Parent's Guide: Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair - Age rating, mature content and difficulty

Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair is a "visual novel" that centres around a group of students who are trapped on a tropical island. With transport cut off, and the nearest land hundreds of miles away, there's no way for them to escape - unless they take their demon headmaster, a black and white teddy bear named Monokuma up on his offer. If you want to escape, all you have to do is kill one of your fellow students, and not get caught out in the following class trial, where the survivors get together to decide who they think did it. Part Phoenix Wright style murder investigation, part mystery novel, and all twisting with suspense, Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair is a game that'll keep you up at night wanting to know what happens next.

As a visual novel, there's a lot of reading to be done here. The vast majority of your time will be spent reading through dialogue between characters, so if you're the type who prefers plenty of action in your games, you may want to look elsewhere. For those who get their thrills from following a good story, or figuring out whodunnit though, there's plenty to be excited about here. With a decent range of characters, each with their own personality, and some heated class trials, where you'll have to use evidence you collected by examining the crime scene to counter your classmates' arguments, it's a lot more than a passive story.

In terms of accessibility, the class trials are definitely the biggest challenge here, requiring a heck of a lot of logic. As your classmates run down what they think happened in the murder, their words will appear on screen, with occasional orange sections that represent weak points. By using the evidence you collected examining the crime scene (known as truth bullets), you can blast through the weak points in their argument - but you have to find the right bullet for the right weak point, and it's a lot harder than it sounds. With plenty of red herrings and distractions, there's a lot of thinking to be done here - and needless to say, it's easy to be led astray.

Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair is a visual novel that, while it doesn't let you do anything violent, does contain several bloody, violent scenes. You'll be shown pictures of bodies of your former classmates impaled on things, dripping in blood, having been murdered by someone in your class. The game also contains plenty of sexual innuendos, ("Welcome to the world of girl love. It's slippery when wet" and "Oh my, screwing. How lewd!", "I even sold my used panties to this noisy pig who kept oinkin' "Panties! Panties!"), and a few pictures of one particularly clumsy character, who falls over and ends up lying less than gracefully, with legs wide open, and usually only a handily placed plate covering her dignity. It's all fairly juvenile stuff though, and far from serious nudity.

Age Ratings

Format Reviewed: PS Vita