Ah well, bad review is bad review, can't change the fact she doesn't like it.
Some people just enjoy be ignorant molded savages you know?
But went looking at it from a serious stand point of a guy who likes reviews to be professional and honest I find her attempt utterly embarassing and completely UNprofessional.
My first qualm is her attmpt at slamming the art in Katawa Shoujo. it seems that she gives stupidly low scores for art she calls generic. I highly disagree that there is such a thing as "Generic" art. When drawn all characters are a product of an artists work and nothign an artist does could ever be called generic, ever. Even copies cannot be called generic because an artists hard work went into it giving it's own unique presence. Even small children in art classes coloring in hardlined character papers, all their work has different subtleties and quirks, each is it's own art and none are the same as the other. Notice I said say artists here, I don't count people copy pasting art or photocopying art as artists. Generic art is dead art, an art that does not exist and certainly is not present in Katawa Shoujo.
Also she never seemed to take into account stylistic choices. She slams the backgrounds as straight up bad without any explanation of her opinion or validation of it. The backgrounds work very well with the overall feel and theme of katawa Shoujo, the backgrounds are grounded in reality fantasticals of our world and match the message of the VN very well indeed. Surely a person who has really gone thorugh Katawa Shoujo would realise that and even if not surely the background art is not so integral to the game that it's worth taking off so many points from the score?
The only valid point she could make about the art at all was the inconsistancy of it at points, and if we count that as her only valid point truely then we find she gave -8 points for slight art inconsistancy.
My second qualm, her take on the story.
What...The...Fuck...
There are almost no words.
Simply put, this game's story is a mess. This is inexcusable in a game like this, which is basically just supposed to be a big choose-your-own-adventure with pretty pictures. 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.
You, Woman, have never played a visual novel before. Ever.
You may have skimmed through them and ooe'd at the art and aah'd at the voice acting but you have never read a visual novel. And you never will.
A visual novel is NOT simply a big choose your own adventure with pretty pictures. It is that in the same way that rape is a valid and lawful way of reproduction.
Do you not see the overarching plot already? The plot is about the struggles of life. The human soul and it's strength. There are no evil overlords only dark thoughts in peoples hearts. Why must there be a big villain? Why must there be a big problem? Or perhaps you do not realise that the small problems protrayed through out all the stories in Katawa Shoujo ARE the big problems, they are small to you but in reality in that situation the people involved think them very big indeed. Your failure to relate. No. Your failure to even attempt to relate speaks volumes about how you went through katawa Shoujo. Like a small child with only the most basic concept of words reading through the bible. The plot after the intro? The plot is about Hisao, it's about him and his life and his struggles. endings? Generic? Is a happy ending automatically generic? Must all endings be melancholy or bitter-sweet? Must there always be long epilouges and after credit sequences of old men in armchairs telling their grandchildren tales by the fire? You gave such low scores because everythign was not blatently obvious to you from the get go and for that I condemn you.
There is no true ending with an actual plot or resolution for the protagonist himself. There's no reason to care whether the protagonist ends up with anyone, because he might as well have been anyone else.
There is no motivation given for the protagonist to do anything besides hanging out with the heroines and earning their love/friendship.
No true ending? OFCOURSE NOT! Life has no true ending. You speak of generic, well, if all you say about generic is true then true endings are as generic as they come, almost every visual novel and it's spinoffs have true endings, I'd say that's pretty generic.
And what is this speak about no resolution for the protagonist? Every route has Hisao resolving issues about himself, coming to understand who he is really, a deep realisation of himself. I'd say thats pretty final and resolute.
A reason to care? You care because you are reading, you care because you come to understand him and the girls, you care because it's human. Ofcourse everything that comes out of your mouth will be biased if you don't care. The same goes for motivation, his motivation is the need to be human the need to connect to people just like in reality. You wrote the review because you needed to connect to people somehow, the same goes for Hisao and his actions throughout the VN, His motivation is nothing so base and generic as combating a great conspiracy.
An you complain of hanging plot threads. Many great stories have plenty of those, they are there to kindle the imagination and give the world broader depth and greater complexity.
Qualm three, Your hate on the characters.
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.
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.
