DanganRonpa: Trigger Happy Havoc

The Short

Pros
- Well crafted murder mystery with just enough dark undertones
- Pacing is very well done; there's hardly a dull moment
- Doesn't fall into the trap of being overly wordy when it comes to inner monologues
- Cases rarely intentionally leave information out to make the ending more "surprising"
- That being said, there are plenty of red herrings, and most work very well
- Characters, despite being obvious caricatures, are genuinely entertaining
- Trial scenes are exhilarating and solving cases is satisfying
- Final scene is exactly what it should be for this story

Cons
- A few minor plot holes persist through to the end
- Some areas of the game could have been better streamlined
- It sucks when your character is like fifteen steps behind you during investigations
- Minigames in the trial start fun but get horribly obnoxious by the end (particularly NonStop Debate)
- Was released as a two pack in Japan for one price, split it up here for more dollahs. Second game is needed to fully understand the world and connections between the two stories.

Monokuma laying down some philosophical puns. 

The Long

I'm not the biggest fan of visual novels. There, I said it. While I was really into them in high school and early college, eventually the whole concept became somewhat taxing. While games like Persona 3/4 and Phoenix Wright managed to combine enough intrigue with their wordy stories, others like fan-favorite Katawa Shoujo, despite still being good stories, missed the mark. Often times these types of "games" boil down to one or two major "choices" over several dozen hours of reading through text, and often times the main character's over-abundant inner monologues completely kill the pacing for me. You can like them, I'm fine with that (and again, I think Katawa Shoujo in still an excellent story piece when it's boiled down), but the tediousness of these types of "game's" pacing often turn me away.

...so why did I even bother with DanganRonpa? Besides the fact that the "Vita has no games?" (it has plenty, by the way). Well, the promise of Phoenix Wright meets Battle Royale was too much for me to pass up, so I dove deep into this high school of despair and emerged...relatively unscathed? Let's take a look.

As a note: DanganRonpa is best played completely spoiler free. I take care in the review to not reveal anything that isn't said within the first 10-15 minutes of the game.

You know Leon? We gonna get along just fine. 

The plot of DanganRonpa is its main driving force, and it starts off with a bang. You play as Makoto, a regular-ass dude who just so happened to get invited to Hope's Peak Academy, a school where only "Ultimate" people get invited too. "Ultimate" in this context could be replaced with "World's Best." You have the Ultimate Baseball Star, Ultimate Programmer, and some other weirdos like the Ultimate Fancomic Drawer and Ultimate Fortune Teller. You and fourteen others all get invited to this school, but on your first day there something crazy happens and you pass out. You then awaken to find all of you have been transported to a hellish version of Hope's Peak, with all the windows and doors leading outside sealed.

While investigating, you come across a remote-controlled anamatronic bear named Monokuma (what is up with me playing games with evil anamatronics lately?). He then announces that he's taken over the school, and everybody is now trapped there forever. The only way they'll be allowed out is if they kill another student, and then get away with it. Once a student is murdered, a brief time for investigating will be allowed, and then a student trial will take place. If the murderer (called "blackened" by Monokuma) is correctly revealed, they are executed. If they aren't, they get set free and everybody else gets executed. So it's pretty freaking imperative that you figure out who killed who.

School's In. Prepare to have a bad time. 

The game's pacing is near perfect. While the intro sequence is a bit lagging, once it gets into the juicy character and plot moments the game blasts off and doesn't slow down. It's quite difficult to stop playing (as evidenced by the fact that I beat this game in under a week). The story takes some absolutely crazy turns along the way, with each of the murders escalating the stakes and being all the more shocking. The ending is a wallop of a reveal, made all the more satisfying by the fact that you use all the evidence you've gathered to break down most of it yourself. That being said, the large "twist" at the end is fairly difficult to predict, and the final ending scene (which has, not surprising to me, earned a lot of negative feedback) is actually perfect when it comes to closing out the story.

Before I go into the cases, it's important to make note of the characters. As stated there's fifteen students total and then Monokuma, the obnoxious bear that can not only show up at any time and in any place, but is also intentionally snarky and rude, trying to provoke you constantly. The rest of the cast cross a wide spectrum of characters, but they're all pretty nuts. I won't spoil it, but watching them interact is half the fun of enjoying the story as it unfolds, and despite being obvious caricatures of the "Ultimates" they're representing, several have surprisingly three-dimensional personalities. As the game goes on, people you first suspected to be scumbags you have second thoughts on, and people you felt were stable break down. Ultimately, the game's interesting premise lived or died on whether or not all these characters trapped in a school together had interesting chemistry, and I'd say it succeeded. Mostly.

Hiro may be dumb as a brick, but you can't say the guy isn't a bro. 

