Transcript
Hey hey folks, Dave here. Welcome to my critique of Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc. Just a friendly reminder that I will be discussing the game for those who have played it. If you haven’t and are worried about spoilers, please pause the video and go play the game before returning. For everyone else, let’s continue.
While thinking about the type of game Danganronpa is, my mind easily went to similar visual novels like the Ace Attorney and Zero Escape series. All three are murder mysteries (although Zero Escape is about the threat of murder). I wonder if a murder mystery is the best kind of story for a visual novel. I have heard it said that murder mysteries are kind of like games themselves, the reader trying to work out who the murderer is, how they commited the murder, and why, before these answers are revealed by the story.Certainly all these games have the player wanting to know the “why” behind everything.
In game design, Danganronpa is closest to Ace Attorney with the most entertaining parts of both games being the trial segments. The students of Hope’s Peak Academy are working out who committed the murders each time one occurs and how they did it (the why is stated from the outset. It frees them from the horror of their high school prison). The trials are more action orientated than Ace Attorney. You’ll mostly be going through testimony as your fellow classmates are discussing the case, disrupting a lie or an inconsistency with a truth bullet. It’s thematically clever. You’re blowing away falsehoods. This action is tense and exciting, not only gameplay wise, but narratively too as you’re slowly unravelling the murder in question.
Rather than increase the challenge of the cases and the logic used to solve them, it seems to me that Danganronpa keeps ramping up the difficulty of the gameplay itself. Well perhaps difficulty is the wrong word. The feeling I have is that the gameplay segments keep becoming more obtuse. Some of it makes sense like the ability to choose from multiple bullets to fire off at a false statement. That’s having the player use their head a little more. Then however you have comments blocking the statements you shoot that you have to clear out of the way first. Then you can suck up keywords from statements themselves in order to shoot them at another statement. And this is just the truth bullet segment. In the dual section, obstacles keep getting thrown in your path in a similar fashion.
This brings up the question of why. It seems that in the interest of servicing gameplay, Danganronpa interrupts the excitement and flow of its digital novel roots in order to have an increasing number of things for the player to do, an increase of the number of plates that they need to keep spinning. It makes me think of the criticisms that narrative heavy games face. How can it be called a game when there’s little to no gameplay, or if the gameplay itself seems superficial? Now I hear that criticism more towards games like Dear Esther or To the Moon than games like Ace Attorney, but I think the answer applies to all story driven videogames.
A narrative game features a different type of immersion than your typical videogame. The immersion is not in the connection the player has with the character they are controlling. There is little to no connection between the controller and the action on screen. These games, the successful ones, achieve their immersion through their writing. Strong characters, pacing, and revelations create a different kind of player engagement, a different type of immersion.The desire to see what happens next. Of course the problem with this type of immersion is that if the narrative isn’t engaging a player, there’s no gameplay to fall back on. It’s a testament to Danganronpa that its desire to try and increase its immersion through this escalation of gameplay isn’t enough of an overstep to destroy the immersion it creates through its characters and the mysterious and dangerous circumstances they find themselves in.
Thanks for watching.
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