I played this for about two hours, I was fairly impressed by the character interactions and I thought the core gameplay was fun albeit the RPG elements were underwhelming. Unfortunately after the first playthrough I found out that the game has an egregiously repetitive gameplay loop where you must play as the same characters repeatedly in order to unlock the rest, but only five of them are unlocked from the start. In addition getting the characters you want is done through a gatcha mechanic where you can spend coins to get cards for characters you want, or spend real world money to get a better chance of the characters you want. When doing a second playthrough of the game I found the same events would repeat and ultimately the gameplay loop just wasn't a good system for me. I'm very disappointed with how the game turned out, although I will give it a few points for letting me spend more time with one of my favorite characters from the series and giving them more development which was nice. All-in-all I don't think I'd recommend this one unless you want some mileage out of a couple character interactions.

Even though this is an expanded version of DRV3 extra modes, it is way worse.

The rpg/tower mode was much more fun in DRV3, here it feels like grinding wave after wave of enemies, just to get resources and complete the game without any fun at all.
The gameplay loop of the board game gets boring pretty fast after a few runs.

Nice gimmick as a shorter extra mode, but it doesn't stand as a game on its own. Pretty sure I won't be finishing this.

This is a mixed bag if I've ever seen one. This game sounded like a no-brainer for an anniversary title. However, corporate greed has a tendency to muck up whatever it gets mixed up in, and it definitely hit this title hard.

There's a general lack of polish in this game, if I'm being honest. It's as if they cobbled together as many reused assets as they possibly could, without a care in the world. One quirk of this is the sound mixing. Voice clips borrowed from Ultra Despair Girls are significantly louder than all other sound in the game. They didn't even get Monokuma's English voice actor to do the title call (one voice clip!!!), they just used the Japanese clip. A lot of stuff feels like it's at a lower resolution than it should be, like the text or 8-bit styled events. All the backgrounds are completely static. The UI feels like it was designed for a mobile touchscreen device, which may not be too far off because...

They really fucked up the character selection by locking it behind shitty gacha mechanics. There's a bunch of shit I'd rather not be rolling for mixed in with the character pools, like presents or hype cards. They had to scum one step beyond though, because you can spend real money to unlock any character of your choosing at maximum rarity. Microtransactions and gacha in a game I already paid for can go to hell.

Corporate bullshit aside, I'm happy to say that this game does still serve its purpose as an anniversary title well. The 3D board of Jabberwock Island makes for a great stage for a board game. It's an expanded version of DRV3's "Ultimate Talent Development Plan" minigame, which was already addicting in its own right. All the new character interactions are a wonderful experience for those familiar with the characters. The familiar music from Hifumi Takada will always make for a nice backdrop to the game.

Overall, I can only recommend this to Danganronpa fans. Even then, I would personally warn you to approach with caution, and to not engage with the microtransactions. It's an alright Danganronpa fanservice fest dragged down by some dogshit.

So in case it wasn't obvious, the game is a massive cashgrab.

Disclaimer: While I didn't clear the "story" (develop 50 characters, very easy and boring), I did complete Floor 200 of the Tower of Despair which is good enough for me to count it beat since that's way harder.

It rehashes the Talent Development Plan minigame from V3 and the other part (but without the dungeons) so there's a metric fuckton of grinding, moreso than any other game this decade. (how fitting it's DR's 10th anniversarry game, but now this is more grindy than DR1's bonus modes too) grinding for cards, grinding for craft items, grinding grinding grinding. And then you'll have to rebuild characters you've already built. Horrible!

The character interactions are fun, the only redeeming factor (even if the annoying nuisance characters like Tenko are still annoying nuisances) and most importantly Tsumugi is in it. I got her WR but not her U so I can't even see all her scenes, which fills me with despair, but I like Tsumugi a lot so that's why the game has 1.5 stars rather than 1.

Danganronpa S features no real story content aside from the basic premise of a peaceful alternate universe where no killing games ever took place and every main character from the series went to Hope's Peak together and became friends. Danganronpa S takes place durning the summer break before everyone's graduation and as a celebration they use the virtual reality program of Jabberwock island to have a party and cultivate their ultimate talents more before leaving Hope's Peak.

