Review: Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony

This review will remain as spoiler-free as humanly possible, as the true charm of the Danganronpa games is their murder mystery aspect. In addition, the footage used in this video was taken from the demo version - which is unrelated to the main narrative story wise but uses the same characters, settings and gameplay features. So, with that out of the way…

Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony is the 3rd game in the Danganronpa series, not including the spin-off hack n slash title Danganronpa Another Episode: Ultra Despair Girls. It also follows the same canon as the Danganronpa 3: The End of Hope's Peak High School series of anime, which chronologically comes after Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair but before Danganronpa V3 itself. It was released in September 2017 in Europe and North America on PS4, Playstation Vita and Steam.

The basic premise of all 3 Danganronpa titles is you assume a 1st person perspective of one of a group of high school students who are all gifted with some form of “ultimate” talent, basically they are one of the very elite in their chosen field or interest. Some of the “ultimates” included in Danganronpa V3 include ultimate pianist, ultimate magician, ultimate cosplayer, ultimate tennis pro and ultimate artist. These characters are tasked with carrying out a communal life together within their school - but the equilibrium is quickly disrupted when Monokuma, the series mascot and antagonist appears and forces them to take part in his twisted killing games.

Monokuma presents the students various motives and opportunities to kill one another throughout the storyline until somebody takes the bait and you stumble upon the corpse of one of your former classmates. This is where you are tasked with investigating the crime scene, collecting alibis, looking for clues and identifying the key points of the murder, such as time of death, cause of death and the murder weapon.

After enough time passes, you then take part in the class trial - which involves all remaining students standing in a circle in Monokuma courtroom and arguing their points. During the class trials you act simultaneously as potential culprits, lawyers, prosecutors and jury members and must use “truth bullets” to either agree with points made by the other students or destroy weak points, false alibis, lies and contradictions in their arguments.

As the Danganronpa games are, at heart, visual novels - the storyline progresses primarily through conversations between you and other characters with minimal action sequences. The class trials all feature full voice acting and you can choose to play with the original Japanese voice actors or the English dub - both have their strong points - but it's a matter of preference between players, it's an argument we shan't go into here.

The game is split up into Daily Life and Deadly Life, which are exactly as they sound, daily life is the usual routine before a murder occurs and deadly life involves the investigation and preparation for the class trial. Daily life also includes free time moments where you can choose which characters you can spend time with and give presents to improve your relationships and unlock new skills that can be used in the class trials.

Upon completion of the main story mode, you will unlock a variety of post-game modes, including a “what if” story scenario that doesn't involve any violence or murders and instead let's you focus on building your friendships. There is also a casino mode in which you can replay mini-games to earn coins and use them to buy items, skills and skins to customise your user interface. Monocoins, which are collected throughout the story mode can be used to buy presents to gift to the other students and used to unlock FMV movies, evenly scenes, background music and concept art in the gallery.

In order to maintain an M for Mature rating, Spike Chunsoft made the creative decision to change the blood colour from red to a neon pink - though the games still include graphic depictions of murder, suicide, death, loss and of course, Monokuma’s ridiculously creative yet simultaneously graphic and disturbing executions. These themes and storyline are made even harder hitting when you consider that all of the characters are of high school age, in their late teens and early 20s at the oldest.

The main selling point of the Danganronpa games in my opinion is the unique art style and the wide array of quirky characters - every player will have characters they identify with and characters they can't stand - and everyone will connect to the motives, struggles and themes differently. 

So I recommend not just Danganronpa V3, but the entire Danganronpa series to anybody who enjoys visual novels, solving murder mysteries or would always choose a less-action orientated game with a rich and immerse storyline than a mindless shooter or adventure title with no substance. 