I won't dig into spoilers, but Kyoko is bland. There, I said it. They try to make her more interesting by tying her into more story bits, but she never really has that spark of life that the other characters do. Yeah, she isn't totally insane like the rest (which makes it easy to render opinions of them), but I really felt she didn't go anywhere.

The other big bland character is, oddly enough, the main character. Makoto is entirely uninteresting. While I understand he probably was meant to be a character one would project themselves into, the guy has no backbone outside of the courtroom, and is completely reactionary. Rarely is he proactive enough to investigate on his own (often times other people drag him along), and in general he just comes off as someone there for the ride. It's not gamebreaking, but being in his head means what he thinks is generally uninteresting and solely used for the plot (rather than developing and actual character out of him), and even by the end the guy felt totally empty.

Monokuma can say some outlandish and genuinely funny chunks of nonsense. 

But the meat of the game is obviously how it addresses the investigations and trials of the murders, and whether or not it knows how much information to dish out and why. In this regard, I feel the game is near perfect. In both the investigation and later trial instances, the game does very well in letting you connect pieces together and, if you are clever, figure it out before even going to trial. Unlike some other games (*coughPhoenixWrightcough*), DanganRonpa very rarely brings new evidence in during a trial sequence. This means you can usually get a grasp of who did it (or at least prime suspects) and form a full story in your head before going in, rather than having only part of the picture and relying on the game to decide when you get the whole story.

There is a plus and a minus to this. The plus is that DanganRonpa knows how to stay one step ahead of you. On the second case, I was certain I'd cracked it. I'd dug extremely deep into the clues, found several layers underneath that worked together, and all my assessments felt just far enough from the initial evidence that I had to have outsmarted the game. Turned out that, during the trial, there was a twist that was not blatantly revealed but totally could have been called had I looked a little harder at the evidence. I hadn't been wrong in my assertions, the game had just thrown a brilliant red herring to make me stop digging, but if I'd kept going I would have found the error and solved it. The game intentionally tricks you into thinking you're ahead of it, when actually there's another layer in. That's pretty good writing!

Though, once it humiliated me on the second case. I was ready for it in the later ones. I successfully predicted the next two even before the investigations happened, though I will admit the way they happened was different than I'd concocted. But I still guessed the killer right in them, but it wasn't an easy thing. The game respected my intelligence, and if I was smart enough to figure it out, it rewarded me. Or I rewarded me, with the smug satisfaction I felt after watching someone I knew was the killer try and lie their way out of their situation while I completely destroyed their claims.

And the case is solved!

Without pushing too much further into the story, I'll just leave it at that. The characters do well at making you love or hate them, or be situated in some area in-between (usually resulting in massive distrust). The game starts off straight up flying in the face of your expectations and knowing it's going to mess with you, and it delivers. While I'll admit the two most shocking instances happen both at the beginning and the end, there's more than enough crazy in the middle to keep you going.

Oh, and the game is actually pretty funny. Despite adhering to it's dark premise really well (aka Hunger Games has nothing on this, especially after revealing what was really going on in the ending), the characters' play off each other enough to be genuinely entertaining (if some in more messed up ways than others), and the characters slowly becoming more and more mentally unhinged as the situation worsens makes them both funnier and scarier at the same time. Overall, solid stuff, and the story is addicting and certainly worth the read.

Hey, didn't they say this in Persona 3 too? What is up with Japan and sad rabbits? 

The actual "gameplay" of the game is divided into three main events. Aside from just general story stuff that happens whenever it feels like it, there are three distinct events you participate in: Free Time (read: social linking your friends), Investigations, and Trials. I'll break them down for ya (protip: Trials is longest).

People compared this game to Persona 4, probably because of both the game's bright, eye-popping style through its UI, and also because it had "social links" like the previous game. I'll just toss this out there right now: they aren't really as in depth as in Persona 4, so much so the comparison is hardly merited. While they do provide a good bit of humor and a little insight into the characters, next to nothing you find out during these events is valuable during an investigation or trial. In addition, the game straight up lets you skip Free Time if you want to just move the story along, so even it knows they're not that important.

All free time actually gives (besides a look into the character you are visiting with) is small passive power-ups that can be equipped during the trials (and a few other minor bonuses, I should point out). Some are better than others, but you could easily beat the game without any of them. Social links also require you to give the respective person presents they like in order to rank them up faster, which means either guessing or consulting a faq. As it stands, they're nice distractions (and there's some funny stuff hidden in there), but not as impactful as you might think.

There you go.

Investigations are very Phoenix Wright-esque, though they do a better job at helping you follow their rules. As mentioned before, you often have a babysitter as you move around, and the game won't let you leave a scene until you've found everything it's decided you should find. In this same vein, it's impossible to go into a trial missing information, so ultimately it's a limited-interaction Disneyland trip through a few crime scenes. Not that there's anything wrong with that; at least I'm not pixel hunting or totally lost (again, cough, Phoenix Wright's investigation scenes).

