I have mixed feelings on the demo. I was only able to play the 3DS one, but having played the original PSP game in Japanese, I was more or less up to speed with the mechanics, although I totally do remember it taking a while to come to grips with it all when I was playing that first game. There's a lot there and that 3DS demo isn't particularly great about giving you some breathing room to really experiment before it's all over if you don't know what you're getting into. So on the mechanical side of things, I'm more or less pleased that what I liked has stayed in the game. It seems like all of the organizational systems and whatnot are present so you don't have to be overwhelmed by hordes and hordes of statistics and whatnot if you don't want to be and the socialization system with the girls and how different ones are better to bond with for certain class types is a mechanic I legitimately like.
But on the flip side, the things that I wasn't super keen on in the original game still seem to be here, too. The battle system has seen some improvements over the original game, but I'm worried that the general time investment for levelling up still favors too much grinding. The fact that you automatically defeat really weak enemies without having to enter a proper battle with them is nice and was in the first game, too, but naturally, you tend to not see those very often if you're just doing normal progression stuff. Even with the fast forward and auto-battling features, stuff just seems to take a lot of time. Granted, I didn't grow up on RPGs, so my patience levels for grinding tends to be a bit less than proper genre veterans, but the pacing still seems to be about as slow as the last game. Really wish it had a feature like Bravely Default where you could change XP and enemy encounter rates because the pacing issues were the big reason why I put down the original game after about 20 hours despite otherwise generally liking the rest of it by and large. If your party levelled up like two or three times faster, I'd totally be way more okay about dealing with its otherwise okay battle system.
Even more worryingly for me though is that it looks like this game plays up its concept with a much straighter face than the previous game. In that first game, there are still a lot of innuendos and whatnot, but it's written as really hilariously biting satire of sexualization in anime and games. It only plays things with a straight face for about 20 minutes before the game starts calling you out as a lecherous asshole for thinking you'd be playing yet another one of those games and it's great. I think the writing for that game was done by the people responsible for the Dangan Ronpa games and it totally shows. But for this new game, I remain unsure whether that humor is still really intact. I've asked around and done research, but I've got mixed signals on it; Japanese reviews in particular from what I read didn't really state it was a humorous game, but they didn't catch onto the satire in the original game by and large either, so I'm not sure what to make of it. I'm contemplating just buying the Japanese version of this new game because I know some of the humor in that original game definitely doesn't translate very well at all, but yeah.
But then again, RPGs tend to make for bad demos in general. I know people really profoundly hated Vesperia's demo and that game went on to be very widely loved among RPG fans on the 360, so I've got hope. I'm a big fan of Spike Chunsoft in general, so regardless of my personal feelings, I do hope that this localization is successful enough to keep bringing their other games over. Dangan Ronpa has shown that they very much so have what it takes to make internationally appealing games and a lot of their work is similarly very well written and it would be nice for people to not have to be a translator like me to get access to their best stuff. We'll see!
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