Operation Backlog Completion 2026

Exciting Surprises from the Nintendo Direct

 Video games  6 Responses »  Tagged with: , , ,
Sep 122025
 

Today’s hour-long Nintendo Direct is over! Did it have an amazing announcement that made me lose my mind? Not quite.

Did it still have some exciting surprises I can’t believe were announced? Actually, yes.

I’ll be covering the highlights for me, so be sure to check out the full Nintendo Direct if you want to see everything.

The Nintendo Direct began with a heavy focus on Mario for the 40th anniversary. I was hoping for a new 3D Mario game, but we didn’t get that. We did get a Super Mario Galaxy 1 & 2 bundle, however, with each game also available separate digitally. It’ll be out on October 2, so that’s pretty soon.

I enjoyed Super Mario Galaxy, if not quite as much as 64/Sunshine/Odyssey, but I never got around to playing the sequel. I’m tempted to pick it up for the Switch and finally play it there.

They’re also releasing Rosalina’s Storybook as a physical item, which is neat.

The new Yoshi game also got my attention. Yoshi and the Mysterious Book is a Switch 2 game announced for Spring 2026. It looks cute, like the sort of game I might play someday.

Speaking of Spring 2026, that’s also the release window for Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream, which got a new trailer at this Direct. I need it.

I love the new feature where you can grab a Mii and put them next to another one. That’s going to be great. (Of course, I hope they still randomly interact with each other on their own, too. That’s half the fun.)

It’s too bad it doesn’t have a release date, but you know what did get a release date? Hades II! Hades II will be out digitally on September 25, with the physical release to follow on November 20.

That’s really close. I might wait for the physical, not only because I want a physical copy, but also because I’m drowning in my backlog.

Meanwhile, I don’t know what Dragon Quest IV, V, and VI did, but Square Enix is jumping ahead to make Dragon Quest VII the next remake. Dragon Quest VII Reimagined will be out on February 5, 2026.

I have the 3DS version, but depending on how they compare, I might be tempted to get this one.

(Are we ever going to hear about Dragon Quest XII again??)

Soon after that came the news no one expected… Virtual Boy being added to Nintendo Switch Online, complete with a physical add-on accessory. I never saw that one coming.

Then came a welcome surprise for me… a new remake of Fatal Frame II: Crimson Butterfly announced for 2026!

I had hoped to see Fatal Frame, but I was still surprised.

I never got around to playing Fatal Frame II on the PS2, and I was always disappointed that the Wii remake wasn’t available in North America, so I am definitely excited for this. Maybe we’ll see a Fatal Frame VI one of these days after all…

Metroid Prime 4 got a release date of December 4, Donkey Kong Bananza is getting DLC, and then it was Pokémon time.

Okay, it’s not a new Pokémon Mystery Dungeon like I predicted/hoped. It’s… Pokémon Pokopia, where you play a Ditto transformed into a human and shape the land into a home for other Pokémon. It sort of has Animal Crossing vibes, so I’m intrigued.

I thought they were announcing another game, too, but it turned out to be a DLC announcement for Z-A. Getting DLC announced before the game is even out was a little disappointing…

…but then the next announcement happened, and…

……

You can’t imagine my shock when I saw Nagito.

Danganropna 2 is getting a full remake in 2026, but not only will it include the original game, it also features an alternate scenario with different victims and culprits. It sounds like it’s going to be just as long as the original game, too, so we’re essentially getting two Danganronpa games in one.

They’re calling it Danganronpa 2×2. Danganronpa 4…..?

So that was absolutely wild.

Monster Hunter Stories 3 got a new trailer and a March 13, 2026 release date. I’ll definitely have played the second game by then, of course.

Finally, the last big announcement for me was the one they ended on: a brand-new Fire Emblem game. Fire Emblem: Fortune’s Weave looks beautiful, it’s due out in 2026, and it… seems to be set in the same universe as Three Houses?

I’m intrigued.

All right, those were the major highlights for me from the Nintendo Direct. It doesn’t have me running out to get a Switch 2 just yet, but there were some nice surprises in there. What were your favorite announcements?

Danganronpa V3… My Favorite Danganronpa Game?

 Reviews, Video games  4 Responses »  Tagged with: , ,
Dec 222023
 

After watching the Danganronpa 3 anime earlier this year, I was all set to play Danganronpa V3, and the winner of this year’s Celebrating All Things Spooky contest chose the game review prize and picked it.

