The Endgame: Danganronpa 2 - Goodbye Despair

WARNING: This post contains spoilers that WILL reduce your enjoyment of the game should you choose to play it. As a courtesy to my tiny readerbase, the spoilers have been blanked out.

Though I'd usually have done a Level One post for this game a week or so ago, it's a Danganronpa game so naturally two hours spent writing a blog post would be much better spent playing through the game to reach the end as soon as possible, that's how highly I regard the storylines of the Danganronpa franchise.

Becuause of just how much I adored the first Danganronpa game I was honestly afraid to play this second one, i thought I wouldn't like that characters as much, and the fact it's set on a deserted island wasn't helping; but allow me to go ahead and say this now, I could not have been more wrong. It was as if I'd decided that 1 + 1 was over 9000.

So the Danganronpa franchise is a series of games (turned anime) which is not unlike a cross between the Hunger Games and CSI. 16 High School students with 'Ultimate' talents (as in, the best at what they do in the world ever) are taken to a deserted island and, thanks to the appearance of a monochrome devil bear thing (called Monokuma) are forced to murder each other for a chance to get off the island to freedom. It's not quite that simple though, of course. After a murder is committed a class trial is held in which all the living students debate on who among them is the killer before a vote occurs; if the students successfully guess who the 'blackened' (read: murdering douche) is, the the blackened will be executed in the most ironic way the game developers could come up with; however, if the students guess incorrectly, the blackened will go free, and everybody else will be executed! Yaaayyy executions!

If you were to play bingo with all 16 characters here, and crossed off every character who died, you would win in three ways

The game is split into a three part structure: Firstly is Daily life, a visual novel/mild dating sim where you simply go around spending time with the other students to learn their backstories and stuff; Next comes Deadly Life, one of your friends has died! Time for us untrained high-schoolers to investigate the crime! This portion is very standard of a point and click detective game, but it works well, and unlike the first game where for example the blackened in first case is more obvious than a bear trying to hide among a small pile of Hundreds and Thousands, all of the cases here will lead to more questions than they do answers as you investigate. Lastly is the Class Trial part, arguably the most fun, where lengthy discussion is had and through a number of minigames you use all the evidence at your disposal to pin down and expose the culprit.

Anyway, enough about the generics, let's be specific here; though I largely believe this sequel is better than Danganronpa 1, even I have my own issues with it, but let's look at the positives first...
Danganronpa is a franchise which uses its characters to make the story so much more potent, as with Danganronpa 1 each and every character is unique and everyone who plays the game will inevitably develop a list of five characters which they adore more than any others, and some they will loathe more than even others in real life; this is part of what makes Danganronpa so powerful, you know a murder will come, but who is going to be the victim, how would you feel if the character you've been getting to know in the Daily Life sections suddenly shows up dead on the floor of a beach house. Play the game and write down your favorite characters. Finish the game, count how many survived. You want my result? 1 out of 6, [even my most favorite character who I thought wouldn't die thanks to her resemblance to one of the first game's characters turns out to be the murderer towards the end of the game]. Danganronpa will rain havoc upon your feelings and your faith in people, enjoy the victory of that first case where two of the less amiable characters snuffed it all you want, it's only a matter of time until the next killing happens, and who knows who it'll be this time....

One noticeable factor about the sequel is how predictable it becomes if you've played the first game. [Case 3, usually very calm character flies off the chain with rage once they're accused of murder]

Which brings me onto the next thing the sequel does so much better than the original, the actual killings. Each and every murder that takes place is unique and convoluted and every case solved give a much greater feeling of satisfaction compared to the first game; take the second to last case for example where a murder takes place in a funhouse using all sorts of misunderstanding to its advantage; it's kinda confusing and really complex, yet everything makes perfect sense, and that is how solving a crime should feel. Don't even get me started on the last case which is [a suicide made to look like murder but is actually murder]. Yeah. Exactly. [The nut-job of a 'victim' basically tortures himself, dangles a spear above him over a bar near the ceiling (holding onto a rope at the end) then starts a fire, the remaining students find the fire and use so fire grenades from nearby (yeah I've never heard of those either) to put it out, buuuuttt one of the fire grenades had its contents replaced by a dense poison gas, which when thrown on the fire caused the guy to die instantly, releasing the spear to fall straight into his stomach, but more importantly, making a fellow student into a 'blackened', and with no way of telling who it is, a truly unsolvable crime], I could even go so far as to call it the most beautiful murder in the history of the detective genre.

Detract from that though, and we come to another key feature of Danganronpa which makes me adore it, and that's the Executions, in the first game they were great: brutal, ironic and in one or two cases genuinely frightening, in each and every one you watched it was almost as if you could feel the Blackened's pain as they endured it, in fact the very first execution even made me feel physically sick, it was that shocking. Danganronpa two however, falls flat initially on this front, with he first execution being too pants for me to even enjoy, the second being mediocre at best and the third was even more pants than the first and holds the place of least favorite execution of the franchise [Used a giant syringe to pump an arm shaped rocket enough to blast the girl into space forever more, I'd have preferred it a million times more if they'd stuck the syringe in her and pumped her full of that medicine stuff until she literally exploded]... What? The power of Danganronpa comes from feeling, and if you can't feel the pain of the person undertaking it, or even laugh at how stupid it is, then you might as well just be watching another cutscene, not a human being dying before your eyes in a truely brutal way.

In the trials you argue by shooting the words out of people's mouths with 'Truth Bullets', it's actually a very powerful way of shutting down someone's argument, you should try it sometime

The last trial though? It takes everything you thought you knew about the world of Danganronpa 2 and instead throws a complete mindrape right in your face, the screen starts becoming all flickery and glitchy and when it first happens you'd be forgiven for thinking your PSVita was having a serious malfunction. [The last trial basically involves a showdown with the mastermind behind it all, this time a virus taking the form of the 'Bigger Bad' from the first game: Ultimate Despair - Junko Enoshima, after an epic battle of wits, the classic 'hold X to charge your final attack' scenario] (and a part where I got stuck looping the same dialogue about ten times because it took me that long to realize I needed to use the statement recall function you only had to use about twice previously )[eventually the final boss went down, and I was left to wonder (after a bit more dialogue) what kind of future the five surviving characters would make for themselves, choosing to remain on the island after finding out about all the shit that's gone down in the outside world.] what does happen to them in the end? Well that's not a question Danganronpa ever likes to answer, Yet the ending is just as satisfying if not more so, and the game just leaves you to mourn the deaths of your favorite characters by showing pictures of them during the end credits.

TL;DR; A tragically beautiful storyline that will play havoc with suspense and emotion. a must have for fans of the hunger games, detective games or visual novels, even more so if you love all three.