All spoilers will be unmarked ahead. You Have Been Warned!
open/close all folders
Main installments:
Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc
- The Closing Arguments that end each class trial can cross into Guide Dang It! territory, since you're expected to summarize the entire murder by filling in blank vignettes of manga segments using nothing but tiny, textless thumbnails that may esoterically depict the event they're meant to represent. Even if you know exactly how the murder went down, you may screw up and lose influence gauge hitpoints just because a thumbnail was too vague for you to figure out. For example, Chapter 4's trial features two thumbnails of Toko either entering or exiting a locker. Which one is which? Who knows—the clues distinguishing the two are very small. She's sweatier in one of the thumbnails. This one goes with the panels of her covered in sweat. It is worth points, so good luck!
- However, it's worth mentioning that, while it's a Scrappy Mechanic gameplay-wise, it's well-liked aesthetically and thematically, due to it going over the entirety of the crime (which is useful to players who have been focusing on analyzing small bits of the crime up to this point and may not have a clear idea of the big picture, especially in regards to event chronology) in an alternate art style. The sequels fix most of the complaints by immediately telling you what the thumbnails are actually supposed to represent, as well as giving you specific questions to answer for each panel.
- The gifts for Free Time Events are another serious case of Guide Dang It!. Not helping is that you can only get them at random. This was improved in the sequel: in addition to the usual gachapon machine, you also have a vending machine that gives you control over what gift you receive (albeit at a higher cost and from a smaller selection), and many of them are easy for you to figure out who would like what.
- Memory Truth Bullets were a frequent source of annoyance, especially to first-time players. More often than not, even if the player knew the answer, they still had to sit through a Nonstop Debate at least twice. They were thankfully not used as frequently in Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair, and were removed altogether and replaced with Lie Bullets in Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony.
- Bullet Time Battles, the rhythm game segments of the trials. They're generally not felt to fit the design of the game, being rather cumbersome on higher difficulties when the game introduces ammo and changing bullets to the system. Later games in the series would simplify it with their own (renamed) versions of the minigame, assigning the aiming and firing to the same button and ditching the Truth Bullet mechanic.
- Maxing out each of the friendship meters in School Mode is already an exercise in trial and error due to how unintuitive a lot of the dialogue options are in terms of how much they'll raise the meter. However, what pushes it over the edge is the fact that you can be randomly given a set of options in which none of them raise the meter by the maximum amount, turning an already difficult and time-consuming task into a frustrating Luck-Based Mission where you're effectively forced to save scum if you want to be as efficient as possible with your limited supply of Trip Tickets.
- In this regard, maxing out Leon and Mondo's friendship meters is especially hair-yanking. Out of a possible 18 dialogue sets, only nine for Mondo and eight (i.e. fewer than half) for Leon have an option that raises their respective meters by a full heart. The frustration can be alleviated slightly by sticking to the dining hall, library, and garden for Mondo, and the library and rec room for Leon, since they each have two of their three dialogue groups presenting full-heart opportunities; however, it's still entirely up to the Random Number God as to whether or not you keep getting the bad one and have to keep reloading over and over again until one of the good ones finally shows up.
Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair
- This game's iteration of the Hangman's Gambit has the audacity to call itself "improved" when, to the vast majority of players, it's anything but. What was once a relatively simple — if dull and uninteresting — affair has been transformed into a tedious and frustrating headache thanks to mechanics that reek of Fake Difficulty. In a sequel in which all of the other returning mechanics received significant improvements, the fact that this one fell backwards so hard is nothing short of an enigma, and most players would rather have had the Hangman's Gambit remain the same or disappear entirely than to be forced to deal with this version of the minigame.
- For starters, whereas most phrases in the first game were typically no more than around 10 letters and usually had a few filled in for you, this game's phrases can go as high as 13 letters, none of which are pre-filled.
- Because of how the way taking damage has been altered, it's entirely possible for two different letters to spawn close enough that they register a collision, thus causing you unavoidable damage before the letters even fully appear onscreen.
- And God help you if you're playing on Mean difficulty, in which the Gambits in Chapters 5 and 6 take on Bullet Hell levels of insanity as letters fly across the screen in all directions, requiring practically inhuman concentration and reflexes to avoid taking massive damage. For most players, these segments end up becoming wars of attrition, in which simply trying to spell the phrase as quickly as possible before the rapidly-plummeting influence gauge bottoms out becomes the order of the day.
- Not that the easier levels are much better, since they have an annoying tendency of forcing you to wait 30 seconds or more before giving you the next letter you need, making running out of time a legitimate concern.
- Speaking of which, do you believe that you can keep a merged letter from earlier on the screen and just save it for when you need it? Think again; after a certain amount of time, those letters explode, with absolutely no warningnote , which means even more damage for you.
Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony
- The timed investigation in Chapter 6. There are a couple of places to check, but you have to do it in a certain order because of the rubble and Exisals in the way. If you run out of time, you get a Non-Standard Game Over and are forced to re-investigate the area you're at and read all the dialogue again (though you can still fast-forward text) with some time restarted.
- You can obtain Friendship Fragments with both Kaede and Shuichi. However, only Shuichi is playable in Love Across the Universe, even though said mode is designed to make gathering any fragments players missed before less tedious, and Kaede's are all obviously easier to miss than Shuichi's as she only has one chapter for 15 characters. If you want to complete Kaede's Report Cards, you have to do so through by going back to Chapter 1 and redoing the Free Time Events sections until all them are maxed, which means you need to go through this one chapter no less than 4 times as everyone only has 2 to collect rather than 5 (though thankfully, there's now an option to start a chapter from the first Free Time period). This also means for players aiming to get the skills from collecting all of the Friendship Fragments of a particular character as early as possible, they were essentially wasting their time and any presents they used as Kaede since she can't earn any skills and for any perfectionists they have to get used to the way all of Kaede's "finish" looking incomplete since she only has two fragments per character which can also lead to wasted time. And that's not even touching the issue of this being closely connected to one of the Underused Game Mechanics.
