What do you think about Hisao's personality?

[Nyzer]

Realistic enough for a character that has to be hollow enough to be partly driven by the player. He comes off as kinda dense at times but really, considering his apparent inexperience with girls, general awkwardness, and the extenuating circumstances surrounding him and Yamaku, it's not really unbelievable.

I wouldn't say that he has five different personalities having to do with the five different arcs, but that his experiences in each arc affect how he grows and rebuilds himself following his heart attack. The only real difference, in my mind, is how if you pick Shizune's route, he makes the move rather than vice versa. He makes it fairly more confidently and a bit earlier than in other routes. Other than that, the people he spends time with rub off on him, and his personality alters slightly depending on who he's with most often - which seems to be fairly human nature.
I act differently around different people, and it's not something I consciously do, though I'm aware of it. And the behavior of others rubs off on me, if I spend a fair bit of time with them.
Though, I could also say that a lot of it might be because of my own social difficulty. I rarely don't feel like I am or might be doing something the wrong way, or whatever. Can't really interact with others besides throwing some lighthearted banter out, if they're the type to respond in kind...

[Revvy]

Nothing about Hisao really annoyed me at all, for example in Rin's arc, where he starts to get angry, he had every reason to In my opinion.

[Nicendeth]

I'd say ProfAllister's analysis is solid, I just happened to empathize with the Shizune and Rin arc Hisaos more.

[Loonie]

Nothing about Hisao really annoyed me at all, for example in Rin's arc, where he starts to get angry, he had every reason to In my opinion.

Yeah, I mean - and this is me speaking as someone who loves Rin's arc the most, but frankly the moment he explodes felt very real for me. I was feeling tired, completely frustrated and dammit, I might've really liked Rin but enough's enough! You know...it was one of those moments that reminds you very well that Rin is not the center of the universe here and that Hisao is, still, a character of his own personality. One over whom you may have some influence over...but still his own character.

Of course...that frustration and anger doesn't justify him blowing up at all heh. Later on he learns he had expectations that Rin simply did not share at that point in time (or at least not consciously) and that he had brought that frustration upon himself in the end. He mistook that night in the atelier as a clear marker that they were now officially a couple. Problem is, that's certainly not how Rin saw it and Hisao just couldn't accept that for what it was - no more and no less.

Funnily enough...neither could I at that point. Fortunately, later on things change.

[Pyramid Head]

MOTHERFUCKER!!!!!

Sorry, i may have gotten a little upset. Hisao is pretty good compared to the typical visual novel or anime protagonist, but maybe he's a little too much of a laymen for the environment at Yamaku, some of his reactions to his classmates just make me slap my forehead. And his behavior during the Rin arc just made me want to kill him, i honestly felt that he never should have encouraged Rin to enter the professional circuit when she was still doubting herself and when Nomiya was obviously a scumbag, but what can you do? Maybe Hisao is like Batman, the moment he quits acting like a miserable idiot the arc instantly comes to an end.

[Xanatos]

Eh, it's alright. He's basically your standard human being. Okay, and then he fucks up.

[Pseudogenesis]

Basically one of those template characters that you're meant to project on. Not to the point of someone like Gordon Freeman or Jack from Bioshock, but enough to where his personality changes depending on the route.

[Tomate]

/b]
aybe Hisao is like Batman

"Because he's the hero Yamaku deserves, but not the one it needs right now?

[Oddball]

/b]
aybe Hisao is like Batman

"Because he's the hero Yamaku deserves, but not the one it needs right now?

Bland, whines alot, relies on others to explain everything and tell him what to do, wants to give up all the time, yeah, sounds like Nolan's Batman alright.

[DrNonookee]

Hisao is also a whinny teenager but so was Luke Skywalker.

So was Anakin Skywalker, and we all know how *that* turned out...

I just felt that he made a big deal/drama out of every occasion.

It's not *him* that's doing it - it's the writers. It's kind of the point of the game; you know, the whole 'drama' bit. If it were all just happy Act 2 feels the whole way through, it wouldn't be a very interesting story.

Specifically, the idea is that it's not just the girls who are in need of love and emotional healing - Hisao is as well. The specifics vary somewhat between routes, as ProfAllister pointed out, but overall it mostly boils down to one word: vulnerability. Hisao is *extremely* fragile when he first arrives at the school, but not in a physical sense; his brush with death has rattled him so badly that it's poisoned his mind. He's angry at being unfairly (in his mind) struck with a disability from out of the blue; he's scared that his life could unexpectedly come to a premature end at virtually any moment; he's apathetic because his brush with death has left him questioning the point of such things as 'hopes' and 'dreams' when he might not live to see them realized; and he's lonely because the aforementioned qualities have accidentally caused him to subconciously repel his former friends - which he then blames on *them* because he can't see the fact that he's in a dark place in his mind.

