Katawa Shoujo: Review

Last time, I covered the bigger picture surrounding Katawa Shoujo, namely visual novels and eroge, and touched on the themes and impressions I got. This time, I plan to take a closer look at the plot and characters. I’ll also be peppering this profusely with nitpicks and gripes.

I should warn you, while I will be refraining from divulging any true spoilers, I will be assuming you’re not worried about me mentioning details that either occur very early in the game or won’t be surprises at all if you’re following along. If this were a review of The Sixth Sense, I would mention him getting shot (happens near the beginning) but not the bit about him being dead.

Katawa Shoujo: Thoughts

Visual novels exist as a strange hybrid of mediums. Little known to Westerners outside of the anime/manga fandom, they are not quite games but not quite simply stories either. They are more like choose-your-own-adventure books half-way between a fully animated anime and a largely text-and-static-pictures manga.

Having many times more text and dialog than either anime or manga, they devote this considerable verbiage to character building and follow the convention of being largely relationship and romance oriented. Overwhelmingly they are dating simulations depicting high-school aged characters in a sort of anime version of the Western Harlequin romance.

These aren't frosted, though

I've been doing a lot of hardware research lately towards purchasing parts for a new system (which I'll probably cover in great detail soon). One of the hardest decisions was the graphics card, so I spent an especially large amount of my focus on reading up on them. Since this started during the limbo before Radeon 6000 series cards came out, lots of review sites were posting the same AMD marketing material as previews before the hands-on reviews were possible. As such, I saw the following slide a ton of times:

And every time I saw it, I thought of these:

Spoilers: I ended up going with Barts.

The mage’s dilemma

Let’s face it: in your average fantasy game, mages suck.

Sure, they always seem cool at first, with their crazy robes (who wears those anymore?), arcane tats, throwing balls of energy or fire around, and generally being badasses. The appeal is really no surprise. Think about it: they are essentially the nerds of the times but with power! These guys essentially are the kids that stayed at home all the time reading books and studying. They are the geeks and scientist types made all-powerful with the concept of magic!

As someone who has spent a lot of time playing games, I’ve noticed a sad trend for our prestidigitators. And it isn’t their fault: so much of gameplay theory and practice over the years has left them in this sorry state. Who do we wag fingers at? Developers? Whiny players?

Things that drive me crazy, Part II

I wasn't surprised at all, but it really bugs me that EA caved to perceived pressure and decided to drop the “Taliban” thing for their latest Medal of Honor game. It's just sad to see them spend a week defending the game and then have to try to do a 180 in press releases. As usual there will be much spinning of the speech such that “respecting our troops” was always their goal but to anyone with half a brain it’ll look like old fashioned ass-covering.