Trivia / Katawa Shoujo

• Approval of God: RAITA appreciates all of the team's work in developing the VN.
• Author Avatar: Word of God says that Kenji is based on Anonymous22, one of the writers.
• Ascended Fanon:
  • When the question came up of whether Yamaku's mascot was a fish, Aura said "Sure, why not".
  • When cpl_crud had the same reaction to the theory that Shizune doesn't actually need glasses, and just wears them to feel important.
• California Doubling: Most of the backgrounds for Yamaku High are actually pictures of the Brown University campus (located in Rhode Island). Additionally, in an instance of actual California Doubling, the kitchen from the Ibarazaki house appears to be of a not especially uncommon design in the San Francisco bay area.
• Creator Backlash: As far as the devs are concerned, anything that was cut (particularly the leaked early drafts) was cut for a very good reason.
  Aura: So let's say you are eating at a fancy restaurant, a nice three-course dinner. After the dinner you ask the staff if you also could eat the trash and scraps that were the byproduct of the meal you just ate.
• Demand Overload: Katawa Shoujo's download server went down within seconds of release. Fortunately, the developers thought ahead and prepared torrent files.
• Doing It for the Art: The team refused money and did it all for the sake of a finished game. One look at this blog post should tell you everything you need to know.
  • Special mention goes to Mike Inel, the man single-handedly responsible for all of the wonderfully-made animated sequences you watch to kick-start Act 2. You can read more about his involvement here.
• Fan Translation: The game has been fantranslated into Russian and German, with a translation into Ukrainian also in progress.
• Follow the Leader: Visual novels featuring protagonists with disabilities like Missing Stars and Love Despite rose in the wake of this visual novel through the efforts of this VN's fans.^note Love Despite even had the Working Title "Katawa Shoujo Plus" at first, though it was soon changed. Missing Stars started as "Mentaru Shoujo", also obviously inspired by KS's name.
• No Budget: The dev team created Katawa Shoujo for free, in their spare time. They also refused donations, instead encouraging people to donate to a charity.
  Crud: Money would kill us.
  • Parodied in the April Fool's joke, which showed it being loaded with Revenue-Enhancing Devices, Product Placement, and being on Steam. And having an anime adaptation by Studio DEEN.
  • Word of God says that being an international team, splitting any possible donation money fairly would have been impractical.
• No Export for You: Unusually, it was Japan that took a while to get it, as the full game was not translated into Japanese until April 1st 2015 (with a hard copy distributed on May 5th at Comita 112). Otherwise the game has only been translated into French, Spanish and Russian.
• Promoted Fanboy/girl: Many developers started as fans of the project.
• Saved from Development Hell: The project, until its 4th January 2012 release, was in development for 5 years, during which it went through at least one almost-total restart, several script re-writes, members of 4LS leaving/shown the door for one reason or another and a few art revisions. It also came very close to death within the first few months of its conception, resulting in the aforesaid restart. Of the 21 or so developers at the end, only three were there from start to finish.
• Serendipity Writes the Plot:
  • In order to keep away from the complexities of programming loads of plot sections and writing loads of dialogue lines that would have to be done if Hisao chose more than one extra-class activity, the story was written so that, if the protagonist is closer to Emi or Rin, he rejects Shizune's invitation to join the Student Council. Even if the other options are not all that time-consuming: Emi's "morning running team" runs at the earliest hours of the day and Rin's art club seems to meet two times a week.
  • In order to save on file size and artwork, the girlfriends' character sprites usually come in only four variations (and even less for the other characters): school uniform, casual clothes, naked (or semi-naked) and a fourth outfit that varies according to the girl's activities (like a physical-ed uniform for Emi and an painting overall for Rin). This explains the students walking around outside classes in their uniforms, even if boarding schools don't mandate them to be worn all the time (for it could risk them being dirtied or damaged), and Emi sleeping in her P-Ed uniform instead on any kind of pyjamas
• Shrug of God: They are Teasing Creators after all. They even say some Blatant Lies to troll. Some things they have at various times refused to give a definite answer to include:
  • Can Shizune read lips?
  • Does Misha have a disability?
  • Does Rin have some kind of mental disorder?
  • Were Kenji and Yuuko in a relationship?
  • What caused the fire?
  • What does Kenji have against women?
  • What happens to the characters after each ending?
  • What was in Kenji's box?
  • Where is Shizune's mother?
  • Where exactly is Yamaku?^note The most we know is that it's probably somewhere near Sendai.
  Aura: ...we (including myself) consider only KS itself official canon, and everything else, including anything we've said or done, is apocryphal.
• Teasing Creators: The devs, especially in regard to Word of God.
  delta: We've also been known to troll, lie, change our mind, and make stuff up on the spot, so good luck with that.
• Trolling Creators: Besides the aforementioned tendency to give random answers to questions, some of them also enjoy posting severely Out of Character stories about the characters on the game's forum.
• Troubled Production: Inevitable for such an ambitious fan-made project. Having to coordinate multiple programmers, artists, and 5 writers (one for each route), many of whom were working on the game only as a hobby and didn't even live in the same country contributed to numerous delays in development. There were also many internal conflicts within the team, leading to high turnover rates among the staff.
• Urban Legend of Zelda: There's still people convinced that at one point the developers made routes for Misha and other girls, and remains of these scrapped paths can be found in the code of the game or can be accessed through some strange means. Romance routes for any other girl besides the main five never got past the discussion stage.
• What Could Have Been: Has its own page.
• Word of God: Word of God says that Molly is not a Katawa Shoujo character and her appearance was merely a cameo.

---