Hey, it's my first video game review for Anime Hipster! I will mention some things about the anime along the way, but I primarily decided to talk about the game here instead. There are several reasons why I'm reviewing the game version of Danganronpa rather than the anime, but I guess the main reason is that I simply never finished the anime. I did, however, pick up the game when it came stateside for PS Vita. While several of these games have come out in the US over the last few years, I've only completed the first one so far, so that's the one I'm writing about. Also, I'm pretty sure the game is a much better experience than the anime, given the style of murder mystery narrative that this franchise presents. The developer, Spike Chunsoft, has also been on the up-n-up in recent years with a number of critically-acclaimed handheld hits such as 999, Virtue's Last Reward, and (to a slightly lesser extent) the Conception series.
At its heart, Danganronpa is a visual novel, but with a little extra gameplay thrown in, which compares favorably to the Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney games. You play as Naegi Makoto, the "Ultimate Lucky Student", so called because he was chosen by lottery to attend Hope's Peak Academy, a prestigious academic institution that only enrolls Japan's best and brightest students, who are all described as "Ultimates": Ultimate Writing Prodigy, Ultimate Programmer, Ultimate Baseball Star, etc. In typical shounen fashion, the list of Ultimates gets increasingly ridiculous (Ultimate Fanfic Creator, Ultimate Biker Gang Leader), and all of the characters are extreme exaggerations and stereotypes in demeanor and appearance. I suppose that's part of the appeal of this series, but it's also one of the things that kept me from digging into the anime when it first came out, despite having friends who urged me to watch it. Regular readers will know I don't have much patience for the over-the-top style of most shounen series, but I'm quite a bit more lenient in that regard when it comes to games, since the interactive element goes a long way in keeping me engaged and interested.
Even so, having finished the game and generally enjoying it quite a bit, I still hate many of the character designs, and I was frustrated at the lack of depth many characters exhibited. Pretty much every line that Toko, Kiyotaka, and Yasuhiro speak grates against my very soul with how shallow and predictable they are. And yet I put up with it because characters like Kyoko and Byakuya are so interesting, and Aoi and Sayaka are so endearing. And that's really where Danganronpa shines. The writers took a shotgun approach to the character design , using the "Ultimates" contrivance as a means to present as wide a variety of characters as possible, with the intention that the player will gravitate more toward some characters than others. Also, this game deals with some interesting gender topics. Similar to Persona's notable treatment of homosexuality, Danganronpa explores stuff like gender ambiguity and transsexuality in some neat ways at certain points in the story. But don't expect the game to sit on some moral high horse either. You can still expect the occasional bit of fanservice, though I think the artists showed a certain level of restraint in this regard as well.
Even if some of the characters are decidedly one-note, they are all incorporated quite effectively into the Battle-Royale-esque plot structure. Upon arriving at Hope's Peak Academy, the incoming class soon discovers that they are in fact being held captive by Monokuma, the ursine robot mascot of the series who insists that the only way to graduate from Hope's Peak is to murder one of your classmates and get away with it. Predictably, characters gradually start dying off, and after every murder there is a class trial, where it falls upon your shoulders to piece together the evidence to solve the crime. If you fail this task, Monokuma lets the murderer free and kills you and the rest of your classmates. And if you successfully solve the case, the murderer is killed, and you return to the school, where the cycle of murder and class trial can continue anew until only one student remains.
This class trial structure is where most of the gameplay lies. When a murder is committed, it's your job to explore the school (more of which gets unlocked after each trial), investigate any evidence you can find, interrogate any witnesses or suspects, and present your findings in the class trial. This evidence is represented in the game by the somewhat regrettable title of "Truth Bullets", which you can use during the trial to refute false statements offered up by your classmates in a series of minigames. Some of these minigames involve picking letters to reveal a hidden word that answers a question brought up during the trial, or tapping buttons along with a sort of free form rhythm game. But the most common thing you do during the trials is the "Endless Debate", where you can watch the other characters discuss various aspects of the murder on repeat, while each sentence flashes across the screen for a short time. You then have to equip one of your truth bullets and find a false sentence in the debate that you can refute by shooting the correct truth bullet into the sentence with either the X button or touch screen. Sometimes other bits of text will flash on screen to block your target, which can be shot down with the △ button or rear touch panel. I found myself using the touch screen most often, since the buttons also require that you aim with the thumbstick, which is intentionally slow and floaty unless you upgrade your aim with skills. Speaking of which, before each trial, you have the chance to equip skills which provide various advantages that make the trial minigames a little easier. At the end of each trial (which can last over an hour) you then have to choose who you think is guilty, and this choice decides whether you get to keep playing the game or not. The answer is usually quite obvious, but even if you guess wrong the game will just spit you back out at the choice again, so it's not a big deal.
