I have decided to re-log this game after a while and my praises of the game have definitely diminished over time. I still think it’s the best in the series since B2W2, but I don’t think it’s “great” or anything. It’s certainly a step in the right direction but nearly every other game in this series for the past 10 years has been “a step in the right direction” only for the next game to not follow up on that at all. I’m so tired of only having “a step in the right direction” instead of a straight up great new game. I don’t care if this is an unfair complaint or whatever because I think it’s entirely fair to expect more from this series given that the best JRPGs on the switch at the same price are made by smaller teams teams with funds several times smaller than TPC.

The gameplay is certainly fun and innovative for the series. Battles and catching Pokémon feel fast and engaging. But throughout the game there’s so many annoyances and issues. The controls feel weird and there’s no way to remap them. The characters are shallow and forgettable, the visuals and optimisation are very sub-par, the new boss fights are incredibly boring and repetitive. QOL has been downgraded from SwSh (I don’t even know how). I cannot in good faith call this game anything other than “slightly above average for the series” even if it’s the first in a long time to do a lot of things right.

Takahashi and monolith soft proving that they can create emotionally compelling and thematically sound stories set in the most realised of worlds mixed in with some of the most likeable and consistently great JRPG character casts, while also maintaining focused story pacing and very fun easy-to-learn-hard-to-master gameplay with some brilliant voice acting and direction. Top it off with a fun world with an absolute ton of endearing details and you have one of the best JRPGs to come out in recent memory.

TL:DR this is pure kinography and I will not let anyone tell me otherwise.

Finished with the game and I feel conflicted. I liked chapters 4 and 5 I guess. The presentation is nice. Didn’t care about like 75% of the characters, and I thought that most of the twists were predictable (except for the ones on case 4 and 5). It was incredibly easy to see where each case was going almost immediately and the game felt quite “patronising” because of it (Granted, I was spoiled on the identity of the mastermind, but that’s it. I was able to predict exactly how they did their plan and everything. Also like if you’ve been on the internet for 5 minutes you probably already know who the big bad was). Whatever do you really care about what I have to say about danganronpa I’m basically just going to parrot what other people have said. I’ve played worse visual novels, I guess.

TL:DR if the cases were “smarter” and if I liked the characters more I’d probably like danganronpa more than I do. Hopefully the second and third instalments fix that.