Invisible Embrace.

When one man dies it’s a tragedy, when a million men die it is a statistic. When a million grizzled and scarred veterans from the gloomy bowels of the internet dive into a downwards spiral of emotions it should shake worlds. This is better known as recent visual novel Katawa Shoujo.

I don’t know what to say. Four borderless days were spent behind the flickering monitor as it slowly stirred my mind like a broth of tar; resisting, loosing then as the week weathered on, turning me around from my desk to see a large print of Rin Tezuka on my wall.

For somebody who studies games, I spend an unimaginable amount of time sitting in limbo and accomplishing nothing other than considering the roof of my bedroom and merging my eternal form with the internet. When I discovered Katawa Shoujo, I was in a house full of drunk companions participating in a conversation about the philosophy of martial arts, and the collection of knives I’ve hoarded for reasons both sane and agreeable, but somewhere in between the dubious festivities, I decided to bore a hole through the evening and subject myself to what seemed like a thought exercise, to see if I could still fucking feel.


Katawa Shoujo pulls at the heart strings in a manner that feels as nebulous as love, or hate, but acts as mechanically as a calculator. Hasao Nakai is a jerkoff. He enjoys reading, soccer and conducting hostage negotiations with his dick. But this is only half the point. Hisao is more or less a tool for the player, a means of finding their love for one of these girls beneath the banner of hating the intelligent, yet clueless protagonist. Every male has an ego, and each and every player probably thought that they could fill the small crevices with their own personalities that Hisao tries to fill with a wrecking ball. Incidentally, we learn more of these rich personalities because we have the chance to develop an unrequited relationship of our own with the girls in the game, anchored only by our meagre choices we are given by Hisao’s blundering attempts to understand anything greater than a cereal box.

So where does this leave us? Angry? Bewildered? Indignant?

The consequence is that we’re touched because, with time, we almost don’t mind. How Hisao conducted himself ended with the game, but what we learned from these characters persisted onwards without hesitation. We’re bashful to admit it, but we’ve all become attached to fictional personalities and characters at one point for one reason or another, and because they reside behind the impenetrable walls of the monitor, we may turn to ourselves in contemplation. What about these individuals do we find attractive? Does it come from our influences, or has it grown from within? Are these things even distinguishable? Personally, I found a great deal of affinity with Rin, due largely in part to my upbringing, life and the errant and uncontrollable wanderings of my brain.

Or maybe you’re just really into being tied to a chair and straddled.

Even thought we can’t reach out and touch the lives on these characters in the ways we would like, they have touched us by making us aware of our own shortcomings, troubles, triumphs and the way we cope with the intricacies of our own worlds. Perhaps that is sort of depressing. Maybe this game is how we can destroy ourselves to better our world, or maybe that world changes so willingly that it passes in the blink of an eye.

Maybe Katawa Shoujo won’t matter to you tomorrow, but it will leave an impression behind; an altered sense of self, a bitter-sweet memory. Or maybe a poster covering the shitty paint on the wall of your share-house bedroom.

In the meanwhile, some worrying music.