This review contains spoilers
YOU’RE TELLING ME YOUR GAME’S TWIST, IN 2023, IS “SOYLENT GREEN IS PEOPLE”???
Look, for all the shit I give Danganronpa as a series, one thing you have to admit is that it’s ambitious and inventive when it comes to its mysteries. The utter weebshit garbage that is everything else in the game becomes justified by the absolute excellence that is the experience of unraveling bizarre plot threads and reaching even more bizarre conclusions — DRv3’s ending couple cases might be my favorite mysteries in any media.
This game does not justify itself. It seems like the designers sat around a table and asked themselves how they could waste the maximal amount of a player’s time. Every single case involves an absolute slog of repetitive cutscenes, QTEs, the worst paced dialogue of all time, deeply uninteresting characters, side quests(????), prestige tours(???!?!?), and numerous minigames that are somehow even WORSE than the bullshit that the DR games were so fond of. This regression is utterly bizarre, given that the DR games largely seemed to figure out how to make their minigames less obnoxious as the series went on. Did every single designer on this game get a bad case of brainrot between v3 and this game?
Worst of all is that underneath this tedium, there’s nothing worth fighting for. There is literally not a thing worth defending. Chapters 0-4 being cut out would improve the game, they’re so bad. None of them rise above the quality of a DR first case. They’re all predictable strings of easy tricks drawn out for hours, like the developers assumed that their players were legitimately stupid enough to need this much time to crack the laziest locked rooms of all time.
And then you get Chapter 5. Alright, I oversimplified calling it Soylent Green, but holy shit was this an uninspired conclusion. Upon hearing the word “homunculus” for the first time in Chapter 2, I groaned and said that this game was just gonna be shitty Professor Layton and the Curious Village, and I was at least 70% correct on that one. Absolutely nothing in this chapter has any interesting ideas to present. That includes the whole self-sacrifice tripe, which was immediately obvious when the emergency exit was mentioned for the first time several chapters prior. This case was middling at best in concept and executed far worse than the closest comparisons.
It feels almost certain, after playing chapter 5, that the devs came up with this case and then decided to make a whole game for the sole purpose of making this case hold narrative weight. Unfortunately, they failed. Nothing about the cases or characters or plots of the prior chapters felt even remotely interesting. I had no connection to the world. It was just a lazy 20 hour loredump session to set up a single mediocre case. In that light, it’s shocking that chapters 0-4 almost entirely fail to connect to the overarching plot. It’s like they’re two different games stuck back to back — the literal worst game I’ve ever played with a kinda okay proof of concept pasted on the end.
Jesus. This game sucked. It pisses me off how aggressively it tried to waste my time, and it disappoints me that it didn’t have a single worthwhile thought in it.
At least the music kinda went hard?
Look, for all the shit I give Danganronpa as a series, one thing you have to admit is that it’s ambitious and inventive when it comes to its mysteries. The utter weebshit garbage that is everything else in the game becomes justified by the absolute excellence that is the experience of unraveling bizarre plot threads and reaching even more bizarre conclusions — DRv3’s ending couple cases might be my favorite mysteries in any media.
This game does not justify itself. It seems like the designers sat around a table and asked themselves how they could waste the maximal amount of a player’s time. Every single case involves an absolute slog of repetitive cutscenes, QTEs, the worst paced dialogue of all time, deeply uninteresting characters, side quests(????), prestige tours(???!?!?), and numerous minigames that are somehow even WORSE than the bullshit that the DR games were so fond of. This regression is utterly bizarre, given that the DR games largely seemed to figure out how to make their minigames less obnoxious as the series went on. Did every single designer on this game get a bad case of brainrot between v3 and this game?
Worst of all is that underneath this tedium, there’s nothing worth fighting for. There is literally not a thing worth defending. Chapters 0-4 being cut out would improve the game, they’re so bad. None of them rise above the quality of a DR first case. They’re all predictable strings of easy tricks drawn out for hours, like the developers assumed that their players were legitimately stupid enough to need this much time to crack the laziest locked rooms of all time.
And then you get Chapter 5. Alright, I oversimplified calling it Soylent Green, but holy shit was this an uninspired conclusion. Upon hearing the word “homunculus” for the first time in Chapter 2, I groaned and said that this game was just gonna be shitty Professor Layton and the Curious Village, and I was at least 70% correct on that one. Absolutely nothing in this chapter has any interesting ideas to present. That includes the whole self-sacrifice tripe, which was immediately obvious when the emergency exit was mentioned for the first time several chapters prior. This case was middling at best in concept and executed far worse than the closest comparisons.
It feels almost certain, after playing chapter 5, that the devs came up with this case and then decided to make a whole game for the sole purpose of making this case hold narrative weight. Unfortunately, they failed. Nothing about the cases or characters or plots of the prior chapters felt even remotely interesting. I had no connection to the world. It was just a lazy 20 hour loredump session to set up a single mediocre case. In that light, it’s shocking that chapters 0-4 almost entirely fail to connect to the overarching plot. It’s like they’re two different games stuck back to back — the literal worst game I’ve ever played with a kinda okay proof of concept pasted on the end.
Jesus. This game sucked. It pisses me off how aggressively it tried to waste my time, and it disappoints me that it didn’t have a single worthwhile thought in it.
At least the music kinda went hard?