???: My ideas are fading... i will soon become a shadow of my former identity... Kazutaka Kodaka... I need you to create a game... call it Danganronpa: Ultra Despair Girls... Fill it with my ideals.

Kodaka: Yes sir... I promise I shall enact your wishes perfectly

(The mystery figure reveals itself from the shadows)
Jeffrey Epstein: Do not disappoint me.

(This review features a few spoilers to the game's story.)

Are you a fan of Danganronpa in any capacity?

Then boy! You're gonna fucking hate this game!

There's a lot I can say about this game, but after going through it twice, this is what I have to say about it.

For starters, this game has really shit characters and edgyisms and one of the worst, most uninteresting plots in the series. Gameplay loop consists of really basic third person shooter mechanics with boring puzzles thrown in to pad out the game. The most iconic aspect of the series (the whodunnit) is not present in here almost at all. There are no trials or mystery solving to be done. The most entertaining character in the series is also reduced to being nothing more but basic enemy fodder.

Other problems the game has include the cutscenes being very mismatched in terms of artstyle, some of them being in-engine cutscenes with characters having basic animations, some of them being pre-rendered CG cutscenes, others being anime cutscenes, and rarely cutscenes that are styled after the executions the mainline games have. It is incredibly distracting to see all of them back to back, and most of them look really poor in quality, especially the pre-rendered CG cutscenes. All of these show up in such a disjointed manner that it just makes the whole thing feel inconsistent with its presentation. The "execution" styled cutscenes especially do not hit as hard in the slightest compared to the main games.

Oh yeah, and to get the obvious out of the way, there's a character in the game who straight up says that he's a pedophile, with absolutely zero reaction from people around him, and one of the characters' backstories is about them being sexually abused from a very young age. Said character is also responsible for a minigame where you have to dodge a machine from groping you repeatedly, with a joke that literally goes "By the way, this is the OPPOSSITE of child porn! So we're in the clear!" To say they handle that subject in a tasteless manner would be a severe understatement.

The other antagonists all have similar backstories in which they were abused by their parents, which is what drives them to do the horrible things they're doing. These characters with the exception of like, one, are all really fucking annoying and uninteresting. One of them I had to straight up mute whenever he spoke because it was unbearable to listen to his voice.

Ultra Despair Girls is a game where the devs threw shit on a wall and saw what stuck, and it ended up as just a mess that (in my opinion) lacked almost anything that I liked about that series.

If I do have to say something good about it. A character that appears in the first game is one of the main characters here, and I found them a lot more enjoyable here compared to when they first showed up. Doesn't mean they're GREAT, obviously. But they have a much better dynamic here with the main character.

The main character is also really inoffensive and endearing at times. Maybe a little bland but that's far from a negative in my opinion.

I've gone through this game twice, like I mentioned, first time on my own, second time with friends. This game and the "Danganronpa 3" anime are by far the lowest point of the franchise.

Avoid this like the plague, there's a dozen other third person shooters out there, and this has nothing that the mainline games can offer.