Recent reviews by Mixa

I found it hard to believe how literally everything ties together and is connected when it comes to plot. Being an Ace Attorney game, it was really predictable how the prosecutor gets prosecuted, again, and who the main bad guy ends up being, again. Also early 1900s holograms were a stupid addition.

I was a bit disappointed by the lack game modes. Why is there not a proper championship mode?

It ran better than I expected with my 4060, around 80-90fps avg at medium settings and 30fps 1% min, however I experienced several heavy stutters and crashes within the short period of time I played this, not great way to experience a good game.

Ironman is tough as nails even on lower difficulties.

The game is great, I just have a few things that could've been improved or changed.
1) There are too many bindable buttons which makes the controls cluttered, and it breaks the immersion when the game has to constantly remind you which buttons to press. I would've preferred to have a weapon ring that had all the infrequently used items and actions such as flashlight, lighter, binoculars, night vision, weapon holster, gas mask, and filters instead of having dedicated buttons for each of them. The wristwatch bind is completely unnecessary, just animate it so it's visible all the time.
2) The unskippable in-game cutscenes are terrible for the consequent playthroughs: I'm playing now the enhanced version and because the saves didn't get tranferred, I have to experience them all over again.
3) The loading times are a bit lenghty, but it's weird that every time you make changes to the graphics settings, the following load is the longest I've experienced in any game. Like if you change from low to high, it takes about 2 whole minutes before the setting gets loaded.
4) At some points this is "check the walkthrough" kind of game. Some interactable elements are not easy to spot in the world, and I had a few getting stuck -moments because I had ran past a switch, a lever or a ladder I didn't notice.
5) The scripting breaks sometimes. In the level Volga, I didn't know I had to neutralize all the enemies in the area before trying to rescue the hostages; because I opened their cell door before doing that, the AI got confused and softlocked.

The first 80 minutes of the game felt like 1/2 walking sim, 1/4 of scripted sequences and 1/4 of actual gameplay, which was boring slow-paced corridor shooting.

The presentation seems simple, but it's a ridiculously polished game. Getting the S+ rank is addicting. I love how most of the weapons and powerups have hidden properties to learn.

Danganronpa and Zero Escape -series were more captivating. The mystery got me hooked though, and it's honestly the saving grace of this game.
The writing is only decent and barely carries the plot by itself; especially the "haha men are horny" -humor is embarrasing. Unfortunately, the gameplay sections are just as disappointing. The dream section puzzles are largely based on your intuition and trial-and-error, and they feel unsatisfying to solve. The action scenes are clunky and ridiculously choreographed, with genre-typical pointless quick time events. The actual crime-solving you'll be doing by yourself is very minimal, the CSI department is completely useless, and it can make you feel like that the game is artificially withholding so much information from you (which it does).

Near spoiler-free thoughts about the game, TLDR in the end
This review expects that you have already completed the first Danganronpa.


// Story //

The story is bigger and better, but after the opening scenes it progresses quite slowly until the midpoint of the game. In Danganronpa1, the cast was doing a spectacular job solving the mystery thorough the story while some believable character conflicts were affecting it, but in this game the breadcrumbs are spread far more sparingly and some of the mid-story character plot twists feel a bit forced in. At one part of the game, out of nowhere a side character picks up a random fight with Monokuma, gets injured and turned into a mechanical android.
In a nutshell, Danganronpa1 had a steadier flow going thorough the game, but still the last half of D2 beats the ending of D1 hands down, I found it very satisfying and impactful. To avoid spoilers I'm not going to say anything more about that.


// Characters //

Compared to D1, the main cast is much more eccentric. While the first game had pretty colourful characters set in a relatively dark athmosphere, D2 goes all out with the character designs, which might be off-putting to some people, especially if you're not used to Japanese style of humor. I personally would've preferred if the cast wasn't as weird as it was presented, but this wasn't a huge deal because:
a) Some characters actually develop a bit this time and will grow as persons, but I would've appreciated having even more character development.
b) More information about the characters can be gained during the free-time conversations, which will help you understand the cast better, therefore they become more tolerable.
c) There's a good chance that the character you despise the most will die at some point lol.

I think the reason why the character development is near to non-existent lies in the free-time conversations. Because the game can't possible know how much time you want to spend with each character, it prevents making too radical character changes to avoid story-conversation conflicts from happening. For example, if a character developed a bad case of PTSD during the later part of the story, but you hadn't talked to him yet and only decided to do it now, it could be possible that in the conversation the character appears to be completely fine because the devs didn't expect you to active such an early event this late into the story.

