Whoever was in charge of Danganronpa's HUD, GUI, and overall interface design should be executed. Danganronpa is an ADHD nightmare to look at. Let's go over all the terrible things present in just a normal cutscene of talking to some of the characters: bright piss-yellow gradients slathered across the screen haphazardly. The entire left side of the screen is covered in yellow whereas the right side isn't. ????? There's a random circle in the top-right corner with outlines that spin like a revolver chamber, a circle whose sole purpose is to tell you what time of day it is (utterly needless, this is a visual novel, the backgrounds would communicate that to you). Character names are not presented horizontally or on top of dialogue boxes like they are in literally every visual novel and RPG known to man. No, character names are shown VERTICALLY for some reason. They're vertical, and they're tilted vertically too, so you have to be tilting your head constantly if you want to see the name of who's talking (this wasn't present in the other games, why did they choose to do this?). And to top it all off, the dialogue boxes have this random checkerboard layered under the text with squares that occasionally glow yellow. Why? Because it's another key for the devs to jangle in their target audience's faces--

KILIMANJARO, BORN 2 BE FAST, CRACK AN EGG ON IT, CUT LIKE VINYL SUPERFLY, HIP-HOP HOUSE TECHNO, IN ALL ENTHRILLING NEW LIVING SOUND, CLUB MIX, DUCHESS, UP N DOWN BABY OH YEAH

See what I just did there? That all looked pretty wacky, cooky, and crazy, but it had nothing to do with anything at all, did it? That was just loud noise for the sake of it. The only thing that did was distract from my review. And that's DR in a nutshell.

There is so much shit distracting you from the important stuff: dialogue. None of this is framed around the dialogue boxes or designed to give the dialogue and character designs any emphasis. It does the exact opposite and just distracts you from what's being said. It's a haphazard, slapdash collage of random bullshit to keep low attention spans satiated in case the loud and obnoxious characters somehow weren't enough. Compare this to something like Persona 5, a game whose HUD is beautifully minimalist and yet just stylish enough to communicate the game's rebellious aesthetica. Everything about Persona 5's cutscenes draw your attention to the dialogue without screaming for your attention (the de-emphasized date in the corner of the screen and de-emphasized skip / log buttons, the jagged but simplistic dialogue boxes, the eye-catching character icons placed right next to the box, etc). But in Danganronpa there is so much stuff pulling your eyes away from what's being said that without the choice to make the characters be in the middle of the screen at almost all times, I bet most people would miss what's being said and by who because there's just so many jangling keys to look at.

You know what the worst part is? DR2's HUD design is tame compared to the vomitus of random stuff in DR3's abysmal GUI.

Why am I focusing so singularly on the graphic design? Because it's a perfect microcosm of the series' overall problem with being way too fucking loud. Everything is messy and amateurish. Everything lacks focus. The characters are one-dimensional caricatures except when the game decides they need to be sad or serious or fucking CRAAYYZYYY. Fanservice is thrown in just to cause a few scant AWOOGAs or HUMINA-HUMINA's. The backgrounds and overall artstyle are pleasing to the eye but whenever the game goes '3D', holy shit does it look terrible. Everyone becomes a literal cardboard cutout (legitimately, they just lazily paste the default model of all these characters onto a 3D plane and call it a day), walking around in first person feels like stilted-ass GoldenEye movement and aiming, and the way that Hajime walks in the 2D overworld is so inhuman and puppet-like that it honestly feels kind of scary whenever he decides to walk from place to place.

And then there's the fucking Trials, a nightmarish smorgasbord of random, distracting, loud bullshit with little to no rhyme, reason, theme, or cohesion. Cutting words apart with swords. Playing hangman. Diagonal GUI, text that flips and spins around, glowing-gradient character icons that zoom in and out at a rapid-fire pace. A noisy farrago of penis music, a nauseatingly disorienting dance of disparate elements that just don't click together, throwing a thousand buckets of paint at a canvas and calling the finished mess art. This is pure fucking unadulterated chaos, but Danganronpa mistakenly thinks there's meaning in the madness. But no. DR is a mess of sound and fury, signifying absolutely nothing but feral noises and goofy Jojo references.

I couldn't even properly finish the first trial because I felt overwhelmed. It's not a hard game, it's not a mechanically challenging game, but it is an exhausting game because it feels like a long-form shitpost, and the beauty of shitposts are in their brevity. A shitpost that lasts twenty-four hours isn't a shitpost, it's a test of your fucking patience.

And unfortunately, I failed. Sorry, but the blank-slate cast of nothing characters with depressingly good designs (they're so good that it's a crying shame they're wasted on such losers) wasn't enough for me. At this point, they should stop making Danganronpa games and just make hentai doujins like they clearly want to.