Like the other two mainline Danganronpa games, Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony begins with a group of teenagers learning that they’ve been imprisoned and forced into a death game. Kill someone, and a trial will be held. If the killer is found, they’ll be executed, but if they get away with their crime, they’ll be allowed to leave while everyone else is killed instead.

The setting is back to a school this time, although much more grandiose than a normal school.

That applies to the cast, too. My first thought after meeting the main characters of Danganronpa V3 was that these people were eccentric even by Danganronpa standards. However, that didn’t stop me from liking them.

In fact, I’d say this is actually my favorite Danganronpa cast. There were several characters I wanted to learn more about from the start, and despite being so exaggerated and eccentric, they developed in a way that felt believable to me. Maybe that’s why this is also the only Danganronpa game to make me cry, with a particularly hard-hitting case.

V3 follows the same structure as its predecessors. While storytelling is largely presented as a visual novel, it also has point-and-click gameplay elements, as well as some areas with 3D exploration. During the Free Time sections, you can choose a character to hang out with to learn more about them, until the story reaches a new death. Once someone dies, you switch over to investigative gameplay and inspect relevant areas to gather evidence. A trial then begins, in which you must contradict statements and present evidence, all in the form of various mini-games.

In my previous Danganronpa reviews, I’ve made it clear that I’m not the biggest fan of the trial mini-games… but in V3, they’re not actually so bad.

I still don’t like having to aim and shoot evidence at contradictions instead of simply presenting it like in Ace Attorney, and I disliked the new “lie” mechanic that lets you reverse a piece of evidence’s meaning to lie during a testimony (on the other hand, it replaced the “grab a key phrase someone else said and use it as evidence against a different phrase” mechanic from 2 that I hated, so I’ll accept that trade-off), but it has much better versions of Hangman’s Gambit, Rebuttal Showdown, and the rhythm game, I prefer the new Psyche Taxi over 2’s Logic Dive, and the newly-added mini-games are… actually kind of fun.

There’s a place where you can play certain mini-games outside of trials to earn tokens, and I actually did so voluntarily, which is a big change from how much I hated the mini-games in Danganronpa 2.

So in short, V3 has my favorite set of trial mini-games, which made trials feel infinitely better to play.

Now, as far as the story goes, it’s not my favorite. The character interactions are top-notch and really helped elevate the story, but it lacked the tight storytelling of 1 and the thrilling climax of 2. It also added five new mascot characters in the form of the Monokubs, and they’re far more annoying than Monokuma ever was.

However, by the time I reached the final chapter, I was still enjoying it enough to consider it my favorite in the series… and knowing how divisive it is had me worried about just what would happen in the ending.

Then I played the final chapter and understood.

After having a little time to reflect on it, though, I… liked the ending. Some parts of it are brilliant, and the whole concept certainly had me thinking. It seems to me that there are multiple ways to interpret the ending, and the interpretations that get people the most upset aren’t how I took it at all.

Click for major Danganronpa V3 spoilers
The first, of course, is the view that it invalidates the previous games by making them fictional. I don’t really see that. They were always fictional from our perspective, and I don’t think V3 makes them more fictional. Nothing suggests the stories of 1 and 2 were a show with real people playing roles, because there are multiple lines that imply they started out as purely fictional media.

My takeaway was that V3 is set in a separate continuity where the Danganronpa series also exists. Danganronpa got to be so popular in this universe that they decided to do it for real.

Of course, another interpretation is that the mastermind lied about everything and the events of Danganronpa 1 and 2 were real. In that case, it seems their in-universe Danganronpa was based on those events. Either way, it doesn’t invalidate them.

Anyway, the the other main interpretation that makes people upset is the belief that the ending is telling us that we’re bad for enjoying Danganronpa, and I don’t think that’s true either. The in-game audience is enjoying it while real people are dying, seeing them as fictional because their memories have been replaced by invented backstories, which is a world away from enjoying a fully fictional story. While certain aspects of the ending did make me wonder if Kodaka had felt under pressure by fans to make more Danganronpa games (and having the main character shout about ending Danganronpa made me say “So we’re never getting a Danganronpa 4, huh?”), it never felt to me like the game was saying enjoying it was bad.

So I can see why the ending is divisive, because it was a pretty wild twist, but it’s one that I don’t mind.

(I was actually more bothered by case 1’s twist relying on the viewpoint character withholding information from the player, which felt like cheating.)

Actually, considering the story up until then had said that after scraping through for our happy endings in the previous games, the world was destroyed and only 16 people survived… yeah, I’ll take the actual ending instead.

