Danganronpa

• 1. Introduction

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  Danganronpa is a Japanese video game franchise in which a robotic teddy bear named Monokuma forces apparent high-school students to kill one another. Kazutaka Kodaka created the series. Spike Chunsoft, formerly known as Spike, develops and owns it. By 2025, Danganronpa had reached 10 million copies sold worldwide. That is a large audience for a story about a death game. How did such a dark pitch win approval inside a game company? What does the player actually do while students die around them? And why do games about murder keep circling back to the idea of hope?

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• 2. The Academy

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  Sixteen talented students open each of the three main Danganronpa games, and each one stands out in a different field. They come from an elite high school that scouts the very best students in the country every year. Alongside them it admits one Ultimate Lucky Student, chosen by lottery. In the games, a bear-like machine called Monokuma traps the whole group inside an establishment for the rest of their lives. The only way home is to kill another person and avoid being found guilty at a class trial.

  The three main games are Trigger Happy Havoc in 2010, Goodbye Despair in 2012, and Killing Harmony in 2017. Related media expands the story in the gaps between those titles.

  The spin-off Ultra Despair Girls takes place between the first two games. It follows Komaru Naegi, the younger sister of series protagonist Makoto Naegi. Toko Fukawa travels with her as they cross a city overrun by murderous Monokumas. Their enemies are a group of children who call themselves the Warriors of Hope. The story was also adapted into a manga titled Genocider Mode. Inside the main games, however, everything builds toward the class trials, which depend on a loop of three phases.

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• 3. The Class Trial

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  Every chapter of a main Danganronpa game is divided into three parts named Daily Life, Deadly Life, and Class Trial. Daily Life follows the standard visual novel style. Players explore the school grounds, talk with other characters, and move the story forward. During designated Free Time sections, the player picks one character to spend time with. Intimacy events reveal more about that person and earn new skills that help later in the Class Trial.

  Deadly Life begins once a murder has happened. Players search for clues and gather evidence to carry into the trial. The Class Trial itself is the main section of the series, where the students try to decide who the culprit is.

  The most common trial minigame is the Nonstop Debate. Characters discuss the case in real time, and the player must spot contradictions in their statements. Each contradiction is shot down with a Truth Bullet that holds the matching evidence. Other minigames break up the debate. Players spell out clues, fight suspects in a rhythm sequence, and piece together comic books that depict the case.

  Two spin-offs abandon this structure. Ultra Despair Girls is a third-person shooter in which Komaru Naegi uses a megaphone to issue commands to most electronic objects, including Monokuma Robots and switches. Unlimited Battle is an action game where touchscreen controls fling a team of four characters at enemies. That free-to-play game reached iOS in Japan on the 7th of January 2015.

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• 4. Making the Games

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  While working at Spike, Kodaka proposed an idea known as Distrust. It was a battle royale style death game among high-school students in a closed environment. The company judged it too gruesome, and the idea was scrapped. Kodaka tweaked the concept and pitched it again, and this time the game went into production as Danganronpa. Spike had previously outsourced its works, and the series became one of its most successful.

  The name itself came from character designer Rui Komatsuzaki. It was first written in kanji and later moved to katakana for the logo.

  Producer Yoshinori Terasawa drew inspiration from movies such as Saw and Cube. The first game uses a distinct pop art style with fluorescent pink blood. Kodaka wrote the scenario, and Komatsuzaki drew the characters. In February 2014, Kodaka said on Twitter that the Sega Dreamcast game Illbleed inspired the story, because he loved how crazy it was. He also names David Lynch as a major influence. In his words: "As opposed to being about death, these are games about playing for your life, since killing is much less purposeful without a motive to justify it. This is something you can really see with all his titles."

  The first game began as a basic visual novel. Because visual novels were growing less popular, the team added new gameplay elements to help it stand out. A tight budget left some lines without voice acting, and voice actress Megumi Ogata later wished she could revisit some important ones. Kodaka felt certain lines did not suit protagonist Makoto Naegi, such as those spoken while exploring an area. He said Spike would have written better ones with more money.

