While I may be the resident video-game guy for FEARNET, there are plenty of non-horror titles that I can't get enough of. Capcom's Ace Attorney series is a prime example, blending melodramatic visual novel storytelling with high-pressure courtroom drama in a way that scratches two itches: Japanese weirdness and my unhealthy love for Law & Order. Unfortunately, the lack of any real horror elements has kept my love for this fantastic series unspoken.
Which is why I was so excited for Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc from Spike Chunsoft and NIS America. It took the legal cues from Ace Attorney and dropped it into a bizarre tale of a hellish high school that's unique, engrossing, and oddly vicious in spite of its overt silliness.
You play as Makoto, who was recently accepted into Hope's Peak Academy, a private school for the best of the best. While his other classmates represent the peak of their particular specialty (the Ultimate Baseball Star, The Ultimate Martial Artist), Makoto won his entrance via a lottery, making him feel inadequate in the presence of such overachievers.
Once in the school, things clearly become even more bizarre: the fifteen students are revealed to be trapped inside the prison-like school by a sadistic bear named Monokuma, who explains that they are to spend the rest of their lives inside the academy. The only way out is to become "blackened," by murdering one of their classmates. Once a murder is discovered, a kangaroo court is held to try and determine the killer's identity: if the rest of the students guess right, the "blackened" is executed poetically. If they guess wrong, they are all executed for their error and the "blackened" is allowed to leave the school.
This ever-so-slightly Battle Royale-inspired setup is shockingly intriguing, which is a good thing as the game is heavily story-driven. You spend your days interacting with your classmates, which can net you some special abilities to use in the Class Trials, and trying to uncover the mysteries contained within Hope's Peak Academy. However, once a corpse is discovered, the game turns into an investigative search for clues, leading up to the Class Trial where the oddly deliberate pacing of the game quickly becomes an arcade-fast blaze of questioning, evidence presentation, and eventually a rhythm game (yeah, Japanese games can be weird) to determine the identity of the Blackened. Once you've got your final argument figured out, you then have to re-enact the murder in a manga-style comic, making sure that the Blackened is found guilty and executed in the appropriately gruesome-yet-goofy fashion, be it "The 1,000 Blows" from a pitching machine, reduced to human butter by G-forces, or burned at the stake before being crushed by a fire truck.
Through all of its weird pacing and odd gameplay cues, Danganronpa never lets up on its level of drama and intensity. You start to like and admire its weird cast of characters, and your daily interactions with them make it a tragedy when you inevitably find their mutilated corpses. The murders are never pleasant, and the sight of a gore-soaked body is oddly made more disturbing by the decision to color all of the blood in a neon pink. Whether someone's been bludgeoned, stabbed, or crucified, their frames are always doused in this strange fluorescence. These murders are wrapped up in scads of mind-blowing twists and turns in the plot that keep you guessing the whole way through to the end, with themes like gender identity, a mysterious sixteenth student living in the walls of Hope's Peak Academy, and the final reveal of Monokuma and the enigmatic "Ultimate Despair."
Danganronpa is not a universally appealing game. Its arrhythmic gameplay pacing, weird blend of visual novel with courtroom drama and arcade elements , and overbearing sense of Eastern oddness will turn off many who play it. However, for those who choose to enroll in Hope's Peak Academy, there is a wealth of brilliant story and human brutality on display that will keep you on your toes all the way to graduation.