t’s fairly rare for a game to wow me these days. Many of the best are at least somewhat know quantities either because of the franchise or because of the team working on it. I was familiar with the work of Kazutaka Kodaka and team from Danganronpa. But Danganronpa was a bit of a mixed bag, a lot of good but a lot of weaker parts too. From the brief description given to it in a Nintendo Direct about being a strategy game and the pedigree I was pretty sure it was something I’d like but I really didn’t expect it to go as far as it did.
Going in blind was probably a good move. I decided after a while the game was basically Fire Emblem x Danganronpa. And it really leans hard into Danganronpa from the characters, to the themes to the general style including art and music. After playing a lot more I’m not sure if the Fire Emblem description fits because the game actually changes over time which is fascinating. It is overall a visual novel. While it does have strategy segments and they are good for a time, the game eventually phases them out as they become perfunctory to the longer term goal of exploring the meta-narrative. The game’s core gimmick is that there are 100 endings and exploring those takes a long time.
You follow 17 characters, high schoolers that are taken from their home in a futuristic Tokyo and placed in a school and given the task of defending it from invaders for 100 days. Each day is mostly comprised for dialog segments and an occasional extra “freetime” where you can gather materials and talk with allies for stat boosts. On certain days enemies attack and you switch to the strategy game portion where you need to defend a generator from invaders. The strategy portions are quite fun but not too hard. I can only remember failing once or twice but you still feel enough pressure that it’s fun to play and you feel like you make it just before you’re out of resources. At least initially. After you power up your team, get a stockpile of items and figure out how to use each character the battles do eventually become trivial. The main issue is that because you can explore any route through the story, the difficulty curve remains flat. So you get better and everything else stays the same. This is one instance where a bit of auto-leveling might have actually made things a little better, or at least a higher difficulty to switch to.
The rest of the gameplay isn’t super interesting. The bonding mechanic is ripped out of Danganronpa and doesn’t get you anything besides some extra dialog. There’s also exploration missions which have you walking around on a game board and getting movement cards to progress. At each space you get a decision that will either get you better material or hurt you. All members losing HP means you lose some of you spoils and ends your free time. Sometime these are mandatory but you can’t really fail them. Overall these segments are kinda boring. They could have added more to spice them up but the battling is the worst. It always feels like it’s bogging the pace down to fight a completely non-threatening group of enemies.
The real meat is the visual novel parts. As the gimmick might suggest there are many paths through the story with lots of decision points. Each of these opens up new routes or endings. There are approximately 10 main routes each having up to 4 different paths and many endings. Many decisions just go to a quick and pointless ending and a few routes are definitely less polished than others but the sheer depth and variety of scenarios is amazing. There are legitimately multiple games worth of content here. What’s also cool is that many of them flow pretty well and are very interesting. There’s a lot of sci-fi mystery and you glean little chunks in each route while also hints at other mysteries. It’s also satisfying to see a series of Chekov’s guns fire in succession. While not everything is a winner, at least half I found gripping wanting to advance the story just one more day to see what happens. Of course not all routes fill in all days, there’s a lot of abridging and you are given a few ways to speed the process up like skipping battles that are similar to ones you’ve already faced (sometimes they get a bit different but usually not too much). Each route roughly follows the same structure with strategy battles but many have extra gimmicks where they often block off certain characters or mechanics so there’s always a bit of variety there.
The main issues are with the amount of content recycling. While they certain do a lot with it, there’s only so many character portraits and locations. You are treated to still images as a treat (although they are awfully compressed on the Switch version) but don’t expect cut-scenes or anything purpose built for the route. Also the inconsistency between routes isn’t just down to what they are trying to do but certain little things like automatically moving to certain rooms doesn’t always happen in some routes. Also, at least at the time I played, it didn’t have a Switch 2 patch so no mouse or 60FPS like the PC version. It’s weird and unpolished like that but it really just shows the soul of the game.
What is really standout is the progression. The game does not expect you to play to get 100 endings. There is a first route which is a good 20+ hours. Even if you stopped there you’d be pretty satisfied. But you can keep going and going. Even playing another one or two routes would be a good stopping point and leaving you fulfilled. After that, you start skipping the strategy portions and try to get to the bottom of primary mysteries which requires either going through several routes or one very particular route which seems to serve as almost the baseline for the latter part of the game (and has extra flourishes especially the ending). But even then there are weird meta mysteries that require unlocking a path to the “best” ending. It just keeps building on itself in interesting ways.
The presentation is also great. There’s cut corners for sure but it bleeds style all over the place. The sounds design is also great. Of particular note is the voice acting. While not everything is voice acted many of the most important parts are and it’s really good. Joseph May’s Serei and Sarah Pitard’s Darumi are definite stand outs that tremendously elevate the characters, on the less good side is Kyoshika who doesn’t feel well cast for the archetype.
It’s not focus grouped, it is unapologetically anime (and particular these characters like Danganronpa are turned to the personality max) and it really shows it’s a work of passion. There is nothing out there even close to what it’s doing. While it still has its budget limitations (apparently it almost bankrupted Too Kyo Games games and they took out loans to fix it), it manages to avoid some of the worst pitfalls of Danganronpa while building something totally unique and extremely impressive.
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