This is a Swedish magazine, I think. Interesting that this game would've got into an actual magazine for review though...
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A quick and dirty translation of the review:
The reviewer used the wrong approach to rate this in my opinion but still, kudos for Katawa Shoujo to make it into an actual magazine for review.You should be careful about what you wish for. Carelessly accepting story suggestions can lead to a Japanese dating simulator being reviewed in the magazine.
Or not. Katawa Shoujo is not of Japanese origin nor is it a dating simulator or even a game for that matter. It is an entertainment product made by a small group working with no pay for five years. Its genre is Visual Novel. And that means text. A lot of text.
Most of the time in the game you stare at the sparsely changing backgrounds and you read a bunch of dialogue and the main characters inner monologue. Every once in a while you can affect the way things go by choosing your favourite of a from e few action selections. If talking heads cause you problems, you should skip Kay Ess.
What makes the brainchild of Four Leaf Studios worth mentioning? Instead of the world-saving heroes typical to games its main characters are disabled.
You play as a high school boy suffering from arrhythmia, Hisao Nakai. Due to his heart problems Hisao has to transfer to a school meant for students who need special care. In the new boarding school Hisao has to deal with his own changed life situation and identity as well as with the difference of his class mates.
Katawa Shoujo sounds like a teenage drama and that's what it ultimately is. Future is confusing, the opposite sex in confusing, your own feelings are confusing. The every-day nature of the problems is refreshing, even though the melodramatic writing style ruins some of the plausibility.
As your at a campus, it's only a matter of time before you face romance. There are five different girl friend candidates, all with their own features. Lilly is blind, Shizune is deaf and so on. Every romance arc is basically a different game, so there's a lot of replayability. For a text adventure quality of the writing is everyhing, and Katawa Shoujo doesn't clear that perfectly.
Let's start with the positive. The games greatest merit is that it averts being sweaty fan fiction. At least from what I experienced, the writers of the arcs for Lilly and the badly scarred Hanako showed commendable effort to get deeper than the surface. Instead of teenage romance, the story centers on understanding difference and finding yourself, which deserves restrained applause. Even though the emotional register sometimes reaches sappy levels, the story has its sad and even touching aspects.
All that's good is in danger of drowning inside a mass of text with varying quality. The amateurish quality of the script is OK, but every scene being over explained three times is not. For example my playthrough with Lilly took about seven hours even though a half of it would have been enough.
Someone wiser than me has said that a critic should first think about what the artist wanted to achieve with his work and then evaluate how well it worked. That's why I have to examine one small and one bigger design choise.
The lesser evil is about how constricting the game is. During one playthrough you have maybe 10 chances to affect the events. I understand that Katawa Shoujo is a visual novel instead of a game but I expected something wrong. The choises are often at the level of "Should I go to the library or to the town", so you can't tangle in complex relationships.
What bogs Katawa Shoujo down is its visual style, maybe because my anime preferences are limited to Akira and Miyazaki. I feel dirty even though the beautiful school girls with a woman's body and a child's face assure me that they are of age.
The problem culminates in the sex scenes what are like the remains from a different game concept. The scenes are short but they are explicit enough to get my cheeks, used to Bioware's kissing, to blush. The softcore porn is made weirdly disconnected by the fact that falling in love is in a minor role compared to examining difference (and similarity.) This is not how it was supposed to work! If you want, you can block the adult content but it won't change the suspiciously cute disabled girls. It depends on you if you find it distracting. For me it dispeled what the game had to say.
You have to overlook a lot in Katawa Shoujo for it to be enjoyable. The game novel that deals with disabled youth has its heart in the right place but it's beating very irregularly.
72 - A Problematic combination of a game and a short novel that only partly manages to handle its difficult subject.
