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.
The majority of the story takes place at Yamaku High School, a boarding school for disabled students, located in an unnamed city somewhere in modern, northern Japan. 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 students with disabilities. Over the course of the narrative, Hisao has the opportunity to come to grips with his condition and adjust to his new life.
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 (or lack thereof) with one of the five main female characters; these may variously end well, poorly, or neutrally.
Development The concept originated in a sketch created in December 2000 by Japanese doujinshi artist Raita Honjou (credited in Thanks as RAITA). From January 2007, the sketch was discussed extensively on the 4chan image board, and a multinational development group was assembled from users of 4chan and other internet communities. The group took the name Four Leaf Studios (based on 4chan's four-leaf clover logo).
Most of the art, sound, and animation assets used in the game are original and were created for the game by a dedicated team of artists on the development forums. Background images used in the game were collected through an open call for background photos, from public-domain image collections, and by a dedicated photographer on the development team. These images were later filtered to match the art style of the rest of the game's drawings. Because real pictures were used, many of the locations in the game are based on real places, with Yamaku High School being constructed from images of Brown University. The city that the novel is set in, although unnamed, is based on Sendai and the school was written to be where Aoba Castle stands.
Release and distribution On April 29, 2009, the team released an "Act One" preview. Act 1 has since been updated for several additional languages; as of Act 1's fifth version, English, French, Italian, Japanese, Russian, German, Hungarian, and both Traditional and Simplified Chinese are included. The complete English-language novel was released on January 4, 2012.
It was announced that the French-language translation would be released July 4, 2013 as both a download and a limited-edition physical edition. The French-language version was made available for download on July 8, 2013. A separate, full-patch adding a completed Russian translation was released independently by its translation group on December 9, 2013. On July 27, 2014, the International Spanish version was released and made available for download that same day. On April 1, 2015, in lieu of their traditional April Fools' Day prank, Four Leaf Studios released the Japanese translation. Additionally, they announced that a second physical release would be sold by the Japanese translation team at Comitia 112 and Comiket 88 (May 5 and August 16, 2015, respectively, at Tokyo Big Sight). The full visual novel has been released officially in English, French, Spanish, Japanese and Italian.
On June 6, 2015, Four Leaf Studios announced the end of support and development for the visual novel and official translation projects, concluding with a final bug/typo patch. They released the English script files in full and instructions on how to patch in and distribute any future fan translations into languages not included in the final official version.
Following the release of the full game, Four Leaf Studios announced that it had no plans for its members to collaborate on any new projects. However, in their celebratory 1st anniversary blog post, Aura had stated that there might be future projects for 4LS announced in 2013, though no major projects were announced. Four Leaf Studios continued supporting fan works officially, hosting selected artists at their Comiket booth while selling new content such as original artbooks and light novels based on the game, with the last attendance taking place in 2017. In 2020, Raide, the artist and co-director of the game, died suddenly, as announced by his family via his Twitter page.
Downloads for the complete novel and Act 1 alone are available for Windows, Mac OSX, and x86 Linux, available both as direct downloads from the official Katawa Shoujo website and over Bittorrent. The soundtrack is also available as a direct download.
The game received a Steam and itch.io release on August 15, 2024.
Characters
Main characters
Hisao is a brown-haired male high school student diagnosed with chronic cardiac arrhythmia and congenital heart muscle deficiency. In the prologue, he collapses from a major heart attack after a female student asks him out. Due to his heart condition, he transfers to Yamaku High School in class 3-3, and although initially resentful of his placement in a school for those with disabilities, he eventually adapts to his new lifestyle. Through his new relationships and interactions, he begins to reconsider his preconceptions towards disabilities, including his own. His main hobbies include reading and chess, though he is noted to have been an avid soccer player before his heart attack.
Emi is an energetic, extroverted strawberry blonde girl with twintails and forest-green eyes. She has prosthetic legs, having lost her original legs below the knees as a result of a car accident eight years prior to the story. Despite her disability, she still has more than enough lower body strength to walk, and is a successful track runner. She values good diet and exercise, and is on friendly terms with the head nurse of Yamaku; she promises to keep tabs on Hisao's exercise in exchange for having him as a running partner in the mornings. She meets Hisao by running into him in the hallway, and endangers his heart on more than one occasion. Hisao feels guilty whenever she pouts, equating her expression to that of a sad puppy. Emi is Rin's best friend and hallmate due to both having extremely passionate vocations and complementary disabilities. Despite her extroverted personality, she is very secretive, has no true close friends, and has trouble getting emotionally close to people, which initially frustrates Hisao in her route. This is revealed to be in fear of losing people important to her as a result of her father's death, who was a track star himself, in the same car accident that took her legs. In her route, Hisao gives her the self-confidence to open up about her true emotions, and the two work to better each other's lives.
Hanako as a child suffered an accident in which her house burned down, taking the lives of her parents. The right side of her body is heavily scarred from the incident, which has left her traumatized and open to panic attacks. Her long, dark purple hair hangs down her back, and her bangs cover the right side of her face, hiding most of her scars. She spent most of her childhood in an orphanage and was bullied during her time in elementary and middle school, and as such she was offered to go to Yamaku. Initially, she is incredibly shy towards anyone except Lilly and Akira. She is another one of Hisao's classmates, but frequently either does not show up or arrives late and leaves early to avoid talking to people, preferring to spend time reading in the library where she can be alone. Through spending time with Hisao, Hanako slowly learns to open up to people and the two become heavily reliant on each other, working together to progress through life rather than mope through it.
Lilly is the class representative of 3-2, a class composed of students who are blind or partially blind (including Kenji); she has been blind since birth. The tallest member of the main female cast, she has long blonde hair and blue eyes. Her father is Japanese and her mother is Scottish with family in Inverness. She is very polite and ladylike with a motherly demeanor, not wanting to intrude on others' private life (including Hisao's reasons for being at Yamaku). It is also noted that she had previously attended a strict all-girls school. In contrast to Misha's fast-paced attitude to Hisao's transfer, Lilly takes things at her own relaxed pace, helping Hisao to adjust to school life in the midst of a busy festival. She is Hanako's closest and initially only friend; she regularly has lunch and tea with her, and accompanies her grocery shopping. She is also on a friendly basis with Yuuko. Shizune and Lilly have been seen to not get along, perhaps due to the fact that direct communication between her and Shizune is not feasible (she cannot see Shizune's sign language and Shizune cannot hear her or speak to her).
Rin, a girl whose arms were almost entirely deformed due to a birth defect, uses her feet to accomplish everyday tasks with surprising dexterity. She has short red hair and dark green eyes, and wears a boy's uniform to avoid the awkward situations that would arise from using her feet while wearing a skirt. Rin has a stoic and wistful unique personality that has brought about awkward situations with her peers, especially for Hisao. As a result, some people do not talk with her, such as Lilly. She is nonchalant with the other students and their disabilities, as she often inquires about other people's disabilities as a hobby. As a result, she is seen as extremely blunt. She is Emi's best friend and hallmate, despite their polarizing personalities. Her role in the school festival is being the sole painter of a giant mural posted in front of the dorms. Rin feels that she can only express her emotions through her artwork and feels misunderstood by everyone around her. Her name was designed as both a homage to legendary cartoonist Osamu Tezuka as well as a pun based on her talent as an artist and disability (the first kanji in her surname means "hand").