Review of Dangan Ronpa: Kibou no Gakuen to Zetsubou no Koukousei
| Subject | Dangan Ronpa: Kibou no Gakuen to Zetsubou no Koukousei |
| By | Helpfulness: 1 Vote: 9succhunter on 2022-04-30 |
| Review | Danganrona really was something special. It was stylish; it was exciting, and it was morbidly funny. It had great characters, a great setting, and even greater music. Detective fiction is one of my favorite genres of fiction. Ace Attorney is one of my top favorite game franchises of all time. It will then come as no surprise that I love funny, lively character writing, and I love weird, interesting video game music. Danganronpa was a fusion of everything I liked, and it was just plain fun to read. Most VNs are only good when the "good parts" come around. The rest of the time, they're usually really boring and annoying to read. You had to grind through these chore-like moments to get to the meat of the experience. Every moment I spent with Danganronpa, however, was the "meat." The atmosphere was on point - you always felt claustrophobic and on-edge. This feeling that somewhere, someone just took someone else' life, and you don't know the who, how or why this happened is genuinely bone-chilling. The dialogue was snappy and had personality. The music is the backbone of the experience - I cannot imagine Danganronpa without the music, just as much as I cannot imagine Ace Attorney without the music. The hangout mechanic too, was genius. I was continuously hit with the Danganronpa experience of hanging out quite frequently with certain characters and getting really attached to them, only to have them be the one to die next. It was an emotional rollercoaster. It reminded me what a joy it was to read fiction - to read something that knew how to take itself not too seriously at times, but also seriously enough when it counts. But of course, this game also had its flaws. Sometimes, character ramble on about the most obvious of facts as if the writer assumes that the player only has the attention span of a goldfish. Some cases were also much weaker than others. My complaints ended there. The whole experience, with all its flaws, was just captivating to me. To this day, I long to read something again that is even remotely similar to Danganronpa. I've read many other visual novels. Many of them were masterpieces of storytelling, worldbuilding, and character-writing. However, few, if any of them, were nearly as fun to read as Danganronpa was. Recently, I read Disco Elysium. It reminded me of Danganronpa, strangely. It was another shining example of fiction that was plain fun to read. Another game that was quite fun to read was Soukou Akki Muramasa. The game had a very strange sense of humor that was irreverent and morbidly funny. Thinking back on my earlier years, I also liked Portal 2 quite a lot, most likely because it also had humor and personality in between all the serious stuff. However, I digress. If you like games like these - that tell compelling stories whilst not taking themselves so seriously all the time, play Danganronpa. Maybe you'll enjoy this series as much as I did. |
| 1 point |