Review: Danganronpa
The premise: you and fourteen other students are locked into your high school building, and you’re all told you have to kill one of the other students in order to be let out. Moreover, you then have to get away with it in a Mafia-style murder trial. The protagonist would never kill anyone, of course, but that isn’t going to stop some of your fellow classmates…
Danganronpa is a detective-style game where you have to both solve the mystery of the school and the “killing game”, while also solving the mystery of each murder as it happens. It has a “psycho pop” aesthetic of bright, flashy colors, bizarre animations, and comic relief, despite its grim premise. And the widely-agreed-upon cleverest/best localization for the title is “Bullet Proof”, with a close runner-up being “Shooty Refuty”.
*cough*
The gameplay alternates between “investigation”, where you wander around the school looking for clues and discuss things with your classmates, and “class trials”, where you go through a series of minigames (many of them gun-themed) to uncover each round’s killer based on the evidence you collected. This is reportedly similar to the Ace Attorney series of games, which I haven’t played yet.
Unfortunately, it’s got a number of flaws. Some of them are cultural: the treatment of the buff woman character (Sakura), a character with an alternate personality who’s a serial killer1, and a character that the writers wouldn’t admit is actually trans.2 (Not to mention how tropey the characters all are, with several of them just getting annoying by the end.) Some of them are gameplay-related: the minigames had finicky controls, probably due to being designed for the handheld PSP, and the porting to computer left us with funky key binding choices. And some of them are structural: to keep you from missing any information, the game railroads you into investigating or arguing things in a certain order, and then several of the things meant to be clues are way too contrived, while aspects of the final reveal were not foreshadowed well at all. To paraphrase the friend I was playing with, “the payoff may not have been worth all the build-up and chain-yanking”.
There’s a lot we did like. The funky “popping” of the furniture in each room never ceased to be amusing (you can see it in the trailer at 1:14). The music is great atmosphere, although it gets a little repetitive after several chapters of mostly-the-same. The wackiness of the villain works pretty well. And we did enjoy solving several of the murders. But overall, I’m not quite sure it hit the mark for me, and since it does have those cultural problems I’m hesitant to even recommend giving it a try.3
(spoilerful discussion of the ending follows)
I accidentally spoiled myself with the name of the mastermind when searching for information—never search for information on a mystery when you’re in the middle of it! or read YouTube comments!—but while it made it slightly easier to solve the final trial, it didn’t change too much in the end. The problem we had with the ending is that there was no point. The mastermind’s motivation just was; there was no reason for it. And while something happened outside to collapse the whole world into chaos, it’s not at all clear what the mastermind had to do with it. There’s a lot of different ways this could be improved: unrelated disaster outside (maybe be clearer about a larger Ultimate Despair organization, not just the two of them), maybe the killing game being a sanctioned government experiment like Battle Royale. I had even suspected there was something clone-ish going on, like in [psychological horror game I won’t spoil but it has you playing a human in the body of a robot]. Oh well.
Danganronpa brings a reasonable premise of trying to fight your way out of a no-win scenario when you can’t trust your compatriots. However, the execution stumbles a bit too much, the portrayal of several characters is “problematic” at the least, and it didn’t quite have the payoff we wanted. Having read Umineko: When They Cry, I have to recommend that instead if you’re looking for “a series of murder mysteries, plus the added question of what’s really going on, plus the harmful effects of seeking the truth”.
Sorry, Shooty Refuty. Oh, but we did come up with this alignment chart for the characters (vague spoilers only):
-
To the point that both me and the friend I was playing with used their “preferred” pronouns for the rest of the game, even when the game didn’t. Fan opinion seems to be split on this, from a cursory search. ↩︎
-
I have similar opinions about Steins;Gate, which I enjoyed more than I did Danganronpa, but which also has a trans character treated poorly. On top of that, the main character is a real asshole for about the first half of the story. ↩︎