every inch counts reaching for clouds
or why rin has the best route in katawa shoujo
I was supposed to be done with this over a year ago. Katawa Shoujo turned ten years old — it was gonna be some big fun anniversary celebration essay! Now, it’s eleven years and some change. I sat and I pondered, trying to think of what form this would even take. I had a thousand or so words already written even! It was a big ol’ diatribe on where I was in my life and where I am now (where I was I suppose) and how this game gave me great comfort. None of ya’s are gonna read that now. At least, not in that form. Too melodramatic.
For the record, it does still give me great comfort. I’m writing this particular part at 11:10pm on a the 22nd of March, a Wednesday. I was in a car accident yesterday, went into the ditch and crashed into a field. Life isn’t super great at this particular moment, but I digress. I just finished up my umpteenth playthrough. All routes, all good ends. Nothing has changed on the game’s end, it’s still the same visual novel I read back when I was 16. Shizune, the deaf girl, was the last route I did. I think it was Emi (the girl with no legs), Hanako (the girl with severe anxiety because of burns on her body), and Lilly (the blind girl) before her. Rin, the armless wonder that she is, was the first one. It always has to be her route that’s the first.
See, it was the first route I got playing it back for the first time. It’s actually kind of a pain to access, truth be told. The game keeps track of these internal flags that track your “progress” with each girl. It’ll send you down certain paths in the first act of the game based on the increments each flag is at. Except Rin. You get her route if you somehow maneuver your way to the start of Lilly and Hanako’s route, but don’t have enough points to actually begin. Even then, you can still get the Act 1 joke ending if you say a dumb thing!
I think regardless of if it was my first route or not, my reaction would have been the same. It still would be the best route. I dunno, it stands out. It’s unique amongst the rest. It’s not so unlike the other routes where it’s some radically different thing that doesn’t fit the total package, but it’s distinctly different in a couple different ways that really make it stand out from the crowd. I really just wanna talk very positively about this thing I like, but I figure not everyone knows what the game is about, so: real quick fast.
Katawa Shoujo is a game about this guy named Hisao. He’s a standard average guy in high school who gets confessed to by a girl for the first time. Like some guys, his hands get shaky, his heart is pounding out of his chest, he might just have a heart attack. He then proceeds to have a heart attack and keel over. Hisao finds out when he wakes up in the hospital that he has an arrhythmia, his poor heart is out of wack and can beat too fast if pushed too far.
He spends the next few months recovering, watching his friends and eventually his girlfriend leave his side, when he gets the fateful news that he’s being released! Hisao just has to go to a completely brand new school called Yamaku Academy, a place with resources for disabled kids. My man doesn’t take this news well and it’s at Yamaku where he’ll start to come to terms with his new disability, meet new friends and — if he’s lucky — he might just fall in love. Congrats!
Each route, for the most part, focuses on this core little thread — Hisao is sad and depressed, eventually coming to befriend the girl in whatever route he’s in. He starts to have a crush on them, and generally by the end of Act 2, he’ll end up resolving to be not as sad and chase after the girl who’s helping him get to that point, all ending up in some sort of relationship. The last two acts are about overcoming the challenges each relationship faces before it either ends disastrously, ends bittersweetly, or ends with a nice happy ending. Pretty simple stuff!
I’m gonna try pretty hard to just focus on this one specific route but I might end up drawing some comparisons. It’s kinda necessary especially since the first thing I wanna talk about is how dynamic this route feels in comparison to the others. There’s a lot of choices in Rin’s route.
A lot a lot of choices. It’s not necessarily complex choices being made here — that entire bit is simply three scenes in a row that lead into a big scene. It’s when Hisao is trying to convince Rin to go through with having a show at an local art gallery. It helps make your choices feel authentic and have meaning since each one unlocks a unique dialogue choice, and some of them have routewide changes! There’s a pretty different take on Act 3 if you leave the art club and you get to see a more full picture to their relationship.
The actual full flowchart for Rin’s route looks something like this, by the way. There’s a lot going on here and when you compare it to something like Shizune’s route (which only has a single choice and it boils down to good end/bad end), it can be a lot.
I will say, I’m being sort of unfair here. Shizune is an outlier, she’s the only route with a single choice. The rest have good variety and pacing in when choices come up, even if I think the pacing might not be the best. The point is that compared to the rest, Rin’s is by far the most involved.
That’s a super good thing too, because the route features something we don’t really get out of the other routes — Hisao stays sad for a pretty long chunk of the story with Rin. He also gets mad. Frustrated. Positively livid in a final scene. We get to see sides of Hisao we don’t get in the other routes.
