Kawasoft Artbook now available for download

The artbook that Kawa Soft produced for their release of the French translation of Katawa Shoujo is now available for download:

http://dl.katawa-shoujo.com/pr/artbooks/Kawasoft_Artbook.pdf

It features some artwork from the game as well as new original content. It's in French, but none of the text should pose much of a puzzle to figure out. So if you didn't manage to be in Paris in July, here's your chance. Thanks again to Kawa Soft for producing the translation and the artbook.

–delta

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Summer Comiket event report

Hi from the Japanese translation team!

It's been some days after the summer Comiket. A warm thank you to everyone who came to our table, despite the extreme heat on that day. Both the new and the previous books sold well, thanks to the support from all of you. The stock of Tomorrow/Today books that we brought for the day even got sold out.

As for the surprise which we did not disclose until the day of the event, we had Raide, one of the 4LS devs and Lilly's artist, came and sit with us. He is on a trip to Japan and managed to drop by on the Comiket. This is the first occasion where a KS dev has personally sat at our booth. If in case you came by, you might have noticed him wearing a Kumamon cap in the back.

When we blundered and forgot to bring all the poster arts, Raide immediately saved the day by sketching up a number of drawings of KS heroines. Also for the first time we were able to respond to sketchbook requests. 5 out of 6 requests were of Hanako, showing her dominating popularity yet again.

We would like to thank Raide and another western fan who helped us, Lawls, for their support.

We saw many non-Japanese visitors coming to our booth, even more than in previous events. It may be that Comiket is becoming increasingly internationalized. We will hanging out again at Big Sight for Comitia 105 on August 18th. Please drop by if you didn't have the chance to come to Comiket.

---

Regarding the translation progress, our initial draft is complete and we are now in the reviewing phase. This is taking more effort than expected, and we do not have a clear view ahead as of now. We think it will take some time before we are able to report concrete progress.

We apologize for the long wait, and would like to ask for your patience.

- hir

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Katawa Shoujo 1.1.1 patch (Mac OS X only)

The Mac OS X version of KS 1.1 has a bug where the game crashes on reaching the Act 1 bad end in French. This is a patch to fix it:

http://dl.katawa-shoujo.com/gold_1.1/[4ls]_katawa_shoujo_1.1.1_patch_[mac][E4951D8E].zip

Again, this patch ONLY applies to the OS X version of 1.1, it is not necessary for any other version (or if you do not intend to ever read it in French).

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Fifth Katawa Shoujo illustration book to be released at Comiket 84

Are you one of the thousands of people attending the 84th Comic Market, despite the sweltering late summer heat? Come chill out at the Katawa Shoujo translation project table and say hello! You'll find us on the third day of Comiket (12th August) at East Hall 5, table プ-46a.

As a new item for this event, 4LS is releasing our fifth illustration book, Imperfect Spectrum. It's a 20-page full colour book featuring Katawa Shoujo-themed artworks by 4LS staff members and our friends. As with previous illustration books, a limited physical edition will be on sale at Comiket and a free digital edition will be released later.

Contributing artists:
Ambi07
Aura
climatic
Doomfest
Ge-B
kamifish
konflikti
Mike Inel
moekki
Monica Ray
Raide
weee

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Katawa Shoujo 1.1 Released

After a year and a half, the first update to Katawa Shoujo is released! The occasion is brought upon by the completion of the French translation project. Give your monitor a high five to congratulate the hard-working translation team. We've also included some other, mostly minor upgrades to the game, such as typo corrections. 1.1 replaces the original release as the main distribution of KS so if you are distributing KS in any way, it'd be nice to swap to this version. Meanwhile, many other translation projects are still forging ahead and when completed, will be integrated into further updates to KS.

The main features of the 1.1 version are:

• French localization
• New version of the "Red Velvet" track, featuring luscious live saxophone tunes from our friend Japes
• Engine upgrade to version 6.15 for OS X, allowing usage of Retina displays and fullscreen.

Get the new release from the Katawa Shoujo website, or directly from these links:

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

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New Katawa Shoujo release upcoming, the party is in Paris

Katawa Shoujo 1.1 will be released on the second weekend of July. The main feature of the new release will be the French language localization, the first of the Katawa Shoujo translation projects to come to completion. The translation was done by a French amateur translation team, Kawa-soft, who will be present at Japan Expo happening in Paris, France from 4th to 7th of July. Here are a few words from them:

Hello to you all, we're Kawa-Soft! 

Our goal is to promote visual novels to everyone who is French-speaking. We translate VNs - always with the proper permission to do so, legally. Everybody at Kawa Soft loves the idea of having a nice international VN collection. Kawa-soft is a nonprofit organization and the few profits (when we don’t just lose money) we make are only used to pay for the booths at conventions and the costs of printing physical releases. 

Katawa Shoujo is the biggest project we've had at Kawa Soft. And for this occasion, we wanted to do something special. This year, we are publishing a 60 page Katawa Shoujo artbook and the KS physical edition will consist of a fancy Digipak case with a full color manual. Additionally, there's a “collector's” edition which combines the Digipak of the game, the game’s OST in CD format, the artbook and a special cloth bag.
Of course, the artbook will be available online for free shortly after. 

On another note, we are doing a lottery with a few games but we'll announce it officially soon on our website, we are for now really busy getting things done for Japan Expo. For the same reason, we don't have any pictures to show you because everything is currently under production... but as soon as we have some, we'll post them on our blog. 

For more information, please follow this link (except for this page, everything else is in French, sorry). 

That's all folks! Hope to see you at our booth.

    Merci,

    Kawa Soft staff.

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Katawa Shoujo at Tokyo events and Japanese translation progress

KS Japanese translation team held a desk in COMIC1☆7 (April 28) and COMITIA 104 (May 5) during the Golden Week holidays in Japan. COMIC1 is an all-genre doujin event resembling Comiket to some extent, and Comitia is an event dedicated to original (not fan-creation) doujins.

We had a large number of visitors in both the events. It was very encouraging to see that so many people are continuously looking forward to the release of KS in Japanese language. Of course there were many questions about how far the translation has progressed. We are trying our best to meet the expectations of all the fans.

The entire game draft has been translated, and we are in the reviewing phase right now. Since a review will not get completed in just a single pass, it is difficult to give a clear-cut number. Our plan is to complete and hand over the entire translation within 1 year.

Other notable questions we had:
- How will the Japanese version be released? : Most likely as an update to the current full version, with the Japanese text merged in, similar to Act 1.
- Releasing in physical media? : No plans as of now.
- This game made a huge news a few years back! : (Yeah that's us)

We'll continue to post our progress in this blog so please keep watching.

- hir