Wednesday, April 1, 2015

Katawa Shoujo Japanese translation released!

illustration by weee

Katawa Shoujo 1.3 featuring the Japanese localization is now available! Three years and change after the original release, KS can be now read in the language of the image that originally inspired the birth of the Katawa Shoujo project. We'd like to thank and congratulate the translation team for their completion of the project, and hope you all enjoy the new language option for our stories.

Download the release from our website or directly from these links:

Torrent: Windows | Mac OS X | Linux
DDL: Windows | Mac OS X | Linux

As always, we greatly appreciate your help in seeding the torrent releases. 1.3 is a standalone release that completely replaces previous KS releases and it's the recommended version for new readers.

Don't forget that we're participating in Comitia 112 on the 5th of May. Please visit the translation team at booth こ29a and say hello! Hardcopies of Katawa Shoujo in dvd cases featuring weee's artwork can be bought at the event.

- Aura

Here is a message from the translation team:
We would like to thank everyone who have been patiently waiting for the Japanese release for more than 3 years since the release of version 1.0. It was truly a long journey with many challenges for us the translation team as well. We're happy that we have succeeded in reaching the final goal. The Japanese translation and the release of Katawa Shoujo could not have been made without the tremendous support from dev folks in Four Leaf Studios, the members of JP translation team, among many other people. We would like to express our thanks for making this release possible.

Katawa Shoujo is a monumental game, which was made in English language, by a team of non-Japanese individuals, with a visual novel format which is very familiar to us Japanese. Despite the title's first hand impression, the stories in the game were very sincere, which received praise across the world. It is undoubtedly a memorable piece, or rather a phenomenon in the history of games (One evidence is that searching for "Katawa Shoujo" in youtube will show 63800 videos posted).

I myself was moved so much when I played this game, which was the reason I wanted to people in Japan to know more about KS. That was also the cause for me to translate it into Japanese.

As the Japanese Otaku culture spread around the world over the years, its influence has culminated into one masterpiece, and now it is being brought back into Japan. It's fascinating how things have come to a full circle, and I feel lucky that I could take a part in this. In a way, I felt it was a mission for me to complete the translation and make it public. That determination has kept me going till now.

Our team has given the best of our efforts into the translation. Please enjoy.

----

7 years since the release of Act1 in 2008, and 3 years since the full version in 2012. English visual novels were far more in the niche back then. However in the past year or two, we are seeing more and more English visual novels in Steam and other platforms. Perhaps Katawa Shoujo had its influence in paving the way for Visual Novels.

I'm hoping that the release of KS Japanese translation would increase interest in other novel games outside Japan, and perhaps their translation as well.

-hir
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