Danganronpa Trigger Happy Havoc – A Fantastic Gaming Experience For Your PS Vita

Title: Danganronpa Trigger Happy Havoc
Genre: Adventure, visual novel
Developer: Spike
Publisher: NIS
Platform: PS Vita

Having not seen the animation or played the original PSP game, Danganronpa Trigger Happy Havoc  (Danganronpa 1 in Japan) intrigued me the second I watched a teaser. The game was supposed to be a visual novel with point and click elements and a lot more. “Imagine Persona and Ace Attorney and Virtue’s Last Reward together” is what a lot of people said before launch. It took me a few days to finish (close to 25 hours) but Danganronpa Trigger Happy Havoc (henceforth DRTHH) is now on my must haves for PS Vita list.

Hope’s Peak Academy is where the cream of the crop from Japan’s students end up. Every student at Hope’s Peak Academy is “The Ultimate something” where something can range from baseball star to martial artist. You play as Makoto Naegi who ends up here because of a lottery. Unlike in games like Persona 4 where you interact with more people as time goes by to understand how they are, DRTHH has you interact with all 14 students from the get go and thanks to their traits and in most cases unique looks, it takes very little time for them to get ingrained in your memory. Hope’s Peak however isn’t what everyone thought it was. There are no classes and the situation goes from anticipation for a new school life to panic and despair as you and your new friends are put into a scenario that instantly reminded me of the SAW series. All this is done by a teddy bear. Yes a teddy bear. Monokuma takes control of your school life and it turns into a survival situation. Monokuma is sadistic and seems to be controlled by something. Also there’s no way to escape because all the windows in the building have been barred shut with metallic plates and when you start out you have access to very little of the building. You have no choice but to play along with this game of survival because the only way to escape is to kill someone and not get caught. Monokuma makes it clear that when someone is killed, there will be a trial where everyone has to find “The Blackened” and if the killer is correctly identified, he or she is punished. The rest continue living in this communal life controlled by a bear. However if the killer is identified incorrectly, he or she will graduate and be free while everyone else suffers. The game has you pumped right from the get go and is pretty hard to put down when story elements keep you hanging by a thread with unexpected plot twists and just plain shocking things.

Your main controls range from point and click exploration within small areas to first person exploration in larger areas. You communicate with everyone by focussing on them and hitting X. DRTHH has absolutely nailed the controls. I love that they allow using both physical buttons and triggers on the Vita and the touch screen. Most games have this stubborn way of forcing you to pick one. Speaking of choices, it is always great when Japanese games have an option to use the original voice overs because some people prefer having the game played the way it was originally released as far as possible. Interacting with objects and things in the environment is pretty easy with the ability to press triangle to highlight objects you can interact with. Take your time and inspect everything because you are randomly given Monokuma coins that you can use to buy gifts and unlock extras after inspecting. There are many story segments that have you forcibly visit certain places and talk to certain people and on other days you get “Free Time” where you can spend your time either resting or with other people. Spending time with other people earns entries into their Report Card in the game grants you skill points. This bit is akin to social links in the Persona games. You can also give someone a present after spending time with them. These presents are obtained by spending Monokuma coins in the store at Hope’s Peak Academy. This visual novel aspect is great because you learn a lot about the endearing characters. When you sleep at night there’s a Monokuma Theater segment that is different each time revealing different things and even advertising the game at one point which made me burst out laughing. The map mode is nice but it feels like a last minute addition and would have made more sense on a 3DS with a second screen.

The game gets its name from the Class Trials that take place after a murder has been committed. Once a murder is committed by someone, you have a certain amount of time to investigate for clues that can range from other students’ accounts of what happened to general evidence. Again I love the ability to use the analog sticks to navigate around while using the touchscreen to inspect elements. After your investigation is complete, you proceed to the class trials where you work with the others to pin point who committed the murder. This section is where you really start to sweat with fast paced gameplay with a few different mechanics depending on the section of the trial. Most of the trial consists of “Non Stop Debates” that has you use truth bullets (the fruits of your investigation including a Monokuma file that is handed to you with details of the body and murder). You use truth bullets in your metaphorical gun to disprove statements highlighted in yellow when they appear. You have to think carefully as you only have a fixed amount of attempts at each phase of the trial. There’s also a countdown on the top right. You can slow the pace down for a few seconds by holding the right trigger. It starts out easy with one truth bullet and one or two target statements but eventually there are multiple bullets you can select from for each phase and white noise used to confuse you. There is also the chance that you need to take what someone has said and use that against someone else in the same phase. It may seem confusing at first but after the first trial you will be proving people wrong and calling their bullshit out in no time. One of the other phases of the trial is the multiple choice question that has you thinking back to certain situations for an answer. Hangman’s Gambit has letters appearing in space and you can either tap them or select them with the cursor to use to complete the word at the bottom left exactly like a game of hangman. Bullet Time Battle has you pressing X along with a song played and the tempo either increases or decreases depending on how you shoot down an argument. The final section of each trial also known as the climax has you selecting different pieces of information and fitting it all together like a comic book before presenting the full summary of the trial and proving who committed the murder. This can get really hard overall if you have selected the Mean difficulty. In some cases, elements get quite ambiguous and you end up nearly using your attempts at an argument because of either the difficulty or plain poor localization. This doesn’t happen more than a few times though.

The art and overall visuals in the game are phenomenal. I can’t believe how good it looks on the Vita screen. Everything from the actual gameplay to cutscenes and animations has been redone from the original perfectly for the Vita. Each section of the game ranging from times of the day to the different trial phases has its own amazing piece of music and you’ll pretty much be looking for the soundtrack when you’re a few hours into the game. Luckily there’s an extras option in the main menu that lets you use Monokuma coins earned to unlock songs to listen to from the game soundtrack. The extras section also allows you to view all unlocked cutscenes and character models. When you enter a room, everything falls into place really nicely and people appear like pieces of cardboard from the bottom of the floor. There’s literally no point in this game where I wasn’t impressed by the visual presentation. Small touches like having the characters around the music player in the extras act like they are in an iPod commercial from the early days and even some of the trophy names just show how much care was put into this game.

The character voices range from really great to pretty annoying in some cases. Also since this is a visual novel there are many sections where the character just repeats a certain word often while the text is different. This isn’t a big deal but I’d rather have some phrases spoken out completely or not at all instead of a character saying something like “but of course” twice in a row. Monokuma’s voice sounds exactly like the Dean from Community to me and given the setting it is really creepy. I much prefer the English voice overs to the original Japanese ones for this game.

DRTHH also allows to save at almost any time in the game. This is a welcome addition because portable games should allow to put them down as you please and not only after you have completed a certain task and so forth. When it comes to games like this, there’s not much to replay-ability barring unlocking a few more trophies if you’re into that stuff because you will know the story. There are different endings as well. I’m not saying more about the story because it will get spoiled for you. After you finish the game there’s a new mode that is unlocked called School Mode that allows you to unlock a few more things and is exclusive to the Vita version. There are no murders in School Mode so you don’t need to worry about that stuff after finishing the game once.

Danganronpa Trigger Happy Havoc is a roller-coaster ride of betrayal, mystery with a dash of adrenaline thrown in. The story might not be for everyone but I absolutely loved it. If you have at any point wanted to experience a visual novel for the first time or enjoyed the Ace Attorney games and want something new, buy this game. I cannot emphasize that enough. Even the box art on the Vita version is excellent. Also avoid playing after midnight because you might have nightmares filled with Monokuma going Puhuhuhuhuhuhuhuhuhuhuhuhuhuhuhuh.