This game is uh...definitely something.

When this game was first announced, I was decently excited. A new Danganronpa game? And it's based on that cute gamemode from V3 that would have been amazing if it was fleshed out a little more? Awesome! Sign me up!

Unfortunately, this just isn't the case. If anything, this is a less fleshed out version of the V3 minigame, somehow.

In the V3 minigame, the game attempts to emulate the feeling of balancing school life with work, social life, and individual goals; and I think it accomplishes this pretty well. Since you have a deadline to make it to the end of the board before a time limit, it really feels like you're trying to finish the semester while also trying to hang out with your friends and levelling yourself up. It ended up feeling like a pretty light life management fanservice sim, and felt decent as an extra mode in a fully decked out game.

But Danganronpa S? It doesn't even come close to this. Instead of trying to finish the semester, you're tasked with running around Jabberwock Island from Danganronpa 2, fighting Monobeasts, and developing your hope fragments, just like in Danganronpa 2. As far as I can tell however, you'll end up developing your hope fragments no matter what you do, and defeating all the Monobeasts ends up being an optional objective, not something you're expected to do, at least not in early game. This was far less engaging to me then the school system presented in V3. Plus, since my goal was to defeat enemies, I spent most of my time trying to level up my character and buying items, rather than talking with the characters, which is supposed to be the main draw of this title. These interactions were fun for the most part, but always felt incomplete to me personally.

And, just like with V3, you're expected to grind your characters in this mode to fight in a separate mode. In V3, this mode was a JRPG dungeon that had a narrative purpose and felt like a sequel to the school life you just finished. But in this game, that separate mode is a simple VS mode where you battle random monokuma enemies with no narrative incentive at all. There are 100 levels in total, each level has three goals, if you finish all three goals you're rewarded with tokens that you can use for the gacha. Once I played this mode, I came to the unfortunate conclusion that this was a free to play mobile game put on the switch. Except unlike other free to play mobile games put on the switch, this game launched on the switch first.

The gacha itself is also frustrating. The game only gives you five characters to start off with, and when you do a 10 pull, you'll end up getting more cards and items than characters to play as, severely limiting what you can do with the game early on. Which I guess is a staple of mobile game gacha, but since I paid for this game, I'm not at all pleased with this.

I only played up to level 5 in the versus mode, and only levelled up about six characters before giving up. I might pick this game up in the future, just to run around and watch the interactions between the characters, but ultimately, I have no intend on ever finishing this game or even getting very far in it. For what should have been a cute little fanservice game, Danganronpa S asks far too much of its player, hoping this will be your next gacha game that you burn dozens to hundreds of hours in, and it just simply isn't worth it. Get V3, finish the story, and play through that game's side mode instead.

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.

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.

because of the sheer lack of true content and even lack of effort in the art/gameplay area, as well as it being just gacha danganronpa mario party, i can't really give it more than a 7/10. however the interactions are for the most part very charming and a good number of them are extremely awesome, either in a comedy sense or a characterization one. i'm not finished yet as of writing this review but i'd say i've seen 90% of the character events.

i've been a danganronpa fan since 2014 and this is the first new piece of content the series has gotten since V3 came out nearly 5 years ago. to put that in perspective, in the 5 years before V3 came out, you had SDR2, UDG, the DR3 anime, the official anime adaptation of DR1, multiple stage plays, multiple light novels, etc etc. From January 2017 to this past November, we've basically had none. And for that, I'm highly thankful for this game. I'm so glad to see my favorite characters again. I'm not sure when's the next time we're going to get anything new from the series, but I know I'll be here and waiting.

Kodaka was right, Danganronpa V3- and by extension, Danganronpa in general, has no end. Because the story lives on inside us even if you've technically "finished" it. That's why I don't think this series will truly die, even if nothing else is made for it. I feel like it's spike in popularity internationally before DRS was even announced is good proof of this.

It's pretty much Mario Party Advance but with Danganronpa characters.
Go around a board, pick up stats to make your character better and eventually beat a boss to unlock the next island. You can tell it was a side mode previously because of how basic it is and the lack of any new voice acting but the gameplay loop is pretty fun...... it just lacks a compelling reason to keep coming back. Like the events are nice, it's cool seeing the different casts of characters interact but it's not enough to put a lot of time into.

The most annoying thing is that outside of the initial starting cast of protagonists, everyone else is unlocked through grinding for coins for a gacha machine and that is awful. Like a random chance to get a character I want to play with? Nah, not fun and the fact you can pay real money as well for this as well makes it even worse.

Ultimately this is a cheap cash in on the anniversary that works as a nice bonus game for buying the trilogy on Switch otherwise it isn't worth checking out on its own

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.