A brilliant game that's buried in a pile of predatory business practices, unreliable online services that even punish you for nothing, "do or don't" mentality when it comes to joining late, and an empty promise to deliver a game that's been in Beta for 5 years now.

I've played hundreds of hours of this, and there is something good stuck in this game. But in it's current state, this game just doesn't respect your time at all. And as far as I can tell it's only going to get worse and worse.

As for me, it's time to move on to games that value your time and don't rely on cheap "pay more to get an invaluable advantage" strategies to generate infinite revenue.

I fucking love Persona 3. But for years on end, I always avoided The Answer. Discussions online would always conclude with The Answer being nothing but just grindy, non-canon filler. An expansion not worth your time. My impressionable 14-year-old self sadly dismissed it entirely because of its reputation and moved on to other entries in the Shin Megami Tensei series. With The Answer returning to Persona 3 Reload as ($35?!) DLC, I finally decided to proceed with my belated playthrough so that I may draw fair comparisons between the original and the remake when the time comes.

It's astounding how the message of this epilogue went over so many people's heads. The Answer is such a bittersweet conclusion to my favorite game of all time and its exploration of the grief felt by the cast after the main game's ending is beautifully told, albeit the player must endure exhausting gameplay in between each impactful scene, derailing the pace a bit. Nevertheless, it's wild how many in the community misunderstood certain plot elements like Yukari's behavior or the true reasoning behind what transpired on the Promised Day. Yukari was so valid here. I don't wish to speak much about it, but I cannot figure out how The Answer mischaracterize any of its party members nor how it "ruins" the message of the main game. If anything, it elevates my feelings of the original and now I loathe myself for putting it off for so long.

Hopefully Reload's interpretation of the Answer can offer more accessibility to those put off by its increased challenge and endless dungeon crawl and its absence of the fucking compendium because seriously that choice is the only thing that really bothered me. On any note, see you in September! Maybe I'll actually jot down my thoughts about Persona 3 Reload as a whole when that time comes.

I want to preface this review by noting that there are many aspects and points of comparison that are lost on me as Reload serves as my first experience of Persona 3. I know that there’s an argument to be made about Reload not adhering to the original atmosphere and overall vision of P3 but since I’m not really familiar with how it’s “supposed” to feel, I don’t really have anything to say about that. Apart from bits and pieces here and there, I’m not aware of aspects that got lost in translation between all the different versions, I only know what I got with this particular version of Persona 3.

I’ve been wanting to experience Persona 3 for the longest time since Persona 4 Golden and Persona 5 Royal are among my favorite games of all time. There was just always the struggle of which version to play, the original and P3Fes are pretty much lost to time unless I use emulation and the only version available on modern consoles is Persona 3 Portable which offered the best version of the P3 gameplay at the time but heavily sacrificed the presentation of the game. Everything was telling me that P3P should not be the way I first experience Persona 3 so I decided to just sit and wait for an eventual remake to happen. I can’t begin to describe my excitement when Persona 3 Reload was announced as I would finally get to experience this monumental RPG that made the series what it is today.

Persona 3 Reload might not be the definitive version of Persona 3, as it lacks notable content from P3P and P3fes, but i think it’s definitely the best version to play Persona 3 in the current day. The game has a shiny new coat of paint that makes it graphically on par with Persona 5 but with a completely different design philosophy that gives it a unique, distinct identity. The presentation is absolutely stellar and the new ultra-stylish minimalistic design language modernize Persona 3 while still making it feel like P3 and not another P5.

This new aesthetic is absolutely beautiful in its simplicity and its modernity. Persona 3 Reload immediately throws it on you when it greets you with its new opening that features the best visuals of any opening in the series alongside its new song. Persona 3 Reload features a redone soundtrack, featuring remixes from the original game with new vocalist Azumi Takahashi coming in as the new lead vocalist. As someone that’s been listening to the Persona 3 soundtrack for years, this change did feel a bit jarring at first but I quickly got used to the new arrangements. Some of the new songs are stellar and instant series highlights, most notably the new night theme “Color Your Night” and the new battle theme “It’s Going Down Now”.

