Any thoughts on Katawa Shoujo?

[haydendawson]

[Angra Mainyu]

[DaFool]

It's safe to assume that the majority of KS fans won't touch other EVNs (Even if you took a random screenshot at some random point in the game and come up with a photofiltered bedroom bg with no sprites that makes it undistinguishible with gazillions of other EVNs out there).

And the KS method of development was never a model to follow, it's just not sustainable. How many of the KS team eventually went and made their own VNs? A few, but I doubt making them was as satisfying as the uber grand project. Five years is too long for game development. Technologies change, game engines change, desktop resolutions change. You have to get that game out while it's still not outdated.

As a creator, I will always feel better being 1 out of 4 people (1 out of 2 is even better; 1 out of 1 is perfect) rather than 1 out of 20. Sure, the project is lauded everywhere, but how much of that praise is because of something I did?

And you know what the world needs? A mecha EVN. There was one... Exile Gear Raynar... was short, was old, and made in Onscripter. I can't believe hardly anybody wants to make a mecha VN. I'm conceiving something like Gurren Lagann and using an isometric grid battle. I really want something like this made, if not by me (since I have hardly any time... except when I'm in the office lol), than somebody or some team out there.

It needs some Anonymous grabbing some sketches by VOFAN or something and rallying people together. But the cold and bitter truth out there is that your project will be more likely to be completed if you do it just by yourself or a tiny team, since "Let's form a team!" projects rarely work out. And the result will tend to be on the short and unimpressive end of the stick. KS raised the bar, but nobody but a company can meet it now (In fact 4LS as a studio is bigger than GUST incorporated). And who is going to invest so much in VNs?

[Jake]

[mikey]

There you all are!

It's too bad I haven't found this forum earlier. I don't really want to reiterate what I wrote elsewhere - suffice it to say that I simply think the directors didn't (or couldn't) do a sufficient job, mostly because of the vast differences in styles and also because in certain instances they just didn't care. Photo BGs, style clashes and downright unacceptable things (rain over a sunshine scene). The thing is, I wouldn't know how to get harmony to the project short of starting over, so it looks to me that the production design was not able to support the scale of the project. Or, to put it differently, it's very apparent it was made by many people with many styles and I was missing a single vision from a "Mr/Mrs KS", so to speak. In hindsight, it was obvious, and I guess the project had so much hype I just wouldn't take the time to look at it realistically, until the release which kind of shocked me with its inconsistency. It's like making dinner with a great piece of meat, cheap sauce, last week's leftover potatoes, freshly pressed olive oil, frozen vegetables and expensive caviar. It's a mess to such an extent, I'd rather have a frozen pizza, because there all the ingredients have the same quality to them.

[Angra Mainyu]

[mikey]

In a certain way I would personally liken the whole package (game, time, memes, fans) to Tsukihime. I see a lot of parallels especially in the way characters are at the centre of the fans' attention, the expectations (the wait for a translation vs. the wait for completion) and I'd even say the games' look and feel is similar in a certain way - even more so their popularity, where they were/are "the" thing that define(d) a short era, perhaps just as the previous era seemed to fade. And as with Tsukihime, I would probably not set any single aspects of KS as oelvn "standard", or aspired quality (animations don't really count for me). I think the magic of both titles comes from much more than just the 500-something megabyte file. The whole buzz and culture around it defined what it would become, even while it was in progress, and when KS delivered, the effects amplified. So while I think that fans can say that KS defeated all other oelvns, the important thing is that it has not put other oelvns "to shame" - thus eliminating the need of many oelvn makers to reconsider, go back to the drawing board or think again about their ambitions and "professionalism".

[DaFool]

I was pretty anxious before the release since I had the impression (mainly from the devs during their trolling days) that they would "destroy us all".

But post release I'm quite satisfied... KS comes off as OELVN more than it admits. (Heck they even admit some of the points expressed here in their latest blog post.) The only things setting it apart:

1.) almost 500,000 words
2.) Hyped everywhere
3.) Impressive animations

And my response:

1.) No story needs that much wordcount. 100,000-150,000 would suffice even for a deep plot. I'm already on my second project hitting 100K.
2.) Don't really care. I'm doing this for the stories I want told. So a dating sim with cripple girls will catch the attention of editors of various online magazines on premise alone. My games need only be flashy enough to convey the story being told.
3.) I'm studying various techniques to make games more livelier... it's to engage and stimulate the player more than to just impress them.

So basically, if we take some of the more active EVN creators, put them all together to create a ridiculously big game, the result will be something like KS. But I prefer the EVN creators all doing their own projects -- more diversity in projects is always a good thing. Although that said, I still actively avoid making a conventional highschool boy pursues one of five girls VN/Dating sim for the express purpose of not wanting to be compared with KS. Thankfully, I prefer other genres just as well.

[mikey]

There may also simply be the factor of a changing times and expectations. When the project was started, the community was still waiting for the "great oelvn" and length and scale was valued much higher - but too much time has passed and KS, I would say has missed that window and was released into a world where "casual VNs" and shorter (~2 hr) works have effectively become the norm, perhaps similar to what "apps" or "mobile games" have done by becoming short / lightweight.

There is in fact nothing to suggest that playing long-text games has more right to become the standard than playing "one-afternoon" sized works. Films are generally 90 minutes long and the difference in how you perceive their quality is hardly ever in their length or even scale. And I think that in many ways the strengths that DaFool pointed out, especially the word count and extra animations is the "old" way of thinking, where animations once stood for coming closer to anime, and text (and by extension game) length was important because most VNs that people knew were 39.99 "full-price" purchases, and a 9.99 game was always the "amateur" option. But I can't help thinking that those times are just gone now, and people in fact prefer the shorter form - that that's in fact mainstream now. Not in Japan perhaps, but in oelvns.

[Angra Mainyu]

Gee, this is the second article about KS on Kotaku this week. Methinks one of the staff has just started playing the game...

http://kotaku.com/5904561/all-you-need- ... nto-a-game

http://kotaku.com/5905626/that-game-abo ... ld-play-it

I haven't really had the time to read these in-depth. But after glancing over them, and some user comments, I'm actually rather surprised by the lack of ire and backlash on the part of otakus. No one really seems to be decrying it for not being made by Japanese people IN Japan. If I didn't know better, I'd say we've just crossed a bridge in regards to acceptance of anime/manga inspired art, which isn't made by Japanese. Or it could just be a fluke.