Once you correctly identify the killer, you are rewarded with a really cool cutscene of Monokuma carrying out a customized death sentence for the guilty party, in a snazzy stylized hybrid-3D-animated art style that stands out from your typical anime fare. I'm also glad that these sequences are lifted straight from the game into the TV series, if only to see them in a slightly higher resolution. This is yet another area where the "Ultimates" concept is used to great effect. Because the characters are such extreme stereotypes, they also have unique characteristics that play into the style of their execution, or even the murders themselves.
To make more use of the sizable cast of characters, Danganronpa lets you spend time with other characters individually between investigations, in a similar way to Social Links in the Persona games. Spending time with other characters and giving them gifts they like improves your relationships with them, fills out their backstories, and unlocks the skills you use help you during the class trials, as well as allowing you to equip a greater number of those skills. But mostly it's just a fun distraction, even if most of the characters will die well before you max out their friendship. However, after you beat the game you unlock a new game mode called School Mode that removes the murder mystery story and mechanics and replaces them with an entirely separate crafting game/management sim where you assign tasks to the characters each day to gather materials, clean the school, and craft objects to meet goals assigned by Monokuma. This mode lets you go through and max out any friendships you missed, and also provides a second set of friendship events that let you unlock additional endings for School Mode, which encourages repeat playthroughs (which is interesting since the main game has very limited replayability).
My only major complaint, aside from the hit-or-miss characters, is the strict linearity of the story. The developers tried to hide this by giving you the freedom to explore the school as you like, and choose who to spend time with between investigations, but the investigations and trials themselves have almost no variability. Monokuma warns you that the trial will begin shortly after the bodies are discovered without much notice, but the story won't commence until you've found all the evidence anyway, and the trials each have one set script that never changes. It would have been cool for the trials to branch out a little more if you were missing evidence or messed up the debate somewhere, but whenever you make a mistake, the dialogue just resets and you keep trying until you get it right. And even when the game presents you with dialogue trees, they still don't really branch. Everything wraps back into the one set storyline.
This isn't necessarily a bad thing, since the story is quite good the way it is, but I would have liked to see more opportunity for choice, since the fun of most visual novels comes from branching stories and alternate endings. Also, I occasionally felt like this strict linearity insulted my intelligence a bit. I mean, the protagonist Makoto is meant to be a simple every-man, but I constantly found myself solving the case in my head during the investigation stage, while Makoto wouldn't piece things together until well into the trial, often relying on hints dropped by Kyoko and/or Byakuya. I love smart characters (cough Death Note cough Breaking Bad cough) and as a result, I found myself relating much more to Kyoko/Byakuya and resenting Makoto for taking forever to put two and two together. I just found it frustrating that repeatedly I thought "Oh, look at that. X is the murderer!" and then Makoto is all like "Huh, this is weird. I wonder what this could mean?!".... and while that's not a direct quote necessarily, it reminds me to mention that the localization can be pretty spotty as well. But that's par for the course, really.
Danganronpa is far from perfect, but I think a lot of that just has to do with its shounen trappings. For what it is, Danganronpa is a fun, violent romp that manages to be a pretty good murder-mystery as well as a pretty good death-games story with a fairly large cast of characters, at least some of whom are satisfyingly engaging. I love me some social linking, and the logic puzzles in the class trials are fun and well-paced. Even if I almost always knew what was coming, I still enjoyed the story's twists and turns, and you can always rely on Monokuma to be the wild card that keeps things interesting. For this style of mystery story I'm glad I passed on the anime and played the game instead, and after playing the game I find the pacing of the anime to be horribly unbalanced (investigations reduced to mere montages?!). Regardless, I'm eagerly looking forward to playing some of the later games in the series when I have the spare time.
--The Anime Hipster