The Shrine

Available on Steam, this is a role model for a dating-sim/visual novel game. Dangonronpa is a murder mystery investigation game with some amount of dating sim on the side where people gets killed and you've found out who did it based on your clues and testimonies. I don't mean the game is a role model in the sense that the game is simply far superior to anything else (though it's pretty darn good), but the way the game actually uses the medium. First of all, most dating sim games don't even have a gameplay outside of selecting some presents for the girls and selecting some choices that either make no sense or is so trivial that anybody can figure it out. If there is a gameplay it's usually nothing remotely related to the story in any way, because surely the Japanese Tolkien who wrote this stuff thought that if you capitalize phrases like "POWER OF LOVE" or whatever cliché enough times that must be true. Imagine if Zelda:ALTTP you're just told that you must use the silver arrow on Ganon but you don't actually fight him because everything happens in a cutscene, it'd be pretty unconvincing why you need silver arrow in the first place. Of course in reality it's readily obvious that you cannot hurt Ganon without the silver arrow and Danganronpa pulls that off quite well in the final battle where it's very apparent that logic goes out of the window immediately and you've to rely on the game's underlying theme instead.

Speaking of logic, Danganronpa is at least better than the Japanese manga 'It was Joe who mind controlled Bob who was Bub's long lost identical twin that killed Joe with the force choke in dimension X' logic that generally passes for murder mystery in Japanese manga. The funny thing is that some of the characters clearly have superpowers so really a lot of the murder could have been "Bob force choked Bub who was in the nearby room". It's actually pretty satisfying that you can figure out most of the game by just paying attention and if you missed something or a particular clue doesn't make much sense you can always just save and load and shoot at every possible combination of bullets until something works. I also like how the game handles difficulty as the battles are fairly nontrivial especially the first time you do it though you can just continue immediately at where you failed with full health (you'll get a worse score for doing that the score doesn't seem to do much besides achievement + number of currency you get for the extras), and of course once you figured out the whole thing you can also just start from the beginning and do one of those 'I swear I got everything right on the first time and knew where every trick shot is' deal. The game's stock 'game over' screen is pretty annoying though, as in if you do choose to game over it's always you (the main character) who gets executed. It doesn't matter if Bob says, "Hey everyone I'm the murderer execute me now!!!", if you failed to prove that Bob was lying, instead of doing the correct thing of executing Bob, the jury executes YOU! There should have been the option of accidentally executing everyone in the game, which is not possible because only the murderers (if you're correct) plus the main character (if you're wrong) can be executed even if you're in a debate where they're clearly trying to execute the wrong guy. You don't even have the option of going along with it because you hated that guy/girl because it's still going to be you who is executed at the end!

But that also brings up a serious problem I have with the game in that since superpower is so prevalent and the power levels are fairly equal, that makes the final encounter very implausible in the sense that if everyone has super powers and are all roughly equally powerful, then the clear thing to do as soon as the last boss show up would be a physical assault and that'd immediately beat the game. After all the notion is that every student besides the main character is Ultimate Something (the main character seems to be more like the Ultimate Guy Who Happen to Have A Gun) so the whole notion that a bunch of guys who are Ultimate Whatevers need to fight the Ultimate Final Boss in a debate because that's the only way to do it even though the Ultimate Final Boss would likely have a hard time beating at least 1/3 of the cast in virtually any field 1on1.

I was reading that in Japan there seems to be this subgenre of literature that's probably best described as 'gratuitously provocative', best summed up by the Fate anime series where they apparently altered the schedule so that a child getting her heart ripped out airs on children's day and a mother dies horribly on mother's day. That is, these are totally valid events that would've also missed the said holidays on a perfectly normal schedule, but I guess the author gets a power trip so he ordered the Anime produced in an altered sequence that'd happen to coincide with these dates and I guess that's supposed to be awesome for not being politically correct. I mean, I never thought the whole 'World of Warcraft children characters are immortal' is necessarily a good thing, but this is still pretty messed up. Until the end it's pretty much just a bunch of guys murdering each other for the usual motives, and then suddenly you got this all powerful Ultimate Final Boss who committed unbelievable atrocities and killed everyone's cats too. It doesn't take away the brilliance of the initial game but it's pretty disturbing and disappointing at the same time. You don't need someone who killed everyone's cats and defiled their ancestor's graves just because we need a final boss.

