Originally released in 2012 by Spike Chunsoft.
Steam version released in 2016.
This review contains spoilers for most Danganronpa media.
I love all three of the main Danganronpa games almost equally. Despite having a similar premise and structure, each game has its own unique aesthetic and approach to the killing game ‘last man standing’ situation. They’re so unique from each other that they generally don’t even feel connected to each other canonically until you get to the very end of each story. But regardless, this series was intended to be played in order, so make some time in your schedule, because it’s a beast of a visual novel series from start to finish.
The first game is claustrophobic. In Danganronpa 1, every student is trapped within one school, unable to step outside. Each room comes featured with bolted windows and stairways locked behind bars. As you progress through the story, each new development only further cements the group’s hopeless situation. Similarly, Danganronpa V3 also traps the students in a high school, but the isolation is far more apparent. The school has visibly been abandoned, with the students struggling to find any evidence of a world waiting outside for them.
Danganronpa 2, on the flipside, takes its sense of isolation to a different extreme. Instead of being locked up in a stuffy old school, the DR2 students find themselves on a sunny island paradise, stocked with food and supplies and everything you could ever need. Far unlike the other two games, this vibrant setting seems like a totally great place to spend a vacation!
Hanging out with my bro
However, even with this comfy environment, any possible enjoyment is sapped from these characters with the killing game’s threat of murder constantly looming over each student’s head. Danganronpa 2 is all about irony. The violence and hopelessness of their situation is contrasted against the colorful mix of cartoon absurdism. This isn’t new to the Danganronpa series, as the first game was filled with the same goofy Monokuma antics, but Danganronpa 2 pulls no punches. This is a story with its own unique twists and turns, trying its hardest to one-up the insanity of the game as the story progresses further.
This sense of amplification is apparent right away when looking at DR2’s character designs. These students not only look ridiculous, but their appearances all completely stand out against each other. Oftentimes you can guess a character’s personality just by looking at them, such as the scenester pop punk girl, Ibuki. Or the prim and proper princess, Sonia. Or the raggedy creep, Nagito. Only sometimes does the game try to pull the rug out from under you with these characters, like Hiyoko, who looks cute at first, only for it to be revealed she’s an evil brat.
These characters have straightforward personalities for a reason. In the case where a story needs to have many characters to function, the ‘one-dimensional’ simplicity of this cast works for the better, leaving the writers more room to focus on the development of the story. A handful of characters do get their moment in the spotlight, however, but it’s not uncommon for tragic backstories and eccentric backgrounds to be left more to the reader’s imagination.
I love bullying Mikan!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Danganronpa is a series that takes full advantage of the reader’s imagination, knowing fully well that the reader’s own devised concepts will carry more power than whatever solution the writers can throw at them. This isn’t to say the writers’ offerings are weak, however. They just like to throw a lot of mysteries at you. For example, someone who had just finished the first game will notice that somehow, Byakuya has returned to the cast of Danganronpa 2! But his appearance has changed dramatically. This new Byakuya is a lot… bigger. So what happened to him? At the start of the game, this new Byakuya is the player’s only link back to the first game. But before the player has the chance to explore this one connection, Byakuya ends up getting killed off right at the start! Just like that, the player is left in the dark on Jabberwock island, just like the other students.
Even if you’ve already played through the game once, a replay is rewarded with subtle hints towards the truth of the story that appear early on into the game. So being spoiled on the story doesn’t entirely ruin it, though I’d highly advise giving this series a shot before somebody blabs about all the crazy stuff in front of you. After all, the sense of mystery is what fuels the story, and I haven’t given away any of the MAJOR spoilers for the game as a whole, yet. So if you have any interest in playing these games, you better step away from this review before you find out about something you can’t unlearn.
Thank you, Sonia!
In the usual Danganronpa fashion, many of its questions will be answered by the end of the story, but these endings like to leave the player left wondering about more questions than they had when they started the game. The ending of the first game leaves the player looking towards the uncertainty of the future, as well as wondering about the mystery of how the killing game even started in the first place. In a dramatic twist the Danganronpa 2 cast turns out to be the missing link between both of these mysteries. These Danganronpa 2 characters? They’re the ones that caused the killing games to start in the first place. And yet, throughout this Danganronpa 2 story, they’re all completely unaware of this. It’s a big bombshell to drop on the player right at the end, and once again, you’re left with more questions than you had originally. Because now you’re wondering, what the hell’s gonna happen with these characters once they go back into the despair-filled real world with their despair-filled bodies? And what’s the state of the rest of the world, anyways? These questions are left unanswered.
But what if they weren’t? Do you want to know exactly how Junko took over the world with the Danganronpa 2 cast? How did they get brainwashed? It turns out that if all you want is answers, you have a way of getting them, for better or worse. Danganronpa 3 (the anime, not to be confused with Danganronpa V3, the visual novel) was the series’ attempt to piece together and explain every loose end left by the games. You will learn everything, but the results aren’t pretty. The Danganronpa 3 anime is bad, to the point where its standing in the canon of the Danganronpa series is almost a joke. Even Danganronpa V3 tried to find the best possible way to invalidate it afterwards.
The more important lesson of the Danganronpa 3 anime experience is that Danganronpa is not information. It’s a story, and it needs to be paced like one, lest it end up turning into violence murder soup. This is a problem that the visual novels manage to avoid by sticking to a reliable skeleton, the motive-murder-trial cycle of each chapter. Because of the straightforward structure of its progression, the writers are once again given more freedom to be creative with the building blocks in front of them. And better yet, this structure makes it easier for the player to speculate about the future of the story. If you know that somebody’s going to be killed off in the next chapter, you’ll be spending more time thinking about how it’s going to happen, which helps hook the player into each chapter.
