It's Not Okay To Date Rape Handicapped Schoolboys

Let's keep the politically incorrect and uncomfortably erotic ball of whatever this is rolling, shall we?


Morbid curiosity.

As if any more needed to be said, morbid curiosity and a skewed fondness for the entity known as "Anonymous" is what compelled me to download and install it. I've only heard of Japanese dating simulators, and the opinions of those perplexed by the notion of them in the past. My own opinion has been of the casual "LOLJAPAN" variety, understanding the dynamics of such interactive media without much desire for firsthand knowledge... until now.

I'm pretty sure my experience with it is a unique one, in the midst of any reviews that have been made public by now. Otherwise I wouldn't be writing about it, 'cause I sure didn't plan on writing about it beforehand. 24 hours after my initial playthrough, I still can't determine whether my expectations were either grossly exceeded or made completely fucking irrelevant, or the former subsequently leading into the latter. In any case, it sent me into a flurry of unexpected befuddlement, introspection, and hearty chuckling afterward that warranted a blog of some sort.

If you haven't been made familiar already, Katawa Shoujo/Disability Girls is a dating sim made by a few good folks over at your local 4chan. It's about Hisao, a boy that gets sent to a specialized school for disabled teens, after discovering, in the most heavy-handed, analogous way, that he has heart problems. After that, it's up to you to help him romance and bed a few of his disabled/disfigured schoolmates, because loljapan.

Simple enough, no? At least, that's what you would expect to have happen, if such was your paraphilic inclination.

But that's not what happened when I played it. I don't even think you can say what happened was similar, in that the palpable irony twisted it into something of an almost malicious nature.



While getting settled in at the school, Hisao meets Kenji, a bespectacled conspiracy theorist and misogynist. I'm assuming that Kenji was written to be a comic foil of sorts, due to his ludicrous social behavior and fanatical ranting. Unfortunately, a few things struck me very quickly that killed any enjoyment to be had from this character. First off, he was getting in the way of my romancing underaged, limbless girls, which made him a nuisance to begin with. Secondly, and on a personal note, he reminded me of a couple people that I've actually encountered, with the real life affliction of compulsive lying and borderline to full-blown schizophrenia. Whether it was their delusions of grandeur, or stories with logic holes so big you could drive a truck through them, neither of these guys were particularly easy to get along with, save a cordial hello here or there. So I tended to avoid them, because you eventually learn when interacting with schizophrenics that the more comfortable with your company they get, the less comfortable you inevitably become with theirs. That's been my experience anyway.

But the game wouldn't let me avoid this guy. That was red flag number one. It's also made somewhat apparent that our protagonist, Hisao, is also uncomfortable talking to him. Yet he remains friendly, at least in a pragmatic sense, so to keep things as "normal" as possible it seems. Which is quite understandable... Until this happens:


Um... wut?

Right after Hisao gets out of the shower, he finds Kenji standing unannounced in his bathroom... Butt-ass naked... Asking for money to buy a pizza. And he's not freaking out about this, why? I mean, it's one thing to keep your cool as an unorthodox situation presents itself, but he doesn't even tell the kid that appearing out of nowhere in the bathrooms of people you just met is a thing you shouldn't do. Let alone, do it naked.

At this point, you may be wondering what the hell I'm doing putting so much thought into a Japanese dating simulator. I've been asking myself that very question, in addition to crying myself to sleep every night since I started this.

Oh, but it gets better.

During my play, I was saving the game before the story branching decision points, so I could restart the game, should the consequences of my decision prove unfavorable - which seemed to be pretty much every time. Every choice I made resulted in Hisao more or less thinking to himself, "Maybe I shouldn't have said that," or "That could've gone better...". Which begged me to just reload the game and choose the apparent "right" option, which had seemingly better results, even though there was no hawtness to be had just yet. I knew there probably wasn't a Game Over ending if I continually made the less favorable choices, but I figured my chances of getting virtual, amputee nookie would be decreased, should the decisions I pick take Hisao down a sexless story path.

However, by the end of his first week at the school, my supposed favorable choices brought Hisao to a rooftop with Kenji, after lamenting that all the girls were too busy with their duties at the school's festival. With nothing better to do, they have a manly... picnic.



Mildly amused, but more or less irritated at this point, I skimmed through the dialogue again, as Kenji went on more paranoid, chauvinist rants - with a drunken Hisao, ever the gentleman, attempting to make the best of the situation as usual with light palaver. And then, it happened. With Kenji slowly advancing, and Hisao fumbling to retreat...



The thought that this would be the height of awkwardness in this particular relationship came as a relief, as once it was over, we would be able to move on to greener pastures...



At least, that's what I imagined would happen, even as Hisao began to black out...



And apparently fall under the effects of a mickey...



And then the screen fades to RED.

Roll credits. Main Menu.


Um.... WAT

What just happened? The game's not over, right? There's more to it than that.

Right?

I was promised fucked up amputee sex. I must've missed something. Is there something new in the Load menu? Nothing. No "Continue Game", no "Next Chapter" option... just my last save. Maybe something in the Extras menu that will tell me something about... Nope.

Did I somehow download the demo version? Is there a second part of the file that I neglected to see and torrent? WHAT THE FUCK JUST HAPPENED?

Are you telling me that all of that reloading and picking the good choices got me the homosexual date rape ending? Are you kidding me?

Are you fucking kidding me?

This has to be a joke. Another sick 4chan joke that I wasn't aware of before because the game was just released, and I'm going to hear about it once I consult the internet. Everyone got the same date rape ending; that has to be it. Oh, 4chan. Why u so 4chans?

So I consult the internet, and lo, no one has mentioned inevitable date rape by anime-Harry Potter yet. WTF. So it was just me, then. The decisions I made that I thought would get me hetero anime sex the fastest became my undoing. The one person that I didn't want anything to do with, was the one I got lucky with. And then the simulator ends. Wow.

Somehow, I feel betrayed. Dirty. Defiled. And there hasn't even been a single explicit sex scene yet.

It's been a really long time since I've felt this way from being exposed to a product of 4chan, and yet they've done it again, even if it was inadvertent. And I can't decide whether it was a work of genius.

Because I was playing the game how I thought it should/wanted to be played, instead of the way I wanted to play it, which potentially would've been rewarded for. With hentai. Did the developers account for this? Was that the ending given based on those specific decisions, or by how many times I reloaded the game to pick the other choice? Or both?

"You went back to choose all the 'right' responses, so you get date raped!"

And that's what I was pondering yesterday... A - The fact that there are people who go through the trouble of creating a game design with an algorithm that ends in your character getting date raped; and B - That I hate it when games penalize you for playing it the way you want to, instead of the way it wants you to play it. Like ones with Good or Evil meters where you're obviously rewarded more for being a good guy, and if you play as a bastard to the end, you get a shitty ending. If what happened here was indeed the opposite, then I believe commendations (of some kind) are in order.

As for this game, I think my best option at this point is to save what's left of my own sanity and walk away with the perspective that I have scribed here... Perhaps I didn't get the "bad" ending after all?

Perchance date rape saved my soul...?

Okay, I think I'm done here.