Katawa Shoujo

Raita was one of those girls in class who drew manga constantly. Pages and pages of terrible action poses and love triangles ripped straight from Sailor Moon. She’d show you her work with this desperate hope, and you’d say it was good because you didn’t have the heart to be honest. But she was getting better, which made watching the progression almost interesting.

For the last decade or so, she’s been pouring everything into Katawa Shoujo. It started as character sketches on 4chan in 2007, designs for a story set at Yamaku High, a school in Japan for disabled teenagers. You play as Hisao, a student there, and the game is essentially a dating sim—you’re trying to date these girls. One’s scarred from a severe fire. One lost a leg in an accident. One was born blind. The title translates literally to cripple girls, which should tell you everything about the tact level here.

But it actually became something real. Programmers and artists from around the world saw those sketches and started building. A full visual novel came together with actual writing and actual character depth. It got released free on Windows, Mac, and Linux in English and German and Russian and plenty of other languages.

That’s the strange thing about the internet sometimes. Someone you barely remember makes something weird and crude, and the internet decides to help finish it into something that actually works.