on the one hand, i feel bad for spike chunsoft and kodaka because i predict that they will likely never be able to escape danganronpa (DR) comparisons for any work they publish for the rest of their careers. i know that this review is going to invoke several comparisons just by itself. on the other hand, this game practically begs for them. the presentation both in art style and music is identical, and some specific plot twists turn the screw against veterans of the DR series in a devious way. still, this game ultimately works best for an audience that hasn't played any of the DR games before, because mystery labyrinths feel like diet class trials and the murders are less characteristically zany or intricate with victims and murderers who you are less invested in as characters. in fact, the worst part is that this game's mysteries are a lot more guessable, to a detrimental point. still, i feel part of the blame is the baggage that master detective archives comes with for a lot of people, and, in that respect, i feel sympathy for this work receiving a lukewarm response critically, financially, and (most importantly) with fans.
let me clarify what i mean when i say "the mysteries are too guessable" because it's a very loaded statement. danganronpa mysteries tend to function with a certain amount of known and unknown variables. when you walk into a class trial for the first time, there's a high likelihood you'll know how some of the events transpired, but you'll lack critical information to really cement how all of it played out. sometimes this can be a certain character being cagey about their whereabouts during the murder, or it can be characters obfuscating evidence with their own motivations for doing so. this means the game will have to provide that information during the trial before you can get a plausible idea for what happened. good examples of this would be 1-2, 2-1, 2-2, and 3-2. it's not necessarily impossible for someone to be able to say "the killer for this case is x, the method they used is y, and their motive was z", but i would say there's basically no case where you can guess all three before the class trial begins.
so, knowing that, let me tell you now that with no exaggeration i was able to guess the murder and methodology for every murder case except the last one before even setting foot in the mystery labyrinth. (the motives were a lot more of a crapshoot. this game places a lot softer of an emphasis on motives for killing especially compared to DR's habit of having monokuma tempt the students with things like "if you don't kill someone i will reveal your darkest secret" or "kill someone and you won't have to deal with a class trial", etc. and instead you'll get more normal motives like killing for profit.) i am not saying this to brag or imply that i'm some super meta-genius when it comes to these things. if anything, i consider myself below average when it comes to solving murder mystery type stories, so you can see the problem i'm presenting here. these mysteries are too undercooked and too simple to really catch me off guard. maybe the DR poisoning has made me keenly aware of certain clues/killers, but i truly believe this is more a failing of the game not presenting enough variables and interesting situations. process of elimination will solve most of the "who is the culprit" guessing before the mystery labyrinths even begin. where's the tension there?
and, to be absolutely clear, there is nothing wrong with a murder mystery being solvable. in fact, some of the best mysteries are the ones where you have all the information and can solve on your own. the problem is pacing. the investigation segments of this game take a fiendishly long time, even by DR standards, and so much of the mystery labyrinths are dedicated to repeating back things the player likely already deduced. i would go so far as to say something like 10% of the game's script is just summarizing either already known plot points or explaining what the player just proved. i actually enjoyed some of these mysteries in spite of this repetition (with chapters 0 and 2 being the most enjoyable of the game imo), but it didn't help that it constantly felt like i was 2 steps ahead of the game all the time.
master detective archives takes a very hard veer away from DR formula as well by constantly introducing new characters as suspects for each case. the problem was that DR reusing characters for suspects was part of the brilliance of its premise: someone who you'd expect to never commit a murder in the first chapter could easily be the murderer by the third. it also invested you greatly in the cast because you didn't know who would make it to the end and who would take that dark left turn to murder. i feel a lot less investment in accusing a character in chapter 1 of this game, for instance, when literally none of the suspects have names. seriously, you're telling me i have to pick between priest, nun, servant, and worshipper instead of people with names? you also get scant precious time to actually know these characters, some of which you'll interact with potentially only once before having to accuse them. again, this is playing against a DR trope, so i get what they wanted to do, but it's sort of like saying "i'm known for writing stories with several endearing characters, so what if i break tradition and give you a bunch of NOTHING characters huh? would that fuck with you guys a bit?". and, well, it results in a lot of moments with deflated tension. that's probably why chapter 2 was my favorite case; you're given an uncharacteristically large amount of time to learn who the suspects are before the mystery labyrinth, and it invested me so much more in the story going on there.
this stringent economy of characters also works against itself with the recurring cast too. there's only about 6 characters that get any development throughout the entire game, and most of the time their presence ends up being mutually exclusive. so, that means you'll get to spend chapter 1 with a, 2 with b, 3 with c, and so on. i think the attempt at quality vs. quantity is a worthy goal, but it lacks for execution. desuhiko somehow ends up being worse than any of the sex pests in the DR games, fubuki's ditzyness borders on "if i leave this girl alone for two minutes i'm gonna walk in on her licking an electrical socket", and generally i'm just left underfed for a lot of these characters as a whole. all of them abruptly disappear in the final chapter as well, which makes their presence feel even more undercut. gumshoe gab does go a bit of a ways to helping characterize them more, but the majority of the time you're gonna be spent with yuma and shinigami, and their dynamic wears thin pretty quickly.
