I've gone on record saying that Kazutaka Kodaka of Danganronpa fame is probably one of the most exciting writers/directors currently working in the medium. Turning an adventure game about a death game at a boarding school into a psychedelic, neon colored carnivale of vulgar humor, absurd plotting and sometimes surprisingly daring social commentary, he certainly established himself as a creator to look out for.
The years since Danganronpa V3's release saw him spearheading a few smaller projects, the most notable probably being the short anime series Akudama Drive. One is inclined to suspect that the success of the DR series as a multimedia franchise left him with some amount of anxiety as to how he'd ever be able to follow it up. DR V3 devoted quite a lot of time to presenting it's point for why a series that has concluded shouldn't continue by popular demand alone.
Accordingly, getting the team back together and working on a followup project took, by his own admission, six years. Releasing under the name "Rain Code", Kodaka delivers something that's familiar, yet more ambitious than his previous works. Rain Code follows a young lad with the rather goofy name "Yuma Kokohead" as he finds himself on a train without his memory. As we are drip fed the games premise we learn that the train is headed to an isolated city state called "Kanai Ward" that's governed by a sinister private company. Everyone on the train seems to be an agent of the "World Detective Organization" sent to the city for a secret mission. And Yuma has made a contract with a shinigami (a Japanese death spirit) called... Shinigami to provide him with assistance in exchange for his memories. That is the central character dynamic, Yuma as a meek and understandably confused detective, Shinigami alternating appearance between a cartoony ghost and a slutty goth lolita (think DR's Junko Enoshima if she fetishized death, rather than despair) as his cheerful and rather bossy partner.
The characters look a lot like those from DR. The music sounds a lot like that of DR. In some regards it also plays a lot like DR. While investogations are now in full 3D with actual polygonal models, unlike DR's pop up book aesthethic, the investigations work similarly and while their conclusion has Shinigami spiriting Yuma away to an abstract "Mystery Labyrinth", it plays out with a lot of the same reaction based minigames as DR's trials.
Where Rain Code feels familiar mechanically, Kodaka is clearly trying to tell a very different story. Where the mainline DR games were defined by their hermetically sealed settings, with the state of the outside world left deliberately ambiguous, Rain Code wastes no time with its world building. Detectives are part of a global franchise. There is a "Unified World Government". The Kanai Ward is governed by a sinister corporation and the closest thing to law enforcement is a peace keeping department more concerned with covering up crime than solving or preventing it. There are some metaphysical concepts that appear as if lifted right out of Suda51's Silver Case games, as Shinigami explains a concept rather akin to that of those games "transmittable crime" early on while the first proper chapter deals with a serial killer representing the repressed desire for justice. I'm not too far into the game but Rain Code feels more ambitious and more political than the DR series usually got.
Artistically, Kodaka has managed to refine his "psycho pop" visual style by embracing a much more overtly fantastical setting. He named Tim Burton as an influence for setting and characters and Kanai Ward certainly bears some resemblance to Burton's expressionist interpretation of Gotham City while many of the character designs show an equally gothic touch. It's sort of a goth-cyberpunk style filtered through the trademark shrill exaggeration of Kodaka's psycho pop sensibilities. The aforementioned Mystery Labyrinths certainly make a great effort to turn the act of solving a murder case into a visual spectacle on the level of a Platinum Games bossfight where perpetrators and obstructive officials take on the shape of monster whose false testimonies you destroy with your truth blade.
I'm not particularly far into the game but so far Rain Code has everything I like about Danganronpa and more. It doesn't merely feel like a successor, but like an evolution.
The years since Danganronpa V3's release saw him spearheading a few smaller projects, the most notable probably being the short anime series Akudama Drive. One is inclined to suspect that the success of the DR series as a multimedia franchise left him with some amount of anxiety as to how he'd ever be able to follow it up. DR V3 devoted quite a lot of time to presenting it's point for why a series that has concluded shouldn't continue by popular demand alone.
Accordingly, getting the team back together and working on a followup project took, by his own admission, six years. Releasing under the name "Rain Code", Kodaka delivers something that's familiar, yet more ambitious than his previous works. Rain Code follows a young lad with the rather goofy name "Yuma Kokohead" as he finds himself on a train without his memory. As we are drip fed the games premise we learn that the train is headed to an isolated city state called "Kanai Ward" that's governed by a sinister private company. Everyone on the train seems to be an agent of the "World Detective Organization" sent to the city for a secret mission. And Yuma has made a contract with a shinigami (a Japanese death spirit) called... Shinigami to provide him with assistance in exchange for his memories. That is the central character dynamic, Yuma as a meek and understandably confused detective, Shinigami alternating appearance between a cartoony ghost and a slutty goth lolita (think DR's Junko Enoshima if she fetishized death, rather than despair) as his cheerful and rather bossy partner.
The characters look a lot like those from DR. The music sounds a lot like that of DR. In some regards it also plays a lot like DR. While investogations are now in full 3D with actual polygonal models, unlike DR's pop up book aesthethic, the investigations work similarly and while their conclusion has Shinigami spiriting Yuma away to an abstract "Mystery Labyrinth", it plays out with a lot of the same reaction based minigames as DR's trials.
Where Rain Code feels familiar mechanically, Kodaka is clearly trying to tell a very different story. Where the mainline DR games were defined by their hermetically sealed settings, with the state of the outside world left deliberately ambiguous, Rain Code wastes no time with its world building. Detectives are part of a global franchise. There is a "Unified World Government". The Kanai Ward is governed by a sinister corporation and the closest thing to law enforcement is a peace keeping department more concerned with covering up crime than solving or preventing it. There are some metaphysical concepts that appear as if lifted right out of Suda51's Silver Case games, as Shinigami explains a concept rather akin to that of those games "transmittable crime" early on while the first proper chapter deals with a serial killer representing the repressed desire for justice. I'm not too far into the game but Rain Code feels more ambitious and more political than the DR series usually got.
Artistically, Kodaka has managed to refine his "psycho pop" visual style by embracing a much more overtly fantastical setting. He named Tim Burton as an influence for setting and characters and Kanai Ward certainly bears some resemblance to Burton's expressionist interpretation of Gotham City while many of the character designs show an equally gothic touch. It's sort of a goth-cyberpunk style filtered through the trademark shrill exaggeration of Kodaka's psycho pop sensibilities. The aforementioned Mystery Labyrinths certainly make a great effort to turn the act of solving a murder case into a visual spectacle on the level of a Platinum Games bossfight where perpetrators and obstructive officials take on the shape of monster whose false testimonies you destroy with your truth blade.
I'm not particularly far into the game but so far Rain Code has everything I like about Danganronpa and more. It doesn't merely feel like a successor, but like an evolution.
