On your first day of school you are knocked unconscious and wake up to find that you are sealed inside with a handful of other students and an evil teddy bear serving as your “principal”. The bear gives you two options.
- Live out the rest of your days trapped in the school.
- Gain your freedom my murdering a fellow student and getting away with the crime.
This is the premise that Danganronpa presents you with. What follows is a twenty hour virtual novel that has you forging relationships with your classmates only to watch it come crumbling down as you work towards a means of escape.
The gameplay is mostly contained to puzzle-like “class trial” segments which serve as a bookend for the chapters in the story. The game strikes a nice balance within the trials by providing you with enough information to develop a theory of events while still allowing ambiguity and making the revelations that come out during the trials to be genuinely surprising.
The trials are at their strongest when they ask the player to determine the truth of events from collected testimony and evidence. The weakest moments come from a series a minigames designed to reveal a key word or discredit an aggressive argument. While silly, the minigames are mostly inoffensive and add some body to each chapter’s end.
However, the majority of your time in Danganronpa is spent investigating the mysteries of the school and getting to know your fellow classmates. There is a massive amount of text to read through and the game is conspicuously front-loaded; it will take several hours to reach the first trial.
You are allowed a certain amount of control during “free time” where you may select a classmate and attempt to win their affections through gift giving and asking questions. There is a grim cost-benefit analysis to these segments as investing time with a character only to have them die is a waste of your limited time. This in fact raises the stakes of the trials where I found myself dreading the deaths of characters I wanted to know more about.
The PS4 port playable but should be forgone for the PSP version if possible. The longish story is perfect for picking up on the go. That said, the narrative is engrossing enough to binge if it hooks you, and it hooked the hell out of me.
If the reading is particularly discouraging, there is an amazing anime adaption which absolutely blazes through the story in thirteen half hour episodes. Those with Playstation VR can get an interesting taste of the game through a short virtual demo.
Danganronpa is definitively a game for a specific niche. The story is wild which is to be expected from Japanese developer, Spike Chunsoft and it can take awhile to get going. Yet for diligent players there is a rewarding conclusion after an amazing journey predicated on the twistiest turns and the turniest twists.
At minimum, this class is worth auditing.
Gamer's Daytimer 