While the main cast is mostly more one-dimensional than it was in the first game, the villains this time are just awesome. Instead of having arbitrary motives linked to the despair theme like in the first game, the reasons of the killing game and character actions become very clear. The case and story twists are huge and twisted af, I loved it.


// Cases and Trials //

The game had some of the best murder cases I've yet to play in any game so far (5th case omg). Most of the murder scenes stay focused in small areas, usually just in the room or the house the murder took place, so the investigation, trial and logic proceedings stay more cohesive. Because of this, the possibility of logical weak points or plot holes popping up is kept to a minimum.

The trial mechanics are improved, tho I still dislike the action based logic games.
When it comes to the logic puzzles, the pieces of the puzzle should be the key to the solution, not vice versa, where the player already knows the answer, but the artificial difficulty of the puzzle makes him waste time and effort just for submitting the answer.
The best example of this is the Hangman's Gambit, where you have to shoot down flying letters to form a sentence to answer a question. The intention of the game is that the letters would act like helpful hints, but usually the player can figure out the answer after inputting a couple of letters. After that you're just waiting for the correct letters to appear on the screen, and the game becomes a time wasting formality. There is an option to turn down the action puzzle difficulty, but as I'm aware it doesn't really shorten the time you have to spend in those games.

The trial mechanic where the game really shines, Make Your Argument, is improved even further. The time limits are stricter, time bonuses have been nerfed, and because of the more compact theme of the murders the logic flows more solidly. There are still some moments where you struggle submitting the answer just because you can't figure out which statement to shoot down, but those are rare now, I had to dig a hint from a walkhrough only once during the whole playthrough.


// Graphics and Sound //

The graphical detail and style are again excellent: the visuals have aged really well considering this was originally a PSVita title. There are some minor but very glaring issues though; I don't understand why the 2D hub world was put together so sloppily, because you'd figure that kind of solution would be easy to execute properly. The character movement animation is terrible, the sprites are jagged and pixelated, and the texture layers between the foreground and the character overlap incorrectly. Also when the background sprites happen to overlap each other, there're occasional graphical errors that are mostly caused by bad object cropping. Object popping is also a thing during the trial sections, which is probably a remnant from the Vita version, it could've been removed from this PC version.

The music is an excellent mixture of old and new, the new tracks keep the distinct Danganronpa style even when they get influenced by the tropical holiday resort theme, the work here is just amazing.

When it comes to selecting the voice acting language, I recommend Japanese due to practical reasons. This allows you to read the dialogue more fluently when the characters are speaking virtually gibberish, so moving to the next text box in mid-sentence is less abrupt.


// TLDR //

The writing and dialogue are again excellent outside some "Japanese" moments, which this game has more than Danganronpa1. Especially the ending and the murder cases greatly exceed the first game, this stuff is wonderfully f*cked up.
The character designs are more eccentric and one-dimensional, but there's some character development around this time.
The villains on the other hand are superior, the motives and character actions are rock-solid, which was very satisfying.
Trial minigames have been changed for the better, tho they are still just artificial time-wasters if you don't like their core mechanics.
Play with Japanese voices, and be not afraid to max out the logic difficulty.

The story is pure Spike Chunsoft style, being amazingly engaging and exciting. It's very well written, proving that these devs are still the masters of unveiling thrilling mysteries. The characters are one-dimensional but (mostly) likeable and memorable, making you really care about the people competing in the death game.

The flow of the cases and trials is very linear and mostly easy, which makes them hardly challenging but very fluent to play through. There were a few tasty "but of course!" moments of realization when you discover something about the cases on your own, but the characters themselves figure things out pretty well during the investigation parts, so the trials leave to be less surprising and exciting. They're still very enjoyable due to the solid logic system for presenting evidence and arguments, there's always a clear item A that breaks the argument B once you realize it.
The other minigames were a bit confusing at first because they felt out-of-place, I seriously wasn't expecting that the case-turning 'Moment of Truth' was just a simple rythm game. It maybe would have been better to leave some of the "action minigames" out and only stick to logic puzzles, but I didn't mind those too bad.

The artstyle and soundtrack are stylishly great; being originally a PSP title the game has aged amazingly well. Due to its origins both the controller and mouse/keyboard are adequate options on PC, I personally used a controller which made a cozy and great experience.