For many reasons, playing this game consistently gave me a headache. One of those headaches got so bad I vomited. Ultra Despair Girls gets the honor of being the first game to make me physically sick.

In my rating system, I reserve .5 stars for predatory, unplayable, or evil games, and in Ultra Despair Girls' case, I'm confident arguing it is a form of evil. (There's a lot I want to blast it for first, but I'll get there!) Even if you're a fan of the typical Danganronpa visual novels, stay the hell away from this. Not only do you have to play two games to understand what's happening in Ultra Despair Girls, playing Ultra Despair Girls will, at most, let you better understand like 2 episodes of the anime Danganronpa 3: The End of Hope's Peak High School - Despair Arc for 1 character that ends up having zero plot relevance before they literally fuck off to outer space. That is not a joke. I cannot overstate how much this game is not worth it.

Wow, just thinking about this game again to write this review makes me nauseous! So let's get into it.

This collection of headache inducing factors masquerading as entertainment can be split into the game's presentation and the game's story content. Ultra Despair Girls is the series' first with 3D gameplay, after previous entries were primarily visual novels. Transitioning genres to 3rd person shooter caused a lot of friction. Development shortcuts are obvious and plentiful, and the team’s intuition for the needs of the new genre is painfully off. But surprise, Ultra Despair Girls is still almost as much a visual novel as the mainline Danganronpa games, and all the gameplay sections are literally filler until more cutscenes can happen.

If you skip all the cutscenes and look at the game's bones, it is a cheap, functional 3rd-person shooter. You'll be asked to trek through the same environments forwards and backwards with slightly different paths blocked or opened, each one a decorated hallway. There are only a handful of enemy types with a handful of ammo types meant to counter them, with puzzles littered throughout the level requiring some light thinking if you want a higher score. otherwise you can progress by blasting everything anyway

Coming from a series known for loud, garish colors, Ultra Despair Girls goes for broke. Where before coloration functioned to keep interest in a visual novel that required hours of reading, the same assault of neon, acidic tones is hard to look at in a 3D environment. Environments have no atmospheric effects and little to no dynamic lighting - the game feels like an HD release of an early PS2 game with bad art direction. The plainly implemented camera wildly shifts whenever you ready your weapon, made even worse if you turn on the unpredictable auto-aiming feature. Maybe you won’t get dizzy as the camera whips around harshly colored environments at disorienting speeds, maybe you won’t get turned around in same-y looking environments when surrounded by copy-pasted enemies. But I did, and I had a real bad time!

Did I mention the game is boring to play? Did I mention the game is slow? That you'll be holding down the run button almost the entire time, often wondering if it even made a difference? That combat is so easy you'll forget it's possible to die until you walk into a pit and get an instant Game Over? That some of the puzzles are glitched and won’t consistently give you credit for solving them? That the game even failed to load cutscenes a couple times and forced me to restart my whole system?

And let me tell you, the story parts of the game are FAR worse.

Make no mistake, the writing in Danganronpa has always been bad. The premise is crass, the characters are distillations of Hot Anime Nonsense, and surprising or shocking the player is valued over logical consistency. But the ways in which the Danganronpa games are bad is at least balanced around being engaging, schlocky fun. Ultra Despair Girls completely fails its handling of its characters and subject matter in ways both bone headed and insulting - and the Hot Anime Nonsense is cranked up to toxic levels.

Here's the game’s premise: a group of genius grade schoolers have taken control of an army of murder robots to brainwash every child on an island. They then use these robots and brainwashed children to mass murder all the adults on the island.

Let me establish here: this premise is very dumb. Leaning into the dumbness, I could see some room for jokes. But Ultra Despair Girls plays this concept completely straight. The aggressors are ruthlessly efficient at their goal, and the adults are massacred. But before I tear into the story, I’d like to touch on a side-effect of this setting that makes the game harder to play.

