After my roommate and his girlfriend singing its praises to me for like eight months I finally got my hands on a borrowed Vita and a copy of the game at the same time and got to play Danganronpa. I like it a lot, but I'm finding it kind of frustrating for a few reasons. I finished the fourth case earlier, and I'm guessing I'm just a few conversations away from the fifth.
Multiple personality disorder, check. Amnesia, check. Now all we need is for this to have all been inside of a computer simulation/dream/hallucination/drug-induced fantasy the whole time and the set of "worst plot devices ever" will be complete. The game seems to kind of think it's lampshading them and being clever, but that's not really worth as much as just steering clear of them. At least, I don't think it is right now, I'm not done so anything could happen. Still, lame.
I'm so tired of the big fat nerd always being a disgusting incompetent creep. Japan has to know who consumes a lot of their products, right? I kept waiting for the fat guy to contribute one positive thing, but nope, he's just a gross idiot who ruins everything and dies because he's so dumb. Greeeeeat.
All of the characters I liked are dead now, which is both good and bad for the story. On one hand it's great because it means I really want to see the villain go down, but on the other hand it's bad because all of the remaining characters pale in comparison to the ones who died earlier. Maybe that changes later, but there was a window there for a minute where my favorite character was the inanimate laptop, and that seems bad.
Some of the logic puzzles seem like they may have lost a little in translation. Maybe I just hadn't figured out the game's particular brand of logic yet, but there were a couple of debate sections earlier where I genuinely could not figure out which answer the game wanted me to use on which question because more than one of each of them referred to the correct answer.
Also, I think I really hate the Vita. My hands are apparently too big to hold it, because I can't easily press X without also hitting down on the right stick. This game doesn't make use of any of its various gimmicks (which does not bother me, honestly) so the touchscreens just keep getting in the way and causing me to accidentally skip dialogue when I try to wipe a smudge off. It's way too chunky and fragile-feeling to be portable, which makes it not really a handheld at all, just a tiny crappy console. Maybe I would feel differently if I played a game that actually felt like it was developed for the Vita and not just made exclusive for no reason, but this has not been a good first impression.
I mean, that sounds like a lot of complaints, but I still really like the game. It's extremely compelling, I can't put it down. It gets major bonus points for being an exciting new franchise, and for finding a great balance for a visual novel between reading and playing. The actual gameplay is a little on the simple side, I would have preferred a game that was a lot less on rails, but that would have been waaaay more complicated and I understand why it wasn't feasible.
I'm not done with the first game yet and already my takeaway is "I can't wait to get my hands on the second game, where hopefully they've ironed out a lot of these problems and polished everything up".