually really well written and surprisingly respectful of its subject matter, even despite the literal translation of its name being “disability girls.” (Personally, I’m willing to blame machine translation.) The coolest thing is, despite being originally written in English, a translation is currently underway to make it available in Japanese – in fact, the “Act 1” version is currently available in Japanese, Magyar, Italian, and other languages as well.
#KATAWA SHOUJO GAME ENGLISH DOWNLOAD#
This is why it’s so interesting to see a title like Katawa Shoujo, which is not only written originally for the English language, but developed by a group of anonymous strangers from all over the world, who met over the Internet and released their work as a free download under a Creative Commons license. The OEL (Original English-Language) visual novel has few examples to it, but the category does exist nonetheless. Yet it’s oddly rare to see independent teams creating visual novels of their own, in languages other than Japanese. A visual novel really doesn’t take nearly as much programming effort as a full-featured video game, leaving the production values and (most importantly) the writing to take the spotlight. Perhaps it’s due to there not being very many popular examples of the medium available in non-Japanese-speaking countries. The medium of “visual novel” is, curiously, a primarily Japanese thing.
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