I find the dating sim aspect to be a bit lacking, mostly because whoever you try to romance has a very high probability of dying and then you've wasted all the time building up the relationship. I understand that all the murders are predetermined so if someone is supposed to die they can't survive by the time the final chapter is around but they could at least change the order of the deaths if you've romanced someone. Since it's really cumbersome to buy presents and you're generally basically just guessing at random who would like what, it's almost not worth the effort unless you already know who is supposed to survive or who has the best abilities unlocks via romance. There's pretty much some kind of de-facto romance going on anyway, in the sense that since you can't romance with a dead girl and the girls who aren't supposed to die, you'd generally know everything you could possibly want to know about them by the time you get to the end. I neglected one of the girls until the end and you go through your basic dialogue and it's literally like 'everything you're telling me about you is something I already knew via the main story' because the game probably assumes you'd try to romance them early on and the later chapters assumes you'd already know this stuff and you can easily work backwards to figure out what you're supposed to have learned had you romance the said girls. On the flipside there are characters who are interesting that you'd like to find out more but you're not going to find out very much more about the guys who died on chapter 1 because they're supposed to be the first person to die. It's a shame because all the characters have a lot of personality to them so if you like character-who-died-on-chapter-1, well he/she can't possibly offer more opinion on chapter 2 because he/she is dead. In Chrono Trigger whoever you have in your party and whoever is in the lead position has different things that reflect how they're involved in the game when you reach Lavos, and it's fun just to go thorugh all the possible combination and it's almost like you can create an entire different set of motives for taking on Lavos just for rearranging your party. Well this is the other way around because your party is always the same exact guys when you get to the end, so you're wondering what the dead guys would've done against the final boss except of course you can't find out because they're dead!

With that all said, I still enjoyed this game a lot. It's just good enough that makes the weakness stand out as a blemish. I mean, most dating sims is just something you put a heavy object on the shift key so you wouldn't even know what the plot was when you get to the end, so it's pretty hard to be disappointed on the last boss or why girl C isn't around to offer what she thought of the final encounter. But since this game is good enough to make me care about the characters, I do want to know what the rest of the students would've done at the end. Well, there's an alternative mode where no one dies and it seems like a pretty straight up dating sim, but I want to know what some of the characters would do if they survived while the other died, and knowing that you can't possibly know this is a big disappointment.

I'm really enjoying this game too. I'm just a little past the point in the story where it flat out tells you you're half-way in. The music and animation is really just top tier for a handheld port. It's really just impressive stuff.

It isn't supposed to be a romance type game despite having an affection/pick who to visit/give gifts system. While the system is somewhat limited in that it's often cut short by character death, I think it just lends more of a weight to who you choose to spend time with and also more of a blow when that person ends up being a murderer/killing someone else.

It just isn't a dating sim. It's a visual novel whose main purpose is the mystery as opposed to a dating sim whose main purpose is commonly to bone a high school girl. I probably shouldn't speak to anything else until I'm done with the story though. If it were another Pick Your Favorite Girl Simulator they would have in fact had to make multiple endings for each girl and I just don't think that's what they were going for. Also far fewer male characters unless they were the ones that had a 100% chance of getting killed in the common route.

Great games played through 1 & 2 on PS Vita

Dating sim pretty much refers to the 'build relationship point with other characters' genre. I mean Rival Schools on the PSX had a dating sim version of it and it was actually kind of interesting that you get to know about the guys who normally have like 3 lines of dialogue in the entire game otherwise. The characters in the game are actually already mostly paired anyway, e.g. Byakuya and Toko, Sakura and Hina, and so on. Building relationship would be mostly to gain insight on the character you care about and the guys around them as opposed to hoping the main character turns into the world's most interesting man around girls.

To use an example from the game, unless you never paid attention to what Hina says you should know she loves donuts. I think that's also the first thing you find out if you try to romance her. But if you just didn't romance her early on, you end up in this bizarre situation where if you romance her later and she tells you about she loves donuts despite the fact that you should already know this. Now Hina has a lot of dialogue in the game itself so you're going to find out more about her whether you like her or not, but that can't be said for the random fodders that died in chapter 1 and 2, even if they're more interesting than Hina. You can't really romance any of them because you might not even have the time and someone who is supposed to die in chapter 1 obviously isn't going to say anything that'd affect anything later even if you did. In fact it's pretty much the game just automatically forces you to romance with the guys who are going to survive until the end whether you cared about them or not. Heck, like I said, you don't even have the option of trying to frame someone who you don't like but isn't supposed to die and see them die. I don't mean like the game goes on while one of the unkillable guys who didn't commit murder die, I mean that you can't even get a game over just to frame someone you don't like get executed. It's a very heavy handed 'these guys who can't die are your friends and you don't get a choice'. There's a lot of point in the game I get the "I'll totally trade X for Y" feeling in terms of who to kill and while it would be impossible to have a totally freeform game where you just get to pick who's supposed to survive, I think it's pretty lazy that they can't even move around the order of some events to delay the inevitable. Or maybe that'd be a lot more work because there are a lot of interesting guys that died really early on and you can't just have a generic stock response for those guys in both regular dialogues and the class trials.