In the Danganronpa franchise, blood is stylized to be flaming hot pink. This is because the mainline Danganronpa games are about teenagers murdering each other, so a level of abstraction stops the tone from getting too heavy. Ultra Despair Girls keeps this abstraction while building upon it, making every NPC's model washed out in bright electric blue so the developers can copy-paste the same two models infinitely without you noticing right away.

Why this matters for gameplay: every level is littered with corpses. You'll find mounds of corpses in the middle of the street. Corpses nailed unevenly to walls. Lone corpses slumped in chairs. With hot pink blood splashes on every surface, and unshaded blue blobs peppering every locale, the already same-y and forgettable level geometry becomes even more incomprehensible. Landmarks become invisible once overshadowed by the same scenarios of copied corpses as you’ve been seeing the whole game. For how simple the levels are constructed, it is astounding to reflect back on how often I had to open the map.

Within this prevalence of corpses does the tainted soul of Ultra Despair Girls start to emerge. Because it is a choice to show all these corpses. Not every game with disaster stricken cities shows the human devastation. But the murder robots and the children didn't just kill all the adults - the brainwashed children are also playing with the corpses.

Children will be gathered around corpses, poking them with sticks, encircling them with dances and games, singing in makeshift choirs. And not just the same copy and pasted scenarios over and over, (even though you will see the same kid Fornite taunting atop a car near a dozen times (random family members still beneath the tires, random kids gathered to watch)). There are hand-placed corpses everywhere. Someone whose leg got hurt, and limped behind some furniture before they bled out. Someone who was running and was slashed in the back while they tried to escape. Throats slashed while seated at an outdoor patio, children pilfering their drinks

There is a commitment to this concept that baffles me. Gameplay wise, it is wholly unnecessary. You only shoot at the robots, not the children. Even boss fights against the genius elementary students have you shoot at their remote controlled mechs. But this commitment is not limited to the level’s set dressing - the pointless collectables strewn throughout the levels include dozens of awful notes from children and adults how they want to kill each other. All collectables look the same until obtained, so you have no idea ahead of time if you are picking up a health upgrade, or four pages of text graphically detailing a plan to feed a human their dismembered limbs. You can nearly taste the self-conscious shame of either the original writer or the translator (or both) in trying to sell this garbage.

So our premise is played straight, but the intention is crashing against the presentation. The visuals are too goofy to work as horror, but the content is too gross to be glossed over. And it is in this failing juxtaposition that we introduce the secret ingredient that takes this project from merely “bad art” to “morally irresponsible”: Hot. Anime. Nonsense.

Hot Anime Nonsense is a collection of cliches and character archetypes that metastasized from decades of anime creators basing their characters off of other anime characters instead of their own imaginations or human experiences. It's a form of repetition that transcends shorthand to become prescription. With Ultra Despair Girls, Danganronpa forgos any glimmer of originality to use anime character cliches exclusively in the most rote, lifeless, plot-first writing possible.

The two playable main characters consist of an upbeat “average” (idiot) girl and mean tsundere girl. (A tsundere is an English anime word stolen from Japanese that means “is a bitch to everyone so you might feel something when they are nice to the main character once in the final episode.” (you will not.)) Upbeat average girl has, at the time of the story’s beginning, been kept imprisoned in isolation for a year and a half. If you thought her time being imprisoned would change her character, give her nuance, or be at all plot relevant, you would be wrong. She was peppy going in, and just as optimistic coming out. Mean tsundere girl is a stalker and has a split personality with a man-hating serial killer. This has nothing to do with her being a mean tsundere stalker girl.

Every interaction between the two follows this script. Average girl says something nice to tsundere girl. Tsundere girl says something mean to average girl. Average girl is hurt and / or misunderstands what tsundere girl said to think maybe tsundere girl is being nice. Regardless, tsundere girl says something mean again. This formula is repeated for every collectible they have a discussion about. This formula is repeated in every cutscene. It does not change for the entire game. It happens this way because the “chemistry” between an “average” girl and a “tsundere” girl is supposed to be comedic. Not by the will of this game’s developers, but by the definitions of how these cliches interact with each other. I don’t know in what anime this dynamic ever worked, but it has been lost to time. All that remains is this formula, hollow and pointless, and woefully inappropriate for this game.