And for the love of God, do not Google ANYTHING while you're part-way through the game! The Internet is rife with game-ruining spoilers that can totally spoil entire sections of the game if you read ahead accidentally. And while Danganronpa V3 *can* stand up alone and doesn't have to be played following Trigger Happy Havoc and Goodbye Despair, I recommend you do try those out first so you can get as immersed as possible in the Danganronpa world - not quite drowning, but up to your neck in neon pink blood!

Review: Doki Doki Literature Club!

This review will be as spoiler free as humanly possible - but Doki Doki Literature Club is a game that is best experienced totally blind - do bear that in mind. 

Also, the game opens with a disclaimer and discretion agreement - “this game is unsuitable for children or those who are easily disturbed,” - Doki Doki Literature Club touches upon some rather heavy subject matter, including mental health issues like depression and anxiety, self harming, suicide and themes of abuse. The script is so well written, that as a player who has personally experienced some of these topics first hand, they can hit very close to home - and while I hesitate to use this word, as the Internet has made a mockery of it - some parts can be triggering. So please exercise some caution.

Upon first glance, Doki Doki Literature Club presents itself as a cutesy light-hearted visual novel/dating simulator in which you play an unseen and unnamed male protagonist with 3 of 4 potential girls to attempt to woo. The visuals are heavily anime-inspired, complete with Japanese schoolgirls sporting brightly coloured hair, unnatural eye colours and suggestive school uniforms. However, this is a mere crust - the first “act” of the game is a total facade resting upon a heavy and incredibly dark and disturbing series of acts that explore the sort of themes a psychological horror game would.

The story itself is fairly simple - your childhood friend Sayori encourages you to join an after-school extra-curricular club - specifically, the literature club. You go along to humour her and meet the other 3 members - Natsuki, Yuri and the club president Monika. Bribed with cupcakes, flirty girls and offers to read new manga - you agree to join. The girls suggest the four of you begin writing poems to share with one another in an attempt to improve each others’ writing skills and confidence.

This introduces the poetry writing mechanic. Each night after attending the literature club - you're presented with this screen - in which you must click 20 different words to include in your poem. This is also how you begin to appeal and build a closer relationship with one of the specific girls - as each has their own preferences of the sort of vocabulary they like to read. 

Sayori enjoys bittersweet poetry, including emotional words and words relating to human connections - such as family, romance, promise, sadness and happiness. Natsuki likes cutesy words and themes and thus favours words like marshmallow, bouncy, kitty, puppy and candy. Yuri presents herself as the most experienced writer and thus prefers more elaborate words and words that touch on darker themes, such as contamination, suicide, graveyard, destruction and massacre.

Upon presenting whatever kind of poem you write to the other girls, they too will show you what they wrote - and as the story progresses, all of their writing becomes more intense and emotional, revealing the secrets of their home lives, their mental state and their true intentions. 

At the end of act 1 however, as all seems to be progressing well, one of the girls will commit suicide - and the game begins to act in very bizarre ways. It seems like one or more of the games’ characters has achieved self awareness and is physically deleting and altering the actual game files contained with YOUR OWN computer. Keep an eye on the games’ directory and you'll see files appearing and disappearing - and lines of text will be added to the games’ program log.

Act 2 is filled with weird visual glitches, distorted music and sound effects and corrupted text. Some lines of dialogue will even be outright changed and on occasion your mouse cursor will move on its own.

In addition, the overall theme of the game will now dramatically change - characters’ dialogue will include more profanity and out-of-character expressions. Sometimes you will be unable to read what they're saying, as they will instead spit out garbled lines of corrupted text.  Their facial expressions will often change too, behaving in truly inhuman and disturbing ways.

Interestingly, there are dozens of pre-programmed glitchy occurrences but not all players will experience them - as they may change depending on the choices you make and some have a small chance of even happening in the first place - ranging from a 33% chance to a minimum of 1% chance of an event even happening - allowing for each player to get a different experience.

Even more things happen outside of the game - as previously mentioned, the games’ directory will spew out random text files and images - some tech savvy players even opened the character files and decoded them into text or images. Some files at first glance simply contained garbled text characters - but were actually haunting messages encoded in base-64 or binary.

