1485: Trigger Happy Havoc

I’ve been refraining from talking about it until I put my review up, but now that’s safely filed, I feel I should enthuse somewhat about Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc.

For the uninitiated — and all the people who constantly claim they have no idea what Danganronpa is — allow me to explain.

It’s a visual novel-cum-adventure game from Spike Chunsoft, the developers who brought us the Zero Escape series that consists of 999 and Virtue’s Last Reward. Its concept is something of a cross between Corpse Party and Zero Escape: a disparate group of individuals are kidnapped, trapped in an enclosed environment (in this case, a twisted, not-quite-right version of a school, hence the Corpse Party comparisons) against their will, and then presented with a series of challenges between them and their final escape. In Zero Escape’s case, this was a matter of solving puzzles and choosing the correct path to the end; in Danganronpa’s case, meanwhile, it’s a little more complex.

The game’s Zero-equivalent Monokuma — a far more in-your-face and sinister antagonist than the largely hands-off Zeroes — challenges the game’s cast to a “killing game” in which anyone who successfully gets away with murder graduates from the twisted school and gets to escape; meanwhile, everyone else gets “punished” by, well, being killed. Conversely, should the “Blackened” murderer be found out, they get punished, but the remaining students don’t get to escape — they just have to continue their school life.

The game unfolds over a series of chapters, each of which involves the surviving members of the cast investigating the mysterious school, trying to get to the bottom of what is going on and then, subsequently, investigating a murder that happens. This is then followed by a “class trial” in which everyone argues and yells at each other and, if you’ve done your job correctly, the culprit is identified and punished. In between these phases, you get short periods of “Free Time” in which you can hang out with the remaining characters to build up your relationships, which subsequently unlocks “skills” for use in the trial segments.

The trials themselves are a far cry from Ace Attorney territory. The majority of them revolve around a mechanic called “Non-Stop Debate” in which the characters continue speaking their lines whether or not you’re ready to continue, and you have to shoot down “weak points” in their arguments with the “truth bullets” you gathered over the course of your investigation. On the default difficulty, for the majority of the game you’ll only have to identify which statement to shoot down with a single truth bullet; on harder difficulty levels (and at certain, critical moments on normal difficulty) you’ll also have to choose the correct truth bullets to refute the statements you think are false. This then gets even more complicated as the game progresses as people start shouting over the top of each other, represented by irrelevant “noise” statements floating across the screen and getting in the way of the things you actually want to shoot down.

These arguments are supplemented by Hangman-like sequences in which you have to recall specific pieces of information by spelling them out, rhythm action sequences in which you struggle to make yourself heard over someone’s constant objections and, at the end of each “case,” a Trauma Team-style summing up of exactly what happened by assembling a comic strip depicting the events leading up to the murder, and what happened after that.

It’s a fascinating game; perhaps not as “clever” as 999 and Virtue’s Last Reward, but that’s no bad thing — while 999 and Virtue’s Last Reward specialise in bending your brain around complicated narratives with peculiar structures, Danganronpa’s relatively straight line to the finish still manages to have plenty of surprises, twists and turns along the way, and has no qualms whatsoever about killing off its main cast with alarming rapidity.

In short, my review has hopefully already made this abundantly clear, but if you have a PlayStation Vita and the slightest interest in intriguing, compelling murder mysteries, you should abso-posilutely pick up a copy of Danganronpa this week. No, I don’t care if you’re already playing Bravely Default. No, I don’t care if you’re getting stuck into Lightning Returns. Danganronpa is fantastic, and I don’t mind admitting that I want as many people as possible to play it so we continue to see more and more games like this in the West.