Because unless you couldn’t tell, there is nothing funny happening in this story. There is no room for jokes. Kids are being brainwashed! The kids have killed their parents! The city’s on fire! Our main characters kind of hate each other! The villains are children, being sold lies from super villains! The neutral side characters are billionaire war profiteers! But every single character follows an anime trope to a tee, and interacts with every other anime trope with dialog written in strict adherence to the anime trope’s unwritten rules. The problem is, several of these tropes are meant to be comedic, either alone or in tandem, and nothing is done to adapt to the story being told.

This slavish trope adherence crystalized for me when I reached the backstory of one of the genius elementary students, a pink-haired loli. (A loli is an English anime word stolen from Japanese (stolen from English) that refers to a pre-teen girl the work invites you to think about sexually. The pink-haired variant is loud, shrill, impetuous, manipulative, and self-infantilizing.) In an effort to bolster her daughter’s acting career, loli’s mother sold both the loli and herself into prostitution to the producers of the industry. Loli is triggered by her multiple experiences with rape any time she hears the word “gentle,” as her father promised all clients would be “gentle” with her.

The instant her flashback is over, the duration of which she has been having an obvious PTSD episode, she takes a cartoonish tumble and falls on her face, camera pointed directly at her exposed polka-dotted panties.

I reeled so hard I had to put down the controller for a moment. Was this game so unaware of what it had done? That it had just invited me to share a mindspace with a child rapist? To demean a child sex-trafficing victim? In service of - a “comedic” panty shot? Because that was the kind of “joke” associated with pink-haired lolis? Was this “joke” preordained the moment they selected the pink-haired loli archetype, irrevocable regardless of the backstory they gave her?

Because she popped right back up and reacted with a taunt, teasing the main character for feeling flustered for seeing her panties. This is not how any human behaves. This is not how the character just described to us would behave. This is how the pink-haired loli archetype behaves. After being abstracted to this degree, all of this behavior becomes pointless on its own, and only given meaning via context. And in thoughtlessly being applied to this scenario, the context makes the representation reckless, vulgar, irresponsible, evil.

It is evil because it establishes the existence of real evils that exist in the real world as also existing in this fictional world, and does not keep the viewer on the correct side of the scenario. It is evil because this invitation is done involuntarily, without pretext, without commentary, without purpose. It is evil because it is ignorant of its own nature. It is evil because it is pointless.

Ultra Despair Girls is evil because it utterly fails its responsibility to give meaning to the atrocities it invents.

The cruelest joke of the whole game is, average girl is not allowed to become a hero within this game. Because her brother is the virtuous modest everyman trope from the first Danganronpa game. By the rules of Hot Anime Nonsense, no one else in this fictional world can be like him, because the writers can’t handle two virtuous characters at once. It would ruin their template for how characters talk to each other. So after the events of the end of this game, average girl has to remain an average girl.

Spoilers, if you somehow still want to suffer through this game yourself. There is no resolution. There is no moralizing. There is a continuation of the status quo, which I need remind you, is the adults are dead, the island is cut-off from the world, and thousands of children are being brainwashed as hostages. Why was this done? Because of reasons dreamed up by characters in other games that are never revealed. How does this get resolved? The brainwashed children, the trapped survivors, the main character’s separation from her family? None of this is resolved in any other game or anime adaptation.

Ultra Despair Girls is grotesque misery porn. It is the bone-headed utilization of shocking imagery in absurd scenarios for ends so oblivious, so shallow as to be nothing besides window dressing. It fails to understand that depictions of child abuse, rape, torture, dismemberment, and familicide tend to make real people, like the ones playing this game, uncomfortable when done senselessly. Ultra Despair Girls shows these topics, and more, artlessly, passionlessly, in ways that are both boring and offensive. I hold this game in the utmost contempt and pity every hard working developer who contributed to a project that objectively made the world a little worse off.