But there’s a huge, very serious catch, one that gives Danganronpa its unique feeling of juxtaposition. You see, Hope’s Peak Academy isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, and the students quickly find themselves trapped within the confines of its walls, teased and tormented by an adorable – yet scary and entirely unsettling – teddy bear named Monokuma Each individual student will be kept at Hope’s Peak Academy in perpetuity unless one of them kills a fellow student and gets away with it, securing their release. And so the seemingly never-ending murder mystery gets underway.
Trigger Happy Havoc’s six chapters – each taking at least three hours to complete – work in predictable cycles. The protagonist, a non-descript teen boy known as the “Ultimate Lucky Student,” can travel around the school, exploring and talking to his fellow students. Eventually, someone is murdered. After being given a short period to investigate the murder, you’re thrust into a life-or-death trial to prove who’s responsible.
Exploring Hope’s Peak Academy might not sound fun, but it is, especially when you consider that a whole new section of the school opens up after each trial is over. This gives you a new supply of rooms to discover and mysteries to stumble upon, made all the better by Danganronpa’s intuitive quick travel system that rarely forces you to walk around the school on foot (though you can, if you want, in first-person view). Constant exploration is further rewarded by the discovery of gold coins with Monokuma’s face on them, currency that can be spent at the school store to buy presents that can be given to your fellow classmates. This, in turn, opens up new, totally optional sequences with your fellow students.The murders in Trigger Happy Havoc are often brutal and always sudden. Moreover, they’re hugely consequential. Danganronpa’s emphasis on character development – and specifically on talking to various characters, learning more about them, and at times befriending them – means that you can start getting close to someone only to find their cold body the next day. I loved how unsettling this was, how nervous it made me, and how disappointed I was when someone I was really getting to know was snuffed out. This is especially true when you consider that getting to know characters requires in-game “Free Time,” a limited resource that may have been better spent getting to know someone else, someone still alive.
Unfortunately, while the murders are brutal, the in-game illustrations don’t always match the brutality. Spike Chunsoft has opted to use pink blood, which removes some of the graphical oomph of each murder scene. Then again, this is only a minor gripe in a game that otherwise totes beautiful graphics. I especially loved how when you enter any given room in the school, load times are concealed by parts of the room – the walls, chairs, and even people within – coming together over a few seconds.
Character development, exploration, and murder investigations are all well and good, but the real star of Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc is undoubtedly its murder trials, overseen by the devious Monokuma. This is when everything becomes less Virtue’s Last Reward and more Phoenix Wright, with the fruits of your investigation coming to the fore. Just about everything you learned during a given murder’s investigation – and even information and evidence introduced by other characters – is important somewhere along the line.What’s so special about these trials is that there’s no prosecution and no defense. Everyone has their suspicions, but these trials are really massive blame games that slowly whittle down to a few culprits. They do get bogged down by introducing too many elements into the mix instead of keeping things simple, but going through each trial is still riveting, especially because you rarely know who the guilty party is until the very last moment. Since catching the real murderer is the only way to keep everyone (except the murderer) alive, these trials are hugely important, albeit linear in nature. Unlike Virtue’s Last Reward, there are no snaking paths through the story. For the most part, what you see is what you’ll get during your second playthrough, too.
