It's not an uncommon sentiment that Kodaka might be a hack but Rain Code is pretty much the only confirmation I've ever needed. I loved DRV3 and pretty heartily enjoyed DR1 and 2 and yet I am now completely convinced he stumbled into a great whodunnit setup with Danganronpa and, when tasked with making a spiritual successor, had no clue what made those games appealing and stumbled into whatever the fuck this is.

Rain Code isn't as offensive as something like Ultra Despair Girls but it feels so, so much more confused. An exercise in futility. I kind of don't even know where to start. There's just so many things wrong here it's kind of funny, and I don't think there's literally any way to structure this other than a bullet point list. So here's that bullet point list.

- It's danganronpa but without most of the things that make Danganronpa good.
- This game is filled with what I like to call "Adventure Game Bloat". One problem I have with a lot of adventure games (not all, but many) is that they just feel like visual novels with menial walking gameplay grafted onto them, and this game's no exception. Lots of very boring and trivial "walk over here and press A" quests that really don't add anything.
- This bloat continues into this game's version of Danganronpa's Class Trials (known here as Mystery Labyrinths) which are filled with completely empty and straight hallways which just serve as places you have to hear dialogue all the way through. That, and repetitions of the same couple of animations over and over again.
- The Labyrinths have even more stilted and shoehorned in gameplay than the Danganronpa games ever have. The debates are only partially the focus now and most of it's just repackaged multiple choice questions. Very lame.
- The stakes and tension are so poorly established, compared to Dangan which is immediately "you are trapped in a death game. Good luck!". Here you are given the vague goal of "Figure out Kanai Ward's Secret" but you don't even begin to actually really tackle it until well past the halfway point, everything else is just futzing around with other random mysteries.
- The vast majority of cases here are functionally self-contained, which is like, really fucking stupid coming from Danganronpa! One of the best things about that is how each case reduced the number of culprits for the next one, as the map expands and creates more possible murder sites. Murders in one chapter create motives for the next. It's a well-oiled whodunnit machine if I've ever seen one. Here, though, more often than not, characters are introduced for a single chapter's mystery as suspects and stop existing the second the next chapter starts. It feels insanely artificial, even moreso than the Phoenix Wright games (which I also have this problem with, but) which at least have the courtesy to have a good deal of witnesses show up again later at least in some minor cameo capacity. Basically everyone linked to the first couple cases do not fucking exist even in the slightest once their respective chapters end, lol.
- None of the characters are even like kind of interesting. Literally the best ones are just the most neutral and tolerable (Yakio, Wendy, Halara), everyone else is annoying or boring or both. The protagonists are one-dimensional anime archetypes and so are the villains. Makoto (a fairly important character who is only introduced to you halfway through the game, lol) is maybe the only exception, but I still saw the one thing that makes him interesting coming from a mile away.
- Shinigami and Yuma get the most screentime and they are among the most annoying and boring characters respectively. People overplay this as a thing that sucks here (it certainly isn't great if your leads are uncompelling!) but it's not even nearly the worst part of this game, since this game could have easily fallen back on the puzzle solving.
- The mysteries just aren't very good. I solved nearly all of them, like, an hour before their mystery labyrinths finished. The first case I literally solved during the investigation period and had to wait 2 hours as the mystery labyrinth slowly trudged through the solution. I presume this isn't as bad if you haven't played as many mystery games, but everything just feels recycled from everywhere else. Oh, they did this in Danganronpa. Oh, they did this in Umineko. And so on. That, and some incredibly obvious foreshadowing stuff that completely shatters many of the mysteries if you even vaguely know what Chekhov's Gun is.
- The few (and I mean few) times I didn't immediately know the answer to a question, the Mystery Labyrinth basically just tells you the answer anyways. You have so much health that failure in a dungeon is like, never even a slight consideration.
- It is insane how many times this game threatens to shake up the status quo and never meaningfully follows up. As previously mentioned, characters get introduced which seem like a signifier that the story's going in an interesting direction and by the end of a chapter it Always goes back to the game's formula it set early on.
- Already mentioned by another reviewer but every even slightly interesting thing is undermined by something else. Any complicated decision or interesting piece of morality is almost always noped out of for some reason or another. There are so many obviously interesting avenues this game could have taken and it seems to deliberately avoid every single one.
- Multiple of the most important pieces of info for the last chapter are established mere minutes before it starts. I know I just complained about how blatant the foreshadowing is here but maybe it could have worked better if there was more than one piece of it floating around at any given time.
- The last chapter is the funniest fucking shit ever and it's definitely the only part of the game that isn't trying to be.
- The soundtrack kind of sucks. I suspect Takada phoned this one in since he's done some really great composition on other games, even recently (I loved his work on Death Come True) but every track here is obviously just a soundalike of some other track from Danganronpa or something that feels completely out of place. There's some decent dark ambient in the last chapter but most of this game's OST consists of stuff like the main theme (very obviously just the Danganronpa theme but with some of the notes swapped around) or that really boring song with the trap hihats.
- They're still doing something wrong when it comes to translating this artstyle into 3D. It doesn't look as bad as UDG but it still certainly looks off, probably something to do with the shading. Or the mo-capp-y animations. Idk.
- It runs like shit. Bizarre to keep this one a Switch exclusive when it often can't even crack 20 fps and often throws you into long-ass load screens. Legitimately the best way to play this as of writing is with an emulator and a 60fps 1080p mod.

Anyways this is pretty bad! Confident in saying that every change from the mainline Dangan games is for the worse here. Chapter 4 is okay and chapter 5 is at the very least entertaining but the rest is very sludge. Probably don't bother!