The aftermath of Danganronpa V3 definitely left fans divided on whether or not Kodaka was a hack fraud. It definitely caught everyone's attention when he revealed his new game...where you solve murder mysteries...featuring the same art style as Danganronpa...and even the same composer. Now, I hate to rip off the bandaid, but I don't think it's going to stop this game from bleeding out either way.

The worst part of this game arguably isn't even a part of the game's content; It's how it runs. Loading screens are extremely frequent and decently long. The game is constantly running just below 30 FPS, giving it a very sluggish feel. Almost every time the camera cuts to a different position, some background element breaks for a frame or two. If it only happened a few times, I'd shrug it off, but these glitches in the matrix happen very often. This game's technical issues don't stop with performance and graphics either. I think the person doing sound mixing at Spike Chunsoft may be asleep at the wheel. There are a handful of occasions where voice clips are way louder/softer than they should be. One in particular is a very loud instance of Yuma saying "oh", which jumpscared me nearly every time it happened. Another is the scene where Shinigami boom-kills the culprit at the end of a mystery labyrinth. She's certainly saying words, but if you're not using subtitles, then good luck hearing them as her words get washed away. If audio problems weren't enough, the lip sync for in-engine cutscenes is also distractingly desynced. Listen, I know. I know that saying "the Switch isn't powerful enough for this game" is beating a 6-year old dead horse, but this game just isn't properly optimized for the hardware that they signed off on timed exclusivity to.

Credit where credit is due, this game's world design is top-notch. A dark, gloomy, futuristic city that's constantly plagued by rainfall, punctuated with bright neon lights everywhere. While I wouldn't call it my favorite work of his, Hifumi Takada manages to provide an appropriately chill and mysterious backdrop to this world through his music. I enjoyed the downtime between cases where you could take on optional requests from the residents of Kanai Ward, if only because I got to vibe with this setting for longer.

On the flipside, the Mystery Labyrinth is the other big highlight of this game. It's a nonstop rollercoaster of absurd spectacle as you answer rapid-fire questions, re-create murder scenes, and more. It frames the process of pursuing the truth as if you're exploring some elaborate RPG dungeon. The major component of this is the Reasoning Death Match. People that try to prevent you from reaching the truth in the real world show up as phantoms in the labyrinth, except now they're buffed up and equipped with all the RGB they could find in the dumpster behind Best Buy. In the deathmatches, you literally dodge the phantoms' statements until you find the one where you can literally cut through it using facts and logic. The Mystery Labyrinth has a critical flaw though: it's the most linear "labyrinth" I've ever experienced. I'm not even just talking about the hallways where you hold forward while people talk (I'm pretty sure those segments aren't even masking a loading screen or anything). It's often structured like a straight shot through with questions along the way, and I never ran out of health once. It's a fairly easy affair.

The thing that hurts this game severely is that almost none of the characters stick out to me. Most of them are introduced, barely fleshed out, and discarded like trash by the end of their chapter, never to be mentioned again. Even the ones who are with you for the whole game, like the master detectives, don't really have something to keep you hooked. You can find collectibles in the overworld that give you side-conversations with the other master detectives to help flesh them out a bit more, but you access them through the pause menu, which means, well, y'know. Even Yuma, the protagonist of this game, feels eerily similar to a character from Danganronpa V3. Yuma's just boneless Shuichi! His character development feels like it's traveling in a straight, horizontal line! He spends most of the game doubting himself and being overly cautious, which is a very boring way to portray an amnesiac. The line starts to ascend a little bit by the end, but that's too late. That's always too late, kind of like how most of the cases in this game end in pure deus-ex-machina. Our heroes usually have no good reason to escape their predicaments, but it kinda just happens anyways, and I hate that! The villains are also complete cartoon characters, something that i enjoy to a point. I wish that their behavior was more subdued outside of the mystery labyrinth. It'd make for a nice contrast, instead of them being on full blast the whole time.

There is one character who'll stick with me though, but for all the wrong reasons. I'm not into Shinigami. Kinda feels like Kodaka just inserted his ideal fetishized woman into the game, and while I'm not against that in theory, she leans a bit too far into "what the fuck is even happening" territory far too often for my tastes. This woman is quite literally horny for murder mysteries, and the way she treats the mild-mannered Yuma can feel downright rude at points. She's very mean-spirited, and genuinely annoying on top of that, never hesitating to barf up pop culture references. Only Yuma can hear her, so I found the funniest moments with Shinigami were the ones where Yuma gave no reaction and went about his business, as he should.

Also, I hate to bring this up, but for how Danganronpa V3 ended (don't spoil yourself, if you know, you know), Kodaka sure came back with a game that feels eerily like Danganronpa V4. Instead of Super-High-School-Level students with Ultimate abilities, you have Master Detectives with Forensic Fortes. "Kanai Ward's Ultimate Secret" sounds like it could be "The Biggest, Most Awful, Most Tragic Event in Human History". This isn't a Nonstop Debate, it's a Reasoning Death Match! Shinigami Puzzle? More like "I genuinely would've preferred Hangman's Gambit 2.0"! It borrows so many concepts from DangitGrandpa, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but the problems start to surface when I think about how DR used most of these ideas to better effect.