  The game reached the PlayStation Portable in Japan on the 25th of November 2010. Promotional material released beforehand, including a playable demo and trailers, showed a different victim from the one in the final game. On the 20th of August 2012, the game was ported to iOS and Android with retina display support, touchscreen controls, and a new image gallery.

  After the first game, nobody planned a sequel. The team split into groups to work on other projects. Kodaka was reluctant at first, but he was drawn to writing the novels called Danganronpa Zero. A few months later, Terasawa approached him with the idea of a sequel. Kodaka wrote Zero and Goodbye Despair at the same time. He placed elements he doubted from the first game into the novel, along with hints about Goodbye Despair, and he recommends reading Zero first. Goodbye Despair arrived on the PSP in Japan on the 26th of July 2012 with various gameplay additions.

  On the 10th of October 2013, Spike Chunsoft released a compilation of the first two games for the PlayStation Vita. It added higher resolution graphics, touchscreen controls, and a School Mode for the first game based on the second game's Island Mode. NIS America had announced on the 6th of July 2013 that it would release the first game in English with both English and Japanese audio. That version reached North America on the 11th of February 2014, and Europe and Australia on the 14th of February 2014. Ultra Despair Girls was announced on the 9th of September 2013 and released on the Vita on the 25th of September 2014.

  In March 2015, Kodaka revealed that a third main game was in early development. It was shown in September 2015 as Killing Harmony for PlayStation 4 and Vita. The team made it at the same time as the anime Danganronpa 3: The End of Hope's Peak High School, which Terasawa and Kodaka called difficult. They refused to compromise on either project, since such an opportunity does not come often. The V3 in the game's title was chosen to tell it apart from the anime. Kodaka said he would then take a break from the franchise, much like the Back to the Future film series, which has three installments.

  A free virtual reality demo called Cyber Danganronpa VR: The Class Trial reached PlayStation VR in Japan on the 13th of October 2016. Kirigiri Sou, a crossover prequel with Otogirisō, came to PC users in Japan on the 25th of November 2016. In July 2020, publishing rights outside Japan moved from NIS America to Spike Chunsoft. For the tenth anniversary in 2021, enhanced Anniversary Editions of the first two games came to smartphones and then to the Nintendo Switch. The Switch also received a brand new game, Danganronpa S: Ultimate Summer Camp, expanded from two extra modes of Killing Harmony. All of these were collected in a bundle called Danganronpa Decadence.

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• 5. Hope and Despair

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  Kodaka said the first two games focus on hope and despair. They were meant, he said, "to portray the disparity faced when someone has killed another person while at the same time portraying the hope of one day achieving salvation." The series shares traits with Koushun Takami's 1999 novel Battle Royale, but Kodaka aimed to offer different ideas. He first planned adult protagonists. He then decided that high-school characters suited the story better, because their immaturity gave room for character development and showed how they would react to a killing game.

  Megumi Ogata voices Makoto Naegi, and she sees Makoto as the embodiment of hope. In her view, the cast feels despair while trapped in the school, and Makoto offers emotional support throughout. That gave her a more optimistic reading of the story, in which the students are going to survive.

  Nagito Komaeda enters in Goodbye Despair with the same Lucky talent as Makoto, yet the staff considered the two opposites. Makoto holds heroic ideals about obtaining hope. Nagito embraces despair instead, believing that salvation can come out of any corrupted work. The anime End of Hope's Peak Academy adds Kyosuke Munakata, a rival who shares Makoto's ideals but is corrupted by the death of his friends. Makoto carries the "burdens of hope" through persistent obstacles, and that allows him to redeem Kyosuke.

  For Killing Harmony, Kodaka chose a new theme: lies. Dishonesty shows up in the mysteries and surprises the player meets. Kodaka drew on a mafia-like game in which players are not given the answers, and he wanted the writing to work in that style. It mostly appears in the gameplay, since the player can enter hidden routes in a class trial by lying at a specific moment. Kodaka had mixed feelings about this, because it risked coming across as forced storytelling. He also avoided expanding romance in the game, as he felt the cast would look weak if he did.

