Operation Backlog Completion 2026

Danganronpa Another Episode: Ultra Despair Girls – Weird, Dark, and Worth Playing

 Reviews, Video games  3 Responses »  Tagged with:
Jul 312023
 

So when I finished Danganronpa 2 back in May, I wasn’t sure which entry to move onto next.

In the end, I decided to go with Ultra Despair Girls first and from there proceed to 3 and then finally V3, so let’s talk about Danganronpa Another Episode: Ultra Despair Girls.

(Note: It’s impossible to completely avoid spoilers for the first Danganronpa while discussing Ultra Despair Girls, so if you haven’t played the first game, you might want to stop reading here.)

Set in between Danganronpa and Danganronpa 2, Ultra Despair Girls puts you in the shoes of Komaru Naegi, Makoto’s younger sister. As part of the motives for the first game, she was kidnapped and imprisoned in a mysterious apartment. Things take a turn for the worse when the city comes under attack by hundreds of Monokumas, and Komaru ends up joining forces with Toko in order to escape.

Now, I was a little worried about what it would be like to spend an entire game with Toko as a companion… but it actually turned out to be great!

This is basically Toko Character Development: The Game, and she (both regular Toko and Genocide Jack) have some great scenes that are among the most standout moments of the game for me. While she and Komaru clash terribly at the start, their interactions are a definite highlight.

Unlike the main series, Ultra Despair Girls isn’t a visual novel or adventure game. It’s largely a third-person shooter, as Komaru gets a special gun that allows her to fight back against the Monokumas. Over the course of the game, you get different bullets that have different effects. You also have a special meter that allows you to switch to Toko, who (as Genocide Jack) uses powerful melee attacks and special moves. Defeating enemies rewards you with Monokuma Coins, which you can spend on enhancements for your bullets or upgrades for Genocide Jack.

Gameplay also has a decent puzzle component. While some of these are riddles, there are also a number of challenge rooms where you’re tasked with killing all the Monokumas in a specific way. Figuring out how to use different bullets and the way different Monokuma variants react to them to meet the challenge’s criteria was one of my favorite parts.

And although exploration isn’t a huge part of the game, it’s worth poking around optional paths for the numerous collectibles, including notes that shed light on the grim occurrences in the city.

Speaking of which, this is probably the darkest Danganronpa game, easily darker than the first two. While death is a constant focus in those games, it’s presented in such an over-the-top way that the games maintain a lighthearted tone, but Ultra Despair Girls shows events with a much bleaker mood despite still having humor and wacky Monokuma antics. Aside from the terrified survivors hiding from the rampaging Monokumas and vengeful children who will gleefully torture and kill them, the main antagonists are children whose backstories involve various types of child abuse, and the game doesn’t shy away from very heavy themes.

It also has one… questionable mini-game section that made me wonder how it got past the ESRB. (Or onto Steam… I feel like with the way Steam is nowadays, it would get banned if it came out today.)

But it’s still as bizarre and over-the-top as the other games in the series – maybe even more so. It’s weird even by Danganronpa standards, and however far you need to stretch your suspension of disbelief to accept the Tragedy in general, prepare to stretch it even further. The heavier themes just make its clash in tones a bit more jarring than usual.

There are plenty of little callbacks to the first game that I enjoyed, as well as a few connections to the second. Despite being set in between the two games, it does contain some spoilers for Danganronpa 2, although it takes a couple of steps possibly meant to mitigate how much it spoils.

Click for Ultra Despair Girls and implied Danganronpa 2 spoilers
For example, the scene with Izuru seems to go out of its way not to show his face, and Nagito wears a glove on his left hand for the entire game. While things like the Future Foundation are spoiled completely, little details like those made me think they wanted to obscure the biggest spoilers for anyone who played Ultra Despair Girls before Danganronpa 2.

Anyway, with as divisive as Ultra Despair Girls is among fans, I was pleasantly surprised by it. The gameplay was simple, but passable, and the story was interesting. It wasn’t included in the recent Danganronpa collection, so if you want to play Danganronpa Another Episode: Ultra Despair Girls, you’ll need to pick it up on Steam, PS4, or Vita. It’s pretty different from the others, but I’m happy I decided to play it after all.

Celebrating All Things Mysterious: Danganronpa 2 – A Return to the World of Hope and Despair

 Celebrating All Things Mysterious, Reviews, Video games  9 Responses »  Tagged with: , ,
May 032023
 

Back in 2020, I played Danganronpa and said I was looking forward to starting the sequel… although it took me over 2 years to get there.

One of the winners of this year’s Celebrating All Things Romantic contest back in February tasked me with playing Danganronpa 2, and I finished it with perfect timing to make it the first mystery game we discuss of this month’s celebration.

Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair has a similar premise to its predecessor – a group of high school students are trapped and forced to playing a killing game in which anyone who murders a classmate and gets away with it will be allowed to leave. The setting is an island, this time, instead of a school, and certain aspects of its presentation are a bit more grandiose, but the general principles remain the same.

Gameplay essentially has three phases. In free time, you’ll have a limited number of time slots with which to hang out with other characters, until someone is murdered. Then you’ll be in the investigation stage, where you gather evidence in a point-and-click format (albeit with the ability to move in a 3D space in some areas). Finally, you’ll advance to the trial, where you’ll use that evidence to uncover the killer by discovering contradictions… and playing a lot of mini-games.

