What would a group of people do if they were locked in a room and their only way to get out would be to kill one person to be set free? That mindset is the plot of the game Danganronpa.
This video game series is broken up into three main games, Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc, Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair and Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony. There is also a spin-off game, Ultra Despair Girls. The Trigger Happy Havoc and Goodbye Despair games have anime shows based off them, but the shows are not as iconic as the games.
The video games themselves follow 16 high school students, each with their own special talents, who are recruited to a government-sanctioned private high school called Hope’s Peak Academy. These students are called Ultimates and are scouted throughout various schools to join Hope’s Peak due to their special talents. These are students who are guaranteed to have a successful career in the future. Some examples of these students are Aoi Asahina, the Ultimate Swimmer and Byakuya Togami the Ultimate Affluent Progeny, both from Trigger Happy Havoc.
As the game starts out, the students find themselves waking up in a large room of the school, and eventually learn they are trapped, whether that be a school like Trigger Happy Havoc and V3, or a stranded island like Goodbye Despair.
Monokuma, the headmaster of Hope’s Peak Academy, shows up and tells the students they are not able to leave the place they are captured in unless they kill one of their classmates and are found innocent after a class trial.
Throughout the game, students are killed, and the player has to go through the process of finding evidence to figure out the killer. They then have to go through a class trial by arguing with other students and find out the killer. When the killer is caught, they go through a gruesome, horrific execution as punishment for killing and getting caught. The executions usually relate to the student’s talent as well as a way to make sure they have the most despair included.
As students are killed, the survivors eventually find clues to what is behind this killing game.
The next three paragraphs will contain spoilers to the main three games.
Some executions like Kirumi Tojo’s, the Ultimate Maid, happens from V3 climbing up a vine full of thorns while being cut over and over by spinning razors as she climbs towards a light. She believes this is the exit. Eventually, she gets to the ceiling where she finds the light is a terribly colored blue sheet stuck to the ceiling and that there was no exit afterall. The vine snaps and she ends up falling to her death.
Another gruesome end was Peko Pekoyama’s, the Ultimate Swordswoman, from Goodbye Despair whose execution forced her to sword fight robots. While she fought, Fuyuhiko Kuzuryu, a childhood friend of hers who she was raised to be a bodyguard for, ran into the fighting. Ultimately, she accidentally sliced his eye midswing. She stopped fighting and was killed by the robots.
These executions play major mindgames with the students in their last moments. Students can be met with a feeling like they have a chance to escape, only to be met with the reality there was no getting out in the first place. Or in Peko’s case, she was the cause of breaking the one rule she had in her life, which was to protect Fuyuhiko, seeing herself as a failure before being killed.
The main three games graphics and designs are absolutely fantastic. The characters all look exquisite in all three games. The game mechanics are also super cool. A player has a pretty set amount of tasks they have to complete, but the speed or how a player wants to go through these tasks is mostly up to them. Some of these tasks are finding out clues, talking to different students to try and have stronger relationships with them or just finding more about the place they are in to figure out how to get out.
There should be some caution placed into playing this game. Due to the gore, it can be a bit much for younger audiences and some of the jokes made are more appropriate for a high schooler or college student.
Ultra Despair Girls is a game following the protagonist of Trigger Happy Havoc, Makoto Niagei’s sister, Komuru Niagei and a survivor from the first game, Toko Fukawa. This game is set in the time before Trigger Happy Havoc and Goodbye Despair.
Robot Monokumas are running free in the city, being controlled by a group of villainous children called the Warriors of Hope. The Warriors are a collection of abused children who wish to rid the world of adults and create a kid controlled world to protect the child population. The player must use Komuru and Toko to defeat the children and the Monokuma robots.
Overall, the game is boring, clunky and is the perfect explanation of a filler game. It is sad to even play it because of how long it takes to play. Many Danganronpa fans on platforms like Reddit and Youtube have long rants about why no one should play this game.
The reason why Danganronpa will not post anymore games is because the creator, Kazutaka Kodaka, does not want the same plot lines and playthroughs to be created over and over, despite fans asking for a game after V3. This is a valid reason to not continue a series because stories should not need to continue if it doesn’t need to. V3 ended on a good note with no cliffhangers, so there should be no point in needing to spend the money, time and energy to make another game.
All in all, these games are incredibly fun to play, the lore and storylines are fantastic and the fandom is quite positive. Although it has faded over the years, a new player is sure to find a Danganronpa veteran around the vast world of social media.