A word of caution: this game contains depictions of sexual assault and frequent references to child abuse, so this article touches on those themes as well. Please take care of yourself, and don’t read this if you don’t want to.
Danganronpa is one of my favorite games of quarantine, and for years I’ve been trying to get to know the expanded world that this murder mystery visual novel trilogy revolves around. I’ve watched the entire anime, read the novels and all the manga that have been translated into English (I’ve even started learning Japanese because the untranslated manga looks better and might actually be quicker to read than waiting for the full manga to come out); I’ve even played the very strange spin-off shooter that celebrates its 10th birthday today.
Danganronpa Another Episode: Extremely Desperate Girl The game was released for PlayStation Vita on this day in 2014, and got a second life via PlayStation 4 and PC ports in 2017. The latter allowed me to snoop on other people’s gaming habits via Steam’s global stats, and learn that I’m one of the approximately 45% of players on the platform who actually finish the game after starting it.
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That’s not actually a terrible retention stat—I’ve seen acclaimed games with far higher churn rates—but it still speaks to the quirky nature of the game to me. It seems to me that even if you’re looking for an obscure story-driven third-person shooter that derives from a series of visual novels, you’re probably already hooked on the series and want to play through it. To put that into perspective, only 45% of supposed series loyalists stick around until the end, which shows what happens when the unstoppable staying power required to be a Danganronpa fan meets the unshakable weirdness of Ultra Despair Girls.
I had a lot of mixed feelings about the game while playing it. I liked it because it featured supporting characters from the original game, injecting some much-needed long-term character development into a series that tends to start over with a brand new cast with each entry. I hated it because its save points were so unpredictable and ungenerous, which turned what should have been rewarding trial-and-error puzzles into unnecessary frustrations that forced me to solve them as quickly and chaotically as possible. And to be honest, I was pretty indifferent to its shooting; I grew up playing crappy action games from the mid-2000s, and UDG mostly convinced me to play it because it politely pretended to be a retro game rather than just a shooter made by a developer who specialized in visual novels.
Ultimately, my main takeaway is that Despair Girls is a must-see in the Danganronpa series, and despite its faults, it contains some of the best storytelling in the series, fleshing out the backstories of multiple characters that were overlooked in the main games, while adding several characters that have become iconic in their own right. The series’ follow-up definitely assumes that you’re as familiar with the characters and events in this game as you were with the two previous main series games. That’s why Spike Chunsoft and company don’t seem to be keen to admit it anymore.
As I’ve already said, Despair Girls did make it to PS4 and PC in 2017, but that was its last appearance. While all three core Danganronpa games are now also on Xbox systems, and were remastered for the Nintendo Switch series in 2021 to mark the series’ 10th anniversary, Despair Girls falls flat in comparison. In fact, the Danganronpa S series bills itself as containing four games – but it quickly corrects your natural assumption by letting you know that the fourth is a new, non-canon board game-style spin-off. That board game, Danganronpa S: Ultimate Summer Camp, even includes UDG characters as well as those drawn from other titles in the series, but without the context of the game providing the background.
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It’s a strange omission, since the Vita and Switch are about as compatible as systems made by different companies can be, and porting between them has reportedly been a relatively smooth process. But it’s less surprising when you consider that there were two big factors working against Ultra Despair Girls when it came to bringing the Danganronpa anthology to Switch. It’s a third-person shooter that plays very differently to the visual novels that make up the main series, and it’s a far cry from Nintendo’s family-friendly image.
The Danganronpa series was already a story about vulnerable young people being manipulated into brutally killing each other, but Despair Girls somehow manages to be even darker. While it shares the same surrealism as the entire series, there’s no denying that Despair Girls’ core themes are horrific violence at both extremes. be opposed to and go through Children.
I do think UDG handles these themes to a great extent, and surprisingly focuses on the effects of violence on the survivors rather than the violence itself, which is very relatable (considering the darkly comedic tone of the entire series). Unfortunately, there are a few places where the game falls short in this regard – the most memorable being an unskippable interactive scene where you, as the protagonist, must protect yourself from a sexual assault or it’s game over, which I imagine is why a lot of the 55% of players who DNF give up.
To be clear, despite the unpleasant and difficult-to-accept scenes described above, I still thoroughly enjoyed most of the game. Desperate Girls is certainly not the only work of historical fiction that fails to strike the right balance when trying to blend tragic realism and black comedy. But despite this, it’s easy to understand why all the content warnings in the world couldn’t convince Nintendo to let UDG get anywhere near one of its kid-friendly systems—which also means that other platforms will have to give up on the anniversary remake, which is now considered definitive.
But ultimately, even if you take steps to mitigate that one badly misjudged scene, the core problem with Desperate Girls is that it doesn’t really cater to any general demographic. Its one-hit-kill puzzles aren’t intuitive enough to appeal to fans of the genre; serious action game fans won’t enjoy sitting through hour-long cutscenes just to see a relatively short shooting sequence; and its scoring system, which punishes poor performance in combat, means it may prove too unforgiving for players who primarily or only enjoy visual novels, even those interspersed with mini-games like the Danganronpa series.
No, as I said at the outset, Despair Girls is really only aimed at one type of player: the hardcore Danganronpa fan who’ll insist on trying whatever weird experiments series creators Kodaka and Takashi are willing to try to get their lore fix. And what a lore fix it is! It’s somewhat ironic – even if it’s entirely understandable – that the remastered collector’s edition of the series omits it, even though the physical copy, packaged in a £90 steelbook, is clearly aimed at the same fans.
