Very conflicted on certain aspects on this game, I overall enjoy the game, just I think it has some of Kodaka's best and worst aspects on display.

This will be light on spoilers as possible but still, warning In case you care for plot points and characters being named.

To start with positives:
I really like the overarching mystery of the game, the "Secret of Kanai Ward" is another grand twist he loves doing with any game he makes, and I think aside from V3, this is the most it's ever landed well for me.
The major antagonist of this game is my favourite he's written, Kodaka has perfected a certain genre of character, and this was another great execution.
The supporting cast is generally quite fun, a lot of the main detective group grew on me throughout the game and I am looking forward to most of their DLC episodes to spend more time with them. Viva and Hallara are particularly my standouts.
Cases 2 and 4 are particularly strongly written murder mystery cases, how their crimes was thought out and executed was really impressive thought out.
Yuma and Shinigami are a fun duo to follow, I like their chemistry and how they interact through most the game.
The art direction and world design is really inspired, the neo-noir aesthetics are wonderfully executed. Rui Komatsuzaki did really great with their signature style of art and how its adapted to 3D is generally quite good.
The great soundtrack by Masafumi Takada. The music in this game goes for a different vibe from Danganronpa and it's full of bangers.
This game has a lot of neat references to other murder mysteries and feels like a love letter to shin honkaku murder mystery, some are more subtle than others but I can tell this was a product of love for the genre.
The English voice acting is consistently excellent, I don't have any performance that never feels like they're not trying.

For my negatives:
The mystery labyrinth feels fundamentally flawed from a narrative and gameplay standpoint. A lot of ideas and mechanics get added to be dropped or never mentioned again, the most annoying being found in the prologue, but that'd be delving into spoilers for that case. The rules to the labyrinth aren't very consistent and feels "Random for the sake of it".
A lot of gameplay segments aren't as fun as most of the mini games from Danganronpa. The most fun is the Argument Death battle and those are just Nonstop Debates with a lot less going on mechanically and logically. This game felt generally easier than every Danganronpa game in terms of mystery solving and playing. Failing never feels like it's a actual tangible possibility. Also for the love of god Kodaka please let go of "Hang Man Gambit" brother that just isn't ever going to be fun.
The side stories are mostly bad, when I saw they had a different writer for them, it made a lot of sense. They are really shallow at the best of times and actively irritating at worst. Ideas will just be introduced to never be brought up again and it feels like "We have Yakuza Substories at home". There are 3 I do enjoy but that’s 1/4 of them being good.
Case 3 is a low point in terms of the game because it feels like half assed filler, nothing introduced in the case ever really becomes important and the mystery itself falls apart as soon as one detail is introduced. It's the only case I'd consider "bad".
I hate Desuko, Desuko is the worst genre of guy Kodaka keeps insisting on writing. The creepy, pervy, wants to shag all women type who is just gross. It doesn't help he is not just implied to be, but is just a pedo. Please stop writing this kind of character Kodaka.
This game has technical errors constantly, thankfully nothing game breaking, but for a game designed for only one console it doesn't feel optimised for it. Pop in is a constant issue with the environment, audio has weird leaps in being louder than was probably intended, anytime the camera would switch perspective it would cut everything to black for a brief moment. It's nothing that is detrimental but can feel really cheap.

This is a good game, I enjoy it for what It is, but it's not close to the best Kodaka can do as a writer. DR2 and V3 are still much better experiences in my opinion, but I hope he sticks with this world and characters. He has something special and I pray he does more with it.

I'm very much of two minds about this latest murder-mystery adventure game from Danganronpa creator Kazutaka Kodaka; there's a lot I actively disliked and I had a pretty low opinion of the game for a good amount of my playthrough, but when things finally kicked into high gear in the last couple chapters, I basically found myself totally won over and was suddenly having a great time with it.

On the one hand, some of the character writing can be pretty grating (Desuhiko's whole wannabe playboy shtick and Shinigami constantly saying things like "boom-kill" and "mysteriful" and repeatedly referring to a teenage girl as "flatty" are the worst offenders), the pacing really drags in the middle to the point where I was pretty bored for a lot of chapters 2 and 3, and the game runs pretty terribly on Switch, with frequent and lengthy loading screens.

On the other hand though, the presentation is top notch, Masafumi Takada killed it with the soundtrack as always, and like I said before, the last couple chapters were so good that they completely turned around my opinion of the game. The final reveals were actually really interesting (and way more fucked up than I was expecting), and there's one tidbit in particular that's such a clever play on audience expectations (especially if you're familiar with Danganronpa) that it genuinely had me cackling when it was revealed.

Basically what I'm saying is, I do recommend this game, but only if you have the patience and tolerance to slog through many uneven hours to get to the best parts. I found the experience extremely worthwhile in the end, but your mileage may vary.

Master Detective Archives: Rain Code is the spiritual successor to the Danganronpa series of mystery novel games. In Rain Code, you play as Yuma Kokohead, a detective for the World Detective Agency who has amnesia, and his mysterious ghostly partner, Shinigami. They travel to Kanai Ward, a corrupt city separated from the rest of the world controlled by the massive Amaterasu Corporation, with many mysteries that must be solved by this team of detectives from around the world. Each of these detectives, known as ultimate detectives, have special powers which help you in your mystery solving, so you can eventually go into the mystery labyrinth, an RPG-like dungeon where the mystery is turned into a physical representation to help you solve the case. Rain Code’s gameplay sees you controlling Yuma in a 3D world, exploring Kanai Ward and solving its mysteries, where many different minigames are at play during the mystery labyrinths. The most common minigame is the battles, which have you selecting truth blades to slice through an opponent's statement. Rain Code is an extremely fun mystery solving game, which improves on a lot of the elements from Danganronpa, yet makes its own, completely unique experience. There’s really nothing else quite like Rain Code.

