Danganronpa 2 Review

Title: Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair
Genre: Adventure
Publisher: NIS America
Developer: Spike Chunsoft
System: PS Vita
Release Date: September 2, 2014 (NA)

Direct sequel to Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc, which released earlier this year.

Danganronpa 2′s player character is Hajime Hinata, a boy entering the famous Hope’s Peak Academy. Hope’s Peak Academy is a highly prestigious high school that takes in 15 talented students a year. Not only do the students have to be personally scouted by the academy, they also have to be the very best at what they do–befitting the title of ‘Ultimate’. Graduating the academy is the equivalent of having a successful future set in stone. On the first day of school, Hajime and his classmates are greeted by a magical rabbit named Usami, who claims to be their teacher, and are brought to some tropical islands for a ‘field trip.’ The main stage of the game are the Jabberwock islands, and Hajime and his classmates must become friends and gather each other’s Hope Fragments in order to leave the island.

Just as Hajime decides to jump into the ocean with his new classmates, the skies turn gray and Monokuma arrives, claiming to be the Headmaster of the school. He changes the rules so that the students are not to become friends with each other, but instead have to kill each other to get the chance to leave the island! Once a murder occurs, a class trial will be held after a set amount of time. At the end of the class trial, everyone will vote who they think the killer is. If the majority gets the killer right, only the killer will be punished. Else, everyone but the killer will be punished and the killer gains the right to leave the island.

The appeal of the game is the delightful juxtaposition between its absurdly comical humor and the gravity of the situation the characters are placed in. The defining character of the series is Monokuma, our evil mascot who will make light of any serious situation and playfully crack completely inappropriate jokes with the enthusiasm of a kid’s show’s animal mascot. The ‘punishments’ are the same, as their over-the-top absurdity only serves to make the events more horrifying. The faster you let yourself be taken into Monokuma’s cheery pace, and the more you accept the game’s insanity, the more fun it will be.

Players of the first Danganronpa will, in no doubt, have fun with the parallels drawn to it in DR2 and seeing them be twisted. In fact, the first 30 minutes of the game should cause them to do a double take unless they go in with the beginning spoiled. DR2 should be quite satisfying for fans of the first game, and expands on the setting as well as answering some leftover questions. The murders are also more convoluted, and the difficulty continues from the first game’s final cases, so DR2′s beginning cases feel as hard as DR1′s final cases (given you are playing on the same difficulty for both). Character-wise, I still prefer the first game’s protagonist and main heroine, but DR2′s cast is more fleshed-out on average. Gundham Tanaka is the best character. Atmosphere-wise, the first game has a more suspenseful and oppressive feeling (DR2 takes place on a tropical island for god’s sake!), which makes it more effective for its premise, but DR2 is ultimately the more satisfying story.

Each chapter in the game is divided into 3 segments. You’ve got the Daily Life part, where you are free to explore the island and spend time with your classmates to see their character events. Once a dead body is discovered, it turns into Deadly Life, where you gather evidence to use for the class trial that happens later. The class trial is where Hajime and the remaining classmates do a discussion to figure out who the killer is.

The class trial is where the meat of the gameplay is held. During Non-Stop Debates, your classmates will advance discussion of the mystery at hand in real time, and weak points in their arguments will appear. You must ‘shoot’ your evidence in the form of a ‘truth bullet’ to shatter their argument. New to DR2 is the option of agreeing with a classmate’s statement and shooting out supporting evidence. You can also memorize someone else’s statement and transform it into a temporary truth bullet to fire, in cases where none of your bullets on-hand work. Sometimes, a single classmate will challenge you to a rebuttal, and you must slice though their lines one-by-one with the analog stick until they reveal a weak point that you can cut through with evidence.

Hangman’s Gambit is where you form keywords letter-by-letter. It’s harder than the first game’s equivalent, since different letters can collide and explode to deal damage, or join together if the same letter collides. You can shoot large letters with the X button to get rid of them, shoot small letters to hold them (and either shoot them off into a different position or make them join another one of the same letter), or shoot large letters with the Triangle button to form the next letter in the keyword. Going from Japanese to English, this is the part of the game that had a notable increase in difficulty because something expressed in 4 hiragana characters can take 10+ English letters to spell, and the longer the word, the easier it is to let the screen be overrun by colliding letters.

New to DR2 is Logic dive, in which you must play a skateboarding mini-game in order to reach a conclusion. The rhythm game at the end is now called Panic Talk Action and handles it in a way that gives you much more room for error (missing a beat doesn’t decrease life). Even the part where you put together how the murder occurred into a comic is done differently enough to be fresh for returning players.

Overall, the gameplay is an improvement due to a better variety of modes in class trials, and generally more stuff to do outside of those. Hajime has a level that increases as he does more stuff (e.g. talking, examining, walking). He can also raise a digital pet that grows as he walks, and there are more ‘free time’ segments to befriend classmates. Each classmate also has an equal number of character events, unlike the first game where the ones who died earlier generally had less events. There’s no way to see all events in one playthrough, but unlocked after beating the game is Island Mode, an alternate mode where you are free to advance character events. Island Mode is also quite fun for your first two playthroughs, where you play a mini simulation game where you send characters to gather materials and build things.

Some people have a beef with NISA’s translations injecting jokes and references into their scripts and making the characters appear more extreme and meme-like than their original Japanese counterparts, but I feel like their style works quite well for Danganronpa 2 and keeps it in the same spirit as the original. There’s also bonuses for English fans as they reference other mystery adventure games that most of the English intended audience are familiar with (like the Ace Attorney and Zero Escape series). The English dub is also quite good, with the more over-the-top voices being the best. It took a while to get used to the more “normal” voices in English, and I still largely prefer Nagito’s Japanese voice, but the rest are good. Another thing of note is that the English script completely ditches Japanese formalities and makes everyone go by first names from the get-go like American high school students. That took time to get used to as well, since everyone exclusively went by last names in the Japanese script.

DR2 boasts the same kickass soundtrack style as its predecessor, as well as the same distinctive art style. Oh, and it’s a direct sequel, so the first game should definitely be played beforehand. If you haven’t played the first game go play it.

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