Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc review

Recommended

by recoome

Magistral, simply masterful... in the good sense of the word: this game would almost deserve the title of videogaming masterpiece, if this title existed. The pitch: the hero (the player) is drawn by lot to integrate the famous hope peak's Academy, a school that only welcomes students dominating their specialties very broadly: the ultimate baseball player, the ultimate writer, the ultimate martial artist, the ultimate programmer... In the middle of 14 pupils of this kind, makes him logically figure of ultimate lucky. But very quickly, things get out of hand: Monokuma, a kind of multifaceted Teddy bear, makes its entrance at the homecoming ceremony, and announces that all the students actually participate in a deadly Battle Royale, where the goal of the game is to succeed in committing a murder , and to come out innocent of the class trial that will arise. Only the one who succeeds will be able to leave the school alive, the other pupils who have not been able to prove his guilt end up executed. And in case the murderer is unmasked, he alone will be executed. Then begins a desperate struggle for survival, between exploring the school to find an outing (since it was locked from A to Z) and strategy games between students who are willing to play this diabolical game... So, as much as saying that the strong point of the game is undoubtedly its scenario, worthy of the best works of the genre; I was held in suspense from beginning to end, through the many reversations of situations and big cliffhangers scattered throughout the game. At each murder, we go from the surprise of discovering "who" died to the adrenaline of the investigation and then... trials! Then unlike other investigative games that I could try (murdered in particular), in this one the investigations become more and more difficult, crimes becoming more and more elaborate... So we can easily guess the author of the very first homicide, but then it is less obvious, or almost impossible at times to quickly guess the author of the facts! The "trial" part takes place in a completely different gameplay than the rest of the game (which consists more of exploration and storytelling): the player must manage the skepticism and objections of the other pupils using the indices acumulated during the investigations, in the form of a shoot game where the "bullets" are in fact said clues, testimonies and extrapolations. If this part seems simple at first glance, it becomes more and more complex in the course of the trials, new rules of the game added to each other to make the whole more and more difficult to manage-advice: do not play in "easy" , the 3/4 of these rules are simply absent and would surely render the trick trivial. The game is however not free of defects: aesthetically speaking, it is not very beautiful, the music is very unequal (those of the trials are great, the others fordable), the first two hours of play drag in length-until the first murder in done, it lags, but after that goes on the wheel hats-but in the end, I think that the narrative qualities of the game and the dynamism of the trials largely catch up with these flaws, until they forget in my case. Add to that a "free" mode once the game is over (20h in stuffing), which gives a bit of replayability, and you still have something to do, even after you finish the story. Personally, I was caught up in this game as rarely, so much so that my 2H sessions quickly turned into sleepless nights... And if you don't see time passing when you're playing, no doubt, you're playing a good game:) In short, I recommend, without hesitation, to the fans of investigative games, point & click and Visual novel, since DanganRonpa is skillfully placed between these 3 categories.