Introduction

Danganronpa is a japanese mystery/suspense visual novel. The game tells the story of 15 teenagers, who are the best of the best in something (sports, literature, etc.), that are chosen to go to Kibōgamine Academy, supposed to be the best school in the country, and guarantees success to every students that graduates it. You take the roll of Makoto Naegi, the Super Duper High School Luckster, who got in the academy by chance. However, they find themselves trapped inside the Kibōgamine Academy, and are told by Monokuma, a mechanical teddy bear, that introduces himself as the headmaster, that they are to stay inside the Academy for the rest of their lives, being “Graduation” the only way out. This “Graduation” will be achieved if they murder someone and don’t get discovered by the rest of the group.

For those of you that don’t know, visual novels are games with very little gameplay, that focus on story, you basically just tap a button to go from one dialogue line to the next one, while watching still images of the characters with their expression. The only gameplay visual novel’s usually have is making decisions that affect the story somehow. However, Danganronpa tries to push this a bit further, and the results are mixed.

Review

TL;DR: Danganronpa tries to mix detective mystery games with visual novels. The story is great, with great twists and ideas, which, alongside with the drawings of the characters, and the choice for strong colors in contrast with the dark story, makes for a very interesting dark atmosphere. The investigation part works pretty well, but the game doesn’t give you enough info on the case to find the truth by yourself, with vital details being revealed by other character at the trial. The game’s mayor flaw in my opinion is the forced action segments on the trial: making you counter an argument by shooting the evidence at the sentence feels clunky and unnecessary, and makes you feel like it would be better to just have a simpler system like Ace Attorney. Still, the story is good enough for me to recommend it, and the fact that it’s got much more gameplay than most VNs makes it a great way to ease into the genre. So in summary, if you are interested in the story, I highly recommend playing it.

Story

There is not too much to complain about regarding the story. The atmosphere the game is able to create thanks to it’s presentation makes you really feel anxious to know what is going to happen next, and it doesn’t disappoint once it happens. The actual story line is a bit cliche, but the great characters are what makes it so interesting. Even if each chapter follows the same model: Monokuma’s incentive -> free time -> murder -> investigation -> class trial, the reasons each character has and how they react to each situation makes it interesting. The main complain I have is that a couple times the game gives you a choice, but it only let’s you choose one of the options, if you choose the other one, Naegi just thinks to himself something like: “I should think more about this…”, and the game brings you back to choose the answer.

Presentation

The presentation is great for the most part. The character design and the style of the drawings, are amazing. Same goes for the different rooms. The game manages to create a happy/creepy vibe perfectly, kind of like an abandoned Amusement Park… or clowns. There are 3 things that I think could have been improved regarding the presentation of the game. First of all, the music. The music is OK, but just OK. I can only think that they wanted to make a soundtrack that would make you feel like you are going crazy, just like the graphics of the game with the bright colors. It does get the job done if that’s what they were going for, but the music loops are really short, and the same tunes are re-used the whole game, so a little more diversity would have been appreciated. Again, it’s not a big problem, but it could have been improved. Next is the ElectroID overall. The ElectroID is an item you have since the start of the game, and it’s where all of the information about characters, ammunition/evidence, school rules, and map are stored (basically it’s the menu). The whole thing feels a little bit clunky and can make you feel a little bit confused about what button are you supposed to press to do what. What annoys me the most about this part is the map, the layout of the different areas is not intuitive at all, having all the dormitory floors, then all the school floors, and then specific big places in those floors like the pool or the gym. In addition to this, to move through the map, first you get to the map of the place you want, and then move from room to room in the map, instead of allowing you to freely move around. The last complain I have is the “censorship”, it’s not really censorship but a choice the studio made to have pink blood and not show too much during the punishments of the culprits. The studio did say that they chose to do that, because they wanted to make the game available for teenagers, and if they showed red blood and more gore, they would have had to make the game 18+. I can understand that, but maybe they could have placed an option in the menu to set the desired gore level, or release an uncesnsored version patch to 18+ users . It isn’t a big deal anyway, since the bright pink fits in well with the rest of the game’s color palette as well as the comic side of the game.

Gameplay

As I mentioned, Danganornpa tries to add gameplay mechanics to a VN, and it kind of fails in my opinion. The exploration part is decent, you walk freely on the corridors, in order to move to the desired room, and once you are in the room, the camera is fixed at one point and it becomes sort of a point and click game. It’s kind of awkward but it works (only complain would be that it makes you watch the different items and people in the room pop up when you enter. Waiting almost 5 seconds each time you enter a room can get kind of annoying). Then there are the class trials. This is where everyone gathers up and discusses to find the culprit. There are 4 kinds of mini-games during class trials. The first one is Non-stop Debate, where you try to point out the incoherence in someone’s argument by shooting it with a “Truth bullet” (the evidence you collected during the Investigation). Every time I had to do this I could only think: “Why?”. There is no point in having to shoot a word or frase, why not just press a button to yell “Objection!” or something like that, and then choose your evidence like in Phoenix Wright… On top of this, it’s not always clear what you have to do, sometimes you know where the contradiction is, but there are different pieces of evidence or different weak points in their argument to shoot, that would make sense, and you have to gamble on how the developer wants you to point the mistake out. The other mini-games are a “form a word by shooting the letters in the correct order” which is ok, a “complete the comic strip by adding the right images from a given pool in the right places” which can be really, REALLY confusing sometimes, since the images are too small and are sometimes unclear of what they are, and a “rhythm game” that has absolutely no reason to be there.

Conclusion

Even with all of this game’s flaws, the great story, well-developed over the top characters, and amazing atmosphere, this game is definitely a must play if you are into this kind of stories.