Katawa Shoujo

[Katyusha]

Anyone browsing Mirror Moon's recent updates lately will have found this already, but I figure it's worth sharing.

Katawa Shoujo (lit. "Disabled Girl." More or less) is an English Language Visual Novel being made by 4-Leaf Studios (which is apparently a bunch of coders, artists, and writers that have never actually physically met before) supposedly based on a thread on 4chan's /a/ boards (which means they're probably either crazy or masochists.)

So far, they're at 200,000 words (according to their most recent entry) and still growing. Which is quite impressive, since, as chendo from Mirror Moon pointed out, that's nearly 1/3rd the size of Tsukihime (itself considered a huge work), and would be considered the biggest (known) such project (in English) to date.

The schtick to set it apart is basically... dun dun dun...

The entire main cast is disabled in some way. One of the girls is blind. Another is missing both arms, and so on. The character you play as also has a heart defect. Unusual, yes, but then, the premise of "slice of life lovestory in a school for the disabled" is interesting. They've also posted some artwork and screencaps of internal testing, and it's looking quite good.

I'm looking forward to seeing how this turns out.

Links:
Website: http://katawashoujo.blogspot.com/
Forum: http://ks.renai.us/
IRC: irc://irc.rizon.net/#zettai-shoujou

[Nagato]

Hmm... I will be following this with hesitant interest. Seems from the excerpt posted that it will be an eroge, though :|

[Taiga]

I'm sure you'll survive. I know I will.

[Katyusha]

Naturally, it'll be an eroge. But then, quite a few big series started out as eroge. Besides, that they tacked on sex in it is no real reason to avoid something that looks interesting.