Milleykins wrote:Hi! I know this thread is ooold, so yell at me if it's bad to reply, but I feel like doing so since it's somewhat personal (I'm the writer of the review). Just want to clear stuff up, since there seems to have been discussion about me personally. >_> Some things...
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Anyway... yah. Basically what I wanted to say was please tone it down a bit, even this much later. I just found this thread now but it still feels kinda bad seeing people personally insult me for something, when I was just writing a review of something I don't like much. We all have feelings you know, whether we're abled, disabled, GameFAQs reviewers, etc...
I must say, I admire you for sticking by your words and coming here to the KS forums to clarify things.
That said, I still think your review was trash. To be perfectly clear, I'm not attacking you personally - I have no doubt that you're a lovely, upstanding individual. And I don't really mind the fact that you didn't care for KS, but your reasons for doing so (or at the very least, the way you presented them) were fairly awful.
Edit: I just realized that I was being as inconclusive/unspecific with your review as your review was of the game, so let me get down to brass tacks, as they say.
I think your assessment of the story and the characters are horrifically inadequate.
There is no overarching plot beyond the protagonist being put into a school for the disabled for heart problems. There is no big villain or problem to struggle against. There is no plot after the intro until you get into a girl's route. Most of the routes have extremely generic endings, with no denouement that makes any sort of sense or anything that tells you about what happens in the future.
I get the feeling you have very little experience with
slice of life. You lambast the game for its lack of a clear villain and overarching plot, citing them as signs of poor writing, when if anything they're a staple of a well-established genre. You say that you're just as qualified to read and understand literature as anyone else, but your inability to recognize the central conflict of the story indicates the exact opposite (hint: it has to do with the fact that the protagonist is diagnosed with a terminal illness). You also seem to insist upon endings with explicit resolutions, which is troubling, as I can list off dozens of stories (and a handful of VN arcs as well) with ambiguous endings that work exceptionally well. That is not a mark of bad writing. You also criticize the endings that are there of making no sense with regard to their respective arcs - something that completely baffles me, but unfortunately you don't provide any specifics so I can't give you any further criticism in return.
There are many plot threads left hanging from the introduction if you don't play certain routes. This is shoddy writing. For example, there should have been at least a passing mention of the Shizune/Lilly relationship even if you weren't on their routes.
Kenji is set up for a story, yet almost nothing is ever explained. The writers should not have started sewing that plot without being willing to follow it all the way to the finish.
Er, why? What more could they have done with the Lilly/Shizune dynamic in the Emi, Rin and Hanako arcs? What could that have possibly added that was, in your opinion, so clearly missing? You don't cite a reason for this at all. Likewise, there are just enough clues throughout the entirety of the game to piece together Kenji's backstory - a bit of subtlety that, at least to me, was very refreshing. However, the point is that the game is not about him, and shifting gears to explicitly showcase his life story would've been (in my opinion) extremely unnecessary. As these are your only two examples of "plot threads left hanging from the introduction," your assertion of "shoddy writing" is laughably weak.
Katawa Shoujo has ridiculous characters. They are over the top. This wouldn't be bad if it wasn't extremely obvious that the writers wrote them based around their disabilities, instead of writing characters and deciding how they would deal with a disability afterward. Granted, this isn't entirely the writers' faults since they based the entire game around some doujin concept art, but it's still a glaring fault.
I know I said that I wasn't being personal, but I will be honest and say that this section of your review does genuinely anger me. You state that the writers wrote the characters around their disabilities. To me, that is a spit in the face. From my perspective, Katawa Shoujo's greatest success is the fact that the disabilities are so tertiary to the characters themselves. The story is not about disabilities, it's about people. It quite seriously ticks me off that this seems to have flown right over your head. Your assertion here is completely alien to me and I would love to hear you talk about in detail.
You also state that the characters are over-the-top - no specifics, so I have to assume that you're referring to every single character. This, again, confuses me to no end. Every character in KS is exceptionally grounded compared to 90% of the anime/VN characters I've seen. The only ones I might place under the category of "ridiculous" would be Kenji, Hideaki, and Jigoro (and possibly Misha). And I would leave it at that, except for the glaring fact that each of these characters is given enough depth so that his or her "ridiculousness" is overshadowed by his or her role in the story (Misha especially).
Now, they are over the top, like I said, yes, but they somehow still manage to be very generic! The writers have watched too much bad high school anime without realizing that they have to put their fandoms aside to write anything other than ridiculous cliches. The shy girl, and the pushy student council president both come to mind as I write this.
Once again, what the writers do with those character cliches seems to have flown over your head. Take Shizune as an example. It's true that at first glance she comes across as the generic student council president type (with the addition of being deaf/mute), but they give her character so much depth, in both her family history as well as her relationship with Misha (and by extension Hisao), that how you could say her character is generic is entirely beyond me. It's true that she doesn't have a real character arc (in that she doesn't change, beyond realizing what she wants to do in life and how her personality impacts others), but the focus of the route is her effect on Hicchan and Misha, and how they change in response to her.
In essence, I can sum up my criticism of your review by saying that you seemed to have skimmed over KS without giving any thought or consideration whatsoever to the game, its stories, its characters, or its themes.
