Score: 9 out of 10

Danganronpa Trigger Happy Havoc is a murder mystery visual novel developed and published by Spike Chunsoft. This game was released in Japan in November 2010 on the PSP since then it’s had numerous releases over the years on other platforms like iOS, Android, Vita and now PC. In February 2014 it was released in North America for the PSVita and as of February 18, 2016 was released on Steam.

She’s so flat. (lol)

The story goes like this. 16 students receive acceptance letters to the premiere high school, Hope’s Peak Academy. Each of these students are given the title of “Ultimate” of their given talent. Ultimate Swimming Pro, Ultimate Martial Artist, Ultimate Fanfic Creator, etc. The main character, Makoto Naegi, is the Ultimate (Un)Lucky Student since he doesn’t really have a talent but was picked from a pool of average students. Right after arriving at Hope’s Peak Academy the students are locked inside by a huge metal hatch and they find all the windows have metal plates over them. Soon they are greeted by their headmaster, a talking monochromatic bear named Monokuma (get it? Mono as in monochromatic and kuma is Japanese for bear). He tells them that if they want to “graduate”, aka get out, they have to do one thing. Get away with murder. At first they refuse but Monokuma starts introducing incentives to get out. Sure enough a murder happens. Now the surviving students have to find out “whodunnit” through a class trial. If the correct person is found guilty they are executed but they everyone gets it wrong everyone else is executed while the killer walks free out of the school.

The gameplay for the main part of the game is pretty easy. Just read and click through dialogue. It is a visual novel after all. Between trials there is free time. During this free time you can explore the school and hang out with the remaining characters. Hanging out with characters is beneficial. One, it moves the story along. You can also gain skills that’s useful during the trials as well as getting to know the character more. You get about 1 to 2 times a day of free time for about 2 to 3 days between murders.

Once a murder has occurred you enter investigation mode where you search for clues. When you find a clue is added to your “truth bullets” to be used during the class trials as a way to correct a lie or contradiction. Monokuma tells you there’s a time limit for the investigation but it’s really until you find all the clues. So you do go into each trial with all the clues you need. Which is good but a couple times it took me forever to find that last clue. Even though the game tells you which rooms the clues are in as well as everything you can click on it still took me longer than it should have but that was probably just me and not the game.

The most important parts of Danganronpa are of course the trials. That’s also where most of the gamey part of that game is. The trials are fully voiced which is very helpful because of all the things you have to keep track of. During each trial a few things will happen.

• Non-stop debate is where charters will go around and talk about what they know. This is also where the truth bullets come into play. The dialogue will appear on screen and some phrases will appear yellow, called weak points, and those could be a lie or contradiction to the evidence. Sometimes the weak point said during the debate can be used as a truth bullet for another weak point. Also during the debates pink words will float around and try and block the truth bullet.
• Hangman’s Gambit is where you need to complete a phrase by shooting letters to complete a word.
• Bullet Time Battle is a rhythm mini game. At some point a character will refuse to give any ground on a point. Whether it be the identity of the culprit or a piece of evidence. During this the other character will spout off things like “You’re Stupid”, “Wrong”, etc. Using the rhythm the you need to lock onto and destroy what the person is saying.

OK enough about what the have is and onto to how it plays. The trials can get kinda hectic, especially the non-stop debates because not only are you worried about aiming the truth bullet at the weak point you are listening to what is being said to pick which weak point to shoot while trying to snipe the pink words in the way to get more time. At higher difficulties you have more truth bullets to use at a time so add loading the correct truth bullet onto that, and you may not even have the bullet and have to pick from the other weak points to get it. But it’s really not as hard as I just made it sound. You are given a lot of time. I never had to worry about time limits. But a couple times the choices you are given are just too vague to know which weak point to shoot. I did fail a couple times and had to restart that part of the trial. The Bullet Time Battles can get tough in the way that the music the is used doesn’t have an easy beat to follow. I had to block the music out to even find the and just watch the screen to find the beat. The better you do at hitting the beat the faster the tempo goes. And sometimes the beat markers are covered up do you have to guess the beat. I feel like I lucked through all the BTBs as is called.

What a creepy smile

The trails themselves are kind of easy. While you won’t know, most of the time, which character is the murder the, game does a good job at ge tting you to the correct conclusion through the trial debates without telling you who it is directly.

Sometimes I felt like I was playing a game for a much younger audience, from just the idiotic things the characters said. One example would be for one murder a cosplay robot suit was involved. Don’t ask. And one character tried on the suit during the investigation and makes the comment how to can’t bend at the waist. Then during the trial when asked the question of how was the body moved the same character says they bent down to move it. I almost missed my chance to shoot that weak point because I was so dumbfounded.

I didn’t have too many technical issues. The only issue I came across was when I using a Xbox 360 controller, which is what I mostly used, at

A detective with the body of a child who uses a voice changing bow-tie? Hmmm…

random times the dialogue would start skipping ahead. The only way to do it would be to turn autoplay (RB) on then turn it off. It wasn’t a button sticking on the controller because just holding A doesn’t skip the scenes like that but holding the B button does. I also don’t think I’ll ever get used to the movement controls using a controller. There is no strafing. That may not sound like a big deal but left and right on the left stick is turning as well as on the right stick. And the moving forward with the left stick overrides turning with the right. Eventually I just kept my thumb off the right stick because it was just causing my brain confusion. Non of these issues were present while playing with a mouse and keyboard though.

Having seen the anime already, which you can find the review of that here, I already knew where the mastermind behind the whole Murder Game was but I had forgotten who the culprits for each individual murders where. The art in the game is amazing. It sticks to 2D flat images even when you can look around in a quasi-3D room. So characters standing in a room like like their cardboard cutouts. And the execution scenes are very stylized. It’s 2D like the the rest of the game but the coloration is different. The voice acting is so much better than the anime it’s almost laughable. After playing the game then watching the anime (this time dubbed) I was almost angry to how different the takes on the characters were. I absolutely prefer the game VO to the dubbed anime, especially Monokuma, Byakuya Togami, Hifumi Yamada, and Celestia Ludenberg.

I really liked enjoyed the game. If you like a good murder mystery, which I do, I recommend this game. I do warn you, if you don’t like to the read then this might not be for you. It is a visual novel after all.

*Code Supplied by Publisher*