Oh yeah, this is a game I feel bad for all the bad guys. Not as in I care about their motives or that they were manipulated or whatever. It's a lot like Suikoden 3 when you played from Luc's perspective and you got the idea what the heck are these 3 small time villains on to think they had a chance against the 108 Stars of Destiny when they can't even get the first part of their world destroying plan in action. All the guys in Hope's Academy are pretty much like the most powerful high schoolers in the world and yet the peak of their power is surprisingly equal. That is, there isn't a guy who is so much better at any particular deathmatching trait that would emerge as a prohibitive favorite, and multiple guys are good at virtually everything (strength, tech, intelligence, etc) and even guys who look like they're fodder have a surprisingly good memory. So when you're even trying to kill someone, there's a very good chance that person can fight back and just kill you. But even if you're successful, then you've to survive a trial against a very well oiled machine. Even ignoring plot armor, it takes a lot to fool even one of the smarter guys on the trial and everyone else can quickly point out and all the students are humble enough to admit they're wrong. I know the game claims like the environment creates distrust and fear and then people just start stabbing each other in the back, but the environment of the class trial actually pretty much ensures cooperation from virtually any individual that isn't the murderer since backstabbing someone during the middle of a trial just gets yourself killed too. There is only one trial I think that had a legitmate chance of going into a mistrial even if plot armor was not involved because all the students just work way too well together. Everything else I don't think the guy committed the crime ever had a chance. In the comic presentation there's usually the scene of the faceless murderer with the evil laugh and attack someone, and everytime I see that I want to tell that guy don't do it! You're just going to get caught and die horribly!

For the system to be remotely fair I think you, as Makoto, should be able to frame someone else as the murderer without triggering a game over. It'd be like a 'dark side' choice kind of thing where instead of sending the doomed murderer to his/her gruesome death you misled everyone else into making the wrong judgment.

I would try more dating sims if so many didn't so fully devolve into soft (or hard, or brutal) porn titles before the game is through.

Is there a real game here?

I didn't even know these games had a dating sim element to them. I thought giving people presents and learning a bit of their backstory just gave me more abilities to use in court. lol

So you have like "free time" during the main story to hang out with people on occasion, apparently after you beat the game(Or during in a separate mode) you can just only do that hanging out part if that's your thing. The meat and potatoes of the game is the murders and the mystery of figuring out why the fuck you're in a killing game.

Yes this is a real game. It's a visual novel first and foremost - I understand where Don is coming from with the dating sim thing but dating sims are a subset of visual novels and while there are elements that are shared, I wouldn't call this a dating sim. The affection system is just that, like a +1 counter having more to do with friendship then romance. There is no romance to speak of in this game. Or sex. In the case of some of the visual novels that are getting translated recently, that commonly just means the sex has been censored/removed, but this was never that type of game so that never happened. The only censoring that I know of is the blood is pink instead of red, but I think that was to conform with Japanese laws and honestly... I think it REALLY suits the game.

I would say that 95% or more of this game has to do with the mystery, with the remaining five percent just being you getting to know the other students, which arguably has importance to the mystery - or at least showing you different angles to view their reactions to the mystery with.

I just finished the game and it's really good. I'm going to be buying the sequel this week and start going through that on my PSTV.

While I completely understand why Don wanted more from this game (it's just that good), it has a completely linear story with the only branching off points basically meaning failure. It could have been more and that could have potentially made it better, but yeah they stuck to making it linear. I don't particularly mind linear games with no branching off points if the ONE story they want told is REALLY good - and this was that.

Unless you're one of those ultra hardcore guys that considers only stuff like Harvest Moon as dating sim where you have virtually earn everything you need to try to pickup girls with, selecting the correct option for the +1 relationship with girl A is pretty much the definition of a dating sim. Honestly just because people are dying left and right doesn't make this game very different in terms of relationship building compared to the games where you just have a small window of meeting girl A before she stops showing up out of the available branching choices.