Now the Trials are where things get crazy. They're exhilarating, to say the least, mostly because of the sheer number of people. Again making the Phoenix Wright comparison, in that game it's essentially a throwdown of logic between two people. In DanganRonpa, you've got over a dozen (at least at the start...) tossing in arguments and opinions that you have to sift through. This is where the real "gameplay" emerges, for better and for worse.

OBJECTION!

There's four events that can happen in a trial, often multiple times: NonStop Debate, Hangman's Gambit, Bullet Time Battle, and Closing Argument. I'll go over the pros and cons of each in brief.

NonStop Debate is the most frequently repeated scene. In this, characters from around the group shout out opinions and speculations on the given topic at hand. As they're arguing, you load "Truth Bullets" (basically the evidence and facts you've found along the way) into your...truth gun? Gun of knowledge? Something? And take aim. When you find a statement that  your "bullet" contradicts, you fire it at the offending statement, obliterating it with Logic and Critical Thinking. Much like the entirety of graduate school.

The game mixes it up along the way, by adding both multiple options to choose from (and you have to cycle through to find the right one), "white nose" obscuring the topics (which you have to clear by tapping the back of the Vita or targeting it with the cursor before you can bullet it), and my favorite: you can take one person's statement and temporarily turn it into a bullet and then fire it against another statement. The latter of these is my favorite as it requires the most critical thinking (since often it just gives you the right truth bullet so you only have to find the offending statement; this requires you to find both the wrong statement and the one it contradicts), and so it's a pity it doesn't actually come up as often as you'd think. Most are simple and can be solved with basic logic.

That being said, this mode pissed me off to no end, mostly because near the end actually hitting the words becomes incredibly difficult. The location of the "white noise" blocking it is completely random, which means sometimes you don't have enough time to both clear the noise and fire the bullet before the statement moves on. There were times when I very clearly hit the statement, only to have the game decide it was "too late" and move on. Luckily the whole scene cycles if you fail to present an argument (and you can fast forward at any time to move things along quicker), but knowing the logical error only to be thwarted by bad shooting controls and the RNG white noise gods is straight up infuriating.

Editor's Note: I just now realized I never used the "slowdown" power given to you at the start of the game. Upon replaying it, even on the hardest difficulty, shooting the words down is a lot easier. So that last section was pretty much me being stupid, whoops. It's still challenging, but the ability to slow down time to line up your shots makes it much less painful. 

I swear purple text, if you get in the way one more time...

Hangman's Gambit is by far the easiest. Basically if someone asks a question that requires a word (or a combination of words) that you don't have evidence for, you jump into Makoto's head (which, apparently, is empty except for random floating letters, which makes sense now that I think about it) to figure it out. There is a random word spot (which gets a few letters filled in depending on your difficulty setting), and it's your job to fill in the remaining letters. They float randomly from the core of Makoto's thought processes, so you shoot 'em with your truth guns in the right order until the word is formed.

Again, not only is the game itself easy (just tap the right letters; a monkey could do it), but the words you have to find are extremely simple to decipher based on the context clues. I get they probably needed something else to do here, but it really is just kind of...there. And easy. Really easy. Did I mention it's easy?

Easy like your mom, HEYOOOHH

Bullet Time Battle is a...rhythm game? Yeah, it actually totally is. Which does an awful job of explaining how it works the first time (the only time I ever failed at a case was during the first two Bullet Time Battles), so I'll break it down easily here.

Basically when another character just won't shut up about something, you have to lock and load dem truth bullets to learn them how to be quiet. Essentially, a song with a beat plays, and a section on the bottom of the screen indicates when the beats hit. You can only press buttons on the beat (hey, it's like Crypt of the Necrodancer! ), and your goal is to shoot away the negative thoughts. Except they kind of suck at explaining exactly how to do it, so I'll tell you.

Pressing "X" on the beat locks onto a thought/word cloud. Once locked on, pressing Triangle to the beat shoots it. Later, when you have a limited number of bullets, pressing Square to the beat reloads. So once you figure that out, just press "X, Triangle, Square" to the beat, repeat, and you'll win. You can literally do it in your sleep.

The game tries to throw you off by making it so the enemy can block the visual indicator of beats, and also it increases/decreases the tempo depending on how you are doing, but if you have any musical inclinations whatsoever you can, again, do this in your sleep.

YOU CAN'T HANDLE THE TRUTH, LEON!