Persona 3 Reload brings the classic Persona battle system in its modern incarnation that was perfected in P5. You have never played a turn-based RPG like these two. The battles just flow so well and the new Shift and Theurgy mechanics borrow from the Baton Pass and Showtime mechanics from Persona 5 respectively to add a deep layer to the battle system that makes each battle feel exhilarating. This alongside the newly added character-specific All-Out-Attack splash screens make you and your team feel like absolute badasses as you decimate your way through Tartarus.

Tartarus is one thing I’m really excited to talk about. So Tartarus is the procedurally generated central dungeon of Persona 3 which you and your party tackle throughout the school year to reach the top and uncover its secret, think P5’s mementos. From an outsider listening in, Tartarus has been the topic of the biggest complaints I’ve been hearing of P3. How it’s so long and boring, and all the floors feel the same. Well I’m here to say that Tartarus in Persona 3 Reload has been absolutely great. It’s still very long but they did a good job diversifying it and shaking things up with each chunk of floors. There are just so many quality of life improvements here that ultimately make the gameplay loop of Tartarus extremely addicting. You had to beg me to stay out of Tartarus.

If you’re familiar with Persona, you know that the gameplay loop doesn’t only revolve around the dungeon crawling. There’s also a complete life sim waiting for you outside those dungeons where you get to live out a calendar-based school year getting part-time jobs, building your social relationships, and keeping up with your studies. I want to give credit where credit is due, this game did this iconic gameplay loop first and it has since become a staple of the series. it is an ambitious and revolutionary concept to seamlessly blend those two types of gameplay into one game and have it be as cohesive as it is, especially when it’s their first attempt with this concept!

There is a lot to do during the day but it doesn’t get overwhelming as it sometimes does with Persona 5 as the settings are a lot different between the two. P5’s hustling and bustling city was perfectly fit for the infinite amount of things you can do in that game while P3’s seaside town is a lot simpler both in terms of things to do and in its overall vibe much more similar to the setting of P4. This made the game have a much more chill and easy going feeling to it. The town just eases you into living in it and its small landmarks are instantly memorable so you won’t find yourself getting lost a lot. This makes Persona 3 Reload an excellent entry point to the modern Persona entries as it allows the player to learn the ropes with a lot less going on.

Social Links, or Confidants for those only familiar with P5, are my personal favorite aspect of the modern Persona games. During your day-to-day life, you’ll come across interesting people all throughout that you can hang out with and befriend. Doing so will have you cultivate a relationship with them that would directly benefit you in the dungeon-crawling side of the game. These were always my favorite parts as I’d get to hear the interesting stories of these people, help them with their problems, or share a good laugh over a bowl of ramen. These stories always feel like the heart of the games for me, each one pushing the theme of its respective game.

Since Persona 3 introduced the concept of Social Links, I’m not surprised that they’re pretty hit or miss in terms of quality. It’s clear that they were still figuring out how to handle that aspect and I appreciate Reload for preserving them flaws and all. The lows are pretty low but the highs are fantastic. I’m taking some of the best Social Links in the series are in this game with one of them turning out to be my absolute favorite from how raw and gripping the real-life consequences that character was going through. My absolute favorite thing about Persona 3 Reload that makes me struggle from going back is the fact they decided to have all the Social Links be fully voiced. This made me connect to these characters on a much different level and I really hope it becomes a standard moving forward.

Speaking of voices, once again Atlus remains top dog in English dubs. I know this is a topic of contention as the entire original Persona 3 voice cast got recast but coming in blind, these performances are all fantastic across the board. I haven’t heard any of these characters speak before but they all sounded exactly how I expected them to and delivered phenomenal performances across the board. I did think that one member of the main cast was a bit inconsistent with their performance but it didn’t stop me from falling in love with their character. Special shoutouts to: Aleks Lee, Zeno Robinson, Alejandro Saab, Allegra Clark, Dawn M. Bennet, Lucien Dodge, and mostly Shelby Young for breathing so much life into these characters and tugging at my heartstrings.