The problem with killing off characters quickly is that most of the characters aren't guys who you're supposed to throw away. More importantly a lot of them are meant to be someone you care about except the game never gets around the said character before they die regardless if you tried to build a relationship or not. The school mode you get for beating the game is almost like 'well if soandso didn't die this is what he/she would act in general situations', and in fact there's a lot of the game that seems to assume you've already approached every character in the school mode before you play the actual game even though it's only unlocked after beating the game. Usually when people support a visual novel you hear something like 'well the sex is totally central to the plot' (yeah right). But this game is more like the other way around. There's one murder where you're putting the panel together the hint says 'was seduction involved?', and that's actually a very good question because it'd probably take something like 1/3 of an average dating sim to explain why the two characters were involved without the obvious explanation. I mean yes you can see the game sort of fills that detail later with flashbacks and stuff but you can't just skimp out that much on detail. Now if A and B could've survived you'd probably be able to see that they're a lot closer than it appears but since they're both dead you can't do that!

So I looked at the outside materials for Danganronpa, and I'm pretty convinced 'The Tragedy' was when all the world's governments simultaneously elected a guy like Donald Trump as head of state.

The game isn't about relationship building though. Was Dark Knight Rises a romantic comedy just because it had romance and humor in it?

Dating sims are a subgenre of visual novels - just because it borrows some elements does not mean it is that thing. That would be like considering Dragon Age games dating sims because you can romance the characters through + affection dialogue and gifts. It's a single element that does not define the game. The motive to continue through these games for the overwhelming majority of people is not the opportunity to simulate dating. It's like adding a cup of milk and a squirt of chocolate syrup to a gallon of water and calling it chocolate milk.

I haven't played Harvest Moon but from what I've seen the relationship with at least one girl is fairly central to the plot. It's just a whole different type of game/story/plot.

The school mode is so you can see their backstory without having to play the game 5+ times since so many people die off so quickly. The writers put all this stuff in there and they needed a way for people to see it that wouldn't drive the players to murder. At the end of the day, even when you do max your relationship with a guy or girl all you get is some blushing, no one is all "We're dating now!" or "It's time for us to bone." It isn't even loosely implied.

Also, yeah, the candidates that have a chance of winning basically all fill me with quite a bit of despair.

Edit: I've been playing Danganronpa 2 and in a somewhat humorous coincidence for this conversation when you max someone's report card you get their "undergarments." Gender doesn't matter. Otherwise still no implication of sex or relationships.

'Dating sim' is just the generic term used for the 'select correct option for +1 relationship' type games, even if you're not seriously dating. Games try to distance themselves away from 'dating sim' because it sounds more sophisticated.

Games like Harvest Moon or even Animal Crossing would fall closer to the 'virtual life simulator' type which I think was what Tokimeki Memorial is like which is sort of the prototypical dating sim. Since it's pretty tedious to virtually pull weeds or whatever you need to get money to buy stuff there just aren't that many games in the genre.

I'm really liking Danganronpa 2. People must have been telling them the minigames were too easy because they basically took them and heaped even more shit on top of them. Hangman's Gambit now doesn't give you any hints to the word (in exchange what you're filling in the blanks for is more obvious) and requires more of a twitch based minigame. White noise requires two shots with the silencer instead of one. Truth bullets can be used to agree with statements instead of refute them. The rhythm game is trickier too but I can't really put that into words. There's also a sword minigame where you use a sword to cut away statements until they say a statement that your "truth sword" refutes.

Oh and semi-randomly there's a "Logic dive" minigame where you're literally a guy on a surfboard dodging obstacles so that you can eventually reach a section where you branch off to answer the question getting brought up in the trial.

Crazy shit.

I'm actually not a big fan of the dating sim being hard. I know I said I want them to have real gameplay elements, but on the other hand whether you're trying to get the next CG unlocked or actually trying to enjoy the story, you really don't need to be doing some youtube worthy feats to get there. I thought Danganronpa's gameplay is just about right. It's actually pretty hard if you didn't use the focus gauge or silencers and I don't even plan on trying to do the 'no damage taken' achievement for the rhythm games because it's just a pain. Of course since it's only achievement purposes you could just easily use your focus gauge if all you want is see the story but if you want to you can practice trying to aim these impossible shots for the chapter 5 that has like the weak point spinning 5 times a second surrounded by two white noises and stuff. I remember back in college my roommate was playing a dating sim where you're a tutor for girls trying to enroll in Tokyo University, so you got to help whoever you're trying to get to gain relationship and they're actually equivalent of high end SAT questions and you don't get to save/load and it has a new bank of questions so you can't just multiple-guess your way, and at the end he's like 'forget this I'm not doing a SAT for some naked picture of girls' and I think some games go too far in that direction.

