Man, I love the magic of the arcade where you just stumble on something, put in a quarter, and find a new favorite. House of the Dead EX is House of the Dead meets Wario Ware meets No More Heroes and that combo is made all the more infectious by that "THANK YOU, WAIT, FUCK YOU" feeling you get cooperating AND rivaling a buddy on the opposite gun, mowing down each mini game. Plus that garish artstyle and manga styled transitions, chef's kiss. Part of me wished this was ported so I could buy it and play it over and over, but it's the sort of lightning-in-a-bottle arcade game that's mostly special because I'll only stumble upon it randomly and make it so far here and there.

I played a lot of Castlevania inspired indie games that just wouldn't click with me--and playing a real fuckin Castlevania made me realize that the hyper specific situations made by the game's eclectic line up of weapons and interesting enemies is what makes Castlevania one of a kind in the first place. Macabre, badass atmosphere and super interesting level design for the SNES era (MODE SEVEN CASTLE CYLLINDAR) are compounded by some of my favorite boss fights ever. I'm admittedly kind of a yo yo and not afraid to use save states on games like these, but this is truly the kind of game where any number of brute force retries won't help you if you don't grasp the boss characters' patterns and specific weaknesses. Presicely what I wanted this era's update of Castlevania to be.

As someone who played and loved all three Danganronpa games at the height of their popularity five or so years ago, I thought this was a serious bummer--an exhausting follow up that insists upon itself far too much to be any good. DR has aged badly in some regards but I'd still consider 2 one of my favorite games ever, and this is a pale husk.

What made investigating bearable in Danganronpa was you weren't just pointing and clicking suspicious objects--you were learning about an extended cast of characters. You learned about the rules of the characters, how they operate, and how that narrows down the culprit. In this one, the second murder case doesn't even bestow you to learn the names of the suspects you're scrutinizing. The characters you need to distinguish to solve the mystery are always introduced in the same chapter they're put to trial, meaning you have nowhere near as much time to develop stakes, I don't really give a shit if these characters die. They're not a perverted invenor I'm weirdly endeared to.

For that matter, the narrative element of the Mystery Labyrinth does this matter no favors. In a literal sense, you aren't debating the actual characters and chipping away at their facade to a satisfying conclusion, you're arguing with their phantom in an alternate fuck all dimension. It's nowhere near as satisfying to deliver that comuppance to a guilty killer when there's so much separating you.

The jump to 3D the characters take is incredibly tacky. Instead of the expressive art of Danganronpa's colorful cast of characters, you get models that move with, more or less, the fidelity of Pokemon NPCs. I also just do not find Kodaka's character writing nearly as endearing as I used to. Maybe it's the different ratio of cast size and screen time, maybe it's because I'm five years older, but it was hard to consider any of these characters anything more than annoying eyesores.

I could maybe forgive all of that if this game didn't move at a snail's pace. The second trial has you investigate FOUR crime scenes, and as I stated above, the investigation is not interesting anymore. For that matter, using the characters' Forensic Fortes frequently recontextualizes crime scenes, prolonging investigations even longer because you basically have to comb it twice! The arguments flying at you in the metaphysical battles have this unexciting, sluggish movement with awkward timing that just made the whole thing a chore compared to the exact 'shooting' of DR, likely another folly of the leap to 3D.

All of that, in conjunction with the characters repeating lore and rules ad nauseum every chance they get, I found myself tapping A to get through dialogue already, and turning off the game partway into the second labyrinth deciding I'd just look up the killer on Youtube, which, to imagine myself deciding to do with Danganronpa, is lunacy. Master Detective Archives is a slow moving, pretentious game that your shinigami-bestowed life is too short for.