I don't think this is Kodaka's "AI: The Somnium Files". Not even close. At best, it's Danganronpa-adjacent. He's gonna have to smooth out all the rough edges and branch out a bit more if he plans to make this an ongoing series. There is potential here, but it's frequently drowned out by a downpour of tedium and unmemorable writing. This rating could definitely go up at least half a star once it releases on platforms that can actually handle the game. Or you could just, y'know, play Danganronpa.

We have Danganronpa at home - so many things Rain Code straight up carries over from Danganronpa, it's impossible not to make comparisons, and unfortunately, they don't end up particularly favourable to the new game, and the few fresh things that the game does mostly clash with the Danganronpa-like parts.

Ultimate Students became Master Detectives, and this is perhaps the only borrow that's a straight improvement - their quirky supernatural abilities are actually relevant to what the player is going to be doing throughout the game.
The nothingburger protagonist with plot amnesia became the nothingburger protagonist with plot amnesia.
Monokuma/[SPOILER] became Shinigami, the ghostly amorphous purple ball of shit/big tiddy giddy sociopathic pastel goth gf, losing all of its antagonistic charm in the process and granting the unwitting player a migraine every time it speaks (okay, I'll admit, Shinigami grew on me a tiny bit over the course of the game and especially in chapter 2, but not enough to stop hating her guts).
This pair of characters is the most the player is going to be seeing throughout the game, and they have no chemistry whatsoever. There are other Master Detectives in the main cast, but they're delegated to the role of assistants, and the player gets to really only interact with one per case, they are: bargain bin Kyoko, bargain bin Soda, bargain bin Sonia, and bargain bin Himiko. I only found bargain bin Sonia particularly fun (I love me some dumb characters when the story acknowledges how dumb they are, and I love the trope of balancing the absolutely broken superpower by giving it to a total moron), Kyoko and Soda kinnies are particularly annoying, and goth Himiko is nothing much to write about.
The final character of the main cast is the chief detective, and I don't see a good way to relate him back to Danganronpa without it being a huge stretch. Nevertheless, I don't have much to say about him either, he's just kind of there.

The five cases plus the overarching mystery case became the five cases plus the overarching mystery case except this time there's no particularly good reason why it is so - half the cases are complete filler from the overarching story perspective (though they do provide some much-needed screen time for the supporting detective characters I suppose). In Danganronpa even the filler cases had the grander purpose of widdling down the cast, which Rain Code doesn't concern itself with in the slightest - the cases have their victims and culprits introduced and promptly discarded a la Ace Attorney, though this game at least gives some of the case-specific characters a bit of an epilogue via sidequests. I won't bother describing case-specific characters as they're all barely fleshed out. Even the antagonists obstructing the cases barely persist throughout the game and dont have much personality beside being cartoonishly evil. This makes it really hard to care about anything going on - one of the things that Danganronpa nailed and this didn't is the persistent cast that the player grows accustomed to whether they like it or not.

Class Trials became Mystery Labyrinths which are effectively like the meme BBC Sherlock mind palace thing, and this is probably my least favourite of the Rain Code's attempts to adopt a Danganronpa concept.
The process of the investigation and the trial in Danganronpa was a haphazard mess made by a bunch of teenagers trying to stumble their way to the truth through kind of randomly shooting shit off of each other, and the overall flow and the minigames do a decent job to reflect that. The questions are asked by characters, and disputed by other characters. The statements are made by characters, and need to be shot down by characters. The characters go on insane tangents that anyone who has ever participated in any kind of unscripted debate knows inevitably happen, and have to prove ghosts weren't involved in the case.
Rain Code has next to none of that.
Instead, questions are being asked by the mysteriful nature of the mind palace. Statements are made by the same nature, and have to be disputed by the trio of the main character, Shinigami, and whoever's the assistant in this particular case. There're no tangents to speak of, and the whole setup feels extremely artificial and unnecessary. Only one case in the whole game actually utilizes the setting of the Mystery Labyrinth to aid the presentation of the case, in all the rest it might as well have been replaced by a quiz.

Non-stop Debates became Reasoning Death Matches. How does it work if the only characters in the Mystery Labyrinth are the aforementioned trio? The game specifically makes up the Persona shadow versions of whoever is trying to obstruct the case in the real world and/or the culprit of the case, just so that the minigame from Danganronpa could be crudely fit in. They don't really matter for anything beside that, they appear before the minigame, and disappear after the minigame. The minigame itself is very annoying, as the player can't just take the stuff being said in, they have to actively dodge around, which is not difficult but somewhat distracting. The biggest problem of this minigame is also grandfathered in from Danganronpa - often there are multiple options that sort of fit, and there's no good way to tell which one the game wants from you, as it often likes to rephrase the same exact statement in a stronger way later during the course of the minigame, and would only accept that one being countered, and not the earlier one.