Based on what I read on the outside material I think Dangonronpa got too carried away with turning the game into good versus evil, which in itself is incredibly dumb because the both the world is overwhelmingly in favor of the good guys (only one trial seems remotely possible to fail) and that most of the trials are rigged to ensure someone is going to kill someone no matter what given all the black technology available in the game (I think that's the Chinese turn for 'black magic' except it's tech, which is quite abundant in the series).

I think a lot of these visual novel writers have an inferiority complex. It's like they think they're the Japanese Tolkien so they always need to incorporate random stupidly epic scenes in the game. I enjoyed Dangonronpa just for the guys randomly murdering each other and the relationships between the characters that aren't Makoto. He's not a loner but I really don't get the feeling he was never a close friend with anyone except Sayaka and that's pretty much because Sayaka is the obligatory dating-sim freebie girl you get for doing absolutely nothing. I really don't need to hear what Kyoko has to say about the nature of humanity, because I'm pretty sure the author doesn't know what he's talking about and even if he did, Kyoko is the last girl I want to listen to in the story.

Haha Kyoko was the best girl :D

The game was about the mystery and The more we talk about this game the more I feel like what you think the game was missing was the opportunity to actually romance the girls :D

Kyoko is a good person in terms of how she's written or drawn, but I have absolutely no attachment to her because she's conveniently never wrong. Also, Kyoko seems to be utterly incapable of understanding that nobody besides Makoto in the entire school actually trusted her so it was literally impossible that she could've led the class jury that's based on majority rule when nobody besides Makoto trust her.

After looking at the Steam forums I think I wanted this to be more of a dating sim because then maybe the game wouldn't have went off the deep end in chapter 6. That is, if you have to spend all your time trying to romance girls maybe the plot would never get to the nonsense that is the end. I have an especially low tolerance of bad plot that started out good (Fate Stay Night is similar too though it's more like a generically bad/unbelievably awesome/hurts your brain cycle). As long as it's just random students murdering each other behind their back, the story was great. I think the interpersonal relationships are way under developed but I can live with that. It's even relatively good at not passing morality on the murderers since the whole game is rigged to ensure someone's going to kill someone else even if they're Mother Theresa (though it really annoys me in discussion where people blast characters who drew the short end of the stick and had to be the murderer for being bad people). It feels like at the end of chapter 4 the game is like 'whoa we have no idea how to make another interesting murder so let's just throw in some black technology and change the entire plot!'

I think the game would've been way better if it's just limited to first 4 chapters in somewhat configurable paths. There's a theme to each of the murders in each chapter so you can just group up people like 'X, Y, and Z could die in chapter 1' and who dies would be determined by your relationship (otherwise it'd be totally random and kind of dumb) or random if you have no relationship with any of those guys. I don't mind if it's random whether someone lives because you befriended them, or the other way around where someone died because you befriended them.

Steam forums for visual novels are really horrible. Or at least they used to be. I don't even bother any more. They were filled with arguments about how they aren't even games and how they have no gameplay. I once saw a popular thread about how visual novels shouldn't even be on Steam. So, yeah, no more Steam forums for visual novels for me.

I don't mean I was expecting people to actually have intelligent comments there but like seeing the character debates there made me realize what I really don't like about the game. That is, I don't want to debate is a person is good or bad if they drew the short end of the stick and had 3 lines before they're axed. All you can say is that guy got the short end of the stick. I was reading in the beta version Kyoko was supposed to be the first person getting axed, and I'm guessing they'd have just involved some copy & paste compared to what actually happened the game had it happened. The game itself attempts to try to get into this big philosophical stuff about why certain guys survived and what it all means. It's like no the guys who survived beat the odds because they probably have friends on the development team!

Given how arbitrary who was supposed to beat the odds, that's why I said it'd be better if it was a full time dating sim all along because then at least you can handpick whoever is going to beat the odds by definition. Of course, they could've avoided the problem if they didn't try to make this game bigger than what it originally started as. If it was really just a murder mystery then there wouldn't be anything more beyond good luck when a Too-Dumb-To-Live beat the odds and walked out alive. It's the game's attempt to try to justify there was actually a reason to why certain guys made it and certain guys did not that really bothered me.

