Danganronpa is a game you’re either immediately onboard with, or don’t wanna touch with a ten-foot pole. I’m here to encourage you to hop onboard or at least shorten that pole, especially since the Vita’s still a bit starved for good games and this is one of its better exclusives.
Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Climax is the Vita remake of the Japan-only PSP original, simply titled Danganronpa, which NISA has been awesome enough to localize. It revolves around fourteen extraordinary high school students – with titles like “The Ultimate Pop Sensation,” “The Ultimate Fortune Teller” and “The Ultimate Martial Artist” - attending their first day at the world’s most prestigious high school, Hope’s Peak Academy. Oh, and there’s also this loser named Makoto who’s perfectly average and only gets in through lottery. Guess who you play as!
Most people would kill to get in this school, but it looks like you may have to kill to get out. As you take your first steps inside, everything goes black and you wake up in a classroom to discover the entire school has been barricaded in a way that makes the vaults from Fallout look poorly secured. A robotic, black and white stuffed bear named Monokuma – who’s kinda like if Persona’s Teddie put on the Majora’s Mask - appears to explain that the fifteen of them are trapped there, but escape is possible. All someone has to do is murder someone else and get away with it, then they can go free but everyone else will be executed.
The game’s genre is a little hard to pin down, as it’s not REALLY a visual novel, despite all the reading. In terms of plot, its closest cousin would be the Zero Escape games, (a comparison the game accepts with trophies like “Despair’s Last Reward” and “Nine Coins, Nine Purses, Nine Bears”) but its actual gameplay lines up more with Ace Attorney, and it has social simulation aspects similar to Persona 3 and 4. If you’re getting a little turned on reading this paragraph, that’s completely normal, don’t worry.
Each chapter of the game has two sections “Daily Life,” and “Deadly Life.” In Daily Life, the students try their best to live a normal-ish life in the high school, and you can get to know them while there aren’t any murders to solve. (Word of advice: the game WILL allow you to hang out with a character even if there’s no benefit. If a character doesn’t look like they’ll actually talk to you, don’t bother.) Inevitably though, someone will turn up dead, and you’ll start your investigation in “Deadly Life.” After you’ve gathered evidence, the class trial begins where you’ll have to make your argument to figure out whodunnit.
I know I made the Ace Attorney comparison earlier, but the trials are more than just presenting the right item at the right time. It seriously turns debates into a shooting game and it… actually works. Each argument takes place in real-time, with people’s statements floating around the screen. If you see a statement that doesn’t mesh with the facts, you shoot it with a “truth bullet” that represents the contradicting evidence. Make too many mistakes and you’ll lose “influence” and it’s game over. This is where social interaction comes in too. As you get to know a character, you’ll learn skills you can equip at the start of trials to give yourself an edge. It’s a neat touch story-wise that skills tend to “match” the character: The fiercely determined Taka gives you a skill to increase your max influence, and the cool-headed Byakuya grants a skill to steady your aim. In addition, there are also rhythm game sequences where you go head-to-head with another student refusing to listen to you, by literally shooting down their insults. The whole game’s a bit weird obviously, but it’s well-designed and it works once you get into it. If the gameplay has an occasional issue, its when you have seemingly equally valid truth bullets, but have to guess which one the writers intended. These are pretty rare though.
Also, I HIGHLY recommend playing on the “mean” logic difficulty, especially if you’re an Ace Attorney vet. Since the actual questions and answers don’t change, there wouldn’t be much point in replaying on a different setting, and you may as well go with the one that doesn’t spoonfeed you for the first half. The biggest difference is that you actually have to choose which truth bullet to fire much more often, instead of the game just loading the right one from the start.
The game also includes an alternate mode unlocked after completing the main game that’s something of a “what if?” story. I won’t spoil the nature of it, but it’s a fun little distraction that mostly exists to let the player see the stories of all the characters that they wouldn’t be able to in the main game because, you know, they keep killing each other.
There doesn’t appear to be much of an overarching plot at first glance, but there’s a much greater mystery behind how the school was taken over and why you’re all trapped there. The game does a good job pacing itself, pulling back layers on that major mystery as you investigate individual murders. I won't talk about the ending itself, but I did notice a couple of dangling plot threads. (Though these could be addressed in the sequel, which NISA is already localizing! Yay!) As for the murders themselves, the game does a good job setting up mysteries and keeping you guessing who’s going to be the next murderer or victim. More than once, I started hanging out with a character I thought for SURE would at least last to the final couple of hours, only to find them dead a day or two later. The only real problem I had with the writing was in the first case which has one of those “reach in, grab the characters and tell them what that clue actually means” moments involving a message written in blood. (Maybe it wasn’t as painfully obvious in Japanese?)
I’d be remiss not to mention the game’s eclectic visuals and soundtrack. The character designs have a lot of color and variety, my personal favorite being Sakura, who looks like a fighting game boss and is a giant middle finger to every cliché anime schoolgirl. The animations have a very unique, identifiable style and whoever wrote the execution sequences is probably sick in the head, in a good way. The visuals in-game look pretty good for the most part, using a lot of style to cover up what would otherwise be lame graphics, though the environments you walk around in could be from PS1. The soundtrack is just as strange and fun, and the title theme will stick in your head for days. The voicework is also very good, and features both Japanese and English tracks. It’s not FULLY voiced, but the important story scenes and all of the class trials are, so it always adds drama when it needs to. The characters are very entertaining. You'd expect Monokuma to be a fun villain, and you'd be right, but believe it or not, it’s the anti-social “Ultimate Novelist” who ends up stealing the show.
And in case you’re wondering, the limited edition was a bit of a rip-off to me. The soundtrack only had like five songs plus the audio tracks to the executions. Not the MUSIC to them, the unedited audio tracks with the sound effects and everything still in there. And the art book only had promo art that can be unlocked in-game. There’s probably some collector’s value to the package since they actually limited it, but don’t feel compelled to seek it out otherwise. Unless you find music greatly improved by the sounds of teenagers getting pulverized. (No, this has not impacted my evaluation of the game in any way. This was more of an aside rant than anything.)
Overall, Danganronpa is an excellent addition to the Vita’s library for any fan of suspense and mystery or visual novels. I wouldn’t recommend it as an introduction to the genre, but if you’re willing to seal yourself into Hope’s Peak, you won’t regret it.
Thanks for reading! Stay in school, kids, but maybe not the kind where you have to kill people to leave.
The event will include a live performance of popular songs from the series by band members, a look back at the past 10 years of the series with fans and guests, and more.
Take photos in augmented reality with your favorite Danganronpa characters – choose up to 70 different characters.
Even approaching 10 years since launch, the Vita remains much loved by gamers thanks to a library of quirky and horrific games, mostly from Japan.
