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(I actually played it on Switch, not PC, but this site doesn't have Switch listed for Danganronpa)
I was sort of reviewing this game more "moment to moment" on Twitter, so I'll talk in broader stokes here.
Danganronpa is a fun visual novel: it tows a fine line between being utterly despair inducing, and insanely wacky and over the top throughout, which prevents it from becoming too depressing of an experience, even as characters you grow to love die left and right.
Those characters vary a lot in the quality of their writing, from being fairly complex and nuanced, to boring cardboard cutouts (and sometimes CRINGY cardboard cutouts, Hifumi). To its credit, most of the cast is at least somewhat interesting however. I was playing in English, and they're helped by some fun voice acting and clever localization.
The plot is HIGHLY unpredictable, and also to its credit, I never felt like the twists were so out of left field that they became complete bullshit shock fodder. Most of the time these twists are pretty well explained, though towards the end, there are some BIG reveals that I felt were, if not completely out of nowhere, perhaps could've at least used the same level of exposition as some of the earlier twists. Some huge revelations are just kinda handwaved into existence. Overall though, it still manages to be really thrilling and attention-grabbing throughout.
The classroom trials are the best part; they go SO in depth on the cases, and the minigames do a pretty good job of keeping the player directly engaged and thinking critically about the information. Most of the time I found the puzzle solutions to be pretty solvable, but there were a couple instances where I had to look up the solution and didn't find it to be intuitive at all (SCHIZO being a Hangman's Gambit answer in the second case was pretty weird, and didn't even fit the prompt)
I also think there could've been more free time between class trials; there are a lot of characters, many of whom have limited screentime, and most of whom require quite a few time slots to max out their social link. Getting 3-5 free time slots between cases is just not enough to see a satisfactory amount of them.
That's about all I can think to say. As a whole I loved this game a lot, and I'm curious to try the others at some point in the future.
I was sort of reviewing this game more "moment to moment" on Twitter, so I'll talk in broader stokes here.
Danganronpa is a fun visual novel: it tows a fine line between being utterly despair inducing, and insanely wacky and over the top throughout, which prevents it from becoming too depressing of an experience, even as characters you grow to love die left and right.
Those characters vary a lot in the quality of their writing, from being fairly complex and nuanced, to boring cardboard cutouts (and sometimes CRINGY cardboard cutouts, Hifumi). To its credit, most of the cast is at least somewhat interesting however. I was playing in English, and they're helped by some fun voice acting and clever localization.
The plot is HIGHLY unpredictable, and also to its credit, I never felt like the twists were so out of left field that they became complete bullshit shock fodder. Most of the time these twists are pretty well explained, though towards the end, there are some BIG reveals that I felt were, if not completely out of nowhere, perhaps could've at least used the same level of exposition as some of the earlier twists. Some huge revelations are just kinda handwaved into existence. Overall though, it still manages to be really thrilling and attention-grabbing throughout.
The classroom trials are the best part; they go SO in depth on the cases, and the minigames do a pretty good job of keeping the player directly engaged and thinking critically about the information. Most of the time I found the puzzle solutions to be pretty solvable, but there were a couple instances where I had to look up the solution and didn't find it to be intuitive at all (SCHIZO being a Hangman's Gambit answer in the second case was pretty weird, and didn't even fit the prompt)
I also think there could've been more free time between class trials; there are a lot of characters, many of whom have limited screentime, and most of whom require quite a few time slots to max out their social link. Getting 3-5 free time slots between cases is just not enough to see a satisfactory amount of them.
That's about all I can think to say. As a whole I loved this game a lot, and I'm curious to try the others at some point in the future.