Katawa Shoujo: HNNNGGGGGGG!!!

I decided to do Kenji's route first and I'm planning to do Hanako's route last. The former to get it out of the way and the latter so I can be fair to the other girls.

Suffice to say, Kenji's ending did inspire me to come with a Hisao (aka "Lone Wolf/Isolation") route where Hisao avoids dying but is on bad terms with Kenji, accusing him of trying to kill him. Much like Beta Hanako, it's all bad endings. During these endings, Hisao can:

• neglect to take his pills and have a fatal heart attack.
• get expelled for cheating on his exams and trying to profiteer off it.
• get arrested for starting a fist fight with Kenji on the school roof as revenge for the manly picnic.
• stalk Iwanako for revenge before breaking down and accusing her of everything, causing him to end up in a psychiatric unit.
• have a meltdown after the girls and Kenji try to stage an intervention, ending with Hisao commiting suicide due to guilt and other repressed emotions.

With all that, it's actually a good thing that Kenji's route is considered the bad ending.

Wow, I never expected this thread to come back to life!

Anyway, I find it interesting that you "decided" to do Kenji's route first. Are you using a flowchart or something? If you aren't using a guide, it will usually happen naturally!

I'm not using a flowchart, and I'll be refraining from using guides because I want to see where my decisions will take me. I think I chose Kenji's route first because I was in a bitter mood at the time and it turned out to be a better idea than expected.

For anyone who hasn't played the game, doing the Kenji route basically requires you to reject the other girls and be a jerk. It also means that when you do finish the route, you have a stronger incentive to try to and build a relationship for both story and gameplay reasons.

Kenji's route is the default if you don't happen to pursue all the right choices for any particular girl. If you choose randomly at every point, you have a 54% chance of hitting Kenji, far more than any girl.

There are also two confusing dialog choices in the demo which instantly look you in to Kenji's route (the infamous "I'm fine" and "Fun, fun, fun" from Lilly and Shizune's paths respectively), but at least they reworded the choices in the final game to be less confusing.

Personally, I got Kenji's route first because I was trying to get Lilly but missed one of the required choices early on.

Edited by storyyeller on Aug 27th 2022 at 8:54:01 AM

I got Kenji's route on my first attempt because it was the first VN I'd played.

So I kept picking the lower commitment choices based on wanting to meet everyone first before making up my mind on which route to enter first.

So, I'm now on the Emi route. This ought to be interesting.

At the end of Hanako's route in her good ending, she explains to Hisao why she doesn't like having her birthday celebrated, because she feels like people are just pretending to be nice to her for one day when she just wants to be alone and disappear. It made me wonder, after Hisao learned that, did Hanako ever express that to Lilly as well? My guess is that she likely did, but it was something I wondered about in thinking about her route.

Finished the Emi route and I'm glad I gave her a chance because honestly, Hisao and Emi's bond is great and she really did improve his life through exercise (in more ways than one). I was going to go for Rin's route but something changed and I'm now doing Shizune's route.

As I've learned, I think each route might have a piece of dialogue foreshadowing the bad ending: Emi's has Kenji say that if he wanted to murder someone, he'd push them off the roof while Misha in Shinzune's route basically tells you not to be a paranoid loser who stays in all day. I'll be sure to pay attention if I end up on the other routes.

Kind of surprised that KS' 10th anniversary came and went without any particular announcement or release attached, then again it's a very niche product and the fanbase is small so there may not be any incentives in doing some big works. By the way, has any fangame or KS-inspired visual novel ever been completed or are all stuck in Development Hell? I also vaguely remember those dubs on Youtube but I don't think anything came out of them.