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Wikipedia says:
Katawa Shoujo (Japanese: かたわ少女, Hepburn: Katawa Shōjo, literally "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 idea for this game started with a sketch posted on 4chan in 2007, which led to some 4channers getting together to make a visual novel out of it. Sounds like a recipe for total disaster! But instead we got a game which is by and large considered to be a classic, a labor of love, well-written and released for free as Creative Commons. Sounds too good to be true, I had to see this for myself.
Yes, definitely. Keep in mind that the game had a whopping 21 developers working on it, and multiple routes, and as far as I know different routes were written by different people. I only did one route (if you're curious for some reason, it was Lilly) and can't speak for the entire game.
It's also hard to comment on "dating sim" visual novels because, well, the characters can be as deep and well-written as you wish, but the whole premise of all these girls falling for Mr. Generic Protagonist inevitably flattens everything. Lilly is a good character, the game thoroughly explores themes of strength and independence vs interdependence, of visible and invisible struggles; and overall the complex issue of "disability" seems to be handled respectfully, so I don't have anything to complain about, but still... *8/10*, consider this to be the highest possible rating I can give to a dating simulator.
I've been playing Katawa Shoujo: Re-Engineered, a community-made remake of the game, with added functionality and translations, updated Linux support and additional Android/iOS support, plus accessibility features such as screen-reading. Unlike most such projects, you don't have to fiddle with installing a separate engine and then extracting the proprietary game assets from a CD or a GOG download or whatever. Katawa Shoujo is Creative Commons to begin with, which means anyone is free to take the visual novel and update it, translate it, repackage it in whichever way they want. So KS:RE is just a simple download & install (though the Android version is not available on Google Play for now so that in particular required a bit of fiddling around). The fact that people are updating the game to this day speaks to how good it is.
I played the "unofficial" Russian translation which was included in KS:RE and it seemed pretty good (though sometimes the translated text was too long to fit inside the dialog box).
gardenapple - 2023-04-20
Game finished 2023-02-10