Romancing disabled girls seems like an insensitive premise for a game at first, but 4 Leaf Studios (inspired by 4chan) have come up with a surprisingly well-made dating sim that is set in a disabilities school. Go to the source to read how the game came to be.

4chan's /b/ board and the anime-focused /a/ board consider themselves separate culturally, although there's plenty of obvious overlap. Both boards saw a major surge of interest in artwork of injured girls around the time of the "Nurse-kun" saga, although "wheelchair girls" have been something of a trope in spheres of anime and gaming for some time – and the image of a bandaged and eye-patched "Neon Genesis Evangelion star Rei Ayanami is practically iconic to anime fans.

The boards began more regularly spawning fetish threads devoted to eroticizing girls and women with prosthetics and eye-patches, complete with glib text about "damaged goods" or "ampu-chans." But it was a single image on the /a/ board that sparked the idea for a gaming project: a sketch by a doujin artist called RAITA proposing several characters for a fictional dating game based on disabled Japanese schoolgirls.

The board's anonymous users wanted the RAITA-inspired game concept to be real so badly that they decided to make it themselves. It's surprising on its own that there is such a polished result.

The amateur collective developing Katawa Shoujo now calls itself 4LS, or Four-Leaf Studios. The developers aim to identify themselves as an entity not dependent on 4chan nor associated with it by necessity. Still, the studio name remains a nod to its 4chan heritage and the culture that inspired the game's creation.

Miss Razz via kotaku.com »