GBAtemp Recommends: Danganronpa Series
The idea of filling icons of hope with so much despair that they’d be willing to kill one another forms the main thematic conflict for the first game; are people more naturally inclined towards despair over hope, and which is stronger? It’s fairly straightforward, just a redressing of a good vs. evil story essentially, but it becomes more nuanced in the second game. Danganronpa 2 takes the first game’s admiration of hope and twists it, showing the folly of locking yourself into a binary between hope and despair and how a fanatic devotion to any one ideal, no matter how noble, can be dangerous. Danganronpa V3 takes things a step further and turns the thrust of the entire series, uncovering and facing the truth, on its head. The sequels also take concepts from the first game and expand on them to introduce new ideas, but the main focus is always on looking at what ideas came before it from a different angle. As interesting as a lot of these ideas are though, their presentation leaves something to be desired. These themes usually come to the forefront during the class trials, and as such, they are endlessly talked to death rather than being allowed to breathe as a natural part of the story. At some point they become a bit of a word salad, with certain words key to the series - “hope” and “despair” and “truth” and “future” - repeated ad nauseam to the point of unintentional hilarity.
Given the way Danganronpa layers its stories, this doesn’t necessarily have to detract too much. At any point, the game can be telling three stories; each chapter functions as a stand-alone murder mystery, the chapters come together to make a tense survival story while building the core themes, then near the end everything gets tied into the deeper lore of the series (and those themes are talked into the ground). So if you’re not into the hope vs. despair thing, you’ve still got a great murder mystery to enjoy for the majority of the playtime.
This approach allows the game to show how much it excels with its genre elements by letting each story work on its own without relying on player investment in the previous entries. The music is excellent, effortlessly switching moods from somber to madcap, breathing more than enough life into the game to make up for the sparse voice acting and lack of visual fluidity that come with the visual novel genre. The art design also does a lot of heavy lifting. Character sprites are wonderfully expressive and their designs are informative on their personality while still seeming like a natural outfit for this world. The game also knows how to handle its large casts, focusing on a few characters to keep the story focus tight, but not letting any of the background characters be forgettable. The mysteries themselves are varied and interesting too. While each game has at least one case that doesn’t work, for the most part they are inventive and fun, complicated enough that you’re normally only one step ahead of where the game’s going, but not so complicated as to be totally nonsensical. The full stories on what lead up to the murder also display the range of emotions the series is capable of showing. Some are absurd and farcical, some are genuinely tragic and moving. As the games progress, certain patterns emerge that can be frustrating to see repeated over and over again, and sometimes the game will get close to doing something different or embracing a fun quirk of the established rules before backing away and going with something seen before. Even then, the duller cases still have some fun surprises to turn up, so they’re never entirely without merit.
during the first trial, but we all know kyoko best girl