The only thing I can say is that you must REALLY hate reality. I have never seen more human characters in a media medium ever before and I highly doubt ever after. Their humanity is almost palpatable. Their emotions, their fears, their dreams and wishes and hates. All of it feels too real to be a fabrication and on some level it isn't. You complain of them being over the top well isn't life quite over the top? Arn't people capable of some really crazy things and thoughts? And writing based on disablity? Perhaps if you were baser and very oblique perhaps but to claim that to an intelligent individual is, to a great extent, insulting. It insults the very core of my person and the meaning of katawa Shoujo to say something like that. You think Emi is happy-go-lucky and unstoppable because she has no legs? Do you think Shizune is so forceful and Forward because she'd deaf and mute? I can feel just from reading THIS STORY that if it were any other way they would still be the same. As it's been said before the most basic premise behind Katawa Shoujo is that it's about The beautiful Girls who just happen to have disablities, not Disabled girls who are Beautiful inside and out.
You speak of cliches, well I hate to say it but really now-a-days, almsot everything someone writes can be called a cliche because almost everything has already been done. Many good ideas are suddenly cliches, Maybe you care, perhaps because it is a cliche you automatically take points, but have you never stopped to try and get past the whole cliche thing and see it for what it really is? Hisaos dash for Lilly to the airport is as cliche as it gets but it is still heart-wrenching, beautiful and wholly inspiring, cliche or not.
Qualm four, I shall silence you!
Sound! SOUND! And in sound of all things you could nitpick for low scores it was voice acting.
Could you hear yourself as you wrote about your justification for the low score due to voice acting!?
Almost all modern eroge are fully voiced. Got that? Let me repeat it. Almost all modern eroge are fully voiced. And voiced well. What's your excuse, 4-Leaf? You were obviously able to get at least a somewhat professional team of artists together. We aren't in the past anymore, and we've come a long way past the likes of True Love.
How dare you foist your inane want for voices into a review and count that as a not only a valid point but an integral one. You ask for voices and throw a fit when there are none? Childish beyond all reason, the other kid has an apple so why can't I have one? Childish beyond words.
Putting that aside, the music in this game is not memorable. It's not necessarily bad, but there is not one track that I could whistle or hum now, and it's only been about a week since I last loaded up the game. This is especially bad, because...
There is NOT ENOUGH MUSIC in the game. Really now. The game could definitely have benefited from a wider selection of tracks, so you wouldn't have to hear the same thing more often.
You say yourself that the music is not bad, and that the game could have benifitted from a wider selection of music, perhaps that is true perhaps not, then I can assume you are not bashing the music completely? That means the the 1/10 score is almost ALL DUE TO LACK OF VOICE ACTING!?
There are no feels to express this insanity. -9 or -8 points for lack of voices? Surely no self respecting person in the world would give something such a low score for something so minor.
My final qualm is this. Your strange need to compare Katawa Shoujo to all these other random titles that count as Visual Novels.
Perhaps it is because you have never properly read visual novels but even people who have only read very few realise that Visual Novels are a medium all their own and each Visual Novel is unique in it's own way. Some are romantic, others are large with great dark threats hanging over the protagonists head, some are slice-of-life and others got from birth to death. Even then those that are similar can never be compared for they are all different. Games can never and should never be compared to one another. Judge it on it's own merits never on the merits of others. Once again you pull the "He has an orange and a bannana so why can't I have both?" straw.
Not only that you compare Katawa Shoujo, a free project done in good faith on their own time with their own money by a group of hard working individuals who recieve nothing from it other than satisfaction at completion, to large budget projects done by large companies who have been in business for years. 4-Leaf has only ever done Katawa Shoujo and many of it's members are new to the whole Visual Novel thing. You compare something with no budget, working only on volunteers to a large project with money and dedicated staff who are paid and do it as a job? I can only call that petty.
Really I can't fault you for disliking Katawa Shoujo, I don't really care that you slam it in a review and make boards and spread hate. I DO however despise your method, your complete lack of anything even closely resembling a gamers or reviewers or even a humans spirit. I don't know why you even tried reading through Katawa Shoujo and writing that review because you clearly did not enjoy it from the moment you downloaded it to the last click, you hated on it every single moment you were in there and that is probably why your review is made of horse shit smothered in dried bullshit. A good review this is not.
I give your review 1/10.
and I enjoyed completing KS very much.. obviously.