Death games are often difficult to get just right. There’s a real tension in how much you develop characters that must ultimately be killed, in how desperate the plight is, how you manage the danger for main characters that the audience knows ultimately have to survive, and so on. It’s a careful balancing act of sympathy and threat, of gore and hope. If it’s done well, it can be amazing. Mirai Nikki is an experience, a compound cat-and-mouse game that’s (on the whole) a joy. If it really fails, though, it can be an absolutely abysmal viewing experience. Magical Girl Raising Project, for instance, doesn’t know how to spend its time or when and where to actually build characters, and is a failed show largely because of how it didn’t manage the Death Game aspect.
In a sense, writing for a Death Game is
more of, well, game design than it is ‘traditional’ writing. Or, if
not more, that’s at least a skill it draws on. While I’m by no means
as much a game designer as I am a writer, it is at least a lesser
area of my expertise. There are many schools of game design, focused
on different aspects, and not all of them are relevant. Competitive
balance, for instance, doesn’t really come into play so much when
you’ve got a script. What does is how to create a fulfilling
“gameplay loop” and design a good player experience. Because,
when you get down to it, the structure of a death game show is, by
nature, a “gameplay loop” for the death game in the fiction.
Assume the story’s main character is the “player” and work around
that. Mirai Nikki has a good loop: Yuki is menaced by a diary bearer
and has to kill or be killed with his current target, ending that
scenario and initiating a bridge to the next. The formula gets
shaken up here and there, but that is what the show comes back to.
Magical Girl Raising Project teases what could have been an
interesting loop (get candies-elimination) but never really gets you
feeling it, as there’s only one iteration between when the
consequences are made clear and when it’s never used again and Snow
White never really has to “play”.
You’d think this would be a real asset
for Danganronpa. This is, after all, a Death Game show based on a
video game, so in theory they should have addressed the game design
elements of a good Death Game in the source material, making it
extremely easy to transport over to the anime, right?
Well… I do think the core
understanding of the ‘gameplay’ elements may have saved the show,
because it’s got a lot of problems all the same.
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