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• 6. Crossing the Ocean

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  Mitsutoshi Sakurai, CEO of Spike Chunsoft, said Western fans seemed to embrace Japanese games such as the Final Fantasy series. Spike also pointed to the poor popularity of outsourced Western games like DmC: Devil May Cry and Dead Rising. For those reasons, Spike wanted Danganronpa to stay true to its Japanese release. NIS America handled the localization.

  Delays meant fan translations of the first game were already circulating online before NIS America took over the project. Only minor changes were made to character names. Spike's single request was that the names for Monokuma be kept intact. Since the premise depends on mystery, NIS America kept the clues and made the Class Trials as challenging as the Japanese originals. The English cast caused few difficulties, but the voice for Toko Fukawa was the hardest to find because the character has a speech impediment. Monokuma was left intact so that he would seem both funny and threatening.

  Goodbye Despair was harder to localize than the first game because its narrative is much longer. The original team worked together again to stay familiar with the concepts of the series. Producers were in direct contact with the original creators, so exchanges moved quickly. Sonia Nevermind's lines were altered, because in Japanese she used terms from the 1980s and 1990s, and the team worried about her catchphrases. Fuyuhiko was difficult to dub because of his harsh personality, and casting was done with the help of Bang Zoom!. Nagito Komaeda was just as hard because of his many-sided personality. In Japanese, Ogata voiced both Nagito and Makoto Naegi, so the English version also used one actor for both: Bryce Papenbrook.

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• 7. Beyond the Console

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  Danganronpa Zero is a prequel novel set at Hope's Peak Academy shortly before an event called "The Tragedy." Its protagonist, Ryoko Otonashi, has anterograde amnesia. Detective Kyoko Kirigiri searches for the culprit, the mysterious Izuru Kamukura. A separate light novel series, Danganronpa: Kirigiri, follows a young Kyoko Kirigiri and her assistant Yui Samidare as they train to become private detectives. The light novel trilogy Danganronpa: Togami begins with Byakuya Togami and his secretary and biographer Blue Ink stranded naked in Prague by the Ultimate Despair organization. Meanwhile the Ultimate Imposter takes over the Togami Conglomerate and announces that unless the real Byakuya is assassinated within 24 hours, the group will "end the world." The second volume sends a younger Byakuya and the Imposter into a family competition against fifteen siblings, which quickly becomes a killing game.

  The first game received two manga adaptations. Saku Toutani illustrated the first, published in Famitsu Comic Clear between the 24th of June 2011 and the 18th of October 2013, and it is told from the perspective of the other students. Samurai Takashi illustrated the second, based on the anime, in Shōnen Ace from July 2013. Kodaka also wrote a short story booklet that came with special editions of the first Japanese Blu-ray and DVD release of the anime. It tells how Makoto came to be selected as the Ultimate Lucky Student of Hope's Peak Academy. A mini light novel by Ryohgo Narita, available after clearing Goodbye Despair once, imagines an alternate universe where Makoto finds an alleged escape switch.

  The manga Killer Killer, illustrated by Mitomo Sasako, began in Bessatsu Shōnen Magazine on the 9th of March 2016. Its third chapter, published on the 9th of May 2016, revealed it as a side story of Danganronpa 3. Misaki Asano, an investigator at the Future Foundation's sixth branch, is paired with Takumi Hijirihara. Since The Tragedy, Takumi has secretly become a serial killer obsessed with killing other serial killers.

  In December 2012, Newtype magazine announced an anime of the first game, titled Danganronpa: The Animation. Lerche produced it and Seiji Kishi directed. It aired between the 4th of July 2013 and the 26th of September 2013 on MBS. Its final Blu-ray and DVD volume, released on the 26th of February 2014, carries an extended last episode.

