When people talk about killer Sony exclusive series, there’s always one that instantly jumps to my mind, and that would be Danganronpa. In a lot of ways, it is to Sony what Ace Attorney is to Nintendo. A long-running anime game series with a passionate fanbase, that blends fun and quirky characters with stories of murder and mystery, all wrapped up in a unique adventure game package.
Much like how Ace Attorney has been afforded a few spin-off games that take classic characters into a new gameplay genre, Danganronpa got to explore similar territory with the release of Ultra Despair Girls on the PS Vita back in 2015, which we reviewed at the time. With a fresh re-release coming out on PS4, it’s worth revisiting the game to see how it makes the jump from handheld to home console.
For better or worse, the gameplay elements of Ultra Despair Girls remain relatively unchanged. It’s a 3rd person shooter where you use a hacking gun equipped with various types of projectiles to take on robotic hordes of enemies. While you can line up one hit skill shots on enemy weak points, their random movement patterns, your awkward aiming speeds, and your even more awkward movement controls makes that more a feat of luck than skill.
Despite the jump to PS4, the game makes no effort to alter the default control scheme or offer options to do so and let you take advantage of the DualShock 4 controller. This means that, if you want to sprint, you’ll need to awkwardly claw at the circle button to hold it down while still using the right stick for camera control. This is alleviated by using the auto-camera function, which works wonders when playing as Komaru, but induces dizziness and frustration when playing as her partner Genocide Jack.
Thankfully, when it comes to the visuals, the jump to PS4 has seen them utilise its added power. Ultra Despair Girls was already an impressive visual feat on PS Vita, with sharp character models that perfectly matched the art-style of the illustrated character portraits that the Danganronpa series is known for. While there haven’t been any major graphical changes, a smoother framerate and bumped up resolution are enough to make this game easily stand alongside many other Japanese PS4 titles. There are some parts of the environment with blurry textures, and a particular early level with a strange blur-effect applied to the lighting, but all-in-all, it always feels like you’re playing a game that’s actually meant to be on PS4.
Part of that also comes from the work they did with the user interface. Ultra Despair Girls has menu visuals that ooze style on a level similar to Persona 5, but the HUD on the Vita release was blown-up for the sake of a small handheld screen. Thankfully, with the PS4 release, not only are the menu visuals kept intact, but the HUD graphics showing your vital info are much better aligned for television play.
In some ways, it’s impressive that so little work had to be done in reworking or updating the graphical assets of this game for a PS4 release. At the same time, while the work didn’t have to be done, it certainly would have helped if they had attempted it anyway.
Ultra Despair Girls uses a few different styles of cutscenes to tell it’s story, a hefty and twist-filled experience with just as much content as the mainline entries to the series. One of these cutscenes styles uses rendered animations with the 3D character models, and they almost always look laughably bad. Rough facial animations, wooden movement, and more plague each of these scenes, and I can’t help but feel like it would have benefited Spike Chunsoft to revisit these scenes and touch them up at least a little bit.
Ultra Despair Girls has a great story that is great for die-hard Danganronpa fans to experience, but it’s wrapped inside of a shallow 3rd-person shooter experience that rarely ends up being more engaging or enticing than the narrative that you’re there for. This PS4 release, while good looking, is almost identical on disc as it was on PS Vita cartridge. A higher resolution and re-positioned HUDs without addressing the controls aren’t really enough for this to be considered the ultimate way to experience this game. Whether you have handheld of home console, either version of Ultra Despair Girls is just as good as the other.
