Katawa Shoujo

Katawa Shoujo (Japanese: かたわ少女, lit. "Cripple Girls", translated "Disability Girls") is a bishōjo-style visual novel by Four Leaf Studios that tells the story of a young man and five young women living with varying disabilities. The game uses a traditional text and sprite-based visual novel model with an ADV-style text box running on the Ren'Py visual novel engine. The game is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND.[7]

Katawa Shoujo
Katawa Shoujo logo.png
Developer(s) Four Leaf Studios
Publisher(s) Four Leaf Studios
Director(s) delta
Raide
yujovi
Producer(s) Cam "cpl_crud" O'Neill
Suriko
Programmer(s) delta
Artist(s) gebyy-terar
Kamifish
moekki
Rose "pimmy" Cote
raemz
Raide
Writer(s) Anonymous22 (Shizune)
Aura (Rin)
Cam "cpl_crud" O'Neill (Hanako)
Suriko (Lilly)
TheHivemind (Emi)
Composer(s) Sebastien "NicolArmarfi" Skaf
Andy "Blue123" Andi
Engine Ren'Py
Platform(s) Windows, Mac OS X, Linux, Android
Release January 4, 2012 (English)[1]
July 8, 2013 (French)[2]
December 9, 2013 (Russian)[3]
July 27, 2014 (Spanish)[4]
April 1, 2015 (Japanese)[5]
December 14, 2015 (Italian)[6]
Genre(s) Visual novel, nakige
Mode(s) Single player
The majority of the story takes place at the fictional Yamaku High School for disabled children, located in an unnamed city somewhere in modern, northern Japan.[8] The player takes the role of Hisao Nakai, an ordinary boy whose life changes dramatically after a heart attack caused by his long-dormant cardiac arrhythmia. After a lengthy hospitalization, he is forced to transfer to a school specialized in providing education and healthcare for disabled students. Over the course of the narrative, Hisao has the opportunity to come to grips with his condition and adjust to his new life.[9]

The gameplay of Katawa Shoujo is choice-based, in which the player reads through text and occasionally has the chance to respond to prompts with a variety of preset responses. The decisions made initiate possible events or dialogue within the story. Depending on the choices made by the player, the story branches into multiple forks. Each of these paths chronicle Hisao's deepening and eventually romantic relationship with one of the five main female characters (or lack thereof), which may variously end well, badly, or neutrally.[10]