The main cast of characters have always been a highlight of the Persona games. I think they are the most important aspect of these games as these are the people you’ll be spending hundreds of hours with. P4 and P5’s casts genuinely feel like my best friends with the amount of memories I have with them and the level of attachment I have. I’m so pleased to say that P3’s cast is freaking phenomenal. This group definitely has my favorite dynamic out of the three modern Personas and include the most interesting relationships.

Going in with the expectations I had from P4 and P5 had me really shocked at the type of dynamic the P3 cast has. Some members have shared history, some just don’t vibe with each other, and you’re not the center of the group. While the P4 and P5 casts would rely on you as an active agent, P3’s casts all have their own agency. They have their own friends, plans, and motivations. Hell, they won’t accompany you on missions if they don’t feel like it. Aspects like that ground the cast and make you see them like real people because yeah my real-world friends are not always free for me, or they won’t always get along with my other friends. I only finished the game last night and I already miss them like crazy.

I look at the stories of Persona 4 and Persona 5 as stories that shaped me as a person. With both having messages and teaching me lessons I can immediately realize have impacted my life after playing through them. Persona stories are really really impactful and Persona 3 is no different. The story delivers such a powerful message and life lesson that really makes me feel like I’m going to tackle my life a lot differently moving forward. This especially becomes stronger when the game has one of the most cathartic and poignant endings that left me with a powerful final aftertaste.

I do have to say that the biggest gripe I have with Persona 3 is in its plot. While the story is fantastic, the plot and its pacing leaves a lot to be desired. The first half of the game feels pretty aimless to be honest. There really wasn’t anything going on in the main story until I reached the 40th hour which would be inexcusable if the gameplay loop wasn’t so fun. It felt like P4 and P5 had immediate hooks to keep playing the games that is definitely missing with P3. The back-half is outstanding but I really feel like it takes a tad too long for things to get going. These games are pretty freaking long and there really aren’t moments in P4 and P5 where absolutely nothing is happening but P3 feels like it has a huge chunk of that.

Overall, Persona 3 Reload is a phenomenal game with a strong visual identity, fantastic soundtrack, streamlined and addicting gameplay, top of the line voice acting, stellar characters, and a powerful story that will for sure leave a lasting impact. While it might not be the definitive release of the monumental RPG, it sure feels like the best way to experience it as of now.

I can only describe this game as lovingly opulent. L.A. Noire is overstuffed and buckles under its own ambition, but also shows focus and restraint uncommon for productions of this scope. It gives so much, and unlike other games that feel incomplete, I have the inkling that with enough time, they might have been able to pull everything off.

L.A. Noire is a detective game centered around reading faces as a game mechanic. The models may not have aged gracefully, but the mo-cap, acting, and animation are spectacular. The phrase “no small parts, only small actors” fully applies, and made me realize again how few games, (even in the modern age!), are even trying. Secretaries and post men delivered their single lines with such authenticity, personality, and impact as to continually blindside me in the way only interacting with the public can. These were not performances of comfortable and familiar acting styles, but recreations of people I’ve met in real life. Vocal inflections at once familiar when spoken, but so mundane as to have never been remembered or imagined. Gestures and glances so natural and specific the TV felt like a one-way mirror. If the only means of gameplay in L.A. Noire had been multiple choice selections during detective interviews, the quality of acting would have been worth the price of admission alone. But for L.A. Noire, that’s only the foundation.

I absolutely adored the first desk of cases after finishing the tutorial sequence. So rarely has a game so consistently dropped my jaw open with excitement and possibility. There was a real tension in realizing how I would have to un-learn so many habits from playing other games with different goals to succeed in this one. As a human who wants to be a good person, in games I’m inclined to pick pleasant dialog options when talking to NPCs. In L.A. Noire, sometimes in order to get good information from good people, you have to press them in a way that makes everyone uncomfortable. And sometimes you have to put on a polite face when dealing with assholes. L.A. Noire wanted me to navigate human motivations to arrive at the truth at the expense of decorum, and its dedication to this perspective impressed me.

