The Danganronpa series easily became a favorite of mine when I first played it on the Playstation Vita. The games featured a thrilling story with charming characters and clever class trial gameplay. With Danganronpa V3 on the horizon, the first two Danganronpa games are now available on the Playstation 4 through Danganronpa 1•2 Reload. Combining the first two thrillers in the story into one package.
THE GOOD: If you’ve never experienced Danganronpa before, I want to just warn you first to not look up too much about the game. The beauty of Danganronpa is to jump right in without any knowledge of it beforehand. You can easily get spoiled on the game’s many mysteries if you choose to look up info. I will say though that this is an adventure game in the style of a visual novel, but very interactive. Especially when it comes to the class trials of the game. Think along the lines of the Phoenix Wright titles. If you don’t mind reading through lots of text boxes, you’ll have no problems enjoying this game.
With Danganronpa 1•2 Reload, you get the first two games in the series, with an increased resolution over their Vita counterpart. These games did release for PC last year, and this is what this release is based off of. Not much difference here though really, these games are pretty much the same as they were on Vita. Not necessarily a bad thing, since the original releases were very well made already. You can even check out my DR2 review here: http://otakudome.com/reviews/danganronpa-2-goodbye-despair-review/.
THE BAD: Not much I can complain about since this is a re-release. The game runs great and with no problems from what I can see. New content would’ve been neat, but I’m not even sure what you would add to an already well-established base. Although, there is one little thing with the resolution increase. Things do feel a bit blown out with some of the game’s textures and the cutscenes weren’t remastered to match the high resolution as you can kind of tell they were upscaled from Vita quality. Minor things though, I don’t think they ruin the experience in any way. Certain things just became a bit more noticeable to me since my only prior experience with the game was on the smaller Vita screen, which worked great for this style of game.
One thing I will say is a bit unfortunate is that these games are only available as a bundle for PS4. So if you’re on the fence and only want to try the first game, or never got around to checking out the second game, you can’t buy either game separately. It’s either both games or none at all. Not a huge deal, but I’m always up for more choices in these types of things.
OVERALL THOUGHTS: When the first two Danganronpa games made the jump to PC, it was a very well made product. It continues to be so with its jump to PS4. So if you haven’t yet experienced the madness that is Danganronpa, then you now have yet another great platform to possibly enjoy it on. The Playstation Vita is still my most preferred way of enjoying these games, but you can’t go wrong with any choice here. Simply put, Danganronpa is a great series that I can’t recommend enough for everyone to check out.