Heh yeah just thought I'd comment on why I've been avoiding the Danganronpa forums like a plague.

I'm up to chapter four in Danganronpa 2 and while I think the original had a better grasp on tension/suspense, I think the second game learned from some of the stumbles. They kill the people off more slowly and the people who get murdered/executed have genuinely served their purpose in the story. The ultimate abilities are more interesting and applicable in general. For example there's still the equivalent of the Ultimate Idol (it's called something else) but instead of being semi-useless they've given her perfect hearing. The affection system is also more useful and they've added a leveling system and Tomagachi minigame. The last two things kind of sound like they'd be shitty but in practice I think they work out.

The music is the only thing that I would say is worse and they seem to agree in a way - some of the sequences use the same music lol

Supposedly the sequel closes a lot of the holes left in the plot by the first game, such as but I haven't gotten far enough in the game for answers.. just more questions. I liked Makoto more than the new protagonist for the most part. The new protagonist seems a little more on the ball with not being quite so much of a pushover, but I think the character design and voice acting for Makoto are better. They've also switched things up and made the protagonist the mystery ultimate which is one of the more interesting things that goes on in the game. He definitely isn't the

All the Ultimates are supposed to be ridiculous talented with the notable exception of Makoto. I mean that's how the game even attempts to justify why there's some cosmic significance between a bunch of high school students killing each other. Otherwise, I'd imagine if Danganronpa is real, Obama would just have a canned speech when the news gets out and NRA will say something about there needs to be more guns to stop tragedy like this from happening and then people would forget about it in a week.

Danganronpa 1 spoilers: Also I just finished Danganronpa 2 and while I wasn't thrilled with the game 100% of the time on a chapter-by-chapter basis I can honestly say that the game ended up giving me exactly what I wanted. It did in fact explain the tragedy in better detail and also went in for some of the unanswered questions. They also did a much better job of setting up reasons why certain students ended up surviving over others.

The cases were also constantly a lot less obvious. Excusing myself from chapter two and three of the original game, I knew who the culprits were in the body discovery animations of both chapter 1 and 4 and seeing where they were leading me in 5 and 6 was also relatively simple. For the sequel, other than chapter one I was relatively in the dark for all of the class trials other than chapter three which they basically gave away during the investigation.

I'm not extremely pleased with the added difficulty to the class trial minigames but at least they were interesting to play which is more than can be said about the original. Still, I wish they were more like Phoenix Wright and less... twitch reaction based.

I was interested to read that Danganronpa 3 will be an anime and not a game and is planned to finish the story for the original Danganronpa crew. Supposedly it won't include class trials and will cover ground that would not work in a video game.. but that last thing is kind of something you HAVE to say if you find yourself making an anime to finish the story for a video game franchise.

Found this online https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4kxXRT7 ... U8JeUxLdJw

Danganronpa meets WWE (with spoilers), and it honestly makes slightly more sense than what actually happen in the story.

Sequel is up for sale on Steam, now. I'm thinking about picking it up again and replaying through both games. The thought of playing through Danganronpa 2 on a controller again is horrifying enough to me that spending twenty something dollars for a PC copy isn't unacceptable. The minigames are just so much more tolerable with a keyboard/mouse.

There's literally no one on Danganronpa 2 from a character design point of view that'd justify paying full price for this game. I know the design is always meant to be somewhat eccentric but they literally have nobody that looks like a normal character in there and I don't pay full price for game/manga that goes that far off from the mainstream. It's one thing to judge a book by its cover but you shouldn't be burning the cover either. I already read the story stuff and the whole black hat technology stuff only gets dumber in the second game and nobody has a face that'd make me vaguely interested in what happens to them.

Disagree, without going into spoilers, Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair is worth playing through for Nagito Komaeda alone.

Yeah there's a lot of love for Nagito and he's definitely an interesting character. It's definitely a fun game, but if you've spoiled the story for yourself already and aren't really interested then that's that I suppose lol.

Err...wtf at Shrin saying the "cases are less obvious"... I remember lamenting the reality that games need to be simple enough for young teens while playing. With the exception of the robot scenario (which was just too stupid to predict), everything was self evident within 30 seconds of each chapter.

Anyway, while the content was kinda kooky and fun, the gameplay kinda sucks. Not the game for me but happy I gave it a try.

The whole murder mystery genre from Japan seems to be just offensive versions Encyclopedia Brown. At least Encyclopedia Brown doesn't pretend it's something anybody could've figured out in 30 seconds. The times where it's not obvious involves stuff so crazy that whatever killing method is likely to blow up in the killer's face.

