Ok, those who know me knows I'm an Ace Attorney b****, so I automatically had a kind of prejudice of Danganronpa. But damn, what a game, I beat it in 25h, but it looked like 5, cause the plot of the game gets you in the guts, the characters are in majority awesome(those who last, at least), even for a visual novel they have some pretty fast-paced action gameplay, and the game puts mistery after mistery jup to the last minute of the game, while managing to fullfill all the questions that they built until the ending of the game. Also Sakura best character

(-)
- The writing in this game sounds like it was written by a year 7 student doing creative writing. Gamers who've never read a book should be impressed.
- There's a lot of filler dialogue too, e.g. constant flashbacks even though the thing that they're flashbacking to happened literally 2 minutes ago.
- The 'free time' portions of the games are pretty boring too as they don't flesh out the characters or have fun scenarios.
- I played this game dub and for the most part the voice acting was good except for the main character who sounds like the burger foot lettuce guy.

(+)
However if you can handle going through the dialogue and the constant filler, then the cases are pretty fun to investigate and the plot is still somewhat interesting. Though it must be said that I played this game with a friend and I don't know if I'd be able to handle the writing if I played this by myself.

Makoto is an average Japanese student heading into high school (you’ve probably heard this one before) and receives a letter inviting him to the very exclusive Hopes Peak Academy, reserved for Japan’s best and brightest. Every year, a random student is drawn into the class even without a specific skill, designating them the “Ultimate Lucky Student.” You’re going to be seeing the word “ultimate” a lot here, so buckle up. Each student in the school is designated the “ultimate something,” indicating they are the absolute best in their field, no matter how specific or useless. For example, in Danganronpa (D1 going forward) you’ll meet the Ultimate Programmer (cool!), the Ultimate Pop Star (okay…), and the Ultimate Biker Gang Leader (…). Try not to get too tied up in all this. It’s very anime, I know. These characters, who are presented as 2D and entirely focused around one aspect of personality, are amazingly well crafted. This game leans heavily on what it does best, and that is the characters depth and interaction with each other.

When Makoto arrives at school, he’s gassed and wakes up with 15 other new students, trapped inside the school. And when I say trapped, I mean trapped. The doors and windows are all covered over with steel plates 6 inches thick and bolts bigger than a fist. No one knows what’s going on, and everyone remembers having just arrived moments before getting knocked out. After introductions are made, the kids make their way to the gymnasium where we meet the star of the show - Monokuma. Ah, what a delightful little bastard. Monokuma is the villain of the story, and he is something you haven’t seen before, i guarantee it. Without spoiling too much, he is a mechanical teddy bear controlled by a sadistic game master somewhere watching everyone through cameras mounted all around the school. He’s charismatic, funny, lame, and terrifying all at the same time.


Monokuma outlines the rules of the Killing Game, which you may have surmised was going to happen. The only way out of Hopes Peak is to kill another student without getting caught. When one student kills another, they are put on a class trial, which makes up the game portion of D1. I’ll get to that in a second. If the class as a whole is able to figure out who the killer is, that person is killed. If the class guesses wrong, the killer escapes and the rest of the class is killed. Ostensibly, only one person can escape either way. The students are given free reign of the boarding school with all its amenities and are sent on their way.

As you imagine, while they are all initially adamant about not taking part in the killing game, it only takes about 3 days for one of them to break. The game follows you as Makoto conducting investigations after a murder, piecing together evidence, and going to the class trials. There’s a lot of downtime between each trial and the next murder, called “School Life.” This is the visual novel part, and can largely be skipped if you like. You collect coins, buy gifts for specific classmates, build affinity, unlock new conversations with some light romance options, etc. Pretty standard fare for an anime visual novel. That’s when the murder happens.

The class trial consists of several minigames as well as logic puzzles that become pretty difficult to solve in the second part of the game. Play hangman, twin stick arcade shooters, and shoot logic bullets from your idea gun to support or refute classmates’ arguments. It sounds crazy but it’s very well done, and is pretty difficult. And let’s get to that right now: this is a hard game for the most part. You WILL NOT solve any of the murders before the trial begins, and if you think you have, you’re in for a rude awakening. They get more cleverly designed as they go and by the end you’ll just feel like a big jackass for ever thinking you could be a detective. But that moment when you realize everything and connect that last dot halfway through a class trial… it’s priceless.

