Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair

I first tried the game Dangrounpa when fans translated it into English on the Sony PSP portable device, and the great admiration on my part was enough to buy me a PlayStation Vita along with the second part, the NIS America official there released , and again … the second part was so wonderful that I really wanted to repeat the experience on the Steam platform and PC and because I wanted the game to have a larger fan base thanks to the greater distribution of the platform among the public achieved compared to the Vita.

The first part of the game seemed to me to be a mix of several different experiences. The artistic and graphical style was similar to Atlas’s Persona game series, with the addition of dating elements to get to know the characters better, as is the case with the social links system. The cases and courts seemed similar to Capcom’s wonderful Ace Attorney series of games, while the main narrative experience seemed like a mix between the Zero Escape series developed by the same company and the famous Japanese novel Battle Royale, which has become more of a genre or a standalone type of story as the novel is about a group of students. Japanese kill each other as part of a government program. However, Dangenronpa combines these elements into a unique and personal experience.

Deadly despair lies on the characters’ faces

Since the story is the basis of the Dangenronpa experience, I will talk about it first in this review of the second part (Farewell to Despair). The story was written by the creative Japanese Kazutaka Kodaka, who demonstrated his writing skills that indicate tremendous talent in this game. The truth is that this game was a nice surprise for me personally, thanks to the wonderful increase in police and crime levels compared to the previous part. I can even say with certainty that the first case alone in this version rivals the last case in the original part.

The story of Dangenronpa 2 follows student Hajime Hinata, who is stuck on Jabberwock Island along with another group of Japan’s brightest students gathered at the superior Hope Academy. Each of these students is the best in a particular field in Japan. There is the best mechanic, there is the happiest student, there is the best animal breeder and other amazing ideas. On this island, there is only one way to survive and come out alive: to commit murder and then not reveal the murderer during the trial that the students conduct among themselves to find out who did it.

You won’t soon forget the psycho Nagito Komaeda

The beginning of the game seems a bit slow on a narrative level, but as soon as the first crime occurs, the game turns on its head and the experience becomes full of tension and suspense. The truth is that the game is full of tragedies and tragedies, and we believe that the deaths of many characters will leave you in a state of shock and with a great feeling of regret and bitterness, especially if you cared about the dead characters and loved by you. The best and most brilliant character is Nagito Komaeda, whose behavior is controversial.

Since it is a game that belongs to the visual novel genre, it means that you will spend most of the time in this game reading texts, but the game also contains a gameplay aspect. Exploration in the game seems very easy as you move the cursor over the background and press one of the buttons to examine the backgrounds, similar to “point and click” games, and the control process seems smooth and perfect to be like I’ve never experienced before I missed using the Vita’s touchscreen. Still, I didn’t really like the game map, and the way of navigating it by moving sideways felt like a step backwards compared to the first part, and the branching of islands in the game is a bit misleading. There won’t be much difference during the investigation part as you talk to the characters and collect evidence to find out what really happened.

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