For Eric's point, I don't follow characters with a face like that no matter how interesting they are. There are maybe 2 guys in the list of 16 characters of Danganronpa 2 that doesn't look like they're on some kind of crack and that's too many crazies. The whole art style reminds me of Amano's work and I never follow anything with him as the major illustrator. If Final Fantasy 6 characters actually looked like their illustration as opposed to a low resolution sprite I'd have avoided the game. I'm not saying the artstyle is somehow inherently bad, but it's just something I don't deal with.

I don't actually know much about Danganronpa 2 other than that the writer obviously has a fetish for the Ultimate Despair and Monokuma being part of the story. I get that Monokuma is supposed to be the mascot and whoever came up with the concept thought that they had the second coming of Doraemon, and I know that most people never saw Doraemon even though it's probably top 5 in manga/Anime in terms of impact on the genre, but I did grew up with Doraemon and you don't just trample on a legendary series without a good reason. I'm not saying you can't make a spiky haired guy named Moku that's a punching bag but if you do there better be a good reason beyond leveraging DBZ's popularity. I think in the general the whole "The Tragedy" thing was dumb beyond belief and makes a terrible for the premise. It'd have made a lot more sense if some powerful/rich guy just locked a bunch of kids up and watch them kill each other for the lolz because with the crazy technology in the world it's not a stretch to say someone could pull it off, but for some reason the author never gives up on this whole 'kids murdering each other is supposed to have a profound effect in a world that's already gone to hell'. I can just imagine you're in a Fallout world where there are raving packs of crazies wearing Monokuma masks eating people's brains and people are supposed to care that Despair TV features some irrelevant kids dying.

kali o. wrote:Err...wtf at Shrin saying the "cases are less obvious"... I remember lamenting the reality that games need to be simple enough for young teens while playing. With the exception of the robot scenario (which was just too stupid to predict), everything was self evident within 30 seconds of each chapter.

Anyway, while the content was kinda kooky and fun, the gameplay kinda sucks. Not the game for me but happy I gave it a try.

Less obvious than Danganronpa 1 was the key part of that. Obviously this shit would be subjective.

I'm going to guess that "30 seconds of each chapter" thing is an over-exaggeration, but I'm pretty sure I also said that chapters 1 and 3 in Danganronpa 2 were really easy leaving only a couple actual cases that I was complimenting and even then only through the filter of how much easier the first game was. I don't really care how stupid a case ends up being. It's supposed to be a fun ride not a realistic "Whodunnit?"

The original game had at least two cases where you could pinpoint the murderer during the body discovery video which was kind of a let down. I found that even with the few obvious cases Danganronpa 2 was an improvement over that. Of course it's super easy once the game starts leaving bread crumbs.

I suppose that's the difference -- I really wanted a "whodunnit" because without that, the whole game centers around some twitch mechanics that aren't especially fun. Would have been nice if the trial spit out a bunch of different options that you didn't were right or wrong until the verdict/decision.

The Japanese 'whodunnit' genre would be a lot more interesting if the author isn't so bent on proving they're smarter than the reader by trying to mislead you. If you look at something like Sherlock Holmes the clues and the testimony isn't meant to purposely make a 'gotcha' moment for the reader. Take "And Then There Were None" I always got the feeling that the reader can't solve it because you don't actually know who any of those guys are so you don't know for sure the testimony/background story/etc they told is actually real and I don't think the author ever intended to one up the reader by the fact that the reader almost certainly do not know what each character's real background is compared to the author who most definitely knows for having invented the said characters.

By the way for Danganronpa chapter 1, that's not as trivial as it looks simply because if not for the fact the killer failed English class you'd have to suspect that the dying message was written by the killer to frame someone else since it's way too obvious. The arguments about how the killer did only things someone who didn't already live in the room is downright stupid. We know on chapter 1 the killer is not on a time constrain, so the killer could've did all the extraneous stuff just to throw people off. I saw an explanation in the TVTropes that highlights the whole nature of this genre where it devolves into wordplay and gotcha moments even though that's not what crime investigation is about. The example TVTropes gives would be say someone died and they interviewed you, and you said, "I don't even own a gun" and then you were suspected for being a murderer because the guy interviewed you didn't tell you the victim was shot. Never mind that anybody living in United States who genuinely don't own a gun would probably say that because anyone in the United States knows that's the most likely weapon a crime would be committed with in the United States. I mean yeah this genre is easy to figure out if you can lower your intelligence to the level of the author but I actually have a pretty hard time doing that so I instead try to solve it by the face, like chapter 3 I just decided it was overdue for someone with a certain type of face to be the killer before anything even happened and got that right, though was less successful on the other chapters. Speaking of chapter 3, obviously nobody has ever heard of the Fifth. I guess technically they're in Japan, but it's not like the class trial has a legal authority that compels you to talk. I mean, it's already super suspicious to begin with but it's one of those case where the killer needs to quit while behind and just stop talking which removed all doubt as to who did it.