He is, in short, an emotional trainwreck - and that's the whole point of the game. KS isn't just about Hisao meeting a bunch of cute-but-emotionally-troubled girls and using the Power Of Love to help them heal - it's about them (and Yamaku in general) doing the same thing to him. *He* changes just as much over the course of the various stories. He establishes connections to his fellow disabled students (and one special girl in particular) - through them, he learns to accept his lot in life, at which point he gradually begins to heal the emotional wounds that have been festering inside of him ever since the initial heart attack.

Hisao starts at Yamaku feeling alone, vulnerable, and worried about the future. I know from personal experience that when you're in that sort of 'despair' mindset, *everything* feels like wangsty, drama-bomb material, and when you feel like you're drowning in your own problems, it becomes very easy to let your sense of empathy slip and accidentally hurt someone else by making stupid choices. Assuming you get the good endings, though, by the end of things he's shed this damaging mindset and is on the road to recovery - all thanks to the collective compassion of a school full of people who, to some degree or other, have *all* been through the same ordeal themselves. Thus the Katawa Shoujo tagline:

You are not alone.

Actually, I always thought that Shizune's personality was more like forced on him than in the others. But at least in the good ending it came out as a good thing.

Sometimes having a bossy girlfriend can be a *good* thing. In each route, Hisao recovers from his emotional wounds in a different way. Shizune's route features a variant of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl archetype - Hisao comes to school practically *radiating* gloom, and to Student Council President Shizune, full of energy and drive and passion for her school, this is simply not acceptable! How *dare* he be all sad and mopey when Yamaku is such an awesome place to be! She won't rest until she drags him kicking and screaming out of his funk, and to that end, she 'gently persuades' him to join the Council - obstensively for her own selfish reasons, but in reality because it will give him friends to talk to and something more productive to focus on. Towards the end of her route, Hisao admits that he was being manipulated by her - but at the same time, points out that the only reason it worked is because a part of him *wanted* it to.

[Xanatos]

/b]
aybe Hisao is like Batman

"Because he's the hero Yamaku deserves, but not the one it needs right now?

Bland, whines alot, relies on others to explain everything and tell him what to do, wants to give up all the time, yeah, sounds like Nolan's Batman alright.

At least it's not Schumacher's Batman. He had nipples.

[rosemarie-chan]

Well I have to say that the whole discussion made me empathize more with Hisao. Sometimes I just forget that even though I am a teenager myself, I don't overdramatize things like most of the other teens and kind of get irritated when they do that. Not only by them, by anyone generally. I always think that I could be dead any minute for many reasons (accident, murder etc.) and I have decided to never regret anything. So the thought of death is an unpleasant one, but it is not so unnatural. anyway, I still believe that even if he didn't have the accident and he met these girls, he would still think and act in a similar way. What I want to say is, the way he treated the girls was not something entirely made after the first heart attack, but probably his way of thinking was similar to the one we see in the game. If Iwanako had the same personality as one of the girls, he probably would have made the same thoughts and mistakes, so I don't blame his personality entirely on his heart problem.

[Helbereth]

The thought that his personality could have been so utterly changed by the heart attack never really crossed my mind. Largely because, in the opening scene, he's the same nervous wreck. It probably changed his outlook, and perhaps inspired him to grip more tightly on the present, but it wouldn't have changed his inter-personal sensibilities.

[Pyramid Head]

Bland, whines alot, relies on others to explain everything and tell him what to do, wants to give up all the time, yeah, sounds like Nolan's Batman alright.

You know people talk shit about Schumacher's Batman, but i think Schumacher was the only one who made a Batman that volunteered to fight crime rather than one who either had no personality or a psychotic pedophile. Or did someone beat Frank Miller away from the franchise for the DC relaunch so that the new Batman might be interesting for a change?

[Guest Poster]

His personality wasn't changed so much as the accident and the experiences in the hospital brought out a more somber and brooding side of him. Drastic circumstances change people.

I always think that I could be dead any minute for many reasons (accident, murder etc.) and I have decided to never regret anything.

Unless you work on a bomb squad or live in a volatile part of a politically unstable country that's regularly plagued by marauding militia, I don't think you can compare the situations. The difference is in the odds. Everybody can die unexpectedly, Hisao's problem is the fact his chance of sudden death is like a hundred times higher than most people.

I do believe that Hisao would have acted differently if not for his accident. He wouldn't have had the tendency to latch onto people the way he did, he'd have been more secure about his future and he'd have been less gloomy. His core personality remained the same, but circumstances matter a lot.