Katawa Shoujo Forums

http://www.gamefaqs.com/pc/650003-kataw ... iew-149701

I'm surprised it took this long to see a review like this posted from a VN player.

I understand what his issues with the game are, but I can't really feel the same way. I had problems with the lack of a uniform art style, or lack of voice, or characters. I stopped really faulting the game for it when I remembered this game was free and developed by a team of people with little to no experience in make VN's.

KS is a good visual novel, IMO of course, and I also understand that other VN's outshine it multiple times over. I just don't feel like I can really condemn the game like this guy can because this game was free and made in the free time of a team of relatively inexperienced people.

I dunno, that's my two cents. What do you guys think?

I think that guy didn't know how to read and understand VNs... hopeless..

I was surprised at how much rage that guy felt for... pretty much everything in KS.

Although I do think VNs should stop being classed as games... I think of them as books, because there are some choices you make, but the vvast vast (in Shzine's arc, VAST) time you spend just reading without making choices makes it more similar to books than an FPS or SBG or something.

Yeah, I saw that review too. I think the person who wrote that has some unreasonable high expectations of visual novels. I played several visual novels before, and I think KS is a rather good one even compared to some commercial ones, at least those that had some erotic undertones in them. Also I doubt that this person has played all five paths, all 5 different stories. Depending on the path you choose, the male lead Hisao himself becomes different on each path, and gets more or less depth as his interaction with the people around him is also different. Anyway, we should just just write a better yet honest review, and post it on Gamefaqs. While this review is unfairly too negative, I think some of the other positive reviews on Gamefaqs may be a bit too gushing and positive too.

Well said Yuuko, well said.

I think I can understand his issues with the game, too. He indeed was a bit harsh with the grading, but in all honesty, I can understand those as well. If one played tons of VNs (and especially those with breathtaking graphics, as usually made by Nitroplus and similar), KS will look bland and way to generic. I disagree that there isn't enough music in there, but I will say that guitars sound absolutely fake and should've been done better. There are some memorable tunes, there, though, but I guess that's in the ear of the beholder.

He does suggest some amazing VNs there, though.

Althamus

I think visual novels are games, but my definition of games is wide. "A game is a series of interesting choices". That's the essence of it. So it's the type of gaming that is closest to literature, but it's not literature either. Well, just my honest opinion, feel free to disagree.

Evildragon:
sure I know there are issues with this game, but do they outweigh the merits? In my mind, when taking all into consideration a score of 7 or 8 would be far far more fair than one of 2.

Also, I think it's not really fair to compare games, or any other type of art like that. It's like being angry when a friend treating you with home made salmon and a glass of wine, because salmon and wine are not as tasty as caviar and bubbly at the restaurant. Or like compairing a SNES game to a Wii one and complaining about the graphics of the former. Every creative work should be judged on the balance of it's own merits and demerits within it's own premises, not compared to a platonic ideal of perfection. By the way, did you notice that the reviewer compares KS to /several different/ visual novels? In other words, the reviewer was expecting a game that contains all the best details of the best games. That's wholly unrealistic, and essentially unfair.

Kind Regards,

B.

Beoran wrote:Evildragon:
sure I know there are issues with this game, but do they outweigh the merits? In my mind, when taking all into consideration a score of 7 or 8 would be far far more fair than one of 2.

That all depends really. I think 2 is unrealistically low, too. Somewhere between 5 and 6.5 is more like it (I've played some better VNs in my lifetime, as well). 7 and above is already being generous and slightly less objective IMO.

I think he was reviewing the prototype version of KS that ran on microsoft powerpoint.

What I really don't understand is the theory of "no big plot=bad vn". After I played KS I tried alot of big VN titles but I couldn't even get past the second chapter on most of them before I simply couldn't take it anymore. Their so-called overarcing plots are either

1. Way too outlandish and completely without logic(yet the characters act oblivious to the lack of it) or

2. Trying too hard to be damn complicated. I actually fell asleep reading endless lengths of thought-dialogues multiple times while playing G-senjou no Maou. They simply have to use such painfully draggy language to get over their point too. Alot of these apparently top-notch VNs overuse and ambiguously use personification & pronouns, which is an old trick to make something shallow seem really deep. They might feel like "word-ception" if you're 6 and your reading history is less than 100 books, but if you're an avid reader of age 15 and above you should be used to age-old cliche writing styles, then it's all bullshit wrapped in shiny paper.

