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iamtoonenough · 21 days ago

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How to Play Danganronpa S: Ultimate Summer Camp

Dangnaronpa S only barely explains how it works, and it does a pretty shitty job of doing so. I’ve been talking with people on message boards just to figure out how you progress at certain points, because you can spend literal hours on this game just doing the same thing and never seeing any obvious benefit to it.

As such, I really felt like producing some kind of overview for the people just coming in. I’ve been feeling the game out, talking with other players about it, and progressing through it gradually, so here’s what you need to know. Or at least, here’s what I wish I’d known when I started out.

1) Your primary goal is to complete the board game with all 60 possible characters.

For every 10 characters you put through board game “development,” you unlock a new story chapter that progresses the overall narrative. It also contains a boss fight (we’ll get to that). You must complete the board game with all 60 possible characters to unlock the complete main story of Danganronpa S: Ultimate Summer Camp.

(If you’re wondering how long it will take to accomplish this, the popular estimate is around 40-50 hours until completion. It’s a lot.)

IMPORTANT: “Completing” the board game does NOT require that you complete any objectives IN the board game. It just means that you have to play through 50 turns on the board. You could honestly just run around in circles on the first island, never advancing, and it’d still count as “completing” the game with that character.

2) The main menu options form a feedback loop.

The main reason you play the board game - aside from just completing it with every single character - is to level up each character’s stats and skills for combat. Specifically, the combat that takes place in another mode called “Despair Tower” or “Battle.” In the Despair Tower, you earn bunches of Monocoins. You then go to the “School Store” option on the menu to spend those Monocoins, unlocking various characters and “Hype Cards” that give them stat boosts and benefits in the board game. And then you go to the board game to play with the new characters you unlock… and the cycle repeats. See? It’s designed to keep you moving from the board game/”Development” to “Battle” to “School Store” and back again.

Furthermore, whenever you unlock and then finsih a new chapter of the overarching story, you are given bonuses in the board game that will help you level up faster and progress farther. Stat multipliers, starting money, etc. And for every 20 “floors” you complete in the Despair Tower, you get early access to a grimoire/scroll that lets you progress through the board game ever faster! So again: Everything is a feedback loop.

3) All about the board game/”Development”

If you’ve played Ultimate Talent Development Plan (a.k.a. UTDP) mode in DRV3, you know the basics of how this works. You roll a die, you move around a board, and sometimes you earn “Cards” that give you special ways to move.

In addition to getting your character’s stats up, you’re going to want to obtain “Talent Fragments” as you go through the board in either game. You use Talent Fragments to unlock and level up “Skills” - which can be special methods of attack, support functions like healing/resurrecting, defensive shields, temporary character buffs, etc.

And of course, as a fan of these characters and this multiverse, you’re DEFINITELY going to want to see the events on the “Friendship” squares. These each show you a random cut scene of your character interacting with other characters from Danganronpa while on the island. You can piece together a number of story threads that connect various characters, you can see characters meet who never had a reason to do so before, you can see beloved friends having new scenes together… and don’t worry, it’s not a waste of time, either. You get big stat boosts from these interactions. :)

One of the nicest features about this game is that it makes your options very clear after each roll of the die. There are so many branching paths on this board that rolling a “five” could take you to any number of places. The game helpfully places an arrow over every square that is a possible destination after you roll. You can simply move the camera over the square you wish to move to (use the right stick to move the camera) and select it, and the game will do the pathfinding necessary to make you land there!

There are also “gifts” which you can unlock in the School Store. You can choose to apply two “gifts” at the start of any play through the board game. A “gift” is a pixelated item that gives you some kind of benefit on the board - like making you gain an extra level in strength each time you level up, or making your Shop prices go down, or increasing the frequency of monokub events, etc.

The differences between UTDP and DRS’ Board: Firstly, battles no longer take the form of a a forced “exam” that occur at set times during the game. Instea, there are now battle spaces all over the board. There are regular battles, midboss battles, and boss battles. A boss guards each grimoire/scroll, and you could call each monobeast another “boss” of a sort. Each of these battles levels up your character, obviously.

Secondly, your in-game goal while on the board is different in Danganronpa S than it was in UTDP.

A refresher: In UTDP, your main goal is to make a complete loop of the board within a specific amount of turns, thereby completing the “school years” and ultimately facing a final battle to “graduate.” Even if you fail at any task or fight, however, you still wind up with some kind of developed character that you can use in “Despair Dungeon” mode by the end.

In Danganronpa S, your main goal is to defeat all six of the monobeasts on the central island at Jabberwock Island. To do this, you must obtain one grimoire/scroll for each monobeast. Each scroll gives you the power to defeat one monobeast, and there are six total scrolls/monobeasts. You have 50 total “days” (turns) in which to take ‘em all out. For every boss and monobeast you defeat, you get a huge amount of XP and level up significantly. And since we’re trying to level up as much as we can so that we can be better fighters in the Despair Tower so that we can get more coins for the School Store so that we can play more characters in the board game… you get the idea. It’s obviously beneficial to complete as much of the mission to defeat the six monobeasts as you can within 50 turns.