But equally impressive was the immense flexibility the game had for my spectacular miscalculations and failures. In an early case, I missed the murder weapon, a gun that had been thrown out in a garbage can right next to where I assumed control of the detective, and the game still let me progress through the entire case without ever having to go back and find it! In another, I missed so much evidence that the motivation of the perpetrator made no sense. Playing through the case again with a guide, I learned not only was he reacting to another man’s unwanted sexual advances, but the dialog of other characters describing the situation had been just subtle enough to work with or without that subtext.

Here is where I explain why L.A. Noire is bounteous while being restrained. As a detective, you look for evidence in 3D spaces. You drive around. There are tailing missions. You chase after suspects, up ladders and across rooftops, in encounters that can end with a first fight or a shoot-out. You break up illegal street races and run from the mafia. And you can skip absolutely all of it, without even affecting your score! The only thing the game cares about, and forces you to do yourself, is collect evidence, conduct interviews, and press charges. Everything else is treated as set dressing.

Which blows my mind, because the level of detail is astounding. There are a half dozen guns with different rates of fire, clip sizes, and accuracy ranges. There are 95 models of cars, each of which control differently, with different top speeds and turning radii. Each where you can shoot out individual headlights. Each of which you can crash spectacularly. Multiple times did I get in a wreck, only to step out and watch an individual car tire roll down a city block or two. Buildings took an astounding variety of cosmetic damage depending on how hard cars crashed into them. It was all so consistent it was difficult to notice, because the moment to moment action flowed so naturally.

All of this effort, and you can choose to have your partner detective drive you everywhere automatically!

If there is one element of the game that brings down the mood, it is the game’s overarching plot. Early cases have a light and fun “case of the day” type feel that makes it easy to replay for the joy of detective work. Later cases delve more into the player character’s personal life and drama, which become interconnected and less fun. It is obvious not as much time was available to develop the space and pacing necessary for the later developments to feel natural. (And the tone becomes more self-serious and somber, which disappointed me after the domestic absurdity of the opening.) I respect the ambition, and the foundations of what I can see on paper look solid. In execution, Cole Phelp's story rips the focus away from the game’s strengths as an adventure game, as player choice can no longer matter as it did when the stakes were lower.

In my rating system, 2 stars represents an average, C rank game, and L.A. Noire is definitely an A+ rank game. It’s so generous, so conscientious, so luxurious, so extra that I heartily recommend it even with its obvious flaws. For how rich and rewarding replaying cases can be, it is an absolute war crime that the console version of this game does not have a “skip cutscene” button. The convoluted saving system can make it difficult to drop in and out of a case within a single session, but most are doable within a movie length amount of time.

More subjectively, there are some elements that I could see turning someone away. I would have been perfectly happy if the entire game had taken place on the Traffic desk, catching fraudsters and tracking down stolen cars. Unfortunately, a good portion of the game is with Homicide and Arson cases. Depending on one’s squeamishness level, you do see dead bodies, awful wounds, and burnt corpses. There is more than one naked dead woman in this game, and the callousness of the depiction walked the line between feeling realistic or tasteless.

While the player character Cole Phelps is framed as better matching the sensibilities of the modern player, the culture of the time has been uncomfortably recreated with period-accurate flavors of misogyny and racism. On the one hand, I understand the desire to depict the reality of the city in a vibrant and believable way, while on the other, I wish the game could have fudged in the favor of a fun time.

Overall, excellent, fantastic, the best open world game of all time, because it lets you opt out of playing an open world game at any moment.

For many reasons, playing this game consistently gave me a headache. One of those headaches got so bad I vomited. Ultra Despair Girls gets the honor of being the first game to make me physically sick.