i certainly wouldn't say i hated master detective archives, but it started to lose me at the halfway mark and basically never recovered. i think the fourth and fifth chapters are especially bad because chapter 4 ends up cutting a lot of corners in its mystery as well as just having several parts that either make no sense or go unexplained. meanwhile, chapter 5 is largely just a lore dump in the investigation and then a regurgitation in the mystery labyrinth. most of the "big" twists of the endgame are things that i had already loosely predicted and just lacked the exact details to hours ago. again, these things being guessable isn't the problem, the problem is rooted in the game thinking these mysteries are big reveals that justify so much slowburn. mystery labyrinths in general just need a lot of retooling because reasoning death matches are a poor man's non-stop debate, shinigami puzzle is "what if we made hangman's gambit somehow shittier", and everything else is just either walking while characters talk, a QTE, or a multiple choice question. i don't think it's wrong to expect better gameplay than just aping what was provided in a PSP game from 2011. at the same time, this game is making me question if kodaka's ever going to want to make something that requires breaking out of the DR formula. sure, the DR series is over, but games like this could functionally be considered danganronpa 4 for as little identity and innovation that they bring to the table. everything good here DR did better, everything bad here is done in spite of DR.
this game was an interesting experience for me because i played it with my boyfriend; he didn't necessarily have a glowing opinion of it, but he did at least find more enjoyment with it than i did. i've told him that's partially because he doesn't know how much is being borrowed from DR (he has never played any of the games), but i think it also helps seeing this as a first from SC and kodaka. i'm going to repeat what i said in that this is a game that does the best with people who have minimal exposure to DR, because the lower gear shift here is felt harder with that experience. i would still consider this better than SDR2, but that stems more from virulently hating SDR2's refusal to deliver on several dangling carrots + incredibly horny for teenagers energy. this game ironically also suffers from that, just to a lesser degree. the one thing i could say in SDR2's defense is that it hits much higher highs than master detective archives: rain code ever comes close to. and while the lower lows aren't felt, i won't deny that i'm much more likely to forget the majority of this game in a month compared to the lasting memory i have of SDR2. i think that sentiment has been echoed in how little i heard about this game going into it. i remember seeing the trailer, thinking "i should play that if i get some free time", and expecting to witness at least a little clamor over it on launch but instead hearing nothing. hell, by the time it even came back to mind, it was several months past launch and no one in my circles had even mentioned it, DR fans included. i was hoping this would be a situation where it was an overlooked gem, but i think its relative unpopularity with both critics and fans alike speaks for itself.
let me clarify what i mean when i say "the mysteries are too guessable" because it's a very loaded statement. danganronpa mysteries tend to function with a certain amount of known and unknown variables. when you walk into a class trial for the first time, there's a high likelihood you'll know how some of the events transpired, but you'll lack critical information to really cement how all of it played out. sometimes this can be a certain character being cagey about their whereabouts during the murder, or it can be characters obfuscating evidence with their own motivations for doing so. this means the game will have to provide that information during the trial before you can get a plausible idea for what happened. good examples of this would be 1-2, 2-1, 2-2, and 3-2. it's not necessarily impossible for someone to be able to say "the killer for this case is x, the method they used is y, and their motive was z", but i would say there's basically no case where you can guess all three before the class trial begins.
so, knowing that, let me tell you now that with no exaggeration i was able to guess the murder and methodology for every murder case except the last one before even setting foot in the mystery labyrinth. (the motives were a lot more of a crapshoot. this game places a lot softer of an emphasis on motives for killing especially compared to DR's habit of having monokuma tempt the students with things like "if you don't kill someone i will reveal your darkest secret" or "kill someone and you won't have to deal with a class trial", etc. and instead you'll get more normal motives like killing for profit.) i am not saying this to brag or imply that i'm some super meta-genius when it comes to these things. if anything, i consider myself below average when it comes to solving murder mystery type stories, so you can see the problem i'm presenting here. these mysteries are too undercooked and too simple to really catch me off guard. maybe the DR poisoning has made me keenly aware of certain clues/killers, but i truly believe this is more a failing of the game not presenting enough variables and interesting situations. process of elimination will solve most of the "who is the culprit" guessing before the mystery labyrinths even begin. where's the tension there?
