Katawa Shoujo
2012 visual novel
Katawa Shoujo (Japanese: かたわ少女, Hepburn: Katawa Shōjo; lit. "Cripple Girls", translated "Disability Girls") is a bishōjo-style visual novel by Four Leaf Studios that tells the story of a young man and five young women living with varying disabilities. The game uses a traditional text and sprite-based visual novel model with an ADV-style text box running on the Ren'Py visual novel engine. The game is licensed under the Creative Commons CC-BY-NC-ND.
The majority of the story takes place at Yamaku High School, a boarding school for disabled students, located in an unnamed city somewhere in modern, northern Japan. The player takes the role of Hisao Nakai, an ordinary boy whose life changes dramatically after a heart attack caused by his long-dormant cardiac arrhythmia. After a lengthy hospitalization, he is forced to transfer to a school specialized in providing education and healthcare for students with disabilities. Over the course of the narrative, Hisao has the opportunity to come to grips with his condition and adjust to his new life.
The gameplay of Katawa Shoujo is choice-based, in which the player reads through text and occasionally has the chance to respond to prompts with a variety of preset responses. The decisions made initiate possible events or dialogue within the story. Depending on the choices made by the player, the story branches into multiple forks.
“Katawa Shoujo” enters the record as 2012 visual novel. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Katawa, Shoujo and visual can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Reception evidence should be dated and situated: later canonical status may differ sharply from the work’s initial circulation. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 8, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q1735675. 1 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank.
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This entry incorporates text from “Katawa Shoujo” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.