I’ve realized I kind of hate Danganronpa’s mini-games.

These are murder mysteries. The challenge should be based on logic, on looking at the clues and seeing what truth they lead toward. I should not get stuck in a murder mystery because I knew the correct answer but couldn’t aim it at the contradiction fast enough, or skateboard past obstacles to reach the right answer, or any of the other annoying mini-games Danganronpa 2 makes you do even when you know what the answer is.

(To its credit, there are separate difficulty settings for the action and logic aspects of the case, so you can make the action part easier without reducing the complexity of the mystery-solving aspect.)

Anyway, I don’t know if Danganronpa 2’s mini-games are worse than the first game’s or if I just didn’t mind them as much back then, but every mini-game made me seethe over how much I prefer Ace Attorney’s style of just letting me present the contradictory evidence. One exception is the Closing Argument, where you lay out exactly how the murder occurred. I like that one.

Like with its predecessor, one of Danganronpa 2’s greatest strengths is that giving you a core cast of characters from which all the murderers and victims will come raises the tension dramatically. It wasn’t long before I was looking at the shrinking cast of characters wondering if any of my favorites would make it out alive.

The characters felt a bit one-note to me (with a couple notable exceptions), and Monokuma managed to be even more annoying due to the addition of Monomi, another squeaky-voiced mascot character. On the other hand, Monomi has the catchiest song in the game, so I have to appreciate her for that.

I spent a good portion of Danganronpa 2 feeling that I liked the first game much better, but by the time I finished, I was less sure. I prefer the first game’s atmosphere and overarching mystery, but the final stretch of Danganronpa 2 was so exciting that it made me reconsider. Despite a couple parts requiring dubious leaps of logic, the cases are pretty solid, as well. And while I have some quibbles with the ending, it also resolved some issues I had with earlier parts of the game.

Danganronpa 2 might have annoyed me at times, but it left me wanting to play more from the series. It’s readily available alongside the others nowadays, with its most recent re-release being the Danganronpa Decadence collection on Switch.

Despite that, it’s not as simple as just picking up the next game. Danganronpa 3 the anime is the actual continuation of the storyline and is not the same thing as the third game, Danganronpa V3. There’s also a spin-off game called Ultra Despair Girls that seems rather divisive. But one way or another, I’ll continue the Danganronpa series soon… hopefully not with as big a gap in between this time.

I Finally Plunged Into the Suspenseful Mysteries of Danganronpa

 Reviews, Video games  4 Responses »  Tagged with: , ,
Nov 272020
 

One series I’d been intending to try for ages is Danganronpa. Murder mysteries, investigations and trials, it sounded like my sort of thing, but I never got around to it.

Well, one of this year’s Celebrating All Things Spooky contest winners chose a game for me to review as his prize, and he picked Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc.

In Danganronpa, you play a boy named Makoto who is selected to attend an elite school, but when he gets there, he finds himself trapped along with his classmates and forced to participate in a deadly game. They’re told that if anyone can successfully kill another student and get away with it, they will be allowed to leave. If not, they have to stay there forever.

Of course, it isn’t long before a student turns up dead.

Similar to games like Ace Attorney, Danganronpa is essentially a cross between a visual novel and an adventure game. There are long stretches of time that are solely story-driven, but at other points you’re set loose to explore and investigate.

Once you’ve gathered all the evidence for a case, the “class trial” begins. Unlike Ace Attorney, these trials involved much more action. Pieces of evidence become “bullets” that you shoot at contradictory statements while the text is on-screen. I’m not crazy about my ability to solve a case being dependent on my shooting skills, but the game gives you enough time that it isn’t too reliant on fast reflexes.

At other points you’ll have to shoot letters to spell out a key word to answer a question, and there are also rhythm game confrontations. Of everything, the rhythm game parts are the ones I liked the least, but I endured them.

(Fortunately, if you lose all of your health and get a game over, you can restart from right ahead of where you failed.)

In between each case, you get a few “free time” sections. These sections let you pick a character to spend time with and learn more about them, which also unlocks optional skills to help you in trials.

I liked the characters, and I enjoyed solving the cases (especially as they got crazier and more convoluted later in the game), but what I really loved the most was the overarching mystery. Why are they trapped at this school? Who is the mastermind behind Monokuma, the robotic bear overseeing the game (who fortunately isn’t as annoying as I feared, considering my general dislike of “cute” mascot characters)? What is really going on?

I loved thinking over every clue and developing theories about the overarching story. Sure, I predicted some things that weren’t revealed until the game was almost over, but it was still fun to watch them finally come to light.

Danganronpa also did a great job of building up an “anyone can die” atmosphere. By the second case, I was already looking at each character anxiously, wondering if one of my favorites would survive through to the next one or not. It made everything feel that much more suspenseful.

Aside from one particularly annoying point in a case that involved a drawn-out debate to prove something that could have been resolved with a single sentence, I had a great time playing Danganronpa. I’m not going to start the next one immediately, but I’m looking forward to playing the sequel when I finally do get there.

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