this game had extreme amount of potential. art is amazing, pacing of first chapters was great, characters are great and dialogues are pleasant to read: game feels really complete.
the problem that after initial 2 chapters story is starting to go nowhere: it feels like two halves of the game are not connected at all, something broke there for some reason (author's interest loss while making? wish to finish earlier?), and it's really sad to see.
well, spoilers ahead:
1 and 2 chapters were made much earlier and released to the public. both cases had really interesting twist, like cyrus had two fake titles, that were revealed in different chapters, and it felt really unique and intriguing. his use of talent as information to make ashley ACCIDENTLY shoot was great. and later reveal of 6 additional character were mysteryous as well. and ummm, nothing of things i said are found in final version of the game
and in the final version of the game ashley shoots for no logical reason - it just don't correspond her moral and was never really explained
my initial thought was that cases was circumcised for the sake of global plot: maybe something changed for the better or cases was just meant to become simpler for some reason
and of course that's not the case: the ending was rushed, every detail revealed contradicted with information we had and make no story feel complete and true. it look like the creator changed their view on the story like myriad of times, but the result and last chapters we get just waste of its potential.
people in the comments already mentioned it, that story has extreme amount of details that contradicts with something or don't even have an explanation to begin with. it's even possible to add some more points, this list became really big for such short game
at the 3-ird chapter when we die at the bad end my mind filled with possibilities: canon became furious?? lyle killed us?? sei somehow rushed to our group?? getting this not specifed information was intriguing to continue story with other group. and oh god, things are already begun be questionable: what reason to give player some choice if it don't change anything at all - you still need to proceed playing in one route.
sei is killing like 3-4 people in a row and you think: oh my god, it's extreme, but okay, we all played danganronpa. there are three possibilities for story to continue, you think: you die, you play catch-up with sei trying to escape, or someone survived and you happily go to the court. then time is reversed and i felt extreme dissatisfaction: it was ABSOLUTELY for nothing. sei's motive for killing don't matches with anything later, zero's words are nonsense and we lost interesting way for the story to process. at the moment of time reverting happened, i hoped to see some good explanation for the reason of that and.... as you know it goes nowhere.... using information we got from unsatisfying game's ending we can think about hypnosis or something, but it is just bad
at the conclusion i would like to say: the game had so good potential and, in my opinion, author of this game is capable of creating something insanely good. but it feels like author is tired or something like that. i don't get it and it really-really hurts for me to think how good this game could be....
if it was possible to wait for another year or two to see this game finished with full potential, i would make this choice with no regret