Katawa Shoujo Forums

Another book Hanako was mentioned reading in the VN was Dance Dance Dance by Haruki Murakami. According to the article, the novel (as well as several of Murakami's other books) deals with loss, abandonment and alienation. It's possible she read that book because it hit a personal spot. (I made a ...

Kasshoku is the name of the university, not the town it's in. (kasshoku is Japanese for brown; Brown University was the school Yamaku was based on) Hisao doesn't live in an apartment near university. He moved back in with his parents after graduating from Yamaku. (attending a university in his home ...

Open ending? Well, I guess the alternative would be to continue the story until her eventual death... Mechanik actually did that in his Hanako epilogue stories, though he employed large time skips up to that point. I wouldn't call this story's ending an open one though. Hanako graduating from and ...

For that reason (well, that and that I'm deeply cynical myself) the parts of Hanako that resonate with me are her cynicism and bitterness. However it has to be balanced with her outer personality too - she isn't so much putting on a front as a shy book lover as she's just suppressing those other ...

Still, what you describe here is, as I said, perfectly valid and perfectly reasonable, but to some degree it requires you to first accept the premise that Hanako is suffering from clinical depression, which IMO she is not. By specifically naming clinical depression you might have put more thought ...

About the first thread the story was posted in, I emptied it out last year and had it locked. The initial version had never even been proofread and contained grammar flubs and tense mixups up the wazoo, so after I reposted the story and its extension in a new thread, I removed the first version. The ...

Thanks. Yeah, the chess game was kinda long, but since this was how Hanako and Hisao kept their relationship going for nearly a year, I felt it necessary to include. Disclaimer: the chess game was set up by simply letting a chess program play a game against itself with me writing down the moves. I'm ...

Thanks and glad to hear you're enjoying it so far.

Thanks.

Thanks for the kind words. If I had one big criticism that I know you probably can't and won't address, it's the choice to use First Person Present Tense on a novel-length work with multiple POV characters. I get that you were trying to stick close to the voice of the original game, but it just ...

Thanks for the kind words. My only regret is that you can't keep writing this for ALL of Hanako's life. I doubt that would be that interesting in the long run. Hanako's life from the start of KS on has been peaks and throughs and I suspect things will remain that way for some time. I had some vague ...

I've seen quite a few stories with Lilly's parents before but I think this is my favorite version of them, and one of the few that makes them into actual people instead of just one note villains. Oddly enough, this has the side effect of making Akira come off to be the "bad guy" on a number of ...

Miss Yumi & Jun are great characters. Thanks. You really show off Miss Yumi’s caring & why she is so good for Hanako making her click with everyone even me. Yumi's caring side is a bit of a double-edged sword. It's her biggest strength and her biggest weakness. On the one hand, she's completely d ...

Thanks for the comments. You obviously put a lot of research into this. I don’t think any other story here considered ‘exam hell’ as something that was a good idea to cover. The initial version of Sisterhood was based somewhat on Lilly's route and for the expansion I took a few cues from Shizune's, w ...

There may be another aspect to Hanako's birthday depression. She's going to be having survivor's guilt, of course. She may also be thinking that if she was never born, her parents might have escaped the fire. What I personally think happened, is that Hanako's parents decided to have a small family ...