Overall, I came out of Danganronpa V3 thoroughly enjoying my time with it. To me, 1 has the best standalone plot, and 2 has the most exciting endgame, but V3 has my favorite cast, my most appreciated version of the mini-games, and a story that certainly kept me guessing.

Danganronpa 3 (Anime) is a Mixed Experience

 Movies and Shows, Reviews  5 Responses »  Tagged with:
Sep 182023
 

After finishing Ultra Despair Girls I continued my Danganronpa experience by watching Danganronpa 3.

Yes, watching. The story set up in Danganronpa, Danganronpa 2, and Ultra Despair Girls is concluded in the anime Danganronpa 3: The End of Hope’s Peak High School, which is not to be confused with the entirely different game called Danganronpa V3.

As if that isn’t confusing enough, Danganronpa 3 is split into two arcs, the Future Arc and the Despair Arc, and the intended viewing order is to alternate between the two.

(Note: Due to the nature of the story, it is impossible to discuss Danganronpa 3 without implying spoilers for the previous games, especially Danganronpa 2. If you haven’t finished Danganronpa 2, stop reading this post now.)

The Future Arc is set after the events of Danganronpa 2, with Makoto being called in by the Future Foundation to answer for what they see as treason. However, this inquest is brought to an abrupt end when everyone is trapped and forced into a new killing game. Each person is given a bracelet that restricts them from performing a specific action. Breaking the restriction will result in death via poison. The bracelets also knock everyone out after a set amount of time passes, at which point an attacker will awaken to kill someone.

While a different setup than the traditional Danganronpa situation (it actually reminds me a bit more of Zero Escape), it creates a great deal of paranoia and tension amongst an already-fractured team.

Meanwhile, the Despair Arc is set ahead of the games and follows the events at Hope’s Peak leading up to the Tragedy.

For about the first half of the anime, I was really enjoying it. The Future Arc was exciting and suspenseful, even if it amped up the action to the point where being an Ultimate basically means you have superpowers, and the Despair Arc was full of comedy tinged with sadness due to my knowledge of where it was going. There were a few things I had to get used to – like different voice actors, different translations for key terms (“Super High School Level” instead of “Ultimate”), and the dub’s decision to make Monokuma’s laugh “nyek nyek nyek” instead of “puhuhu” – but overall I was having a lot of fun.

Then things started to fall apart.

Click for major Danganronpa 2 and 3 spoilers
I already had mixed feelings about Chiaki being a real person, but I could accept it. And I didn’t like Junko making the Student Council kill each other instead of Izuru actually killing them all, but it was just a minor gripe. And Monaca giving up on despair and blasting off into space was a bizarrely boring way to handle her character, but at least it wasn’t a major plot point.

Then the brainwashing part started.

I had been looking forward to seeing Junko interact with the Danganronpa 2 cast. I expected to see her psychologically manipulate them into falling to her side. Some of them, such as Mikan, felt especially set up for this sort of manipulation.

But no. Junko creates a despair-filled murder video and adds in subliminal messaging created by the ultimate animator, and this causes anyone who watches it to be brainwashed into loving despair. The Remnants of Despair ending up that way because they saw a magical brainwashing video was so, so much less interesting to me than what I’d expected. It’s basically presented as mind control, too.

That plot point made Junko a less interesting villain to me and retroactively lessened the impact of 2’s reveal that you are the Remnants of Despair. It changed Makoto’s perspective from, “You did terrible things, but we believe if you’re reminded of hope and given a chance to bond, even you can be saved” to “You were brainwashed, but we can undo it,” which weakens it a lot for me.

And then, when the secret of the Future Arc turned out to be that there is no traitor, just that one person is woken up each time and shown a brainwashing video that makes them kill themselves…… well, I suppose I felt some despair at that plot point, so at least that’s something.

While the Future Arc remained interesting for a while before falling into the same trap, the second half of the Despair Arc increasingly felt like less-interesting retcons to what the games implied.

The climax, therefore, hinged on a plot point I hated… but I actually didn’t mind the final episode. It had a lot of fanservice (of the “catering to fans” variety) and glossed over some points too quickly, but at least it was fun, which is more than I can say for those earlier plot revelations.

In the end, I’m not sure what to say about Danganronpa 3: The End of Hope’s Peak High School. It has a lot of fun parts, especially in the first half, but I also feel like my overall Danganronpa experience would be the same or even improved by not watching it. Regardless, I’ve now finished the Hope’s Peak storyline, so next up for me is Danganronpa V3!

If you watched the Danganronpa 3 anime, how did you feel about it?

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