Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair is the official sequel to 2010’s hit release of Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc, finally available on PC. Its idea is the same as the first – a large group of quirky characters find themselves robbed of their memories and stranded in a closed environment, with the only possibility of escape coming as a reward should they manage to commit a murder and escape identification as the culprit by their peers in the subsequent class trial. When this happens, they are allowed to go free while everyone else is executed, while if they fail, they themselves will be executed while everyone else gets to keep on living.
The story is composed of a series of murder mysteries that take place within a greater main narrative wherein the protagonists try to plumb the mysteries of why they’re being confined and forced to murder each other, as well as the events that lead them to their current circumstances. The characters are a good mix of anime tropes and actual development, and for the most part come off as very sympathetic and believable in their motivations, given the context and genre. There’s no branching routes or choices to be made in the main game, for the most part, and the story is entirely linear. The writing is excellent, hitting all the emotional beats and following a logical progression even when it appears to be devolving into complete and utter nonsense.
The actual gameplay consists of two parts – exploration, which consists of a looping side-scrolling section you use to navigate the game’s islands, static scenes that resemble pop-up books where you interact with things and people using your cursor, and first person sections that you use to explore certain specific environments. The other major part is the investigation and trial section, where all of the actual meat of the gameplay is – you examine locations and talk to people in order to gather clues, and then deploy these clues in a trial setting in order to determine the culprit. Sometimes this takes the form of straight-up questions, sometimes you’re asked to pick a relevant piece of evidence for a particular problem from your entire big list, and sometimes you have to play an infuriating minigame in order to accomplish the same thing, but most often you’ll be going around a circle listening to everyone make propositions about what happened, and either calling out inconsistencies by shooting their words with the damning piece of evidence or backing them up using the same process. At other times, your peers will call you out themselves, prompting a verbal duel where you use the analog stick to slice apart their arguments in preparation for a final devastating response. The order of events makes sense, and there’s only a few instances which required significant leaps of logic in order to figure out the proper way to proceed, but there’s enough twists and surprises in the mysteries to keep you guessing and doubting yourself even when you’re pretty sure you’ve solved it.
You can’t actually fail in either the evidence collection or the trials. Trying to leave a scene before you’ve got all the relevant clues results in your character refusing to do so, and running out of influence during a trial only reduces the reward you get at the end.
In terms of presentation the game is flawless. Be it CG, character spirits, voice acting , background score, everything is brilliant and spot on.