In my rating system, I reserve .5 stars for predatory, unplayable, or evil games, and in Ultra Despair Girls' case, I'm confident arguing it is a form of evil. (There's a lot I want to blast it for first, but I'll get there!) Even if you're a fan of the typical Danganronpa visual novels, stay the hell away from this. Not only do you have to play two games to understand what's happening in Ultra Despair Girls, playing Ultra Despair Girls will, at most, let you better understand like 2 episodes of the anime Danganronpa 3: The End of Hope's Peak High School - Despair Arc for 1 character that ends up having zero plot relevance before they literally fuck off to outer space. That is not a joke. I cannot overstate how much this game is not worth it.

Wow, just thinking about this game again to write this review makes me nauseous! So let's get into it.

This collection of headache inducing factors masquerading as entertainment can be split into the game's presentation and the game's story content. Ultra Despair Girls is the series' first with 3D gameplay, after previous entries were primarily visual novels. Transitioning genres to 3rd person shooter caused a lot of friction. Development shortcuts are obvious and plentiful, and the team’s intuition for the needs of the new genre is painfully off. But surprise, Ultra Despair Girls is still almost as much a visual novel as the mainline Danganronpa games, and all the gameplay sections are literally filler until more cutscenes can happen.

If you skip all the cutscenes and look at the game's bones, it is a cheap, functional 3rd-person shooter. You'll be asked to trek through the same environments forwards and backwards with slightly different paths blocked or opened, each one a decorated hallway. There are only a handful of enemy types with a handful of ammo types meant to counter them, with puzzles littered throughout the level requiring some light thinking if you want a higher score. otherwise you can progress by blasting everything anyway

Coming from a series known for loud, garish colors, Ultra Despair Girls goes for broke. Where before coloration functioned to keep interest in a visual novel that required hours of reading, the same assault of neon, acidic tones is hard to look at in a 3D environment. Environments have no atmospheric effects and little to no dynamic lighting - the game feels like an HD release of an early PS2 game with bad art direction. The plainly implemented camera wildly shifts whenever you ready your weapon, made even worse if you turn on the unpredictable auto-aiming feature. Maybe you won’t get dizzy as the camera whips around harshly colored environments at disorienting speeds, maybe you won’t get turned around in same-y looking environments when surrounded by copy-pasted enemies. But I did, and I had a real bad time!

Did I mention the game is boring to play? Did I mention the game is slow? That you'll be holding down the run button almost the entire time, often wondering if it even made a difference? That combat is so easy you'll forget it's possible to die until you walk into a pit and get an instant Game Over? That some of the puzzles are glitched and won’t consistently give you credit for solving them? That the game even failed to load cutscenes a couple times and forced me to restart my whole system?

And let me tell you, the story parts of the game are FAR worse.

Make no mistake, the writing in Danganronpa has always been bad. The premise is crass, the characters are distillations of Hot Anime Nonsense, and surprising or shocking the player is valued over logical consistency. But the ways in which the Danganronpa games are bad is at least balanced around being engaging, schlocky fun. Ultra Despair Girls completely fails its handling of its characters and subject matter in ways both bone headed and insulting - and the Hot Anime Nonsense is cranked up to toxic levels.

Here's the game’s premise: a group of genius grade schoolers have taken control of an army of murder robots to brainwash every child on an island. They then use these robots and brainwashed children to mass murder all the adults on the island.

Let me establish here: this premise is very dumb. Leaning into the dumbness, I could see some room for jokes. But Ultra Despair Girls plays this concept completely straight. The aggressors are ruthlessly efficient at their goal, and the adults are massacred. But before I tear into the story, I’d like to touch on a side-effect of this setting that makes the game harder to play.

In the Danganronpa franchise, blood is stylized to be flaming hot pink. This is because the mainline Danganronpa games are about teenagers murdering each other, so a level of abstraction stops the tone from getting too heavy. Ultra Despair Girls keeps this abstraction while building upon it, making every NPC's model washed out in bright electric blue so the developers can copy-paste the same two models infinitely without you noticing right away.

Why this matters for gameplay: every level is littered with corpses. You'll find mounds of corpses in the middle of the street. Corpses nailed unevenly to walls. Lone corpses slumped in chairs. With hot pink blood splashes on every surface, and unshaded blue blobs peppering every locale, the already same-y and forgettable level geometry becomes even more incomprehensible. Landmarks become invisible once overshadowed by the same scenarios of copied corpses as you’ve been seeing the whole game. For how simple the levels are constructed, it is astounding to reflect back on how often I had to open the map.