The last segment is Closing Argument, which I won't find a screenshot for because they're all spoilers. Basically, your job is to fill in a manga-style set of pages that represent exactly what happened. Some are already filled in, but you have to figure out the empty spaces. These are generally ok, but the biggest problem is the parts you can choose from are very small circles on the bottom, with pictures that are both tiny when compared to the panels and also somewhat abstract representations of what happened. This means that I found myself more fighting the battle of "what the hell is this bubble trying to convey?" rather than actually piecing the murder together. It was fun when it worked (and when it plays out it's actually really well done visually), but it does lead to some unwanted confusion.

I think that, in a whole, sums up the gameplay aspects of DanganRonpa: it's fun, but has unwanted confusion. I'm glad the trial elements are there otherwise there would be no skill-based gameplay bits in the game, but as a whole they feel relatively unpolished and, frankly, tacked in just so the game could have something interactive. It's an interesting contrast to Phoenix Wright (which fully embraced it was a visual novel and you just straight up present facts without any nonsense), and I really like the visual styles during the different minigames, but when they started hindering me actually presenting what I knew was a counterargument I got annoyed.

There are a few other minor niggles I have, too. To get presents you put coins into a capsule machine, but there's no option to just dump them all in there and get a hundred presents at once. You have to do them one at a time (putting in more coins just increases your chance of not getting a duplicate), which is absurdly tedious. Burning though a hundred tokens can take 10-15 minutes of your time just cranking the knob, which is no fun. Last minor thing is the map. It does let you teleport (hooray!) but the cursor isn't free flowing (boo!) which means sometimes it would move or go somewhere I didn't want it to. Not a biggie, but this (and a handful of other things I just won't mention) are little gameplay issues that probably wouldn't have taken long to address.

I'm glad you can actually walk around the school, even if there isn't much to see. 

 Graphically DanganRonpa looks great. It's an up-rezed version of a PSP game, but you wouldn't be able to tell playing it on the Vita. The game has a distinct sense of style, from its menus to its character art. Even the school itself, with its bold colors lighting the hallways and odd colored doors, is like something out of a strange nightmare. Special note must also be made of the trial sequences (especially NonStop Debate), where the camera spins around the circle of students and the visual style becomes heavily stylized. It looks really good!

Characters and objects in the 3D environments intentionally look like 2D cutouts being propped up. It's a style choice so I get it (since they're 2D drawings they decided to just not bother rendering them in 3D), and while at first I didn't like it, it grew on me and fit the game. What I really didn't like was the poor draw distance for objects, meaning people (and lights, which are the most noticeable as you move) pop in only when you get close. It makes looking for people to social link with a pain.

The few animated scenes (usually the executions) are delightfully done in a pseudo 2D/3D style. And I just realized I used "delightful" to describe executions. I'm probably on a list now.

The music is solid. It isn't exactly...I dunno...memorable like Phoenix Wright was, but most provide proper ambiance and all fit a neat style. It's mostly standard visual novel fair (again, just there as background noise), so it's all good.

The voice acting is decent. Almost all lines are spoken during the trials, which I appreciate. Out in the world, only a few key ones are ever said. Most are simply prefaced with a "reaction" audio clip (such as "Oh!" or "What?") to match the tone of the text. It's fine, save the few characters who just have them cussing as part of their clips. There's only so many "You son of a bitch!" you can get totally out of context before you get bored of it.

Oh yeah, I didn't mention it before, but there's plenty of f-bombs in this game to earn it is M rating. Just tossing that out there if you thought this game was for kids for some reason.

Living cutouts. How...nice?

So after all this jibber-jabber, what do I actually think about DanganRonpa: Trigger Happy Havoc? Well...I liked it. Really liked it. Liked it so much I stayed up late almost every night last week because I had to see what happened (hurting both my sleep schedule and my productivity at work...). The game is actually fairly long (think ~20 hours), but it certainly didn't feel it. The story is so well paced and the characters so entertaining, you can't help but get engrossed. They do well on their bizarre premise (and equally bizarre characters), and the trials are exhilarating and nailing the culprit satisfying.

Since people probably want a Phoenix Wright comparison, I'll toss this out there: I liked it better than the Phoenix Wright games I've beaten (which is just the first two, mind you). The pacing is brisker and the investigation and trial portions faster and funner. It's got a black sense of humor (unlike Phoenix, which thrives on it's charming goofiness) that works well with the story, and has quite a few "adult" jokes that caught me off guard. I still think the Phoenix Wright games are phenomenal, mind you, but DanganRonpa takes those ideas and streamlines them in all the right ways.

If you like a good, bleak story and enjoy deciphering mysteries, DanganRonpa is quite a good time. The somewhat lackluster minigames and overall strangeness may turn a few people off, but you came for the ride, and it's absolutely a ride worth taking.

Oh yeah, and just because I had to say it: no duh DanganRonpa is a game. Why is that even being brought into question? It's a game. QED.

Four out of five stars. 

It's the trial of the century.