The idea stuck, gained traction, and a team of volunteers all banded together to spend five or so years slowly producing a finished product from this original seed.ĭespite being released freely with a Creative Commons license from a ragtag group of forum folk, the game is indistinguishable from commercial ventures of the past. From what I understand, the idea started as more or less a joke, a doujinshi artist's idle illustrations exploring a ridiculous "what if" scenario. It is in this strange world of visual novels that we find Katawa Shoujo, a game with a history almost as interesting as its premise (I’ll get to that in a moment). One can imagine the erratic screenplays that emerge from a writer attempting to incorporate elements and scenes from all of the girls one would normally experience as separate story threads. In their efforts to ensure that the various females all get their screen time, they almost always fall into the harem trope, even the ones that attempt to favor a single girl's story as the primary plot.
Many an anime has been based off of some visual novel or another ( To Heart, Kanon, and Clannad, to name a few of the more well known ones), brought into existence either due to the success of the series or even occasionally in order to promote interest in it outright. Very few feature a female lead with a selection of male heroes to pursue.
I suppose the analogy to women's fiction persists here ( 50 Shades of Gray anyone?), though instead largely oriented to a young male audience.
Overwhelmingly they are dating simulations depicting high-school aged characters in a sort of anime version of the Western Harlequin romance.Īnd then there is the elephant in the room: the nudity and sex scenes. 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. They are more like choose-your-own-adventure books half-way between a fully animated anime and a largely text-and-static-pictures manga. Little known to Westerners outside of the anime/manga fandom, they are not quite games but not quite simply stories either. Visual novels exist as a strange hybrid of mediums.