Within this prevalence of corpses does the tainted soul of Ultra Despair Girls start to emerge. Because it is a choice to show all these corpses. Not every game with disaster stricken cities shows the human devastation. But the murder robots and the children didn't just kill all the adults - the brainwashed children are also playing with the corpses.

Children will be gathered around corpses, poking them with sticks, encircling them with dances and games, singing in makeshift choirs. And not just the same copy and pasted scenarios over and over, (even though you will see the same kid Fornite taunting atop a car near a dozen times (random family members still beneath the tires, random kids gathered to watch)). There are hand-placed corpses everywhere. Someone whose leg got hurt, and limped behind some furniture before they bled out. Someone who was running and was slashed in the back while they tried to escape. Throats slashed while seated at an outdoor patio, children pilfering their drinks

There is a commitment to this concept that baffles me. Gameplay wise, it is wholly unnecessary. You only shoot at the robots, not the children. Even boss fights against the genius elementary students have you shoot at their remote controlled mechs. But this commitment is not limited to the level’s set dressing - the pointless collectables strewn throughout the levels include dozens of awful notes from children and adults how they want to kill each other. All collectables look the same until obtained, so you have no idea ahead of time if you are picking up a health upgrade, or four pages of text graphically detailing a plan to feed a human their dismembered limbs. You can nearly taste the self-conscious shame of either the original writer or the translator (or both) in trying to sell this garbage.

So our premise is played straight, but the intention is crashing against the presentation. The visuals are too goofy to work as horror, but the content is too gross to be glossed over. And it is in this failing juxtaposition that we introduce the secret ingredient that takes this project from merely “bad art” to “morally irresponsible”: Hot. Anime. Nonsense.

Hot Anime Nonsense is a collection of cliches and character archetypes that metastasized from decades of anime creators basing their characters off of other anime characters instead of their own imaginations or human experiences. It's a form of repetition that transcends shorthand to become prescription. With Ultra Despair Girls, Danganronpa forgos any glimmer of originality to use anime character cliches exclusively in the most rote, lifeless, plot-first writing possible.

The two playable main characters consist of an upbeat “average” (idiot) girl and mean tsundere girl. (A tsundere is an English anime word stolen from Japanese that means “is a bitch to everyone so you might feel something when they are nice to the main character once in the final episode.” (you will not.)) Upbeat average girl has, at the time of the story’s beginning, been kept imprisoned in isolation for a year and a half. If you thought her time being imprisoned would change her character, give her nuance, or be at all plot relevant, you would be wrong. She was peppy going in, and just as optimistic coming out. Mean tsundere girl is a stalker and has a split personality with a man-hating serial killer. This has nothing to do with her being a mean tsundere stalker girl.

Every interaction between the two follows this script. Average girl says something nice to tsundere girl. Tsundere girl says something mean to average girl. Average girl is hurt and / or misunderstands what tsundere girl said to think maybe tsundere girl is being nice. Regardless, tsundere girl says something mean again. This formula is repeated for every collectible they have a discussion about. This formula is repeated in every cutscene. It does not change for the entire game. It happens this way because the “chemistry” between an “average” girl and a “tsundere” girl is supposed to be comedic. Not by the will of this game’s developers, but by the definitions of how these cliches interact with each other. I don’t know in what anime this dynamic ever worked, but it has been lost to time. All that remains is this formula, hollow and pointless, and woefully inappropriate for this game.

Because unless you couldn’t tell, there is nothing funny happening in this story. There is no room for jokes. Kids are being brainwashed! The kids have killed their parents! The city’s on fire! Our main characters kind of hate each other! The villains are children, being sold lies from super villains! The neutral side characters are billionaire war profiteers! But every single character follows an anime trope to a tee, and interacts with every other anime trope with dialog written in strict adherence to the anime trope’s unwritten rules. The problem is, several of these tropes are meant to be comedic, either alone or in tandem, and nothing is done to adapt to the story being told.

