Oh no, I can feel it happening. I’m regressing to my 2016 self, PlayStation Vita in one hand and a teeny-tiny Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair cartridge in the other. What began as little more than a time-kill opportunity—I had purchased the Sony handheld and a copy of the first Danganronpa in a desperate attempt to speed up what was a ridiculously long journey to my college—had become a full-blown obsession in less than a week.
Welcome to Soundtrack Sunday, where a member of the PC Gamer team takes a look at a soundtrack from one of their favourite games—or a broader look at videogame music as a whole—offering a little backstory and recommendations for tracks you should be adding to your playlist.
The pink blood. The bonkers executions. The psychedelic pop soundtrack that perfectly punctuated every moment: roaming the school halls and building friendships with fellow students to upbeat, peppy tunes… before discovering a body and hearing the swell of distorted music as instruments and vocals overlap each other and I’m staring face-to-face with the victim.
Masafumi Takada’s work was like nothing I’d ever quite heard before, and it was half the reason I was so desperate to get my hands on the sequel after devouring the first game, Trigger Happy Havoc, in mere days. And now, with the announcement of Danganronpa 2×2—a remaster of the original Goodbye Despair along with a brand-new scenario which’ll take a completely different narrative direction—Takada’s work is refusing to leave my brain once more.
Watch On
So I thought it was the perfect opportunity to dive a little bit into Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair’s music and highlight some of the best tracks that make the game just so gosh darn good. Which, in a world where I now associate the series with Covid, Junko Enoshima cosplays, and TikTok dances I was far too old to be participating in, is something that can be easy to forget.
Bloody good pop
Takada’s work can be best described by director Kazutaka Kodaka’s explanation of Danganronpoa’s whole vibe: “psychopop,” a blend of gruesome and horrific but with all the flair of a pop beat. In an archived interview with US Gamer, Takada dove a little further into the process: “If you try to make a horror game, you’re not going to beat Dead Space, so why try it? Rather than that, why not create your own genre?”
That idea is what led to what I can only describe as the most bizarre soundtrack you never want to stop listening to. Instruments and genres clash with each other yet somehow come together across jazz and electronica to craft something that is almost as odd as Danganronpa itself. But perfectly fitting.
Goodbye Despair retains a lot of the tracks and motifs of the first game, but Takada often rearranges them to strike the balance of familiarity with a more evolved experience that its sequel offers.
There are some key differences, though. In another archived interview with VGM Online, Takada said that the purpose behind Trigger Happy Havoc was to create music that felt claustrophobic. A way to nail home the setting—an inescapable school with barred windows and no outside contact.
Watch On
Goodbye Despair, on the other hand, dumps all the students on a tropical island. It’s the complete opposite of the first game, and so Takada “wanted the player to feel that abundance of space” through its tracks.
The tropical vibes show up throughout like in the aptly-named Tropical Despair, and Beautiful Ruin (Summer Salt). The latter is an excellent track that really helps to set the change in location, almost convincing me that things wouldn’t be quite so murderous in this game. Spoilers, I was wrong.
There’s also Miss Monomi’s Practice Lesson, a brand-new track to introduce the face to Monokuma’s heel. Another adorable stuffed animal—this time a rabbit—who faces some unfortunate circumstances right at the beginning of the game when she’s converted into a half-cyborg in the same vein as Monokuma.
The song begins with an opening sting similar to Monokuma’s own lesson track, but begins with a mechanical voice spelling out Monomi’s name. It’s a great nod to her transformation, with the entire track toeing the line of sounding cutesy but just that little bit unsettling.
It’s a soundtrack best experienced with all the insanity, anime, and bright pop colour palette that Danganronpa is accompanied by. But I still have to list a couple of absolute bangers that you should be adding to all of your playlists immediately. From heart-racing tracks that put you right in the heart of each murder trial to the ‘in-between murder’ songs that make this whole killing game business seem not so bad:
Am I going to have these tracks on repeat until Danganronpa 2×2 launches? Almost definitely. Unfortunately there’s no firm release date yet, but it should hopefully be out some time next year. I’m already theorycrafting about the new murderers/murderees in my head as we speak.