Note: The game contains depictions of sexual assault and frequent references to child abuse, so this article also touches on those topics. Take care of yourself and don’t read this article if you don’t want to.
Danganronpa was one of my home-comfort games of choice, and I’ve since spent many years developing a painstaking understanding of the expanded universe surrounding this trilogy of murder-mystery visual novels. I’ve watched the entire anime, read the tie-in novels and all the manga that have been translated into English (I’ve even started learning Japanese because the untranslated manga looks better and may actually get out faster than waiting for this to come) ;I even played this very strange spin-off shooter from start to finish, which celebrates its tenth birthday today.
Another episode of Danganronpa: Girls in extreme despair Released on PlayStation Vita on this day in 2014, it was given a second life with PlayStation 4 and PC ports in 2017. Approximately 45% of players on the platform have actually completed the game after starting it.
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That’s not actually a terrible retention statistic – I’ve seen some critically acclaimed games with much higher churn rates – but to me it still speaks to the quirky nature of the game. It seems to me that even looking for an obscure story-driven third-person shooter spun out of a series of visual novels, you’re probably already going to be very nerdy about the series and aim for completionism. To put this into perspective, the fact that only 45% of franchise die-hards made it to the end of the credits shows what happens when the unstoppable staying power that Danganronpa fans demand meets the strange immovable object That is “Desperate Girl”.
I had a lot of different feelings while playing this game. I love it because it stars supporting characters from the original books, injecting some much-needed long-term character development into a series that tends to erase its history and start over with an entirely new cast with each installment. I hated its unpredictability and ungenerous save points, which turned what should have been a rewarding trial-and-error puzzle into an unnecessary frustration that I blasted through as quickly and chaotically as I needed to. To be honest, I was pretty indifferent to the filming of it. I grew up on the janky action games of the mid-2000s, and UDG mostly convinced me to play the game, politely pretending that it was a retro game and not just a shooter made by a developer specializing in visual novels.
In the end, my main takeaway is that Girls of Despair is a can’t-miss addition to the Danganronpa story, and despite its many shortcomings, it contains some of the best storytelling in the series within the main game. Multiple characters who were overlooked fleshed out the backstories, while several were added who became iconic in their own right. Coming into the series later will certainly assume that you’re as familiar with the characters and events of this game as you are with the two main series games that preceded it. That’s why Spike Chunsoft and co. are weird. No longer seems keen to admit this.
As I’ve already said, Desperate Girls was ported to PS4 and PC back in 2017, but that was its last appearance. While the three core Danganronpa games are currently out on Xbox systems and have been remastered for the Nintendo Switch series in 2021 to vaguely commemorate the series’ 10th anniversary, by comparison “Desperate Girl” did poorly. In fact, the Danganronpa Decadence Collection claims to contain four games, but quickly corrects your natural assumptions and lets you know that the fourth is a new, non-classic board game style spin-off. The board game in question, Danganronpa S: Ultimate Summer Camp, even includes UDG characters as well as characters drawn from other characters in the series, but no background information on these characters is provided in the game.
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It’s an odd omission, as the Vita and Switch are pretty much compatible with systems made by different companies, and porting between them is reportedly a relatively smooth process. But things start to get less weird when you consider that there were two major factors that worked against Despair Girls when it came to making the Danganronpa series for Switch. It’s a third-person shooter that plays completely differently than the visual novels that make up the main series, and it strays far from Nintendo’s family-friendly image.
Danganronpa is already a series about vulnerable young people being manipulated into ruthlessly killing each other, but Girls of Despair still manages to get even darker. While it shares a surreal quality with the series as a whole, there’s no getting away from the fact that UDG’s central theme is gruesome violence be opposed to and go through children.
I actually do think UDG handles these themes well for the most part, surprisingly (given the darkly comedic tone of the entire series) focusing on how this violence affects the survivors rather than on the violence itself describe. Unfortunately, the game seriously misses the mark in a few places – most memorably an unskippable interactive scene where you as the protagonist have to protect yourself from sexual assault or end the game, which I imagine is where a lot of DNFs occur 55 % dropped.
To be clear, I mean it when I say that I still, for the most part, really enjoy this game, even though the aforementioned scenes are unpleasant because they’re hard to push past. The Girl in Desperation is certainly not the only work of fiction in history that fails to strike a balance when trying to blend tragic realism and black comedy. But nonetheless, I can easily see why all the content warnings in the world couldn’t convince Nintendo to let UDG get anywhere near one of its kid-friendly systems – and by extension, that means other platforms are now considering getting the Anniversary Remastered Final Edition too. Will have to do.
But ultimately, even if you want to do something to mitigate this grossly misjudged scenario, the core problem with “Girls” remains that it doesn’t really cater to any general demographic. Its one-click puzzles aren’t intuitive enough to appeal to fans of the genre; serious action fans won’t appreciate having to watch hour-long cutscenes just to watch a relatively brief laggy shooting section; and its ratings The system penalizes poor performance in combat, meaning it may be too unforgiving for players who primarily or exclusively enjoy visual novels, even mini-games like the Danganronpa series.
No, as I said at the beginning, Girls of Despair is really only aimed at one type of player: die-hard Danganronpa fans, who will continue to try whatever weird experiments series creator Kazutaka Kodaka ) are concerned about trying to fix their stories. What a legendary restoration! Ironically, and while that’s entirely understandable, it’s been omitted from the remastered collector’s edition of the series, despite the fact that the physical edition, packaged in a £90 steelbook, is clearly aimed at the same fans.