You can’t escape the truth, Hajime!
As far as visual novel packages go, you aren’t going to find many that are more stylish than Danganronpa 2. The UI is dazzled with vivid colors and cute little icons. The Takada soundtrack is popping just like in the first Danganronpa game, with an expansive track list tailored for every emotional moment and every minigame included in the story. And besides reading the game’s lengthy story, you’ll have loads of opportunities to interact with the environment, as well as engaging with the investigations and trials.
Traversing the world is a bit different from the first game, as our main character Hajime has to walk to each destination through a scrolling 2D path of the island. Or if the player feels the need to rush, they can teleport him around the island with quick travel instead. DR2 features 3D environments similar to the first game, but the scope of DR2’s world is too massive to model entirely in 3D like the high school in DR1.
Similar to DR1, the player can click all over each 2D room to inspect various items. You take full advantage of this ability during the ‘investigation’ segments of each chapter. You need to click on every piece of evidence and talk to every student to gather up ‘truth bullets’ for the ensuing trial. Additionally, during each chapter, 5 Monokumas are hidden for you to try and uncover as a bonus, though I recommend ignoring these on your first playthrough, lest you get stuck obsessive compulsive Monokuma hunting like I did.
Once you get to the trial, you’ll find that the developers have attempted to try and fix certain ideas from DR1. Some of these trial minigames are still annoying, like the ‘improved’ new version of Hangman’s Gambit, which is as needlessly slow as it was before. Panic Talk Action tries to function as a rhythm game, with expected problems involving input lag and syncing issues. Oh well, they tried! Can’t be too upset with new Takada tracks, anyways. The new minigame ‘Logic Dive’ is fun, though. It reminds me of an edutainment PC game where you traverse through an obstacle course and you have to choose the right path by picking the right answer to each question.
I’m willing to tolerate a lot of bullshit writing in a visual novel and still enjoy it. Danganronpa’s writing, by pretense of its massive popularity and impressive presentation, is going to be held up to an impossibly high standard. It’s got its own problems, just like any other story with hugely ambitious scope. With such a large cast, and such a ridiculous plot, you’re bound to hit some snags along the way. Some characters end up getting helplessly chucked out at the expense of plot development, and this seems to happen in Danganronpa 2 more so than the other two main visual novels. Mikan’s role in chapter 3 is one of the more obvious examples of this. And then you have shit like Izuru Kamukura?? Look, sometimes these writers just can’t help themselves but throw in some goofball shit into the story, but in general, their crazy ideas are hit more often than they miss.
Compared to all the colorful personalities and insanity of Jabberwock Island, our protagonist Hajime is surprisingly reasonable, making his reactions feel genuine. And in this setting, filled with cartoon nonsense in a world that is constantly breaking down, you need that grounded perspective to keep this story from going completely off the rails. The situations in this story are far more ridiculous than the ones that happen in DR1 and DRV3, and where Makoto has Kyoko to rely on, Hajime basically has nobody. The game pairs Hajime up with Chiaki towards the end, though it almost feels like he’s given that connection out of pity. It doesn’t mean much in the long run.
With each ending to their visual novels, Danganronpa goes for a “everything you know is a LIE” reveal, and being able to pull the rug out from under the player without losing the impact of the twist requires careful pacing and reliable characters. Destroying the established world too suddenly gives you a situation like with the Danganronpa V3 ending. By all means, I think V3 has a great ending, but it’s their surprise shotgun approach to the “everything is FAKE” reveal that causes players to claim that the ending ‘ruined’ the game for them. Danganronpa 2, despite having a similar type of ending, builds up the player slowly to this big reveal, tearing apart the world piece by piece before dropping the bomb on them.
At least someone is enjoying the fun house!
In case the main story didn’t give you enough content to hammer all of these characters into your brain, DR2 also features more character exploration via ‘free time’ events and a post-game Island Mode. During the game’s story, free time events allow the player to choose between every available character, letting Hajime talk to them and learn a bit more about their eccentricities. The player will soon feel the need to start strategizing which characters they should prioritize first. Should you aim for your favorites right away, or try talking to people who you think are going to die first? This is a game where ‘saving the best for last’ will come back to bite you in the ass.
Thankfully, after the story is finished, the player has a second chance to revisit any free time events they missed during their playthrough. As a reward for completing mind-numbing resource mining tasks in the new Island Mode, you are allowed to revisit every character from the game and finish the leftover Free Time Events. And not only that, but Island Mode also gives you a Tokimeki Memorial style ‘dating’ mechanic. This is a bonus feature that lets you take any character to a variety of locations, giving you three dialogue options to try and win them over. Only one or two of these options give you a positive result, so it’s likely you’ll get funny results when you inevitably fail one of these. Once you get a character’s affection level to the maximum, you unlock their relationship ‘ending’ cutscene, giving Hajime a conclusive final interaction with them before you finish the game. Fully completing Island Mode is a horrible experience, though it’s fun to mess around with for a little while.
The reason why the player is given so many opportunities to interact with the game’s environment and characters is to further fuel their own imagination. You’re given so much information to mend together, and so many possibilities to wonder about. Thinking about the possibilities of Danganronpa 2 ends up becoming a game in itself. And after experiencing this massive brain stimulant of a visual novel series, it’d only make sense that I’d end up forming some connections with it, myself. It’s a long lasting experience, and it’s an experience I’ve come to enjoy.
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