Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair is the sequel to the popular first title, DanganRonpa: Trigger Happy Havoc. In it, you are a bunch of high school students who have been accepted to a prestigious academy. Not all is as it seems though as a fun-loving “field trip” becomes the home of killing.
Having not played the first title, I went into Danganronpa 2 with only a small idea of what was going to happen. Even with that small idea, I was surprised by what came after – in a good way of course. At first, during the fun-loving “field trip” part I was getting fairly bored. Thankfully, that didn’t last very long. As soon as the killing plot came into play, I was hooked and remained hooked for the rest of the game.
Since I am unable to compare any mechanics to the first game, take all these with that thought process in mind. The character models, at least in about 95% of the games graphics, are 2D “cardboard cut-out” models. This can look a little weird when you’re walking through an area that is actually made in 3D as you’ll just see flat objects either turning towards you (actual characters) or just sitting there (objects). It’s really only in the 3D areas that this starts to look odd – in the 2D scenes that make up most of the game they look great.
The soundtrack is mostly good, though I did start to get tired of some tracks after a while. One feature I did like is that on a majority of the screens you could always see the name of the track that is currently playing. The voice acting in the game is good however I wish there was more of it. It threw me off every time the game switched from a voiced part to an unvoiced part, and it liked to do this a lot. It would have been great if these scenes were at least consistent in which way they did the voicing.
The controls in Danganronpa 2 work for what they need to do, at least for the most part. Within a trial there are some controls that can be a bit picky but you can work around them. I sometimes had issues with trying to move my pointer while moving, but I could just stop to adjust it. Of course, this is mostly a personal issue I have with games in general, so it’s not fully a fault of the game.
In the end though, Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair is a fantastic title for the PlayStation Vita. As someone who typically doesn’t go into mystery stuff at all, Danganronpa 2 had me wanting to possibly explore the genre a bit more. At the very least, it does have me wanting to at least pick up the first game at some point to play through it as well. Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair is a title worth recommending for sure, even with the small issues I had with it regarding things such as the voice acting being hit or miss on when it happened. Definitely be sure to pick it up if you have a PlayStation Vita! And no, while it would likely be recommended to play the first game to understand it completely, it definitely isn’t a requirement to do so.
Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair Review Score
4.5/5
I would like to thank NIS America for providing me with a copy of the game to use for this review. Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair can be found for purchase on Amazon and through the PlayStation Store.