and, to be absolutely clear, there is nothing wrong with a murder mystery being solvable. in fact, some of the best mysteries are the ones where you have all the information and can solve on your own. the problem is pacing. the investigation segments of this game take a fiendishly long time, even by DR standards, and so much of the mystery labyrinths are dedicated to repeating back things the player likely already deduced. i would go so far as to say something like 10% of the game's script is just summarizing either already known plot points or explaining what the player just proved. i actually enjoyed some of these mysteries in spite of this repetition (with chapters 0 and 2 being the most enjoyable of the game imo), but it didn't help that it constantly felt like i was 2 steps ahead of the game all the time.
master detective archives takes a very hard veer away from DR formula as well by constantly introducing new characters as suspects for each case. the problem was that DR reusing characters for suspects was part of the brilliance of its premise: someone who you'd expect to never commit a murder in the first chapter could easily be the murderer by the third. it also invested you greatly in the cast because you didn't know who would make it to the end and who would take that dark left turn to murder. i feel a lot less investment in accusing a character in chapter 1 of this game, for instance, when literally none of the suspects have names. seriously, you're telling me i have to pick between priest, nun, servant, and worshipper instead of people with names? you also get scant precious time to actually know these characters, some of which you'll interact with potentially only once before having to accuse them. again, this is playing against a DR trope, so i get what they wanted to do, but it's sort of like saying "i'm known for writing stories with several endearing characters, so what if i break tradition and give you a bunch of NOTHING characters huh? would that fuck with you guys a bit?". and, well, it results in a lot of moments with deflated tension. that's probably why chapter 2 was my favorite case; you're given an uncharacteristically large amount of time to learn who the suspects are before the mystery labyrinth, and it invested me so much more in the story going on there.
this stringent economy of characters also works against itself with the recurring cast too. there's only about 6 characters that get any development throughout the entire game, and most of the time their presence ends up being mutually exclusive. so, that means you'll get to spend chapter 1 with a, 2 with b, 3 with c, and so on. i think the attempt at quality vs. quantity is a worthy goal, but it lacks for execution. desuhiko somehow ends up being worse than any of the sex pests in the DR games, fubuki's ditzyness borders on "if i leave this girl alone for two minutes i'm gonna walk in on her licking an electrical socket", and generally i'm just left underfed for a lot of these characters as a whole. all of them abruptly disappear in the final chapter as well, which makes their presence feel even more undercut. gumshoe gab does go a bit of a ways to helping characterize them more, but the majority of the time you're gonna be spent with yuma and shinigami, and their dynamic wears thin pretty quickly.
i certainly wouldn't say i hated master detective archives, but it started to lose me at the halfway mark and basically never recovered. i think the fourth and fifth chapters are especially bad because chapter 4 ends up cutting a lot of corners in its mystery as well as just having several parts that either make no sense or go unexplained. meanwhile, chapter 5 is largely just a lore dump in the investigation and then a regurgitation in the mystery labyrinth. most of the "big" twists of the endgame are things that i had already loosely predicted and just lacked the exact details to hours ago. again, these things being guessable isn't the problem, the problem is rooted in the game thinking these mysteries are big reveals that justify so much slowburn. mystery labyrinths in general just need a lot of retooling because reasoning death matches are a poor man's non-stop debate, shinigami puzzle is "what if we made hangman's gambit somehow shittier", and everything else is just either walking while characters talk, a QTE, or a multiple choice question. i don't think it's wrong to expect better gameplay than just aping what was provided in a PSP game from 2011. at the same time, this game is making me question if kodaka's ever going to want to make something that requires breaking out of the DR formula. sure, the DR series is over, but games like this could functionally be considered danganronpa 4 for as little identity and innovation that they bring to the table. everything good here DR did better, everything bad here is done in spite of DR.
this game was an interesting experience for me because i played it with my boyfriend; he didn't necessarily have a glowing opinion of it, but he did at least find more enjoyment with it than i did. i've told him that's partially because he doesn't know how much is being borrowed from DR (he has never played any of the games), but i think it also helps seeing this as a first from SC and kodaka. i'm going to repeat what i said in that this is a game that does the best with people who have minimal exposure to DR, because the lower gear shift here is felt harder with that experience. i would still consider this better than SDR2, but that stems more from virulently hating SDR2's refusal to deliver on several dangling carrots + incredibly horny for teenagers energy. this game ironically also suffers from that, just to a lesser degree. the one thing i could say in SDR2's defense is that it hits much higher highs than master detective archives: rain code ever comes close to. and while the lower lows aren't felt, i won't deny that i'm much more likely to forget the majority of this game in a month compared to the lasting memory i have of SDR2. i think that sentiment has been echoed in how little i heard about this game going into it. i remember seeing the trailer, thinking "i should play that if i get some free time", and expecting to witness at least a little clamor over it on launch but instead hearing nothing. hell, by the time it even came back to mind, it was several months past launch and no one in my circles had even mentioned it, DR fans included. i was hoping this would be a situation where it was an overlooked gem, but i think its relative unpopularity with both critics and fans alike speaks for itself.