To find the very best PS Vita games, you have to look beyond conventional genres and blockbuster names. Sure, Killzone: Mercenary is a fun shooter that captures most of its console brothers’ intensity and multiplayer fun. Tearaway is charming and memorable, as Media Molecule is known to bring in spades. But neither has captured my attention in ways that offbeat Japanese titles have been able to. Take my favorite Vita game: Persona 4 Golden. The OLED screen becomes a conduit for pushing bright, vivid colors and polished anime artwork to your eyeballs, and the day-by-day game structure, with short-but-sweet social events, chops up an 80-hour RPG into perfectly digestible chunks. Then there’s Zero Escape: Virtue’s Last Reward, a mind-bending visual novel whose challenging, multi-hour puzzles can be tackled in bits and pieces throughout your day.
These are my two favorite PS Vita games. But Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc feels like the firstborn child of a sweet, sensual marriage between the two.
NIS America is porting this Spike Chunsoft-published game over from Japan, where it debuted on PSP in 2010. It’s part visual novel, part investigation thriller, all wrapped up in the antics of fifteen high school students trapped in a prestigious academy by an evil teddy bear headmaster. Monokuma, the sadistic, deceptive, and psychopathic headmaster bear in question, has ensured that escape is impossible, and the only way to "graduate" and leave the school is to kill a fellow classmate and not get caught in the ensuing investigation and trial. It’s totally wacky, and the way Monokuma appears at random to interrupt conversations, introduce new rules, or give inappropriate commentary adds creepy intensity to a game already overflowing with it.
As a visual novel, Danganronpa throws a lot of text your way–but unlike Virtue’s Last Reward, there’s slightly more involved gameplay that punctuates the lengthy conversations. At times, you can freely move about the school and its dormitories, choosing who to talk to and what rooms to explore. There’s incentive to build relationships with your classmates, a la Persona 4’s Social Links, between murders, as there’s opportunity to unlock equippable skills that prove useful during the game’s court trials. More on those in a bit–I want to emphasize just how much the social interactions and day-by-day structure of Danganronpa feels like Persona 4 Golden. Choosing to spend time with a classmate is a tradeoff that loses a segment of the day in which you could have chatted up somebody else. You can choose to give presents to a friend, too, with beneficial or detrimental effects on the relationship based on your ability to read their wants.
The interface even reflects Persona 4, with a delightfully cheeky, self-aware yellow color palette and time-of-day marker that actually work as a dissonant element of Danganronpa’s alternately terrifying and happy-go-lucky atmosphere. You’re always on your toes, as the cartoony musical cues of Monokuma’s monologues, bright pink blood, and wacky character designs clash with the grim reality of teenagers murdering each other for the right to escape a hellish prisoner’s dilemma. And I shudder to think of losing some of these characters, all hilariously written with oodles of personality. There’s Hifumi Yamada, the obese fan fiction writer infatuated with 2D women. There’s Toko Fuwada, the teenage prodigy romance novel writer. There’s Mondo Owada, the biker gang leader who seems to mask a deep sense of honor and a heart of gold. Words, actions, and trademark "dialogue sounds" (not every line is completely voiced) range from the genuinely sentimental to hilariously bizarre, and this unpredictability keeps me coming back for more. ‘Free Time’ can be just as engaging as murder time.
But murder time is where Danganronpa really shines as a mystery with complex ideas and not-so-obvious solutions.
More details after the break…
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Every time a murder happens, you’re given time to investigate the crime scene, talk to classmates, and gather clues around Hope’s Peak Academy to prepare for action-packed class trials in which a consensus is reached on who the killer is. Investigation time is, unfortunately, pretty linear, as the game won’t let you proceed to the class trial without finding everything of importance you’ll need to make the right argument. But a good deal of fun is had simply trying to piece together clues to identify the killer before the trial begins. This can be difficult, as the trials might reveal key information that’s nearly impossible to guess, but investigations are engaging nonetheless.
The trials themselves feel a bit game-y to me. Refuting arguments and pointing out contradictions in classmate logic is done by shooting "Truth Bullets" (collected evidence) at phrases that quickly move across the screen. You can take aim with a reticle or simply tap the screen, but actually having to aim at phrases and fire early enough for your Truth Bullet to hit before another phrase appears feels unnecessary and often requires repeating the sequence despite already knowing the solution. Other parts of trials are just plain weird. One classmate inevitably devolves into a spluttering mess of denial, and you enter a rhythm mini-game where pressing X and Triangle in-sync breaks through their denial. Diversions like these test gaming abilities that have nothing to do with the intellectual nature of murder investigation, which is fine when they work. But when you fail a trial because the artwork needed to finish a comic book of the murder is tiny and somewhat vague, you feel smashed against a superfluous obstacle to progress that has nothing to do with solving the case.
Still, discovering and correctly identifying the murderer always feels satisfying, even if the result is something all players will inevitably reach through trial-and-error. All things considered, Danganronpa is an exciting mix of quirky Japanese humor and characters, haunting atmosphere, and gameplay structure that works in short bursts on the road and marathon sessions at home. Several hours in, it’s hard to say whether Danganronpa will surpass the spiritual predecessors that claim my top two spots on PS Vita, but it’s vying for your undivided attention when it drops on Tuesday, February 11.
This is just PSU’s preview of Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc, so stay tuned for Ernest Lin’s full review and final score on release day. Join the conversation in the comments and tell us your favorite PS Vita game and if anything about Danganronpa grabs your interest!