Katawa Shoujo r7 is a comprehensive remaster of the 2012 release, bringing in a plethora of improvements, bug fixes and all-new features with no compromise on the original's creative vision.
Download Link
New Features
- Ren'Py 7
The unwieldy codebase meets the modern version of the visual novel engine, allowing for arbitrary resolution scaling, HD text rendering, much faster skipping, stability and accessibility features.
- Wide Mode
Ever wished for a new outlook at your favorite game? Broaden your horizons with a new mode, taking advantage of the widescreen technology that's been gaining popularity in recent years.
The peculiar resolution is made to strike a balance between the wider feel and the coverage of all existing visual content, and can be used to iterate upon other originally 4:3 interactive media as well. Toggleable off in settings, should you wish so.
- Accessibility Features
The gentleman's suite. Provided by the engine itself, but capped off with a nice endpoint. In addition, all of the ingame text and user interface is adjusted and confirmed to be usable with self-voicing alone.
- Controller Support
As a side-effect of this starting development as a PS Vita port (see below), full controller support is now available. The controls (in the spirit of accessibility, of course) are optimized for the possibility of one-handed play; every aspect of the game can be perused with the controller in either hand.
- Community Mod Framework
As the foremost in what's to come for the Katawa Shoujo community, this release includes means to develop and deploy custom scenarios that plug and play directly into the main game. For them, every resource existing in the base game becomes available, as well as support for new resources at any resolution, both old-style imachine-based and new-style string and image translations, ruby text, and even voice acting. I sincerely hope this well help someone achieve their very own creative vision.
For this initial release, four expansions have been developed:
- The Dream of a Little Star – A story set deep within an alternate universe, and a testament to the capabilities of the Ren'Py engine.
- Summer's Clover – A rather infamous mod from the olden days when modding Katawa Shoujo was illegal.
- Learning to Fly – Act 1 – A recent mod, developed with the higher-resolution capability in mind and with prospects for an extended future.
- pXt – The only thing made by 4LS on this list.
Source files for the mods are included, and the files for Learning To Fly are annotated. Enjoy!
- Italian Translation
Because why not, really. It has been unequivocally officially released over here, but never made it into the game because it happened after end of support.
- Original or Upscaled
This release gives you the either option. To load in the HD pack, download `hd-2x.rpa` and place it in the `/game` directory.
- Streaming-Safe
Say, you ever wanted to (make someone) livestream the game to prove its worth to the public? But oh woe; irrespective of the adult content settings, it suddenly shows nudity onscreen, violating the streaming platform's terms of service.
This is now fixed, and sprites will be appropriately censored when adult content is off.
- Additionally:
- Added autosaving. The two topmost save slots (one for the base game and one for DLC) are reserved in a way that doesn't interfere with existing saves, but overwriting them will result in them being overwritten back.
The game autosaves at each timeskip, and can be autosaved manually in mods. - Added fast-forward, an alternative skipping mode. Accessed with holding Right on controller and / on keyboard.
- Changing music in the jukebox now extends to the rest of the Extras menu, and persists after completing a replay.
- Consequentially, completing a replay now puts you where you left off on the library screen.
- In the gallery, exiting out of an image sequence is now possible with right-click / Circle / Esc. In Wide Mode, both fullscreen and original versions of the image are displayed, and skipping to the next image is possible with middle-click / Triangle / Enter.
- As the A key is now reserved for Ren'Py's built-in accessibility menu, turning on auto mode is moved to Shift+A and Z.
- The engine is modified from upstream for the various needs of the project; the changes are documented in `renpy/diff.txt`.
- Added autosaving. The two topmost save slots (one for the base game and one for DLC) are reserved in a way that doesn't interfere with existing saves, but overwriting them will result in them being overwritten back.
Bug Fixes
Unfortunately, there is no list of everything that had to be fixed over the course of all this. However, here are the things I remember:
- Fixed the wrong-warping and language changing bugs that plagued all previous attempts to update the engine version. (There is a good reason nobody has done this before.)
- Fixed the crowd flickering in certain situations (like Hideaki's appearance in Lilly route).
- Looped the train ambiance properly.
- Fixed the save name saying "False" if the save is made in an unnamed scene.
- The hotfix pack from here has been applied.
Shiny New Things
- PlayStation Vita version
Ah, the Weebstation. A console that revolutionized the visual novel market in Japan, and came out less than a month apart from KS itself. It is a match made in heaven, really.
This version functions identically to the PC release, and all expansion content is available as well, except for the following limitations:
- No FMV support. Only Tom could ever fix this.
The videos are provided separately; extract them to a folder of choice and view them with a standalone video player. I recommend this one. - No self-voicing, as the Vita doesn't have a TTS engine.
- In its current iteration, the Vita is not powerful enough to render transforms and transitions at the same time. A lot of work has been put into mitigating this, but there are a few spots in the game with inavoidable lag left.
- The language files are separated out into their own modules. To change the language, download the respective archive and replace `base-lang.rpa` and `base-script.rpa` in the `/game` directory with the language of your choosing. Loading more than one language pack is not advised, but saving the game in one language and loading it after changing the language files will work.
The .vpk comes bundled with the English version. - Likewise, any loaded expansions will add to the RAM burden, and for the most demanding ones the amount left is not enough; this is why `base-script.rpa` is separated out. Moving it outside the `/game` directory will unload the main game's script from memory, and allow those expansions to be played with no issues. Don't forget to place it back after finishing.
- Even still, the amount of memory errors seems to increase dramatically with the size of the persistent file, to the point that 100%ing the game on a single file would've not been possible. The vast majority of this file is information about what text you've seen, so you have two options:
- Flush this data automatically at each save, and not record what text you've seen. (This option and, consequently, "Skip unread text" are on by default, as the prospect of someone not reading these instructions and having their game slowly become unplayable is frightening.)
- Flush this data manually, if recording seen text is something you require for completion. You'll need to do it about once per route.
- No FMV support. Only Tom could ever fix this.
- Katawa Crash
I am rather fond of Katawa Crash; however, the only way to describe Adobe Flash in the present is "obsolete". So, this is a complete remake of it in Godot. In 60 FPS, with HD rendering, controller and keyboard support, and UX improvements in the UI, in every other aspect the Katawa Crash you remember.
Download Link: Katawa Shoujo r7
