Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc

If you were to create a three-pointed graph and put Persona, Ace Attorney and Zero Escape at the three angles, somewhere near the center would be Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc.

In recognition of Danganronpa hitting Steam on Feb. 18, I present you the following review of the PS Vita version (don’t worry; I finished this before February). We’ve talked a lot about this series before but, as it turns out, we haven’t reviewed the thing.

Danganronpa begins life as an unassuming visual novel. You take the helm of an ordinary high schooler who won a lottery to be admitted to a school for gifted youngsters… specifically for prodigies who became the best in their field (no matter what that field is) by that age.

But no sooner than you arrive than you and your extraordinary classmates are knocked out an awaken sealed in what seems like a nightmarish perversion of the school where you are told that nobody gets out… unless they get away with killing one of their classmates.

Thus begins the routine for each chapter. You’ll explore what parts of the school are available to you at that point, progress through the story and use a predetermined number of free time to build your social links rapport with certain classmates (doing those advances a little side story with each classmate and unlocks skills for the other half of the game). You won’t have enough opportunities to max out more than three in a playthrough, so don’t sweat being perfect. Then, somebody gets murdered, you have to investigate the crime and hold a trial. After all, the murderer only earns their freedom if they get away with the deed.

The investigation segments play out like an abbreviated Ace Attorney run. You will gather testimony and evidence by talking to the other classmates and examining objects at the crime scene and various other areas of the school that may be related to the crime.

The game generally won’t let you leave an area until you’ve collected everything you can at that point, and the trial won’t start unless you have 100% completed the investigation. There’s no risk of an old school Sierra-style unwinnable puzzle here. That being said, not everything you collect will be used at the trial, though there is a story-related reason to gather it just the same.

The trials are where the games style goes right off the rails into flash and dazzle. They hand the camera to Michael Bay for lots of quick cuts and tilted pans. And it works. Why? Because we’re Michal Bay-ing static images, so it’s more like a Ken Burns effect cranked up to 11. As what’s being shot isn’t itself in motion, we can actually see what it is.

The trials are more like jury deliberations as everybody is trying to figure out whodunit. Your classmates will talk out pieces of evidence and their suspicions amongst each other, and your job is to pick the right time to interrupt with the right thing to say. This is almost always an Objection! or to reveal a clue from your court record.

But they way they do it is immersed in the Michael Bay-ing of the scene. As each character speaks, their words scroll across the screen. Some of their phrases are in a different color, and you have to aim a reticle and shoot the discolored words with a “Truth Bullet” that contains the answer to their contradiction. You’ll have to lead the target and make sure the murmurings of the off-screen characters don’t block your shot, however.

But that’s just one of many minigames you’ll be playing as the trials unfold. There’s also the Hangman’s Gambit, where you have to shoot letters to fill in a word related to the next piece of evidence. You’ll also sometimes go one-on-one against a classmate in a war of words expressed as a rhythm game.

Each of the minigames will get increasingly complex with new controls or actions until the final trial. As a whole, it’s bizarre, high-strung and a bit overloaded. More focus on the trial’s disjointed gameplay would have really helped to take the game to the next level.

There’s quite a bit of exposition front-loaded into the game. Establishing 15 characters and two settings is a lot of work. Many of the characters are pretty one-note, but I’ll forgive them their shallowness as such extreme personalities and appearances are needed to tell so many of them them apart. If we’re going to have the game last longer than an hour, there’s going to need to be a fairly large number of potential victims, eh?

The story does a great job at being alternatingly funny and fearsome. It’s also good about dropping breadcrumbs to the greater mystery just enough to keep you on it… though the big twist for the ending could be easily guessed by the player as early as Chapter 2, the details will remain shrouded in mystery until the end.

Verdict: Go for it (4/5). A few nagging issues with execution are all that separates this game from being a classic.

…Not that you need my recommendation; you’re going to impulse buy it in a Steam sale anyway. Just have an intention of actually playing this one, OK?