Besides the characters, the other big selling point of this game is the music. I can’t really describe how good and ridiculous it is, so just take a listen to the main theme. It’s a banger, no two ways about it.

This game is about 35 hours long, so it’s a bit of a commitment to be sure. The only negative thing I have to say about it is the clunky controls during the School Life parts, but that doesn’t make up a lot of the game and it’s mostly skippable, plus the fast travel option helps. My last note is that the ending will blow your mind and fuck you up, and you’ll probably race to start downloading the second game.

This is a violent game. It’s gorey. It’s unforgiving. But it’s also hilarious. There’s a weird line Spike Chunsoft straddles here that I didn’t know about between sadistic murders and funny pranks. But again, it’s so self aware of how ridiculous it is it all feels right. Monokuma is a great and memorable villain, and you’ll find yourself casually checking Amazon to see how much a plush costs.

Danganronpa knows its strengths and leans on them - the ridiculous dialogue and puns, the deeply detailed characters, the wacky art and music. The school life sections, which I find to be tedious, are mostly skippable. The murders are brilliantly put together and full of red herrings, and you’ll walk into the class trial feeling confident but looking like a total dumbass. The logic puzzles are difficult but mostly pretty fair, and you’ll think “oh I see I should have done that” a lot. Yes, this is an anime game, and it’s somewhere between a visual novel and an arcade puzzle, but even if you don’t like any of those things I honestly think you might still like this game.

When I think back on Danganronpa, I feel its enduring popularity and fanbase was achieved by the perfect storm. It was an edgy Japanese high school murder mystery in the early to mid 2010s. Emo culture was still fresh in our memories, anime was becoming well and truly mainstream with zoomers, and it left enough questions unanswered for fans to come together in online communities to discuss the game, concoct their own theories, and give it word-of-mouth.

The game's visuals also ensured that it would be a hit. Whether it was for the pink blood, the cardboard cutout characters, or the ingeniously designed mascot Monokuma, Danganronpa made a lasting impression on our eyes and minds. As the celebrated cartoonist Zachary Hadel, of Smiling Friends fame, would say, Danganronpa looks 'iconic.'

I say all this because, hell, I was one of those edgy zoomers - one of the first, in fact. I played this game when it was still a PSP exclusive, using the fan translation that I still feel is superior to its official counterpart.

Rarely has a game been so perfect for a certain demographic, but that's not to say that Danganronpa's appeal has faded for newcomers. Its dark humour, memorable cast, striking visual style and absorbing plot handily secure its place in the pantheon of visual novels. If you haven't played Danganronpa before, the best time to play it is now. NOW. Before Alzheimer's disease sets in. Upupupupu!

Hahahahaha screw this game

This game sets such an amazing intro with its first case. It's fluidly paced, the twists and turns in it are genuinely intriguing, the aesthetics and music work wonderfully, and the cast is fun with setting down a foundation for their growth later on.

The game's core strength is its presentation. The designs of the characters, the settings, the art style, the music, everything is so distinct. It's all really charming and memorable and the aesthetic alone does a lot for this game. It even tricked me into having a fun time with this game which gets worse and worse in hindsight.

The game's writing is dumb. The characters will take forever to get to basic conclusions the player got to a long time ago, there's frequent moments that defy common sense that don't even make sense in character, nobody but exactly three characters actually progress the investigations/cases with everyone else seeming like wastes of space there to give testimony or be there to be argumentative, a lot of things feel like contrived like Case 2 with the Genocide Jack stuff and Case 3 with the hammers and Case 4 with the multiple pointless suspects and Case 5/6 with the very obvious fake nails, the characters get zero development outside of one getting genuine development and a few others either getting posthumous fleshing out or very barebones development, and the plot twist at the end feeling really forced.