A game that very much indulges in common themes and elements of the shin honkaku mystery genre, perhaps in a even more direct way than the Dangaonronpa series. The prologue starts strong and the final two chapters are kind of interesting (even if they were entirely not in the direction I expected the plot to go), but I stalled the game for months in chapter 2 due to how difficult it is to get into the actual early-game mysteries. There's very little in chapters 1-3 to get you invested in the victims and suspects of the murders so they bank on the partner detective of the chapter being good, and I struggled to find the chapter 2 partner entertaining in any way possible. It took until chapter 4 to feel a real tension in the story, and I wish they made better use of some of the detective abilities introduced.

Chapter 1 was surprisingly complicated for a chapter 1 mystery, but that was it. The design of the mystery-solving aspect of the game is a downgrade as somehow the mysteries are more obvious than the later Danganronpa games while the mini-games you have to play feel far clunkier due to being in 3D with long load times. Rather than feeling excited at getting down to the truth, I thought most of the cases were quite obvious but the game has to make you go through the motions where it assumes you don't know the solution and you have to play along. It's hard to not compare the game with Danganronpa which gave some real emotional highs in its 5th case in every game, but at least the setting is interesting and has potential if there's any more games in this universe.

I am a fan of how the protagonist is 150cm and there are many women in the game who are over 180cm.

Слишком очевиден факт что эта игра представляет собой что-то вроде Danganronpa 4, но пересобранная. Те же самые головоломки, только в меньшем количестве, от чего иногда хочется очень сильно зевать учитывая что и большинство дел довольно скучные и с логическими дырами.
Но хоть головоломки однообразны в плане геймплея, они разнообразны в плане визуала (Но в техническом плане игра выглядит просто ужасно, за это стоит благодарить Unreаl engine 4 на Nintendo switch)
Сценарий может и не блещет, но он достаточно хорошо написан чтобы пробраться через всю игру и выяснить почему в этом городе три года идёт дождь...

I'm going to compare Rain Code to Danganronpa a lot in this review, because, Danganronpa simply fixes so many of the issues that Rain Code has.

Kodaka has somehow regressed in his writing, to blatant fetish bait, and weirdly one-dimensional characters. Rain Code is structured exactly like Danganronpa, in that it has 6 chapters worth of murder mysteries for you to work through. All the while, the looming threat of the overarching mystery behind the scenes, gets teased more and more as you progress. Now, that is Rain Code's first immediate issue. Cases 1-3 feel entirely filler. They serve to end up as pointless endeavours, masked with the illusion of progression. Each case, we are introduced to a murder, given 4-5 potential culprits, culprits who are given about 5 lines each, so they really have no impact on the story or emotional value whatsoever. Some of the culprits don't even get named, which is absolutely insane to me. You are also given the aid of 4 mystery detectives, who each join you one by one, to develop them as characters, and also expand on the range of detectives that are possible within the world. It is unfortunate, in that regard, that half of these detectives don't really have any character to them, and entirely serve as troupes. Desuhiko and Fubuki are both entirely flat. Desuhiko is the pervert anime troupe, and Fubuki is the oblivious anime troupe. This wouldn't be an issue whatsoever if Kodaka was willing to progress them beyond simply being a troupe, but he just doesn't bother. Shinigami, the character secondary to the protagonist is also one of the worst partners i have ever seen. She spends the whole game belittling Yuma, the protagonist, but also insulting every other character in the game. This makes her insufferable, particularly when her dialogue completely ruins any emotional, or intensive scene that happens within the narrative. The only way I can see her being fixed is to either get her to shut the fuck up for 5 minutes, or to just give her any ounce of character at all. I'm not one to particularly be prudish about sexualization. But when it takes priority over everything else, then it does become a big issue for me.

Kodaka also gets absurd with his blatant fetishistic writing in this. Danganronpa was always decent with managing this, at least in the main trilogy. However, Rain Code is absurd with how unsubtle it is. Rain Code has: Vore, Vomit, Giantess Women, Sexual Abuse, Crossdressing, Insanely Dumbed Down Women, verbal abuse, and at points, insanely rapey dialogue. All in service of Kodaka's fantasies I guess?

However, I wouldn't have finished Rain Code if it weren't for its positive aspects. I think the final two chapters are great. Chapter 4 is on the level of some of the best Danganronpa chapters because it plays on the relationships you like, and has a lot of genuine nuance to its mystery. Yakou, Vivia, and Makoto all save the game from being completely bare bones, as they all encompass Kodaka's excellent writing from Danganronpa, where characters were allowed to hide their true intentions within the dialogue. The game is at its best when it gets smart with the way it portrays its mystery. Rain Code leaves off very open-endedly, so I hope that the team has a serious reflection on the many issues with Rain Code, when it comes to the sequel.

A great story brought down by a few annoying characters and very repetitive writing.

I thought that overall this was a nice take on the mystery genre and I like the lore of Kanai Ward enough. There are a lot of good twists which are basically the foundation of whether I find these games enjoyable or not. The last two chapters definitely deliver on that front.

I actually didn't find Shinigami that annoying though! It was mostly Desuhiko and Fubuki.

Basically, this game didn't exactly blow my mind like some of the other greats in this genre, but it's definitely a good time.