I'll break this down into a few sections as best as I can, but I'll give a summary for those looking for a quick review. For those that played Danganronpa, if you played this game, you're going to find enjoyment here; the vibes and style are very different and you won't get the same experience of entering a class trial or anything like that, but you'll find a similar sense of humor and writing for the better and worse. As for the game itself, its pretty good. Not something to gush over, as I think the story's themes aren't quite as profound as other titles, including the last of the Danganronpa entries, V3, but still think its just solid.

Cast
The characters are all at least good, with some of them being great. Shinigami is basically Junko Enoshima done right; despite being a death god whose got a very different outlook on life and death and its sanctity than our protagonist, she manages to feel more human with those human moments being much stronger because of the said natural disconnect. She manages to carry over the funny from what that character did in that series, while also being her own unique charming character. Yuma also makes for a compelling protagonist, growing a lot as the game progresses, and most of the detective agency makes for a likeable bunch. Desuhiko is the token pervert of the group so you might not be as big on him; for me personally, he was ok, but definitely the weakest of the core group. The antagonists and suspects are all pretty strong for what they are and there really isn't a character in the game I can call outright bad, which is pretty impressive with the number of folks we meet.

Presentation
I'll be short with the music; Masafumi Takada composed it, so its pretty excellent. As for the art style, that's also pretty damn solid. Really the only problems I have from a pure presentation perspective personally are the fact that this game's stuck on a switch and you gotta play it at 30 fps. I believe data miners have already found xbox buttons in the files for the QTEs, so if you're worried about having to actually use a switch to play a game, hey, there will probably be a port within a year.

Story
The game is new, and with the game being so new, I won't go into heavy spoiler discussion as said discussion isn't as helpful when the game's not as much of a known entity as a game that's been around for a few years. As for what is there, I'll say the game has some pretty strong chapters where you're gonna find yourself very sympathetic for the culprit, and others where you'll be practically screaming murder this guy! The overall main story and main twist of this game is strictly okay. I think it grows a bit too big as far as stakes than the game needed to, but I do think it was fairly built up to aside from one detail. Now with the main story being overall okay, you do still have some pretty strong character moments and the stories in some of the individual chapters hold their own as being pretty great.

Mystery Quality/Gameplay
I'm bunching these together since the gameplay in the Mystery Labyrinths and mystery solving themselves are pretty tied together. So, to answer if labyrinth minigames are better than class trials for solving the mystery, yes, I would say so; a lot of shackles from being stuck in a high school are solved by them and despite me not feeling a similar level of tension to class trials, I do think these labyrinths and their approach to minigame design are a general improvement over the last game; they also do a good job cutting the more useless minigames. As for the mysteries themselves, I thought the mysteries for each case were pretty rock solid, save for maybe the first one. There's a few details I didn't personally like, but I didn't have any problems with the rest of them, aside from what I've gone over with the last case, though its always hard to do those flawlessly and I think for what it was worth, it was fine.

Concluding Thoughts
I don't think Rain Code is quite a game of the year, or the best story I've seen in a game. However, what Rain Code does have going for it is that it manages to be a really good game that'll manage to feel familiar to fans of Kodaka's other words like Danganronpa, while also being incredibly unique. There isn't a game with a vibe like it, and while I think it would be difficult, if Kodaka would want to revisit this occult world and write more mysteries for it, I'd be curious to see what they are.

If you enjoy character creation and giving your characters a theme to stick with and love Dragon Ball, this game is well worth it's sale price. Between the accumulation of minor issues and the most OK story ever though, it's hard to recommend it at full price with the game's age. Still, the game still gets free updates including a new raid boss and has a ton of dlc available to you if you want more. I know that wall of dlc looks intimidating but trust me when I say the base game holds up. Just don't expect a mechanically strong fighter or anything wait for the next budokai tenkaichi or get Fighterz.

For me personally, I've loved my time with the game and the game makes it fun to try build up a cosplay build even if the Dragon Drip is limiting at times. If I could give my biggest gripes to this game, it'd be being unable to change a lot of equipment color, mainly iconic ones from the series, an occasional lack of polish, and the game not giving the player that many chances for serious role playing.

The game is also kind mid visually if you don't mess around with the settings. Here's what I did at a 1080p monitor that satisfied me:
Turn off the glare and Depth of Field.
The glare doesn't really look great but is maybe fine on low, but the depth of field looks rancid and just makes the game blurry rather than actually adding a proper depth of field effect.
Next turn off fxaa and enable anti aliasing via your graphics card software. You'll probably wanna turn this off when you're not playing the game to avoid messing with other games or applications.
Lastly, this was the big one for me and makes the anti aliasing a little redundant, was enabling virtual super resolution and running the game at 4k. I did this just fine on a rx 5600 xt and it's an old game, so I wouldn't worry too much about the words 4k here if performance is a concern. This makes things look really sharp and really clean for me.

I want to give this game a higher rating, sincerely so, but there are just so many problems tied to this game that exist in previous FromSoft games that are only doubled down on here. On top of this there are numerous issues with the combat that make it a frustrating experience, particularly with many boss fights.

