news does travel fast

[janz]

Less than 4 hours of releasing full version, already got mentioned on a Chinese news site. Congratulations.

Whoever wrote this article made some mistakes, oh well.

here is my rough translation:
Title: First Galgame from Europe and America(well, "Europe and America" can mean the west), Katawa Shoujo's full version finally released

Since 2007, 21 volunteers from all over the world came together via 4chan created a virtual game studio Four Leaf Studios to develop 《片轮少女》（かたわ少女，Katawa Shoujo）. After 5 years of development, this game's full version has been released today.

Katawa Shoujo used typical Japanese galgame model to express itself, for example, it used background music, character spirit and text to tell a story.

Everything in the game, including art assets, music, screenplay etc. were all created by members of Four Leaf Studios. Also this game itself is free to play, does not have any fee. Thanks to the developing team's language background, game's full version supports English, French, Italian, Japanese, Russian, German, Hungarian and Chinese.

April 2009, this game released act one's content as demo. Due to it's special topic(all characters are disabled including main character), it has caused a stir and controversy. Of course, the game's main theme is very positive, the disabled characters are meant to be loved rather than exploited.

Because it's a galgame, Katawa Shoujo inevitably have some adult content. But the developers created a switch for people to turn off such content( for example, Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3 or The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim both have adult content and have a rating of 18+ or M+ in Europe and America). Because Katawa Shoujo is released for free via the internet, it does not have to go through normal publishing channels. It will not receive a rating from organizations such as ESRB or PEGI, but the developing team consciously labeled age requirement.

http://game.chinanews.com/netgame/01/20 ... 18741.html

[Merlyn_LeRoy]

Also up on Sankaku Complex now:
http://www.sankakucomplex.com/2012/01/0 ... -released/

PS: googling blogs, I see it's also getting talked about in Russian, German, and Spanish so far...

[Aquilez]

As well as Kotaku and Siliconera.

[Teclo]

Also Destructoid.

[cemex]

Here's the discussion thread on 2ch

http://ikura.2ch.net/test/read.cgi/news/1325668131/

hasn't reached the overwhelming levels of the 4chan thread, but there has been quite a few replies

[Suriko]

http://kotaku.com/5872886/that-game-abo ... r-download
http://www.destructoid.com/disabled-gir ... 8974.phtml
http://www.diygamer.com/2012/01/freewar ... o-release/
http://visual-novels.net/vn/index.php?o ... 7&Itemid=2
http://www.siliconera.com/2012/01/04/af ... jo-is-out/
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/news/vi ... -Available
http://www.sankakucomplex.com/2012/01/0 ... -released/

[Teclo]

Now if only Giant Bomb would cover it - and I can oddly imagine Edge magazine covering it too.

Edit
Oh wow, if you want some mild rage material, check out the comments for the game on its Play Force One page (the home of "sexy Flash games"!) that I just found by googling KS.

http://playforceone.com/pf1_games.php?m ... a%20Shoujo

[Aquilez]

Now if only Giant Bomb would cover it

I highly doubt that Giantbomb would cover it. They barely cover any indie games.

[Teclo]

I know, I know. They seem to favour Kinect games these days, too.

[janz]

Also up on Sankaku Complex now:
http://www.sankakucomplex.com/2012/01/0 ... -released/

PS: googling blogs, I see it's also getting talked about in Russian, German, and Spanish so far...

Here is the implication... chinanews is not a blog, it's a news website... and as a news website, it shares articles with other primary mainstream news websites...
This article now appears on http://roll.sohu.com/20120105/n331238112.shtml, which is one of top 3 portal sites in China.
Also http://game.people.com.cn/GB/48601/48627/16798735.html , this is more of "official"/"governmental" news site which is operated by People's Daily ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People%27s_Daily ). It's almost impossible to get more official in China than this... Frankly I didn't realize People's Daily has a whole section dedicated to anime and stuff....
Anyway, it's just kind funny to see part of Chinese communist propaganda machine have news article on Katawa Shoujo.

[hir]

Hi,

The news of full version release if heavily buzzing in Japan as well...search for かたわ少女 in twitter and the result is astonishing.

Also various blogs are covering the news, taking quotes from the 2ch thread Suriko already mentioned.

Notable news is that a few full-fledged game news site has decided to cover this topic on their site.
- Kotaku Japan -> http://www.kotaku.jp/2012/01/katawa_sho ... eased.html
- Gamespark -> http://gs.inside-games.jp/news/312/31254.html
My take was that no regular site is going to cover this due the name of the game but things turned out differently.

I'm having a hard time visiting the forum to avoid spoilers...it'll take months for me to complete the entire game.