At Nintendo's E3 Nintendo Direct, Nintendo managed to salvage E3 for many fans with a show full of surprises and announcements, including a new 2D Metroid game and a remake of Advance Wars. While maybe not the biggest surprise out of the direct, nobody expected all the Danganronpa games to end up being ported to Switch, including a new spinoff board game RPG hybrid called Danganronpa S: Endless Summer.
Danganronpa Decadence is a collection of all three mainline Danganronpa games (Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc, Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair, and Danganronpa v3: Killing Harmony) for the Nintendo Switch, included with Danganronpa S: Endless Summer, a side game originally included in Danganronpa v3 that has updated with enough additional story and artwork to be a standalone game.
For those unfamiliar with Danganronpa, these detective mystery visual novel games follow the same formula. You are trapped in a location by a psychotic teddy bear named Monokuma with 15 or so other students, all possessing unique talents that make them "Ultimates" in their fields. The only way to earn your freedom is to murder another student and then get away with it in a class trial while the remaining students try to deduce the culprit amongst themselves. The series is known for its eccentric characters, clever twists, and elaborate mysteries. This is what makes Danganronpa S such a surprising new entry, as just going off the trailer, it seems not to have a lot in common with its previous installations.
The Danganronpa games have always been about creating an oppressive atmosphere of despair. They're at their best when they make you care about these characters and then take them away, leaving the remaining cast to not only determine how their friend's life was taken but then single out one of their own as the murderer behind this cruel act. Yet, Danganronpa S seems like a more lighthearted romp with the cast from every game on a fun vacation adventure. Seeing what these characters are like when their lives aren't in danger is genuinely uncharted waters for the series, providing fans more of the intimate character moments fans love, such as the friendship that slowly developed between Shuichi, Maki, and Kaito in v3.
The promotional artwork seems to point further in this slice-of-life direction, as well. One shows the characters engaging in a nighttime festival with stands and prizes. There's another illustration with a different set of characters having fun on the beach on a sunny day. Honestly, after so many games where it felt moments like these were few and far between, Danganronpa S is a perfect gift for the fans of a series that's now over a decade old.
Furthermore, it'll be interesting to see how they decide to balance the board game and RPG mechanics. The different assortment of characters in Danganronpa could absolutely function as RPG classes, given their array of varying talents. From what we've seen so far, the RPG battles appear very traditional, borrowing from Dragon Quest in its UI and presentation, but they still seem to have classes. One screenshot showed a few of the characters from Trigger Happy Havoc as either Balanced, Cerebral, or Athletic.
Danganronpa has always been a bizarre series, even among Japanese visual novel-type games, but they've always had a certain style that really sets them apart. Anyone who's seen the ending to Danganronpa v3 would tell you another entry into this oddity of a series just wouldn't be likely, so to have it return in a way that feels like a gift longtime fans with Danganronpa S, is an excellent sendoff. Danganronpa S and the Decadence Collection will be released sometime later in 2021, but an exact date has not yet been announced.