It’s another year and another anniversary for Katawa Shoujo in early January. The community for this VN is very passionate and never fails to deliver on celebrating and putting out new content (regardless of whether the developers sanction it or not).
Re-Engineered
First and foremost, Fleeting Heartbeat Studios, the team behind 2022’s Re-Engineered version of Katawa Shoujo, and current owners of the official KS forums has released a major 2.0 update for the VN:
We’re very excited to announce the biggest milestone in Katawa Shoujo: Re-Engineered’s history. We’ve been working on this update for the better part of an entire year, and we believe we pulled off something truly amazing.
We went ahead and remastered every single CG that matters into proper 16:9 aspect ratio in 1080p high definition, without any cuts like in the previous KS:RE releases. This effort was largely manual and took hundreds of hours. This is entirely thanks to our wonderful artist Niomesan and ZenMaruki who also helped out here and there. We’re extremely grateful for all the help we’ve received.
This release also contains some quality of life fixes besides the main event, here’s a non-exhaustive list:
- Added streamlined Steam Deck installer
- Fixed text centering in some specific non-standard boxes
- Credits now roll properly, with character sketches playing at the correct timings
- Better font rendering for CJK languages
- Choices are now randomized like in the original game, checkmarks included for all choices you have already chosen during former gaming sessions
- Added support for Steam achievements
-FHS
The CGs extended by artists (not just by using some AI) are a feat worth praise and are the one thing KS needed to be fully modernized. The original Re-Engineered release relied on cropping the original CGs to fit the 16:9 ratio. That is now a thing of the past!
Semi-Official Vinyl & CD Release
In a collaborative project between Four Leaf Studios composer Sebastien Skaf, Rob Kovacs, and featuring art from Rtil, a piano arrangement album of tracks from Katawa Shoujo will be available on CD and Vinyl, as well as to listen to through a variety of streaming services! It is said to be released Q2 of this year.
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