His growth isn’t clean. The other routes feel very…clean. Everything goes super well for Hisao, all things considered, outside of Rin’s! Things fall into place, it’s a nice start and then the bumps happen down the road, almost all of those bumps happening just before or in Act 4. He meets the girl, he falls in love and has it reciprocated, that love is threatened — don’t screw up loverboy! Rin’s route is way messier. Hell, you even get rejected midway through Act 3 for Rin because she can’t think about you, the exhibition comes first.
Rin’s route doesn’t feel the same as the others because it isn’t just a love story. There’s some real “will they or won’t they” energy going on, watching these two try and sort out their feelings with each other through miscommunications, lashing out, reuniting, pulling apart and coming together. I like that there’s consistent growth, sometimes negative, all the way until the very end.
It also helps that Aura, the writer for Rin’s route, is also just really good with words.
He tends to go long, creating long passages of description and prose that help settle you into a dreamy space. Things like chilly shadows, no time in the night, sunlight littering. It flows in a swaying manner, bordering on overlong even, that gets incredibly disarmed by how blunt he’ll get when things genuinely do matter.
Deep into Act 4, things explode. Rin runs away from the exhibition, no one can find her, Hisao is at his limit being pushed away by the girl he loves and Rin can’t handle people expecting something from her that she’s not. The two argue in a confrontation after her art teacher blows up at her, realizing that they might not be what they want from each other.
The two do eventually come to something of a reconciliation, breaking through each other’s walls and finally coming to something of an understanding — the thing they fought so hard for, even if it came in the shape neither might have wanted.
Some of these emotions gets communicated through really good, consistent usage of the OST’s heavier songs. Doing some quick and dirty research, Rin is tied for or has the most uses of what I’d call the “Feels Bad” songs. Emotionally heavy, intense songs that play at low points in the story.
- Cold Iron — tied 3 uses with Lilly
- Caged Heart — tied 5 uses with Emi
- Moment of Decision — most uses at 3
- Shadow of the Truth — most uses at 3
- Stride — most uses at 8
- Breathlessly — tied 3 uses with every girl but Emi
Almost 23% of the time when music shows up in her route, it ain’t inspiring happy thoughts. Almost everyone else is in the low/mid 10%s, and you can absolutely feel it. Every time it pops up, it hits like a hammer. I love it. Nothing else in this game feels the way this route does.
I’ve been talking about how heavy, and dark, and sad this route is. It also has the best use of the big emotionally positive songs. Innocence, Comfort, and Aria de l’EToile strike at exactly the right moments, paying off the turmoil and angst with amazing moments.
The emotional lows are real low, but you gotta go through some valleys to get to the summit. Aura’s writing nails it. The presentation is a notch above the rest (there’s some specific direction that’s pretty unique to this route). The good ending to this route is genuinely phenomenal. Everything comes to a head, every sort of theme and message that’s been discussed and explored is laid out on the table for Hisao (and us) to really crystallize into a cohesive message.
I adore this game. I can sit here and critique it, point out the inconsistencies and irregularities in writing and tone because it had five writers. But what’s the point? Does it matter that some cracks have formed on the surface over ten years? I don’t think so. It still holds up. It’s still Katawa Shoujo. It’s the game I needed when I was young, and it’s the game I still go to year after year to help reflect on just how far I’ve come.
I really did need this game. When I first read it back in 2012. I was just like Hisao (frfr). It sounds like a joke, but I was really just starting to try and come to terms with my own disability. Thanks to a genetic disorder, I have bad joints. Really really bad joints. Joints that’ll probably need to be replaced when I’m in my mid-30s to 40s. They told me this when I was like nine.
I have chronic pain in my hips and knees. I’ve needed to have a cane by the time I was in college. I hated it, truthfully. Myself, even, but that’s not the point. I’m doing fine now. But at the time, I was alone with myself in my little bedroom. I couldn’t talk to anyone about it and even if I tried, I wasn’t able to communicate the sort of depression I had. And here comes this little game that people talked about by saying “haha you can sex the cripple”. (Also hate THAT word, but this was 4chan and that’s just how they talked.)
I gave it a shot and was seen. Truly seen. It was unreal to read something that I related so clearly to, that depicted the exact state I was in. I needed to hear that it was okay to be myself. That I wasn’t broken, that I was just human. Someone deserving of love and understanding. My disability didn’t define my humanity, I did. That definition, that understanding would eventually take an additional seven odd years to come to a nice concise word but if I had to pick one…just one word…
It’d be peace.
hi, thanks for reading! i realize now that not only did I miss the 10th and 11th anniversary of Katawa Shoujo, I also missed the anniversary of my first article here about breath of the wild. check that out if you want! i will write at least another thing before another full year passes, i don’t want another gap to happen again! i’m active on twitter. i don’t stream much these days, but when i do, it’s on twitch. i hope i don’t go another full year without writing another one of these, but we’ll see. later!
