Katawa Shoujo Act 1 – Initial Impressions

By now, I think that most of the visual novel community has played the Katawa Shoujo demo at least once. It’s really quite an impressive piece of work, so you should definitely go download it if you haven’t already. I got the Hanako ending and I’m at roughly 70% completion right now, so I think I’ve played enough to give my initial impressions.

So cute!

Just for those who are curious, it took me almost exactly two hours to get the Hanako end. I bet that I still have another hour to go until I get all the other endings, so expect a total play time of roughly three hours.

The first thing you notice about Katawa Shoujo is its really awesome art. All the character sprites are very well drawn, and easily match the sprites in any visual novel offered on J-List right now. It looks like the backgrounds use a combination of filtering and visual touch ups on photographs. Even though they’re not hand drawn, they still look very nice and don’t conflict at all against the sprites. The event CGs are also very nicely drawn, although not as perfect as the character sprites. (But they are still heads and shoulders above most other free visual novels.)

The art is very outstanding

The second thing you notice is its equally outstanding original sound track. Katawa Shoujo sounds almost exactly like a visual novel you’d generally have to pay nearly a hundred dollars for in Japan.

The sound track is really easy on the ears

The third thing is the really excellent programming. There’s quite a large number of parallax pans and zooms, all of which look really cool. I haven’t seen these kinds of visual effects in most Japanese visual novels, so props to whoever thought of them.

The effects are all really nice

In terms of the story, admittedly, the game is just a demo and doesn’t actually privy us with much plot development. The entire thing consists of mostly scenes of Hisao’s daily life at his new school. Aside from taking place at a school for handicaps, it’s fairly by the numbers stuff: the characters go to class, visit the town to buy groceries, and prepare for a school festival. Given the fact that it takes nearly two hours for all of this to happen, the plot takes a pretty leisurely pace most of the time. But since it seems pretty normal for most dating sims to begin relaxed and then get more dramatic later, I’m assuming that there will be more drama in the full game.

More Hanako is always good.

The demo appears to contain the entire trunk of the game and cuts off at the beginning of each of the girl’s branches. Unfortunately, this was kind of anti-climatic, since the game cut off exactly when things started to get interesting. It was kind of cruel to force me to spend nearly two hours trying to break open Hanako’s shell only to have the game end the instant she appeared to open up to me. But alas, seeing how this is just a demo, I can live with it.

Also, there is an suspicious omission of information about Misha. Much of her story appears to be missing in the demo, the biggest of which involves why exactly she’s at the school when she appears to be a perfectly normal girl. The game had faded out tabs for all the arcs in the extras menu, and I didn’t see Misha’s name there, so I’m wondering if she isn’t one of the end girls or if this is more of a technical error.

Misha: Not an end girl?

In terms of the characters, there’s a pretty traditional set up here. There’s Shizune, the tsundere class rep, Emi, the cheerful little sister type of character, Hanako, the shy bookworm, Lilly, the elegant older sister figure, and Rin, the slightly off beat laid back girl. In addition, you’re joined by Kenji, the obligatory idiot male sidekick. He provides plenty of laughs along the way, so it was good to have him on board.

Cue your obligatory idiot male sidekick

In terms of the girl’s disabilities, they do play somewhat of a role, but to tell the truth, the demo doesn’t really go beyond providing the player with the traditional dating sim set up. The disabilities are presented in a pretty politically correct manner, although they don’t really create any dramatic tension in of themselves. I’m expecting more drama in the full game, but the demo resembled more of a regular high school dating sim rather than a thoughtful social message about disabilities. Maybe it’s because there have been plenty of games about sick girls before – it’s pretty much a staple of the genre, from Kana Imouto to Nagisa of Clannad – but so far, the disabilities are kind of there, but there’s no real plot conflict arising from them yet.

Rin brings up a deadly good point…

I think the game is a hopeful start for Katawa Shoujo indeed. Now that we have the appropriate set up out of the way, it’s time for there to be more dramatic tension in the plot. I fully expect the full version to be more heart rending than the demo, so consider me looking forward to it. Looks like I won’t be making any jokes about Katawa Shoujo’s epically long development cycle any more.

~ by Samu-kun on May 5, 2009.