Is Hitman's Next Target Assassin's Creed? 
Why Kotaku Australia Should Never Work With Children... Or Robots 
Three Words I Said To The Man I Defeated In Gears Of War That I'll Never Say Again 
New Doom 3 For Xbox 360 And PlayStation 3 Supports Head-Mounted Displays 
Far Cry 3 And The Stranger In A Strange Land 
Why Robin Makes Batman Better When I first heard that a visual novel centered around dating girls with physical disabilities was being made, my first thought was “only in Japan”. Of course, I was completely wrong. While made in the style of a typical Japanese visual novel — and even based on a Japanese sketch — Katawa Shoujo was created by a group of fans from all over the world who met on the message board 4chan.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve been playing the American-made visual novel, Katawa Shoujo. Like the name of the genre implies, there is a heavy emphasis on the story to the point where you’re almost reading as much as you would with a print novel.
Katawa Shoujo: a rather unusual romp with a cast of several disabled girls, created with no budget by a bunch of 4channers. It’s certainly an interesting experiment, but does it actually work? Kotaku reader Ben Latimore shares his thoughts on the game.
“Boy Severs Arms After Playing Video Game” read the headline of a story that ran on CNN’s iReport site earlier this morning. It’s the stuff of nightmares for video game advocates, another chance for those who demonise games’ effects on human behaviour to crucify the medium.
You might expect a project like Katawa Shoujo — a free, internationally developed eroge (Japanese visual novel with erotic themes) roughly about dating girls with disabilities — to be a crass, perverse, even exploitative piece of work. Perhaps that expectation would only be amplified after learning that the game originates primarily from notorious internet messageboard 4chan, a community not exactly known for its subtlety and sensitivity.
But you’d be wrong.
Katawa Shoujo, the game about dating disabled teens, has been in the works for over a decade. It’s from members of webforum 4chan, and over 20 developers worked on it.
Nearly two years ago, Leigh wrote a great column on a dating game called Katawa Shoujo being made by members of a 4chan group. What made it stand out were two things: one, it’s been in some kind of development for over a decade, and two, it was a dating game based on girls at a school for disabled teenagers.
