marrow #22 | posted 11 march 2026
what if ace attorney cases were actual murder mysteries where you deduced things? and what if that deduction involved timed action minigames?
2010's danganronpa: trigger happy havoc's reputation kinda precedes it but also i knew basically nothing about it. some sort of murder school and nagito komaeda from fingers in his ass sunday is there. except he's from the second game.
well so: makoto naegi (that's you) and fourteen other teens arrive at their new elite high school on the first day of class and find themselves trapped in there by an edgy stuffed bear calling himself the headmaster (that's monokuma. you've seen him). the way out: kill someone and don't get caught. you are obviously not gonna kill anyone though, so your role as makoto is to do the murder catching.
i think that deduction is so fun. the cases aren't too complicated or intricate if you've got experience in the genre, but there's something very satisfactory about putting all the information in place. like in ace attorney, first you collect evidence, then you use that evidence as truth bullets in your rhetorical gun to make sense of the case. unlike those games though, each stage of the trial is on a time limit (you can pause though), and knowing the truth isn't enough: you gotta shoot those bullets. the action part is kinda fun, but i'd have gladly chosen the lowest action difficulty had i known how involved it all was... at least i had the foresight not to choose the highest difficulty.
the trials are definitely the game's highlight but people need time to murder each other. you even get some free time to hang out with people, learning skills to use during the trials. and learning more about the characters i guess but to be honest i didn't really care all that much and i was vaguely minmaxing because i really didn't wanna git gud at the rhythm minigame.
also i played the pc port and it's not upscaled or anything from the psp and i really really love that. the backgrounds being collages of crusty assets is genuinely super cool to me. i love the weird tomato billboards in the kitchen and stuff.
erm so this game is. Problematique. like there's two darker skinned characters and one of them is the cartoonishly muscular girl nicknamed "ogre" while the other is whitewashed in literally every single cg she's on. one character is the stereotypical double personality type and the word you use to reveal that during hangman's gambit is schizo. the same case has a transfem character and damn that's a whole thing and she's referred to as a guy for the rest of the game...
basically danganronpa is an edgy ass game and it's rather tiresome.
the present system was also just bothersome. it's already a mechanic i dislike but it felt particularly annoying here. after the first trial i had enough monocoins that getting the ideal presents for characters whose skills i was aiming for was just a matter of time, and the little gacha thingy is tedious as fuck (maybe i should have used that afk script...). the time to get new skills is already limited (hard cap on your free time, plus characters can just, yknow, die), so there's no need to add another resource aspect into the mix.
well it's there in the title. it's a shonen. specifically: there's all the power of friendship and hope against despair and that shit's so ass. sorry. it's whatever! it doesn't really hurt the game or anything. it's just lame lol.
also when it comes to a very specific mystery of what happened to the cast... i had a prediction that was already kind of a lame explanation but i found the real answer more so.
honestly i feel similarly lukewarm about the overarching mystery as a whole. while playing i just didn't really care all that much for The Tragedy or finding out who the mastermind was. and i think deducing the mastermind in the last case is pretty nice, and i think they're a fun character, but while playing i wasn't really putting much thought into it... i think it's different when the mastermind feels more palpable throughout? since it's not a single person picking the characters off and then there was none style, it just wasn't as important to me.
danganronpa: trigger happy havoc is a fine and fun game. the mysteries are all pretty straightforward, if you're paying attention you can stay a step ahead basically all the time. but that makes it — dare i say it — cozy. and i think it's also a testament to how well made the game is. it's a nice set of murders, everything is neatly wrapped up and stuff. i liked it despite its flaws. maybe not enough to play the second game any time soon, though i've heard that's the best of the series.
i did like it better than ace attorney though. i wonder who i'd be if i had the sony portables instead of the nintendo ones...