I actually really dislike slice-of-life and I hate slice-of-life anime(I think the theme desecrates the art), but I do think that slice-of-life is how VNs should go. All those random fiction and immensely complicated yet cliche storylines really oughta be in an anime rather than a VN. So if people can accept slice-of-life anime(which I can't), wtf is all this hate for slice-of-ife VNs???

EvilDragon wrote:

Beoran wrote:Evildragon:
sure I know there are issues with this game, but do they outweigh the merits? In my mind, when taking all into consideration a score of 7 or 8 would be far far more fair than one of 2.

That all depends really. I think 2 is unrealistically low, too. Somewhere between 5 and 6.5 is more like it (I've played some better VNs in my lifetime, as well). 7 and above is already being generous and slightly less objective IMO.

True. Speaking as a VN player more or less experienced as that reviewer, this game is pretty polarizing so it's about an average score of 8 with reasonable people rating it from 6 to 10.

The biggest problem with that guys review was that he compared apples to oranges (Hahaha, Liar-Soft game, Sharin no Kuni, Cross Channel, Umineko No Naku Koro ni, and Rance. NONE of these are Ren'Ai games. All romance is secondary at best.) I prefer oranges, too, but I can recognize a damn good apple.

For the record, while I did inflate that score since it would be the first review, and I wanted Katawa Shoujo to get some attention, I still consider it a 9/10

Why give so much credit and discuss over such a poor review? And I say it not because of its low score, but because the author (a girl) also felt the need to make the Gamefaqs KS board know:

http://www.gamefaqs.com/boards/650003-k ... o/61953830

Before I posted there, a lot of other users already pointed the fallacies of the review, like lamenting the lack of voice acting (a point stressed with a smug tone) and the supposedly scarce variety of music tracks - then she cites Higurashi, which has no voice track, and Cross Channel, which has a third less music tracks than KS. Other complaints are patently ridicolous ("no big villain"). Beside the doubt she played KS very superficially, if not at all, there's the bigger doubt she's not even the veteran on Visual Novels she claims to be, if she forgot those titles have the same flaws she ponts in KS. She can still give the game 2/10 but how can I (and you) take her review seriously?

Zoram wrote:Why give so much credit and discuss over such a poor review? And I say it not because of its low score, but because the author (a girl) also felt the need to make the Gamefaqs KS board know:

Quoting to emphasize: the person who wrote this game is female. Just dispelling assumptions.

But yeah, I'm forced to admit that I find her taste, shall we say, questionable.

Zoram, yeah, well I see your point but I didn't thread was there on that board, and I guess others here also wouldn't have. Also, it's sort of inevitable that a thread would show up here too. It's not a good review, although I do get the writers point, and her arguments are not all that bad. I just think she's unable to see her own huge negative bias which makes her rate the game much lower than would if she realized this. That's why I think every review should include a /slant/ category: how much they liked the game personally, to show that the reviewer has thought about their own bias.

Kind Regards,

B.

Nekken wrote:

Zoram wrote:Why give so much credit and discuss over such a poor review? And I say it not because of its low score, but because the author (a girl) also felt the need to make the Gamefaqs KS board know:

Quoting to emphasize: the person who wrote this game is female. Just dispelling assumptions.

But yeah, I'm forced to admit that I find her taste, shall we say, questionable.

As a Rance fan, I must agree that anyone who likes Rance games is either extremely open-minded or has questionable taste.

Jokes aside, the visual novels she mentioned all have a significant fan base and are good, but are all so escapist compared to Katawa Shoujo. I find it difficult to suggest new visual novels to newbies because of that.

Oh yes, I noticed in the gamefaqs thread: she seems to believe that it's fair game to compare games up to a platonic ideal of newness.

[quote]
As the industry moves forward, we must revise our judgment systems to compare games to others. This is why we would say a game that came out this month with Atari's Adventure-level graphics had bad graphics, though they were likely considered great when it came out. If a game used a bad MIDI trumpet for its soundtrack, we would call it horrible, though having one instead of the random beeps in Pitfall would have been truly amazing.
[/qoute]

As a guy who actually made a Zelda style Atari 2600 (http://ature.wordpress.com/) game only 2 years ago, I disagree vehemently with this. Technology marches on, yes, but that doesn't mean that old styles and mediums cannot be used anymore. Did painting become obsolete now that we have digital art? Of course not! I think this way of thinking is a ridiculous example of the if "it's new it's cool" crowd.