This slavish trope adherence crystalized for me when I reached the backstory of one of the genius elementary students, a pink-haired loli. (A loli is an English anime word stolen from Japanese (stolen from English) that refers to a pre-teen girl the work invites you to think about sexually. The pink-haired variant is loud, shrill, impetuous, manipulative, and self-infantilizing.) In an effort to bolster her daughter’s acting career, loli’s mother sold both the loli and herself into prostitution to the producers of the industry. Loli is triggered by her multiple experiences with rape any time she hears the word “gentle,” as her father promised all clients would be “gentle” with her.

The instant her flashback is over, the duration of which she has been having an obvious PTSD episode, she takes a cartoonish tumble and falls on her face, camera pointed directly at her exposed polka-dotted panties.

I reeled so hard I had to put down the controller for a moment. Was this game so unaware of what it had done? That it had just invited me to share a mindspace with a child rapist? To demean a child sex-trafficing victim? In service of - a “comedic” panty shot? Because that was the kind of “joke” associated with pink-haired lolis? Was this “joke” preordained the moment they selected the pink-haired loli archetype, irrevocable regardless of the backstory they gave her?

Because she popped right back up and reacted with a taunt, teasing the main character for feeling flustered for seeing her panties. This is not how any human behaves. This is not how the character just described to us would behave. This is how the pink-haired loli archetype behaves. After being abstracted to this degree, all of this behavior becomes pointless on its own, and only given meaning via context. And in thoughtlessly being applied to this scenario, the context makes the representation reckless, vulgar, irresponsible, evil.

It is evil because it establishes the existence of real evils that exist in the real world as also existing in this fictional world, and does not keep the viewer on the correct side of the scenario. It is evil because this invitation is done involuntarily, without pretext, without commentary, without purpose. It is evil because it is ignorant of its own nature. It is evil because it is pointless.

Ultra Despair Girls is evil because it utterly fails its responsibility to give meaning to the atrocities it invents.

The cruelest joke of the whole game is, average girl is not allowed to become a hero within this game. Because her brother is the virtuous modest everyman trope from the first Danganronpa game. By the rules of Hot Anime Nonsense, no one else in this fictional world can be like him, because the writers can’t handle two virtuous characters at once. It would ruin their template for how characters talk to each other. So after the events of the end of this game, average girl has to remain an average girl.

Spoilers, if you somehow still want to suffer through this game yourself. There is no resolution. There is no moralizing. There is a continuation of the status quo, which I need remind you, is the adults are dead, the island is cut-off from the world, and thousands of children are being brainwashed as hostages. Why was this done? Because of reasons dreamed up by characters in other games that are never revealed. How does this get resolved? The brainwashed children, the trapped survivors, the main character’s separation from her family? None of this is resolved in any other game or anime adaptation.

Ultra Despair Girls is grotesque misery porn. It is the bone-headed utilization of shocking imagery in absurd scenarios for ends so oblivious, so shallow as to be nothing besides window dressing. It fails to understand that depictions of child abuse, rape, torture, dismemberment, and familicide tend to make real people, like the ones playing this game, uncomfortable when done senselessly. Ultra Despair Girls shows these topics, and more, artlessly, passionlessly, in ways that are both boring and offensive. I hold this game in the utmost contempt and pity every hard working developer who contributed to a project that objectively made the world a little worse off.

the writing in this game is just

"WOAH THERE MR. BADASS MCSWAGOTRON! HOW YA DOIN WITH THAT BITCHIN NEW MISSION EH????? HOW BOUT THOSE SEXY NEW GUNS?????? AHAHA ANYWAYS MY WIFE LEFT ME BUT THATS BESIDES THE POINT, WE GOTTA GO KILL THAT ULTRA BONER NAMED HANDSOME JACK! ANYWAYS, I GOTTA GO, MY MICROWAVED BURRITOS ARE DONE! FUCK EM UP MR. AWESOMESAUCE!"


hire me randy and then treat me like shit