Danganronpa S is an expanded version of the Ultimate Talent Development Plan mini-game from Danganronpa V3. Now featuring 60 characters (Including some from Ultra Despair Girls which didn't make an appearance in the original mini-game), new sprite designs of all the characters in beach attire, new CGs, new encounters and over 1000 different character events making Danganronpa S the definitive way to experience the UTDP.

Danganronpa S is made only for the most die-hard fans of the series, this is a pure fan-service game and unless you care about seeing your favorite characters get to interact with each other in much more wholesome ways that they never got a chance to before, the game offers very little else aside from an addictive, seemingly endless, cylindrical grindy gameplay loop of developing characters in the board game mode, fighting enemies and completing missions in the turn-based dungeon crawler battle tower mode while farming for materials to make better equipment for your characters and Monocoins to unlock new, stronger characters and upgrades from the gatcha machines (You can pay real money as well, but there's no reason to when everything is unlockable through just playing the game) to go back and develop them through the board game mode and then just rinse and repeat. So if all that grinding doesn't sound enjoyable to you it's probably best to stay away and just look up the character events on YouTube, but If you loved the UTDP mini-game from V3 enough to put hours upon hours into it like I did than this is the game for you.

If you have brain damage like me and soypoint when you see certain DR characters and want to see more of their interactions it's worth getting, but otherwise it's fairly barebones since it's basically just a slightly expanded version of the board game from V3.

Spike Chunsoft has said they're interested in doing more DR spinoffs and I hope whatever ones we get after this are more proper "full games"- I like DR:S and even I would be disappointed if all the new spinoffs they made were on this tier.

tl;dr danganronpa fighting game when

It's kind of fun, but it's gonna get old quickly. I thought the fact that they remade Jabberwock Island into a board game was very cool and I loved their attention to detail in that regard. Was very satisfying for a first time playthrough of just exploring all the islands and seeing the different set pieces brought to life.

And now for the problems. Seeing the various character interactions is nice, but not getting the voice actors back because they didn't want to pay them is a bummer. Using Mukuro's Junko sprite is EXTREMELY lazy and a huge letdown as someone who's a fan of Mukuro. The battle system is extremely barebones and not fun. If you've ever played a decent turn based RPG, let alone something like Persona or Trails, this combat system will completely bore you to tears. The VS Battle mode is not only boring as fuck but also unclear in its difficulty scaling. You're pretty much forced to grind the Development mode a ton of times to get the bonus EXP/money upgrades every 10 characters, which is tedious and boring especially when you are forced to develop characters that you don't like or don't care about because that's what you received from the gacha system. RNG elements in the Development mode can also be frustrating, there is a good amount of legitimate strategy to be crafted when it comes to maximizing your time effectively, which I do enjoy, but a lot of it comes down to the RNG of whether you will get a surgery or not, random Destination jumps, randomly getting your life savings stolen by the Monokubs, etc... which can get frustrating when you're trying to make a good card, especially if you invested presents into the run. Getting all 5 Grimoires and beating all the Monobeasts is actually a welcome challenge and adds replay value at the beginning particularly when you don't have the resources to work with. However I can imagine that once you get to 20, 30, etc. cards (I'm currently around 15) developed it probably gets laughably easy to do that which removes the challenge aspect altogether. There's a secret boss found by getting a password from Nezumi Castle and then using it at the Ruins (clever, I like that attention to detail) but other than that it will get stale and repetitive quickly once you find yourself able to get all the Grimoires and beat all the Monobeasts consistently.

Also, it has to be mentioned, the fact that you can just pay for Ultra Rare cards is so god damn lame, and a sad attempt at a cash grab. This game should have literally been free to play if they were going to implement that and make getting good cards naturally such a pain in the ass. V3's system where you could at least limit it to 1 particular game that you want cards from was a lot easier to work with, not to mention avoiding these trash "Hype Cards" and presents from the machines altogether.

All in all, the game has a TON of flaws, but is a nice little distraction that should keep you interested for 10-20 hours if you're a fan of the series. For $20, not the worst thing in the world, but this actually had a ton of wasted potential. If only they actually put effort into making it a good/fun game instead of just re-using the systems from V3's postgame while slightly altering it for money making purposes.

EDIT 2 years later: I've actually gotten surprisingly more mileage out of this game, whether traveling or just being bored and wanting a Danganronpa fix, that I'm actually bumping up my rating half a star. It's kind of a guilty pleasure