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It's time. Rin calls to us. We shall return to the Katawa Shoujo.

All the respect in the world for the fact the game is officially distributed (legally!) as a torrent, and apparently it's even seeded.

Cute installer dialogue box…

Welcome to the Katawa Shoujo Setup

Setup will guide you through the installation of Katawa Shoujo.

It is recommended that you close all other applications before starting Setup. This will make it possible to update relevant system files without having to reboot your computer.

Put a lot of effort into the alt text for that one btw.

Completing the Katawa Shoujo Setup

Katawa Shoujo has been installed on your computer.

Click Finish to close Setup.

☑️ Run Katawa Shoujo

☑️ Show Readme

That sparse title screen… empty canvas background… and gentle piano and guitar music…

Visual novels are a wonderful genre of media, it must be said.

It depends of course very much on the particular game, but for some games, just sitting at the title or menu screen and enjoying the ambience can be a very wonderful thing.

(re: https://social.noyu.me/@hikari/statuses/01K2H6R6Q4APKTF2F2A8JNDABF)

The ambience in this game… the music especially, but also this little snowfall animation…

“The world around me - the canopy of bare branches, the dull winter sky, Iwanako running towards me - all these fade to black.”

Wow, this game makes really fantastic use of its medium… We're having that experience again of, “oh, that thing you experienced when you were much younger didn't just seem good because it was the first thing of that type you experienced — it was actually good”, like with Haruhi.

“It's a school called Yamaku Academy that specializes in dealing with disabled students.”

“Disabled? What? Am I…”

hate to break it to you Hisao but Health Events come for everyone

“It's funny, I had always thought my life was actually kind of boring, but now I miss it.”

We are going to have to stop quoting everything from the opening, it's too much.

Moving forward feels good.

Remember that blank canvas of a menu screen? Now that we've entered the first arc, a little scrap of paper with Hisao (the protagonist) appears on it… presumably eventually the entire menu will be filled with memories!