Review of Super Dangan Ronpa 2 Sayonara Zetsubou Gakuen
Subject | Super Dangan Ronpa 2 Sayonara Zetsubou Gakuen |
By | Helpfulness: 3 Vote: 5scipe on 2020-11-17 |
Review | Danganronpa 2 is a mess. There are a few parallels with the first game, which are explicitly noted yet never actually go anywhere. Beyond that, DR2 does not feel like a game that was made by people who learned from the first game. It repeats the same mistakes of its predecessor in spades; the amount of tropey anime fanservice scenes has increased exponentially, the endless rambling about hope and despair has somehow become more incomprehensible, the comedy even more inconsistent. Some of this can be attributed to the large tonal shift: rather than a claustrophobic academy, the setting of this game is an idyllic tropical paradise. One would think that the juxtaposition between this location and the grim events could make for an interesting experience, but the way that the series segments "daily life" and "deadly life" effectively means that the game is an unusually long dating sim without stakes - until it suddenly isn't. DR is a series that more than anything relies on its characters. Every single installment has a main plot that is divisive at best and gameplay that is baffling in its irrelevance, but the franchise still has its fans, and this can largely be credited to its ensemble cast(s). So, how does Danganronpa 2 hold up in this regard? Eh. For one thing, it's hard to review them due to the fact that it's hard to say *anything* about the characters as a whole. In DR1, the entire point of the Ultimate/SHSL Students was that they were high school student stereotypes cranked up and subverted. The popular girl, popular enough to be a genuine celebrity who is nonetheless not what she seems. The tough guy who is a full-on gang leader yet his toughness conceals desperately suppressed feelings of weakness. So on and so forth, with all these sorts of layers unfurled over time as the students are placed under pressure. There is no unifying motif to the ragtag group of teenagers this time around. Technically, the conclusion of the game implies a possible shared motif, but it's both incredibly generic and doesn't even effectively cover the entire cast. With that said, a quick rundown of how it handles characters that are worth mentioning: Hajime Hinata is the protagonist of the game, and his inability to remember his talent is the one real continuous mystery for the early chapters. The protagonist of a VN is always at risk of becoming a complete non-entity, partially due to the fact that they almost always lack a physical appearance. I will give credit at the very least for trying to make their MC a character this time, but they did not succeed. Founding a character arc on drawn out amnesia creates a very predictable problem. By the time Hajime remembers what his character depth is, it's resolved mere moments later in a manner that feels like a joke. Anything else is connected to the completely incoherent and overly long final chapter exposition fest. Chiaki Nanami takes on a similar role to Kyoko Kirigiri from the first game, aiding the player in trials and becoming their only real consistent ally. While her personality can be entertaining and her role near the endgame is pretty interesting, she spends most of the game doing little other than speculating on the mystery in trials, and is more interesting as a twist than an actual complex character. Fuyuhiko Kuzuryu is the most coherent character in the game. His role and intended significance is obvious even without the game spelling out for you the fact that he is attempting to develop as a character. His arc is competent and raises interesting questions about forgiveness, but any further character exploration is essentially stamped out at the end of chapter 3, and he does nothing of note for the rest of the game beyond being "The Guy Who Curses But He's Friendlier Now". He's not a main character, but he's notable for being the only real time aside from *arguably* Gundham Tanaka that the game attempts to develop one of its side characters. Nagito Komaeda isn't just the best character in DR2. For plenty of people, he IS DR2. He's the cause and center of the games most iconic moments, and if DR2 has any themes, they basically amount to "whatever Komaeda is prattling on about". He's got a strange yet pretty internally consistent worldview and he's the one source of tension throughout most of the game, and creates this tension beautifully. Maybe too beautifully. Nagito's spotlight hogging focus is probably part of the reason so many characters end up underdeveloped, and while his philosophy and motivations are interesting, the fact that they are given center stage every single chapter can lead to some amount of fatigue. There is no other character I consider worth addressing. The rest are a hodge-podge of comic relief or missed potential. I'll give Danganronpa 2 this: It's certainly competent and writing character *concepts*. Playing through the hilariously unsubtle optional events where the students explain their backstory to Hajiime shows that the developers really did have a lot of ideas and pride in each and every one. Most of the students in the game could be the pretty compelling protagonist of a different story. But they're not in a different story. They're in Danganronpa 2, and the game sidelines the things that are interesting about these characters for forced repetitive humor, or simply kills them off before they can amount to anything. There is only one way in which I would say DR2 improves upon its predecessor, and to be fair, it's not a trivial way at all. The aspect of DR that pulls it beyond being a pure story-driven visual novel is the mystery solving aspect, and the second game absolutely blows the first out of the water here. Perhaps its due to the writers feeling more comfortable in challenging people they can assume went through the first game, or perhaps something about the larger setting made for more creative freedom, but this group of students are way more capable and creative when it comes to killing each-other. There are a lot of scenarios that are incredibly interesting to speculate on and puzzle out, and the game contains far more "eureka" type moments where you are led naturally to suddenly figuring out the one detail that turns everything around. Danganronpa 2 is a game. Seriously. It focuses more than anything else on the aspects of the *game* Danganronpa. The minigames, the general polish, the mysteries and how you go about solving them. But it does this at the expense of nearly everything else. The characters are mostly shallow and one note unless you bother to go through optional events that describe to you a more interesting character who isn't actually in the game. The plot is a disjointed mess that fails as a mystery. It's strong suits prevent it from being anything I would call outright bad, but it's still incredibly disappointing in a variety of ways. |
3 points |