**I’m gonna start this blog off by giving you all fair warning that the game I’m about to “review” most certainly crosses into NSFW territory. Although the content of this blog does not, Google searching this game and clicking some of the following links could very well be a trap.**

Katawa Shoujo, or Disability Girls, is a game/visual novel centered around a young man with a heart condition who finds himself at a school for the disabled that just so happens to be filled with cute, single girls. If that sounds like the setup for a bad porno or some kind of webcomic you’d find on 4chan, then you aren’t all that wrong.

Produced by 4 Leaf Studios, Katawa Shoujo does indeed find its origins on 4chan (/a/ in particular) where a thread popped up featuring the artwork of one RAITA. The piece featured all the building blocks for a dating game involving a private school for the disabled, and started quite a wave of interest in the subject. Of course, this kind of thing isn’t all that surprising to see on the Internet. Although surprisingly, from what I understand, this push for disabled and crippled girl content was actually urged on after a thread on /b/ featured the touching tale of a nurse at a nursing home doing his best to take care of a 7-year-old girl that had recently come under his care after having lost her family (and most of her limbs, plus an eye) in a terrible car accident. Kotaku posted a slightly more detailed history of all this on their site a little while back, for those interested in their article it’s here.

Regardless of its origins, though, the most important thing to remember about Katawa Shoujo is that it’s a game that would never have seen the light of day had it not been for the Internet. Now I don’t mean that in a “the web helped them put it together” kinda way that almost any project could claim these days. I mean it in the sort of “this game was developed and put together by people from many different locations all around the world without ever getting together in the fashion an typical game studio would” kinda way. This game is a shining example of the kind of quality projects that can only just now be made in this day and age. Continue reading “Review: Katawa Shoujo; or how I stopped worrying and learned to love disabled girls”