To start with my single player concerns, you start with incredibly low vigor regardless of the character, but luckily you're able to mend that fairly quickly if you just level up vigor for basically all of the early game. Now, for my major combat gripe, there is not a single boss in Elden Ring with maybe the smallest of exceptions that I would genuinely call fun or good; as for what my big problem is with most of them, they suffer from one of if not all of the following frustrations that make them a pain to fight against. Note that my issues are compounded by the bosses sharing these characteristics rather than being isolated to certain encounters.
1. Obnoxious roll catching moves. Its fine to have a few roll catches here and there, but my issue here is that almost all the fights in this game have some. This game especially has some very frustrating ones that look incredibly stupid, like when Godfrey holds up his hammer for god knows how long, shouting "I'm gonna do it, I'm gonna do it!" in his head. (No, he doesn't actually say that). By the end of the game you're gonna get sick of this gimmick.
2. Bosses don't give you clear openings or reasonable room to breathe. This applies to some bosses much more than others (basically stuff like beasts and what have you). It kinda ruins the pace of the combat for me and adds a lot more waiting or forces trades.
3. Bosses that just leap and zoom around the place. I don't mind this when its a horse boss, but this happens a fair few times when you're not on a horse. I don't think running across the arena to maybe get one swing in before it attacks you and runs away again is engaging gameplay.
4. This is kind of blend of everything described here, but I don't think the speed of this game works with the game's mechanics. The methodical foundation from essentially Demon's Souls just doesn't support the fast anime fights of bloodborne, especially with how often they happen. If this game had stuff like that game's life recovery mechanic maybe my feelings would be different but as is I think the enemy's are too fast for what the game provides to be satisfying combat.

Okay, that's enough shitting on the game for now, what praises can I give it?
For starters, the game's just drop dead gorgeous; it might have some of if not the best art direction from games I've played as of late, and this is not an overstatement. Just about every area in this game is beautiful, each one trying to outdo the last. The character models and character creator themselves are fine, but the armor sets (AKA, the Souls Drip) leaves a lot to be desired in my opinion. All the effects and weapon arts look pretty cool as well. All this does come at a small cost of performance in my experience, not so much in average frame rate, but for me on my RX 5600 XT and Ryzen 5 3600 in the form of what I dub Elden Buffers, short windows that generally last a second of the game's sound continuing but the image on the screen being frozen, till the Elden Buffer ends, playing out the missed time quickly before resuming the action. Your experiences may be different.

Another point I have to give is just how fun it is to explore the worlds Elden Ring provides. The vibes I get from riding my horse and visiting areas for the first time and just hopping about is unique to this series and honestly a welcome change. Its also nice to have a game where walking away from an encounter and coming back to it later and checking out other areas is reasonable. You don't really have to grind since "grinding" is just playing the game normally in different areas. The dungeons and catacombs do reuse bosses a fair amount, but I don't really mind this at all, even if I don't like the bosses in this game; if anything there's a certain charm to gaining some familiarity with foes.

The combat itself outside bosses is usually on the positive side, albeit with some caveats. When you're fighting certain fuck you enemies, like the giant hands or that one enemy that I swear belongs in bloodborne that just pounces on you relentlessly and screeches endlessly, the combat does kinda suck a little and makes me wanna close my game, but most enemies in this game I do enjoy fighting to some degree. It's also fun testing all cool incantations or sorceries you find in this game; for those on a first run, I highly recommend doing a hybrid build in this game since having a little bit of faith provides a ton of utility and a lot of cool little tricks for sticky situations while still having access to the melee combat for most encounters. The perceived weapon/build diversity is also incredibly high, though viability is another issue.

Okay, back to grievances, this time about the rune arc system. The long story short on this one is that there just isn't enough rune arcs for single player gamers. I can understand not caring to give as much since they are effectively buffs and not a way to obtain your default stats, but it is still frustrating how sparse they are in this game compared to say, Dark Souls 2, where the first NPC you meet in the game is capable of giving you 5 at once if you come back at a later time. I thought that you'd find more in later game areas, but you really don't. This would be less of a problem if the multiplayer foundations of this game were good, but that's far from the case.

If you're familiar with any of the previous Souls games, like DS3 or Bloodborne, you'll also be familiar with this game's mishandling of Co-op. The invasions in this game use a system that by default sends you into a co-op world, meaning that co-op players get invaded constantly, generally within a 15 minute loop where invasion cooldowns happen. This unfortunately discourages co-oping through entire levels online as no one wants to get invaded every 15 minutes, and would rather just want to get a boss done and over with. This also makes invaders forced to use super optimized builds since taking on 2 or 3 foes at once requires you to kill each of them quickly, reducing the capacity for build diversity in achieving success. All in all, nobody wins, and participating in this game's online kinda just sucks aside from aiding people with bosses. On that note, clearing area bosses for hosts is one of the few consistent ways of getting rune arcs, and I just failed to enjoy doing so at the rate I got summoned compare to other entries. At this point I'd rather Fromsoft do away with online or rework it completely if its just making their game dramatically worse having it.

On a final note, I think there's something very, very good in Elden Ring, plagued by Fromsoft failing to learn from previous mistakes while somehow making new ones. A part of me loves this game, but another part of me seriously loathes this game and is frustrated by the encouragement of Fromsoft's shortcomings. Its beyond me how a game this flawed got game of the year and is so universily praised.

This game would probably be 5 stars if not for the archaic mistakes that get corrected in future games, mostly, like the grinding for items and the ridiculous amount of types of stones. Luckily the game has a duping glitch to circumvent all that. Aside from one area it has really good level design, a cool art style, decent combat, and one of the more engaging narratives in the souls games, at least by the standards of the series, and some of my favorite NPCs. The poison swamp straight sucks and is possibly the worst mandatory area in the whole series.

It's pretty good if you like the standard format in a semi affordable fashion. Unfortunately even though it's more affordable than paper magic it's still kinda expensive if you don't want to grind drafts, and too much for me to play f2p since it feels like a job to keep up if you don't like the current state of magic's formats. And on that note, wotc's lack of quick management of their alchemy and historic formats despite being digital environments turned me off the game completely as I was already frustrated by the snail's pace of rebalances in standard. Also the client kinda sucks a little.