Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair Anniversary Edition

I know it's the general consensus that this is an improvement on the first game, but I'm afraid I can't agree. I mean, I definitely get why this is the more acclaimed of the two games: everything that happens in Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair is a build-up to the final trial, the entire game acting as build-up to an enthralling climax that is surely the best trial in the entire trilogy, and you would be well within your rights to argue that all of the weaknesses before that are justified by the pay-off they service. But I just don't know whether I can really bring myself to believe that an utterly phenomenal final forty-five minutes is enough to elevate the previous twenty or so hours above a game that was pretty much perfect.

The problem is that several of the changes it makes diminish the game rather than enhance it, and before you learn where it's going with all of them, it carries the slight whiff of a sequel that's trying a bit too hard to be different to its predecessor. The tropical island setting isn't as coherent or compelling as Hope's Peak Academy was, and it feels pretty contrived at times. The visual design of the characters is certainly more immediately striking, but a number of the actual characters underneath those designs are worse than their counterparts in the first game, and a couple are actively irritating. The new mechanics introduced into the trials vary wildly; the Logic Dive is a fun enough bit of variation to the gameplay, but the new Hangman's Gambit is a chore. The Tamagotchi in your student handbook is just....there, adding repetitive admin without adding any real gameplay. Monomi gets old fast. And the trials themselves have moved away from focusing on logic and deduction, and instead are now focusing on providing as much whiplash as possible on the plot twists. That sounds like it could be an improvement, and sometimes it is, but it does test the player's ability to suspend their disbelief to its absolute limit, and there are points that feel a bit gimmicky and forced in a way that the first game rarely did.. Again, a lot of this - the island, the actions of the most annoying of those irritating characters, some of the minor plot strands that felt like throwaways and loose ends - is explained away in the final trial, which goes a long way to softening the blow, but if we're comparing this to a game that didn't need to compromise the bulk of its story and worldbuilding in service of its ending, there's only one winner, surely?

Still, everything else is the same, and how much can you really complain when that's the case? I feel like this game had to be wildly ambitious, because there is nothing else a writer or developer could reasonably have done with the task of creating a follow-up to Danganronpa - it had to be bigger, bolder, sillier, funnier, and more convoluted, because if it's not, why even bother? And yes, it may stumble upon the way, but by and large it respects the most important part of that balancing act - keeping the core of the game exactly the same. The sickness and glee, the suspense, the comedy, the drama, the betrayal, the intrigue, it's all here. Being the weakest part of a trilogy is no great shame when the other two entries in the trilogy is as brilliant as they are, and the foundations underpinning them are so solid.