Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc
Hope’s Peak Academy was once a school for Japan’s most gifted individuals. Now all that resides is a psychopathic teddy bear who’s created a saccharine-sweet world of despair. You play Makoto Naegi, a run of the mill student who’s been accepted into the school along with a group of far more extraordinary students. It becomes clear quite quickly that the school is anything but normal and they’re trapped. Monokuma, the aforementioned bear, lays out a simple premise – live here until the day you die or murder a fellow student, get away it with, and escape.
Things start off rather subdued in this visual novel. You spend time with your ‘friends’, get to know what makes them tick and pick up skills that you can use later down the line. Likewise, by exploring you’ll collect gold coins to purchase presents for others and initiate conversations you’d otherwise miss. It’s not long though before tensions start to rise, everything gets a little Lord of the Flies, and the first body hits the ground. CSI mode begins and you don a pair of sunglasses Horatio Caine style to scour the crime scene for evidence – although it’s more the latter, actually.
Make no mistake, Danganronpa is a dark, mature, game and the murders throughout it are gruesome. You’re able to get away with playing it in public simply because the world is so colourful that even the blood at crime scenes is neon pink. For the player though, this actually makes the game even more sinister as the whole world in which you inhabit is simply off kilter.
Once you’ve collected your evidence, you’ll be whisked off to the courtroom to decide which student committed the heinous crime. You better be certain though as if you get it wrong everyone dies. However, the game won’t let you proceed to the courtroom until you’ve found all the evidence you need, which is reassuring. Using the evidence you’ve collected you’ll present your case and pick apart other people’s arguments with ‘Truth Bullets’. Rhythm-based mini-games finally help you overpower the accused’s denials. When you do pin it on the guilty party, they’ll be dragged away, executed in a weird and gruesome way and you’ll be another student down, the group getting smaller and smaller all the time.
Danganronpa is a fantastic but intensely weird game - equal parts murder mystery, Phoenix Wright-esque courtroom thriller and social sim. It’s brimming with accomplished writing and interesting characters that have more to them than meets the eye. If you’ve got a PS Vita and don’t mind lots of text you simply owe it to yourself to pick up Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc. In fact, this is a title even Sherlock Holmes wouldn’t want to put down.