Hangman Gambit became Horny Gambit, er, Shinigami Puzzle. It's kind of embarrassing. It's definitely not that bad by the weeb media standards, but I wouldn't play this game in public as Shinigami strikes one of the classic pin-up poster poses when the player finally strikes out that E in KNIFE as the barrel sloooowly rotates to reveal it.
The "point at the correct spot" minigame became the "point at the correct spot" minigame. The surfing/taxi driving minigames have their analogue too. The reinvestigations during the break are here as well, replaced with the protagonist suddenly remembering some extra details by the virtue of Shinigami hitting him really hard in the head. The weird rhythm game during the culprits mental breakdown is replaced with the weird obstacle course during the culprits Persona shadow mental breakdown. The comic book case reconstruction is here, the execution cutscene is here, et cetera et cetera - pretty much everything about Class Trials has been sloppily adapted in Rain Code and hangs in a sort of weird game design vacuum, whereas in Danganronpa it was a gamified extension of the process of the cast trying to figure things out.

The balance is basically not a thing in the gameplay systems. The health is pretty much infinite, even messing up deliberately to see whether the game has funny lines for the obviously dumb options (it doesn't, which is a shame because those lines were half the fun in Danganronpa) I never got more than like 1/10th of the total health down. Messing up Horny Gambit, however, gives the player an instant game over, which is still not a big deal because it just sends the player to just before the minigame. I really think they shouldve just boom-killed the middle man and got rid of the health system and game overs entirely, leaving only the rank system as it is, lowering the rank if the player gets something wrong.
The skill system is also really weirdly implemented. The skills cost points to unlock, and points to equip. The issue here is that both of those costs are exactly equal, and leveling gives the player equal amounts of both, so they can just always equip everything they unlock, which makes either one of those point systems completely redundant.

The biggest most awful event in human history became the world's biggest mystery, which I'm really just using to disapprovingly gesture towards the game's overarching plot. It's pretty bad. I'm keeping this review spoilerless, and describing even in vague terms exactly how the plot is bad will immediately give plenty of ideas as to what's going on, and just like some good stories lose impact if you spoil them, some garbage stories lose their stink if you spoil them as well. I'm not running a charity here. Besides, who even plays Danganronpa and the like for the overarching plot? Instead, I'll give my spoiler-free opinions on the cases of the game.

Chapter 0 is a solid introductory case, maybe on the level of DR2-1. Not as baby-mode as DR1-1, has some interesting moving parts, and only a few very questionable moments.

Chapter 1 is awful and almost made me drop the game. The victims are literally who, the potential culprits are introduced not even throughout the chapter, but almost the last moment during the investigation itself, the assisting detective is extremely annoying, and the mechanisms of the case are bullshit stacked on top of bullshit. It's worse than any of the Danganronpa series cases.

Chapter 2 is pretty good, it being mostly filler notwithstanding, maybe somewhere around DR2-4. It actually introduces the characters its about to involve and lets the player hand around them for a bit before anything happens. The assisting detective is awful, but the game continuously roasts their ass at any opportunity. Shinigami is less annoying in this chapter, which might've been a huge contributor to me liking it as much as I do. That doesn't last for long, but hey, we take those. This case has the only good usage of the labyrinth in the whole game. I haven't spotted anything too bad with the logic of this case either, which is something I can't say too often.

Chapter 3 is a filler episode involving completely unlikable filler cast, and even the obstructing villains disappear into aether completely as soon as the case is done. Pretty dumb and about as unremarkable as DRV3-2.

Chapter 4 tries really hard, but it just didn't work for me. Subjectively, very unremarkable, but I feel like if the player somehow manages to get invested in the proceedings it might be a really good case.

Chapter 5 is [REDACTED].

The last thing I'll remark upon is the visuals and the music. The aesthetics of the Kanai Ward are really good, and I like the clip-art looking Mystery Labyrinth bits. The portraits of the characters have great facial expressions, and I like the way the 3D models mimick those expressions as they happen. The pause menu has great aesthetics as well. The music is fine I suppose, I already don't remember a single track from the game while multiple tracks from every Danganronpa game still live rent-free in my head, but none of it was grating or unfitting or anything like that.

I lied, the last thing I'll mention is the interesting marketing decisions the devs/publishers have made. In an interview I've read something along the lines of "we're releasing the game exclusively on Switch because we don't want to compete with other A or AA games coming out at the same time" and assuming it was the actual reason and not the marketing speak for "Nintendo offered us a really good timed exclusivity deal" it's just ... what? The game was the only one of its sizeable-but-not-too-big caliber released in the midst of the traditionally dead season, compete with what, Final Fantasy XVI? And what's up with the weird "please don't advertise our game for free or we might just sue your ass" (paraphrasing) disclaimer shown as the player launches the game? Didn't Danganronpa only get it's abysmally obnoxious dedicated fandom due to popular let'splayers of the early 10s jumping onto it?

I feel like I've written a lot of negative things about the game, and only a few positive, but I think overall I enjoyed the experience, even if it had the aftertaste of a bootleg Danganronpa. If it's really a start of the new series, I hope it strays way way further from it's Danganronpa roots and acquires it's own identity.

Alternatively, I hope the next installment of it turns out to be literally Danganronpa.