  The second anime, Danganronpa 3: The End of Hope's Peak High School, aired between July and September 2016. It splits into two simultaneous parts. Side: Future concludes the Hope's Peak Academy storyline, and Side: Despair is a prequel to the first two games. Kishi directed again at Lerche, and Norimitsu Kaihō wrote the screenplay. An anime of Danganronpa 2 had been planned first, but Kodaka felt that the characters' story had ended within that game. Class trials were considered for the new series, but the team thought another one would be too painful for the characters. That led to the decision to make the conclusion an anime.

  Masafumi Takada composed the original soundtracks for the games and the anime. Sound Prestige Records released the Trigger Happy Havoc soundtrack in Japan on the 14th of February 2011. The anime's opening theme was "Never Say Never," performed by TKDz2b with Jas Mace, Marchitect and Tribeca.

  A stage play based on the anime's Future Arc premiered on the 20th of July 2018, with InnocentSphere's Hideyuki Nishimori directing and writing the scripts. Characters also appear in other games. Crypt of the Necrodancer features remixed music from the series and skins of characters such as Makoto Naegi, Monokuma and Junko Enoshima. The mobile survival game Identity V staged a crossover with costumes of Makoto, Kyoko, Junko, Monokuma, Hajime, Chiaki, Nagito and Mikan, plus a pet of Monomi.

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• 8. Sales and Reception

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  As of the 7th of November 2018, the games had sold over 930,000 units in Japan. The best seller there is Trigger Happy Havoc, with a total of 258,250 units on the PlayStation Portable. In Europe and the United States, the first two games on PlayStation Vita together passed 200,000 copies by April 2015. In March 2018, Spike Chunsoft reported that each of those two games sold an additional 200,000 units on Steam.

  USgamer credited the popularity of Danganronpa to its plot and gameplay and to its "zany, multifaceted characters." Hardcore Gamer praised an "uncanny ability to leave its players slack-jawed at the sights of the unraveling plot points." Destructoid admired the art style and the well thought out story. Critics said the character designs made it easy to tell the cast apart and to enjoy their interactions. They also praised class trial twists, such as the true character of Nagito Komaeda in Goodbye Despair and the last action of Kaede Akamatsu in Killing Harmony. The trials were often criticized as easy to solve. The ending of Killing Harmony divided fans, since it has the characters become aware of their fictional nature.

  Cosplayers often choose the cast, with many favoring Junko Enoshima and the mascot Monokuma. In November 2019, a Monokuma costume caused controversy in Austin, Texas. The drag queen Erika Klash was denied entry to a Whataburger while dressed as the character, after performing in character at the Austin International Drag Festival at the club Elysium. A Whataburger representative later apologized in person and on Twitter. Some critics also reacted to the first game's reveal of the gender of a cross-dressing character, with a few calling it "a cheap plot device."

  The first game won awards including Game of the Year, Best Sony Portable Exclusive Game, and Best Adventure Game from GameFan. Game Informer gave it Best Vita Exclusive and Best New Character for Monokuma, while RPGFan named it Best Story and Best Graphic Adventure. Goodbye Despair earned Famitsu's Game of the Year from readers, Hardcore Gamer's Best PS Vita Game, and the Award of Excellence at the Japan Game Awards. In 2017, Famitsu readers voted Danganronpa among the top four adventure games of all time, alongside Steins;Gate, 428: Shibuya Scramble and Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney. Killing Harmony won the Excellence Prize at the Famitsu Awards and Best Plot Twist from Game Informer. A Famitsu poll for the tenth anniversary found the series more popular among female players than male players, and most popular with young adults.

  In 2014, the 19th Animation Kobe committee gave Seiji Kishi its Individual Award for his career stretch that included Danganronpa: The Animation. GamesRadar writer Kenneth Shepard praised End of Hope's Peak Academy for bringing closure to Makoto's story arc and for being easy for newcomers to follow.

  Kodaka credits the North American success of Ace Attorney with showing how gameplay mechanics could set a game apart from most visual novels, and Danganronpa later built on that. His team was surprised by how popular the three games became. He felt the series came close to Atlus's Persona, although Persona remains vastly more popular. Anime director Tomohisa Taguchi was so impressed by Kodaka's work that he collaborated with him on the anime Akudama Drive.

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