Katawa Shoujo: The Reviewening: Mechanics

Katawa Shoujo is a Visual Novel (henceforth abreviated as VN). But what does that mean? The VN is an extremely popular genre in Japan, but is generally regarded with distrust here in the west. VNs are, as one would expect from the name, largely text and images. The amount of interactivity varies. It goes all the way from the fully 3D world to wander around in in Hotel Dusk: Room 215 to the investigating around a series of preset 2D screens and trials sections of Ace Attorney and the puzzle sections in the middle of otherwise barely interactive 999.

They all have one thing in common: the part you're really there for is the dialogue sections. KS is almost all the way non-interactive. 99% of KS is reading, and you very rarely get a choice: something like once every half-hour. Most of your time is spent sitting there, clicking or pressing spacebar, reading text, listening to music, and looking at pictures.

The choices you do get are rather significant, though. The game is divided in 4 acts. The first act is essentially a 2-hour prologue common to all routes. Depending on your choices, you'll end up with a different girl, at which point you're locked in for 3 acts, which vary in total length from Emi's 3-4 hours to Rin's whopping 7-8. The choices you make in this period affect what ending you get, usually out of good, bad, and very bad, though there are a couple routes with only 2 endings. The frequency of these choices varies drastically with route: one presents you with a lot of basically pointless choices until act 4, another presents you with a single choice through the entire thing.

This acts as a double-edged sword. On the one hand, the whole packet is a lot tighter than a more open experience, with none of the weird dissonance that comes from players romancing several partners and going through a one-true-love arc for each, or other such player-based shenanigans. On the other, the less interactive nature of this approach may be discouraging to users, and may create a barrier between them and the main character.

KS also uses the sparse interaction it does have greatly. Since most of the time you're just clicking through text, it does weird little things to throw you off. For instance, if Hisao gets interrupted, the game might force-jump you midway through his speech. When Kenji, your weird dorm-mate, goes on and on about conspiracy theories, the text may make a dramatic pause at each full stop. It's simple, but effective, and used sparingly enough to be cool each time you see it.