
This, in turn, opens up new, totally optional sequences with your fellow students.ĭanganronpa totes an excellent cast of unique characters.The murders in Trigger Happy Havoc are often brutal and always sudden. 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 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). 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. After being given a short period to investigate the murder, you’re thrust into a life-or-death trial to prove who’s responsible. 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. Trigger Happy Havoc’s six chapters – each taking at least three hours to complete – work in predictable cycles. And so the seemingly never-ending murder mystery gets underway. 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. But there’s a huge, very serious catch, one that gives Danganronpa its unique feeling of juxtaposition. Prepare to be humming a couple of these tunes after a few hours of play. And then there’s the catchy soundtrack, one that has only a small selection of tracks, but one that never seems to get old.

The voice acting is also well above the quality usually found in Japanese ports.

Spike Chunsoft did an especially nice job of writing great dialogue – dialogue that NIS did an equally wonderful job translating – that elicits laughs and gasps with regularity. Pretty much all of the characters – save one very specific example – are likeable and interesting.

Play Indeed, Danganronpa’s unique cast of characters rest at the core of the experience.