Doki Doki Literature Club is a rare example of a game that literally has no excuse NOT to be played. Why? It's available right now for download from its official website or via Steam for the low low price of FREE. That's right - you will receive around 3-5 hours of gameplay and some truly disturbing existential horror for literally nothing. So close this window, open your Steam client and get ready to witness some seriously fucked-up psychological horror, cold blooded existential dread and watch your computer get manipulated by in-game characters with nothing you can do about it.

Japanese Super Mario Stacking Game

Whilst trawling Amazon for some fun things to unbox and review, I found several Japanese import Mario toys - most of them selling for under £10 each with postage - as long as you didn't mind waiting for the package to come from Japan.

Naturally I jumped at the chance and grabbed a couple of them. One of them I bought was this; a stacking game of sorts - in which you balance red, green and clear mushrooms on a warp pipe with a wobbly base.

As I don't speak Japanese, I can't tell you any of the rules or object of the game - but I'm assuming the aim of the game is to see how many of your mushrooms you can stack onto the wobbly warp pipe before it topples over. And as there are 14 clear mushrooms, 4 red mushrooms and 2 green mushrooms - I assume red are worth more points than clear ones and green ones are worth more points than red ones.

It's very well made and the mushrooms themselves are well painted - the warp pipe is sturdy and wobbles pretty well when under the strain of holding multiple mushrooms. Not bad for something that cost me less than £8.

Here's some shots of the box itself - if anybody speaks Japanese and can give me some rough translations of anything this box has written on it - I would be most grateful. :)

Front view

Side view

Side view

Back view

Top view

Bottom view

And if you wish to hear me make funny noises while attempting to balance all of the mushrooms on the pipe base, here's a video:

Unboxing: Japanese Pokémon Candy

Today I'm going to show you a pair of Pokémon candy/snacks I received from Japan! One is a box of "milk candy," and the other is a Kinder-Surprise style chocolate egg.

Firstly, I had a box of "milk candy." The packaging on this was just amazing - styled after a Master Ball, which even opened up like one once the seal had been broken!

On the inside of the lid, there was a little maze-style puzzle. Under the bag of snacks, I found a collectible sticker - holographic too! The one I got was Mega Blaziken - and it came with some stats on the back - naturally I have no clue what it says, as I don't speak or read Japanese!

To be honest; the snacks themselves were a little disappointing. They tasted like Golden Nuggets cereal that someone had left open for several months. They had a slight crunch to them, but once they were wet in your mouth, they quickly disintegrated into nothing.

Here's some close-ups of the packaging:

(Click to enlarge!)

Front view of the package

Back view of the package - including a sample of the stickers that are available to collect

Side views of the packaging

The puzzle printed on the inside of the packaging

Sticker and packaging that was found inside

Front and back of collectable sticker

Inner bag

Close-ups of the snacks

Next, I had a chocolate surprise egg. It was rather a small box - and didn't come with any bonus goodies inside, but of course, the main prize was inside the chocolate egg itself!

The chocolate was pretty good, a mixture of sweet and creamy and yet it had a mildness to it - like it was a candy specifically made for children. Well duh. :)

The figure inside, according to my Twitter followers is Zygarde 10% Forme. It was fairly simple to build and comes with a nice display stand - which personally I don't think it needs, as it can stand on its own feet - but perhaps other figurines in the set can't.

I'm feeling a little hacked off, as one of the available figures was ESPEON - my FAVOURITE Pokémon - but noooo, I couldn't get that one, could I?!

Here's some close-ups of the packaging:

(Click to enlarge!)

Front view of the packaging

Side views of the packaging

Top view of the packaging

Back of the packaging - lots of Japanese text!

The foil wrapper from the egg itself

Close-up of the figurine

Side views of the figurine

The assembly instructions and list of other available figurines

And finally, here's my full unboxing video: