I have to admit, I started Danganronpa V3 with low expectations. I’m not a huge anime fan and hadn’t played either of the two previous episodes, so I had my reservations. However, despite my initial reaction to the game I feel myself being pulled back in to play more… Now my only concern is how to lure my fiancé off the PS4 so I can get back on!

You start by witnessing someone’s kidnap (by naked kidnappers too I’ll add!) before witnessing the kidnapped character break out of a school locker into a class room. Equally as confused as the character, you meet a second student who’s also been abducted and trapped.  It transpires that 16 characters have been taken and imprisoned in the school, but why?

The game stays true to its anime style as I felt like I was playing through a graphic novel rather than your typical PS4 game. Still illustrations of each character slide on and off the screen (depending on whose speaking) rather than animated 3D models moving about it their environment. The aesthetics of the game include bright colours, in places to the point of almost being obnoxious. As I was playing I did find some of these objects distracted me from the other things that were happening on the screen and reading the story.

As we’ve come onto discussing the story I’ll emphasise how much of a crucial part of the game reading is. My goodness, this game has a lot of reading. There are some parts of the story text which have been given a character voice over, but not all of them. I still had to read each section anyway or I’d lose my place in the text. Reading a lot of text didn’t particularly bother me, but I would have preferred all characters had been given a voiceover. Maybe I’ve just become lazy and expect my story plopped in front of me on a plate. However, if you removed the reading and couple that with the small amount of interaction and movement built into the game, you’d end up just watching and doing very little. Reading the story keeps you more immersed focused on the game.

Something I wasn’t prepared for was the swearing and some of the comments that came out of characters’ mouths! Danganronpa V3 does have a mature 17+ rating, but I spent a good chunk of the beginning part of the game under the impression this was aimed at a younger teen audience…It’s not. I actually thought some of the rude comments were hilarious! My sense of humour is dark so that may not be the intention, but I still had a good ol’ chuckle.

I wondered if the game would frequently reference storylines from the other series and if I’d be left confused because of this. If it did this it wasn’t obvious and I wasn’t left feeling I needed to play the first two episodes to enjoy this game.

The only part I wasn’t keen on was the Monokuma Units, they annoyed me. The initial introduction of them is pretty cheesey and a bit lame. And, because there were six of them it also meant that every time one spoke the screen paned over to them…even the one that didn’t speak!

Danganronpa V3 may not be everyone’s cup of tea but it does have a certain charm and quirkeyness about it which makes it entertaining. It also had an uphill struggle as I mentioned, I’m not a massive fan of graphic novels. However it won me over and drew me into the story.

Thanks to Deep Silver for supporting TiX