Price: $30
Developer: Spike Chunsoft, Abstraction Games
DLC: Not that I am aware
Genre: Visual Novel
Hope's Peak Academy is a school for only the ultimate students. So when Makoto gets accepted, he is shocked. He won a lottery and was deemed the Ultimate Lucky Student. Upon arriving at the school he blacks out and wakes up in a random empty classroom. Shortly after some initial exploration he meets a lot of other students in the exact same predicament. They are unable to leave the school due to it being completely locked down. They are soon after approached by a strange bear named Monokuma. He tells them that the only way out is to graduate, and that graduation requires the students to kill each other.
Once murders begin you(Makoto) must investigate to gather evidence and make your arguments in a heated class trial! Figuring out how the murders happened and catching the culprit is the objective.
We have a ton of characters in this game from all walks of life and backgrounds. From the Ultimate Baseball Pro, to the Ultimate Biker Gang Leader, just about all the oddities are covered. As the game progresses you can spend time with other characters and give them presents you get from gambling in the Monokuma vending machine. Be careful what you give to whom, though, as not everyone likes the same things!
The school itself is huge, although not initially. It starts off really restricted but after certain events transpire more areas are unlocked for you to explore. I do recommend exploring everything too as there are hidden coins scattered all over the place.
Moving about the school is rather simplistic. You can move from room to room via very basic controls and warp around the entire complex using the map function in the menu. You will be doing a lot of both. While in individual rooms you can move on a fixed point to alter your perspective and point-and-click on a variety of targets.
If there is one area this game really falters it is definitely the gameplay mechanics in the trials themselves. Despite being the most exciting and highly anticipated segments of the game, they can often be unnecessarily frustrating. Trying to convey an argument is not necessarily hard, however, sometimes it can be challenging when trying to explain it in the way the game wants you to. You get 5 hearts and each time you mess up you lose one. You gain half of one back each time you succeed, though. I failed a few times because I had to eventually brute-force the argument to find out exactly what it wanted from me. It really broke immersion during these events. There's also some speedy tempo based segments that are not that bad but can be annoying in their own right.
Fortunately, if you screw a bunch and fail it lets you start off right at the same spot with full hearts. It makes me wonder why they even made it so ridiculous at times if you could just restart with full resources?
If you are looking for a game with replayability, this might not be your thing. I have no idea how this game could be replayed unless a significant amount of time had passed to where you would forget how things were resolved. I am not saying you could not replay it and not have fun, it is just that it is very narrow and rigid in its design so there is not a lot of room for experimentation. I did manage to get about 30 hours out of it, though.
As far as information on the port: It has various options for resolution and AA as well as controller and mouse/keyboard support. The one thing that I found especially irritating is that the sound options did not kick in until you loaded your individual save files. So if you do not like how loud it is initially, you might have to deal with it until you quickly load up your file. Annoying, but not a deal breaker. It also holds your mouse hostage so you have to alt-tab out of the game to do anything else(if you play in windowed).
Conclusion
This game is SO GOOD! Despite the ridiculous issues I had in the trial sections(mechanically speaking) the game held me fast in its grips. It is a very compelling piece of narrative and a total blast to play detective and blow up people's arguments in court! I sort of wished I played the game on the easiest difficulty, though, as the added gameplay elements actually seemed to annoy me more than I felt they contributed to the overall experience. It was one of the best experiences I have had in a long time. I bought it on a whim, and was blown away.
Recommendation
If you like having fun, then yes, play this. It's a very generic game in terms of gameplay but the focus is on the narrative and investigation/trials. These parts are so much fun that I just cannot recommend this enough to everyone.
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