Like Kali I don't actually like most of the gameplay elements in Danganronpa and it sounds like 2 just drags them out each more. The only thing I enjoyed was the 'manga recreation of the crime' in Danganronpa 1 and otherwise I can do without the nonstop debates and certainly the other stuff that's even less interesting than that. I mostly play the game to see if someone interesting is going to die and since nobody seems remotely interesting in Danganronpa 2 to begin with, I think I'll skip that unless it was 75% off. Well, I kind of wanted to see Danganronpa IF but I already saw it on YouTube, and without animation the whole ridiculousness of the story actually falls apart and sounds more like a badly written fanfic. Danganronpa has a serious issue with failing to realize that 'extraordinary' is not a praise when you're fighting guys who are literally on top of the world in their respective professions. The classic Kenshin example is when Kenshin was fighting Enishi and one of the commentor was saying Enishi is very skilled at swordsplay, and Sannosuke correctly pointed out that 'very skilled' guys get KOed by Kenshin in one hit. Telling me that the Ultimate Despair could kill ten ordinary high school boys isn't exactly very impressive when you've already seen Sakura dragon punching a Monokuma and have a nontrivial chance at winning.

Actually, I think the story could've benefited by looking at Metal Gear Revengenance. It's got the same over the top craziness but when you're told that Senator Armstrong is strong because he played college football (and potentially could've played in pro if he didn't go to Navy!) nobody actually questioned why a Senator could fight a cyborg like Raiden and easily have the upper hand just because he played college football. It's no more crazy that Senator Armstrong was the final boss of MGR compared to the Ultimate Despair, but Ultimate Despair never comes close to the same kind of threat. They don't even have any nonsensical trash talk, like I was fully expecting a line like, 'I didn't even go to form 2 when I destroyed United States!' from Ultimate Despair, and as cheesy as that would sound, it'd at least establish why you're both supposed to take the villain and the protagonist seriously. I never got the impression that any of whatever the villain was up in Danganronpa actually contributed to this doomsday scenario. As far as I can tell they elected Donald Trump in the year The Tragedy took place and it actually had nothing to do with the Ultimate Despair, and even if it did, you also never got any sense of why a bunch of high school kids surviving or not would matter in this world.

I wish I'd played the Phoenix Wright games more recently so I could validly compare the difficulty and whatnot to thisg ame

Phoenix Wright is significantly easier, you can't really fail the mini-games in PW like in Dangan, so you can only fail the court battle.

Hardest part about Phoenix Wright is hoping the translation was done properly so the word usage contradicts the evidence properly in English.

Obviously these games have to be relatively easy because if they were actually anything comparable to a real mystery most people would never solve it since I'm sure not a detective people count on to solve locked room mysteries or whatever. Half of the time stuff in this genre boils down to can you think at the same level as the author for whatever inexplicable leap of faith required to get the proper conclusion, and at the same time you must not be overthinking the problem too much because usually it'd actually be pretty trivial for the killer to get away with a perfect crime if they had a brain.

Some particularly crazy example I can remember from Kindaichi, a fairly long running manga on the murder mystery, is the one where DNA evidence showed it was Bob who did it but it turned out that Kindaichi knew Bob had an identical twin Bub separated at birth that did it. Another one is they had some number of suspects and Kindaichi made everyone take a multiple choice test of 100 questions (5 choices) that contain information regarding the crime (e.g. Bob was killed by A: knife B: gun C: pipe D: club E: bottle) and the killer was the guy who got all 100 questions wrong which would be (0.^100 = 1 in 5 billion. Besides the fact that you wouldn't have the authority to force someone to take a test like that even if they're already arrested (and they're not), obviously the killer was dumber than a box of bricks to purposely miss all 100 questions instead of just refusing to take the test, and even then, I'm not sure that's sufficient evidence. I mean you can say whoever miss all 100 questions obviously knows a lot about what happened in the crime, but I think another got 70 out of 100 correct so it's not like the people involved have no idea what's going on.