Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair

Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair is a game that is really difficult to score.

While the sequel to Trigger Happy Havoc was released several years after the original in Japan, the U.S. ended up receiving both games in 2014. The original game possessed one of the most inventive and entertaining narratives in recent memory, yet suffered from dull, uninteresting gameplay that didn’t quite mesh with the story. Instead of learning its lessons from the first game, Danganronpa 2 repeats the same mistakes of the first effort and then some.

The game starts in a similar fashion to the first: you play the role of Hajime Hinata, a new student at the prestigious Hope’s Peak Academy. You and your fellow new classmates are quickly whisked away to a tropical island by your robot rabbit teacher for a field trip. If you’re already going “huh,” strap in, because this game’s plot only gets wackier. While your school life starts with plenty of sand and sun, everyone’s favorite psychotic robot bear Monokuma soon shows up and the killing game begins anew. Once again, you and your classmates have two options: live out the rest of your lives on the mysterious Jabberwock Island or successfully get away with killing one of your classmates.

While the game to use the player’s preconceptions about different anime archetypes against them, the writers appear to have been self-aware enough to know they couldn’t tell the same story twice. Once again, your classmates are comprised of a number of anime archetypes. There is the Ultimate Gamer, the Ultimate Yakuza, and the Ultimate Photographer among others.

The cast is certainly memorable, though I found myself not quite drawn to them as much as the first game’s cast. Part of this is a testament to just how great that cast was. It would require me to spoil both games to further detail my issues, but with the first game, each character seemed to fit well into the overall puzzle comprising the game’s plot and themes. With Danganronpa 2, certain characters just fell totally flat. Worse, several of the female cast members suffer a bit from certain somewhat gross anime stereotypes. There is nothing here that is particularly offensive, but the characters in question were a little too defined by these more base aspects.

While I found Danganronpa’s narrative to be consistently great throughout, Danganronpa 2 is a more uneven experience. It is almost a tale of three games. The first third is solid and sets the table for the rest of the story. Chapter 2 in particular is quite strong. It is the middle third where the game seems stuck in mud. The steady drip of just enough information to keep the player interested in the overall mystery isn’t quite there, while the chapters themselves are fairly lengthy. Some of the characters involved in these parts of the game just aren’t that interesting. Instead, there is a sense of isolation with the mysteries of these chapters that isn’t brought back into the larger events of the game. These chapters aren’t necessarily filler, but there is a sense the writers didn’t know how to get from point A to point C.

Fortunately, players who make it through the slog of the middle chapters are rewarded with a fantastic final third of the game. Anime and manga fans familiar with the methods by which things can get crazy and epic in the melodramatic, over-the-top ways anime and manga can do will savor every last moment of the games concluding chapters. While the narrative ultimately lacks the emotional punch of the first game, it is certainly an entertaining romp.

Not much has changed in terms of graphics and music. Danganronpa 2 features the same beautiful and stylistic visuals of the first game. If anything, there is more variety to the visual presentation thanks to some rather clever sequences that should remain unspoiled. The soundtrack might have even surpassed the high standards of the first game’s fantastic music. I have had Usami’s various related themes stuck in my head ever since playing the game.

The game is still at its core a graphic novel broken into three phases: basic exploration and dialogue, free time, where you engage in Persona-esque social link conversations, and murder investigations and trials. Outside of the class trials, not much varies from the first game. The free time sections still suffer from the same problem as the first game where too much information about the cast is held back for the main story to make them all that interesting. Two things are a bit better though. The first is you can now choose which gifts you want to buy rather than having to us a random item dispenser. The more substantial change is that, except for the final skill unlocked when maxing out a relationship, you get to pick which skills to purchase. This is a welcome change over the first game where you might never find the more useful skills due to pursuing the wrong relationships. There is also a rather rudimentary Tamagotchi game you can engage in for additional coins, gifts, and skills, but it requires the player walk to destinations rather than use the fast travel system, so it has fairly minimal value. Finally, there is a mini-game outside the core game I don’t want to spoil, but I did not play it for long as it wasn’t very fun.

So that leaves the class trials, which represent the core of Danganronpa 2’s gameplay. I was not a big fan of these sections in Danganronpa, as none of the actual gameplay mechanics enhanced the experience. With that said, they were fairly unobtrusive and inoffensive. Danganronpa 2 on the other hand features annoying gameplay that at just about every turn made me want to stop playing the game. During nonstop debates, sequences that will bring to mind courtroom arguments from Phoenix Wright, there are pink lines of text hovering over the text you’re meant to shoot at in order to present your counter argument. In the first game, these took a single shot to get rid of. In this game, it now takes multiple shots unless you seek out skill upgrades. The skill necessary to ultimately make this inconsequential is located at the end of a particular character’s path, so there’s a good chance you won’t end up finding it in your first playthrough. It serves no real interesting purpose and just makes these sequences take longer than they should.

The other gameplay sections fare even worse. A hangman mini-game makes a return, but this one requires you to match letters scrolling across the screen to form words. The controls for this section can’t keep up with the frantic pace the game demands. The new “Logic Drive” mini-game reminds me of a bad Genesis-era mini-game or a bad phone game. Danganronpa’s rudimentary rhythm game sections return, but are not really any better than they were the first time around. The worst new mini-game though is the Rebuttal Showdown. Here, you play a really lame version of Fruit Ninja by using the touchpad to cut apart another character’s statements. But each line of text can require half a dozen cuts. Meanwhile, you’re not supposed to cut some statements, while you’re supposed to use truth bullets to counter others.. But then the pace is so frantic that it’s difficult to stop and select the correct bullet. If you screw up during any of this, you might have to repeat the previous section.

At best, you’ll likely find these gameplay sections to be similar obstacles to the first game that must be overcome to continue the narrative. But here lies the critical issue with Danganronpa 2: sequels should learn from the mistakes of their predecessors and correct them. Outside of some minor quibbles, this game corrects little from the first game. Instead it just doubles down on all of the mistakes previously made. And that in lies the scoring issue I mentioned earlier. Ultimately, I decided to award it the same score as it’s not per se bad. I guess this in the end serves as a good example of how two games can have a similar score, but can carry different levels of recommendation.

Danganronpa 2 is by no means a bad game, but it is a sequel that in most every measurable way feels worse. It doubles down on bad, out of place mini-games. There are portions of the plot that are just as good as the original, but its middle chapters feel slow and directionless. Even the parts that work suffer from being less fresh than the original game. Here’s hoping that the upcoming Danganronpa 3 does a better job addressing what didn’t work about the original two games.