Wait, where are the island bosses who have the grimoires/scrolls?

They’re all found in locations that are significant to the murders/deaths in each chapter of Danganronpa 2. That should be enough information to get you there.

But I can’t finish the game in 50 turns!

Yeah, it’s nearly impossible to pull that off until you get at least the first stat multiplier that you unlock after 10 characters. And as I said up top: There are bonuses obtained for every 10 characters that get you through the board faster, and there are MORE bonuses for every 20 floors you finish in the Despair Tower. You’re going to level up faster and faster with time, and after a while you’ll be flying through the quest to kill all the monobeasts. Hang in there.

Actually, it’s gotten pretty easy for me to finish the game in less than 50 turns by now.

Great! Your NEW goal is to reach Level 99 with your character. Doing THAT will unlock secret additional challenges in the board game…

4) All about Despair Tower/”Battle”

In DRV3, “Despair Dungeon” mode had you descending through the floors on a quest to reach the very bottom, traipsing over maps with random battles and finding treasure chests.

In Danganronpa S’ “Despair Tower”, there is no map to walk around and no treasure chests to find. It’s JUST the RPG-style turn-based battles now. Each floor has three waves of monsters to defeat in turn-based battle.

Just like “Despair Dungeon”, you can bring in a party of four characters who you developed and granted “Skills” over in the board game. There are Athletic characters (coded red) who are best with physical attacks, Cerebral characters (coded blue) who specialize in “magic” elemental attacks, and Balanced characters (coded green) who can do pretty okay with either attack method.

Also, you’ll notice that each floor has a set of three “challenges.” Complete them all and you get bonus monocoins, which is the primary reason you’re in this mode in the first place. The higher you go in the tower, the more of the rarer monocoins you’ll be able to collect.

Wait, how come I don’t have the equipment I bought in the Shops on the game board?

Sorry - that equipment only applies to the board game. To get equipment such as weapons and armor for the Despair Tower, you have to craft it using the materials that the monsters drop. (Look for the option to “Create” whenever you’re on the screen where you put together your party.)

I can’t accomplish this challenge/defeat this battle…

That’s a sign that it’s time to return to the board game for some new, stronger characters. :)

5) All about the School Store

This is where you unlock characters as well as their applicable “Hype Cards.”

Each character comes in four tiers - N, R, S, and U. Higher tiers offer bigger multipliers when obtaining Talent Fragments and also can develop/use more skills that you make with those fragments. Obviously, U-ranked is the best and can have the most skills, and N is the lowest tier and can use only one or two skills.

Be forewarned: Some Friendship events in Development mode are ONLY available to you when you are using S or U-ranked cards.

Hype cards are character-specific bonuses that provide the given character with boosts to their performance in the board game, helping you to level up faster and more efficiently. The best of these hype cards are denoted as “WR” rank. …..and I don’t know why.

There are four machines in the School Store which dispense the cards.

The vending machine is for microtransactions. You can use actual money to unlock any character card or hype card you choose. Not much to say here.

The regular MonoMono Machine takes standard silver Monocoins. This machine has a high probability of giving you “N” or “R”-ranked character cards.

The Golden MonoMono Machines takes the rarest currency of the three - golden monocoins. This machine has a high probability of giving you “S” or “U”-ranked character cards as well as “WR” Hype cards

The MonoMono “Yachine” takes pink Monomicoins. You usually unlock these coins by getting “achievements” elsewhere in the game. (The “Usami Flower’ option on the main menu screen will show you a green exclamation point symbol whenever you have reached an achievement and can enter to pick up some bonuses.) This machine has a high probability of giving you hype cards, “gifts” (which are items that provide benefits within the Development board game) and “S”-ranked character cards.

So wait, am I going to need to spend money on microtransactions to progress?

I honestly thought so at first, and I felt pretty salty about it. But as it turns out, I’m earning character cards of a totally workable level (”S” and “U” rank) at a decent enough rate that my progress through the other modes has never been hindered. In fact, I actually did spend 99 cents when I started the game to unlock some U-ranked character cards right out of the gate… and I didn’t really benefit from doing so. At least not initially.

I hadn’t unlocked any stat multipliers yet, so the rank of my character cards didn’t matter much. I was still only able to level up to around Level 50, and I still wasn’t producing very strong fighters. If you’re going to use the microtransactions at all, it’s better to wait and use them when you can benefit more.

The main reason to use the microtransaction feature is just to get access to a U-ranked character card at a time of your own choosing. Otherwise, you’re at the whimsy of the random machine rolls, forcing you to play with whoever you happen to unlock. Thankfully, once you earn a character card, you’ll never get a duplicate again - it drops out of the rotation, thereby increasing your chances of getting the ones that remain. Because of this, just keep bouncing between Development and Battle modes and you will INEVITABLY get everyone even if you don’t spend any money on microtransactions.

Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaand that’s pretty much the rundown. There are more details, of course — you can find out exactly what you get for bumping into any character on the board by scrolling down to the Card/Effect/Obtained From table on this wiki page, for one thing.

I really hope the fandom manages to benefit from this explanation. Have fun, everybody!

#tanks... this game has me confused

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