Today, September 25, marks the 12th anniversary of Spike Chunsoft’s Danganronpa Another Episode: Ultra Despair Girls. Released back in 2014, the title is an action-adventure TPS spin-off of the original murder mystery visual novels following protagonists Komaru Naegi (younger sister of Makoto Naegi, the main character of Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc) and Toko Fukawa (another leading character from the first game).
Commemorating the anniversary, Danganronpa creator Kazutaka Kodaka took to X to talk about what it looked like developing the title back in the day.
Kodaka says that, in a sense, he considers himself to have reached a pinnacle with Ultra Despair Girls, as he will “never be able to write another scenario that surpasses it.”
Apparently, the development process itself was also painstakingly difficult, especially when it came to designing the game’s event cutscenes. According to Kodaka, he and a few other developers would pull all-nighters to create the scenes. A lot of the times, the program they used for creating the event scenes would crash, causing hours of work to go down the drain. Kodaka wasn’t quite fond of staying overnight at the office (which was not an uncommon practice for many developers back in the day, though it was most prominent during the late 90s and early 00s), so he would usually take a taxi home at his own expense (public transport in Japan usually doesn’t operate past midnight), take a nap, and go back to work.
However, he states that he made this game with the firm intention to make players “absolutely cry through experiencing the relationship between Komaru and Fukawa,” which could be a big reason why he went all in on developing it.
As he explained in one of his previous interviews, Kodaka doesn’t consider his sad scenes complete until they actually make him cry. “When I test play the game and a tear softly falls down my cheek, that’s when I consider it finished. This is an absolute for me. […] If I’m unable to cry, I switch back to the creator’s perspective and try to think about what went wrong.”
Danganronpa Another Episode: Ultra Despair Girls is available for PC (Steam) and PlayStation 4.
Related: Danganronpa 2×2 devs cite needing time to play GTA 6 as one of the reasons behind remake’s delay
