It certainly was a trip full of emotion. Nothing was as I expected. It was all better than I expected. Much better. Katawa Shoujo exceeded all of my expectations. Every last one of them.
I signed up to these forums 3 years ago. January 2009. I had heard about the project a month earlier, in Dec. -2008, on 4Chan. I had already seen Raita's famous concept page earlier on the I-Net, but it wasn't until Dec. -2008 when I learned that some bold group of nutjobs are actually going to go trough with this. It aroused my interest immediately. This was a very daring project for at least a couple of reasons. The first truly western visual novel, released to a playing field mostly dominated by the japanese. And the first one to deal with the love lives of the disabled. Yes, not even the japanese, with all their hardcore, leather & latex-bondage porn had dealt with material like this before. Katawa Shoujo, I felt, had some very realistic possibilities to become a groundbreaker title in many ways. Definitely something that I wanted to see with my own eyes.
So I signed up and waited. While waiting for the release, I pondered the potential outcome. This would most likely end in one of two ways: 1) The devs could give us a torrent of humorous cripple fetish porn, and that way really troll the japanese and the Internet VN communities. After all, this project originated on 4Chan. Or, 2) they could go at it with a serious mindset and a desire to do things right, and be hell bent on creating the most epic win that has ever originated from 4Chan. The Act 1 demo from 2009 was already hinting that the latter would be the case, and now that I've seen the final product, I'm extremely happy that 4LS chose to take the classy path over the smutty one.
Like I said earlier, it's been an emotional ride. I haven't felt this strongly about a visual novel since playing Three Sisters Story, my first one ever, on the year 2001. Much like 3Sis, Katawa Shoujo too introduces you to a cast of characters so well written and thought out, you just can't help but to care for them. The storyline of KS is a victory to quality amateur story writing, with all the underlying themes and rich attention to detail residing therein. While some popular love story clichés (like Lilly's good ending) do appear, even then the writers have done their utmost best to get the best material out of it all, and overall just tried hard to deliver, with great results. Simply staggering.
The same can be applied to the game's character designs. With the possible exceptions of Shizune and Lilly, you can't really take any of the main female characters at face value. Trust me on this, first impressions can be deceiving, and I'm really happy that the writers chose to make it so, as it proved to be this game's greatest source of enjoyment. You didn't always know what to expect, and it was this major asset to storytelling that kept the plot twists fresh and interesting. All of the girls are well thought out personalities, with each having their own set of problems, desires, strengths and weaknesses, all of which you slowly learn (and with some you really need to learn to be able to get them) more about as the plot neatly unfolds. The 5 years of work and dedication put into this project really shows.
The same goes for the game's audiovisual output. The full CG art and character sprites are pretty and expressive, very true to the authentic japanese manga drawing style in their appearance, and almost always of clean, commercial quality, and on the musical side, the composer has really managed to create a beautiful soundtrack that wrenches your heart, touches your soul and fills your lacrimal canals with tears. Bring tissues, ye who are not completely cynical and cold-hearted bastards. You have been warned.
Now, if I'd have to complain about something, sometimes the storytelling did feel like it was dragging a bit. Not much, and not often, but a quantum of these moments were there, where I felt like "Ugh, come on already". Shizune's path having only one choice felt kind of a funny design choice, and at the other end of the spectrum, Rin's story path choices sometimes felt brutally deceiving and hard to read. Something could also be said about the use of real photographs as backrounds, because at times they did stick out like a sore thumb and felt kinda cheesy when compared to the beautifully hand-drawn anime shoujo standing in the foreground. Photoshop filters or not.
But overall... These are very small qualms and don't really detract you from the gameplay, if visual novels are at all your thing. Just save often. It's just amazing what this group accomplished with their limited resources, and with everybody coming from a total amateur background. Indie developers throughout the world be proud. Katawa Shoujo as a whole is a very charming tale, and depending on how fast you wanna wolf it down, there's anywhere between 50-60 hours worth of material in it, if you don't abuse the Skip Text-feature. Not bad at all.
In short: Epic Win. 4 Leaf Studios, I salute you.
(PS. Nice touch with the contraceptives. Very responsible of you, as most other visual novels don't really bother. ;D)