Case 2 is a case I enjoy for the neat twists and turns but also kind of hate for having a lot of deeply uncomfortable transphobic stuff. Case 3 and 4 are just boring, and Cases 5 and 6 are genuinely infuriating to me.

I'm trying to keep this as spoiler free as possible so all I can really say is that the game peaks at the first case and curves downward the more you go into the game. Maybe if this game had more intelligent writing or better characters I'd be more forgiving, but nope. This game is the wet dream of an edgy Hot Topic tweenager who thinks anime tropes are interesting personalities.

+I love the premise here, it's especially shocking at the beginning when you don't know very much about the world and the setting. the juxtaposition of brutality and levity is sharp
+the game makes many attempts to tackle weaknesses with the Ace Attorney series, and some of them are definitely successful. I appreciate how interactable objects in the environments are shown, how it won't let you leave areas without getting all the information neeed, the limited number of evidence supplied for each argument sequence, and many other things I can't remember at the moment
+the music is godlike... takada really outdid himself here
+the way the secrets are spooled out over the course of the game is well-done imo; overall the pacing is top-notch. it helps that later chapters have short investigations and long trials, and each trial usually has some oddity that reveals more about the universe of the game
+I also enjoyed the ending quite a bit. they absolutely stick the landing, and the way the mystery clears up in the final chapter is rewarding
+playing on windows has one big advantage: the mouse makes aiming during the trials a breezy process. I really would not have enjoyed playing this with a controller I think

-I really don't like being constantly led around and fed info by byakuya and kyoko... it feels like makoto not only lacks any agency but is also a complete dullard. it doesn't make me feel like I'm solving the case when the two of them are doing so much of it for me, and being incredibly condescending to boot. it's even more annoying when they (specifically byakuya) make obvious mistakes...
-specific annoyance: why are there argument sections where another character says the contradiction, and I have to turn their argument into a bullet and use it on whatever they were responding to in the first place. the reasoning wasn't my own! how would this not be better just as dialogue, or with actual evidence I can use for my own contradiction
-the rhythm minigame is broken on the pc port, as far as I'm aware. whatever the case, the beat to click along with is not properly in sync with the music. I really should not have played this game on Mean difficulty...
-the cases in the middle dip in quality... I think there's frequently a slump in these kinds of games so it's not really a surprise to me here
-a lot of the characters are pretty one note. esp as more people get picked off, I feel like the main survivors are not that great of a group

dr1 throws a lot of ideas at the wall, and the core design is novel and rock-solid. it's enough to carry this game beyond the deficiencies in characterization and the overabundance of needless gameplay additions/minigames, and it makes me very excited to dive into the later entries as I know they are considered improvements on this initial formula. first games can always struggle a bit to make all the concepts gel, and at the very least this one manages to pull through with a lot of heart and a really fascinating premise.

Es un poco complicado hablar de danganronpa, es un juego muy extraño que genera emociones fuertes, tanto positivas como negativas, puedes odiarlo o amarlo es un juego que no deja indiferente a nadie y por eso es muy complicado hablar de él. El juego es estúpido, su historia es esquizofrénica y tiene un ritmo tan acelerado que nisiquiera te da tiempo a procesar bien lo que ocurre (Yo sigo tratando de digerir el final), los primeros 2 capitulos tienen un ritmo algo más tranquilo pero a partir del tercero la cosa se desmadra por completo y no baja la intensidad hasta que termina, es una montaña rusa larga y desesperante sin apenas momentos de descanso, es estrambótico y despilfarra estilo lo mires por dónde lo mires. Es un juego tonto con una historia sin mucho sentido ni sustancia pero a su vez se me es imposible no amar sus estupideces, se que no conectará con todo el mundo pero si eres capaz de aceptar sus tonterías y meterte en su ridículo lo vas a gozar.

A veces pienso si esta hecho a propósito o no, algo así solo puede estar hecho por alguien que sabe muy bien lo que está haciendo o que no tiene ni idea,incluso si es un accidente nada más eso no le quita lo cautivador que es, es un juego imperfecto, pero no podría haber sido hecho de otra forma