Danganronpa Another Episode: Ultra Despair Girls

**WARNING: KEEP MULTIPLE SAVES OF THIS GAME. THERE IS A KNOWN BUG THAT CAUSES SAVE FILES TO BE CORRUPTED WHEN SAVING AT THE END OF A CHAPTER AND THERE IS NO FIX.**

First off, don't even consider playing this unless you've played the first two Danganronpa games. Seriously. Just don't bother. Don't even read this review. Come back when you've played them.

There's two reasons I say that. One is that while there are some decent puzzles, the basic third-person shooter gameplay here isn't anything special, and if that's the main thing you're getting from this, you won't exactly have the best time in the world. The other is that this world is so dense with references to the previous games, and does so little to explain them for any newcomers in the room, that the plot just isn't going to make sense if you don't know why a bunch of kids referencing Big Sis Junko is a big deal or why the main character being called Komaru Naegi is significant, or why this woman alongside you keeps turning into a scissor-wielding serial killer every time she sneezes or gets electrocuted, or why the words 'hope' and 'despair' are always weirdly highlighted. All of those spoilers are actually spoilers for the first Danganronpa game and not this one, which illustrates my point rather neatly. Truth is, you're not playing this for the game itself, you're playing it because it's set in this particular world and is an extension of this particular lore.

Treated in that way, it does a fine job. You get to find out more about Hope Peak's Academy, you get to meet family members of the characters you know from the first two games, you get to see what Nagito was doing with his life before Danganronpa 2 happened (surprise: it's kinda creepy), and you get to see more of the wider world that exists in this universe and get a bigger picture of exactly how far and wide the biggest, most awful, most tragic event in human history has spread, rather than being confined to a single school or island. The collectibles, as you'd probably expect, play into that mythos - particularly the hitlists, which are death orders placed on characters that (for the most part) don't otherwise appear in the game, and all link back to characters and events from the rest of the series. You also get a much greater insight in Tuko Fukawa as a character, which is unexpectedly one of the game's strengths - for the most part she was one of the more dull and unrelatable characters from Trigger Happy Havoc, but she takes on another dimension here. And there's the fact that you get to hear the full origin story behind the Monokumas, which is nice; that scene particularly fleshes out the story of the series nicely.

It's not quite the rollercoaster ride that the two main games were, though; most of the head-spinning plot twists that the game is known for are reserved until right at the very end of the fifth chapter, with the rest of the plot up until that point following a very linear path. It's fairly bog-standard stuff - there's a group of five enemies (all children dedicated to killing adults) you have to take down, and you'll fight one at the end of every chapter. The boss fights do at least have a slight puzzle element to them, as do a few of the gunplay sections - Komaru carries a megaphone that can fire eight different bullets (eventually - you collect them as the game progresses), two of which interact with the environment and six of which are used for combat, and each is suited to different enemies and environments. It's probably a little more simple than it should be, with each bullet clearly corresponding to one particular enemy you're meant to use it on (and the game goes to great lengths to point this out to you), but the boss fights and the arcade puzzle sections do involve a bit of welcome forward planning and thinking on your feet with the weapons at your disposal. Those arcade sections come thick and fast at times, but I actually wish there were more of them, if anything - a separate game mode where you worked through a number of these puzzles, along the lines of the tower modes in the Vita version of Mortal Kombat 9, would have been a great addition. Outside of those sections, the fighting never really gets a chance to become dull, but particularly with ammo as plentiful as it is, it's hard to deny that it's effectively simple painting by numbers, just matching the enemy type to the bullet type.

That's one minor criticism. There's one major one, and unsurprisingly it's the major elephant in the room for the Vita in general - fanservice.

Now, Danganronpa 2 had started to go down a pretty slippy slope on this front already, with Mikan Tsumiki - Trigger Happy Havoc had limited it all to two characters with a bit of cleavage and one fairly hard to find easter egg, but Goodbye Despair went out of its way to mock the culture of fanservice by introducing this character who had a particular gift for landing in very compromising positions (always conveniently censored from the camera, of course), and including a few jokes here and there mocking the character, the player, or other games. Fine, I can get on board with that. Ultra Despair Girls kicks this into over-drive though - there are two boss fights where one of the female characters loses their clothes throughout the fight as they take more damage, one of which is especially creepy because the character that gets stripped to their underwear is a child. A child that straps the main character to a board and makes a machine made of robot hands grope her, by the way. You'll get a trophy for completing this minigame called 'Keeping the Ratings Down', and after beating the child in question (remember, literally the entire plot hinges on the fact that the bosses are children) she'll say 'I'm actually 18, but this is really too much!' She's not actually 18. That's kinda the whole fucking point of the game. I get what the developers were trying to do, and there's still a definite tone of mockery about it, but I can't get away from the fact by showing fanservice to mock fanservice, they're still ultimately showing fanservice - it definitely feels like they're trying to have their cake and eat it too. Given that the Vita is a handheld console, and therefore given to being played in public, I'm amazed that so many of the games show things you wouldn't want to be caught dead looking at, and this is no different. To top this off, there are also several lightly BDSM-themed cutaways where you see Toko's fantasies involving Byakuya, and they're also the only unskippable scenes in the entire game. Now that I think of it, that's actually a much better way to satirize fanservice - forcing you to look at a half-naked man - but it's still incredibly uncomfortable when one of these scenes pops up while you're playing it on your lunch break at work.

It's a shame that Ultra Despair Girls falls into that trap, because so much of the series is creepy in a good way, and parts of this game are too - the cutscenes toward the end of the game involving Monaca and Nagisa are brilliantly effective in establishing her as a villain and showing off how much she has tried to model herself on Junko, and some of the notes you'll find which outline the child abuse that several of the characters went through are harrowing. As a extension of this universe it's absolutely welcome (and at this stage, I'm honestly struggling to imagine Spike Chunsoft releasing something Dangranronpa-related that WASN'T a welcome addition), and as a game it's largely deeply enjoyable and home to a couple of very good, quite inventive mechanical and structural ideas. It's simply not on the level of the two previous games, though. Then again, not too many games are - and we can just treat this as something to hold us over until Danganronpa 3, right?