An American Writer's Thoughts on Japanese Animation

One in the Chamber – Danganronpa Spoiler Review

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.

But for the time being, we set the stage: a group of extremely eccentric High School students wake up sealed into the school they were coming to, Hope’s Peak Academy. They don’t know each other and might be missing more memories than that. Our host then appears: Monobear, a teddy bear split down the middle between a demonic black and angelic white image. Of course, from the start we have the idea that this is just the form the mastermind chooses to communicate in, but that matters very little as it’s the face of our villain for the meat of our running time.

Monobear introduces the rules: All the students set for Hope’s Peak have been trapped in a game of despair. The only way to leave the school, according to the rules of the game, is to get away with murder. That is to say, if you want out, you first have to kill one of your classmates. Then, after the survivors are given an opportunity to investigate, a trial is held where the class must decide who to convict for the killing. If the class gets it right, the killer will be executed and the game continues, but if they’re wrong the killer goes free to the outside world and the rest of the class is put to death.

And that is the basic, effective loop for the show: A murder is committed, evidence is gathered, and a trial is held in which the true culprit must be convicted before the next edition of the loop begins. Our Main/Player character, Naegi, usually has to be the one solving the case, and along the way they try to close in on Monobear and the heart of the game itself.

Now, before I get into the cases, it’s time to introduce what, depending on who you are, is either going to be the biggest draw or most constant bother for the show: the students we’re locked in with are pretty much all crazy. Naegi is kind of normal, as are two of the girls at introduction (Idol Sayaka and Noted Amnesiac Kyoko Kirigiri), but the rest of the cast is either extremely bizarre in their visual design, extremely bizarre and extreme in their characterization, both, or revealed to be extremely bizarre somehow later.

For me, at least, this does a lot of damage to the show as a show.

And, if you’re a fan of these reviews, I know what you’re thinking. Don’t I like insane, colorful characters? Haven’t I praised the hell out of a number of shows, particularly Trigger productions, for having them and even wished other characters would be more colorful? I have, and I do… when they’re used right. If the choice is between too big and bold on one side, or too bland on the other, go bold. That’s generally much more tolerable. But between bold and bland there’s balance, and balance is best when you can have it. The majority of the characters in Danganronpa feel like they’re overcorrected. I haven’t played the game, so I won’t rule out the possibility that they work better there, but do you know what I have played? Ace Attorney games. Ace Attorney characters are big and loud, with bold personas and eccentric visuals often meant to evoke a strong theme or even support some kind of pun, but they’re still familiar humans enough to function as suspects, witnesses, and supporting characters in murder mysteries without the dissonance between their weird personas and the need for often character-based deduction to not follow absolute moon logic being too much to handle.

Because you can’t expect the Danganronpa characters to behave like sane or even mildly unhinged humans, since they’re so weird, you can’t really “play along” with the show as scripted media, which spoils some of the game when it comes to a mystery.

Because the characters don’t quite land their depths, the story overall doesn’t quite land. It never feels right. And that’s the biggest thing detracting from Danganronpa because it’s always there. All these “Super High-School-Level” whatevers detract from, rather than adding to, the twisted psychological elements.

In any case, the cases. After apparent fashion girl Junko gets killed by Monobear for acting out and all the students are shown personalized videos to give them motives to escape, Naegi starts to bond with Sayaka, and ultimately promises to protect her. At her insistence, they switch rooms, only for her to turn up dead the next morning, immediately painting Naegi as the prime suspect in the first and (by its nature) largest class trial.

In what turns out to be typical for the show, the investigation phase is present, but abbreviated, bringing us to the trial. Naegi is cleared logically rather quickly (with Kirigiri’s Holmes-esque deductions helping him along a good deal), and finally fingers the culprit when it’s realized that a blood message left by Sayaka, thought to say “11037”, was actually a poor attempt at a bad angle to write “Leon”, the name of one of the other students and the real killer. The whole story eventually is dragged out in trial, how Sayaka, desperate to escape, organized the room swap and armed herself, intending to kill Leon and frame Naegi, only to be overpowered and killed herself. The final nail is driven into Leon’s coffin (with over-the-top bullet visuals I presume are right from the game) by the revelation that he used his baseball skills (that being his “thing”) to attempt to dispose of some of the evidence in a way no one else could. Now, one could argue that this kill was something like self-defense, but in Monobear’s court that doesn’t matter: Leon is guilty, and he’s sent off to execution.

The executions (styled “Punishment time”) are another love-it-or-hate-it element of Danganronpa. They take on a very different art style, with strange lighting, and are so extreme and goofy that you’re not sure until it cuts back to the reactions in the ordinary art style whether or not the Punishment Time is literally happening as you see it. The Punishment Time for Leon, the Baseball Star, is to be tied to a stake and bludgeoned with baseballs (shot out of overtuned pitching machines) until dead, and frankly they only get more insane from there. The abrupt stylistic change and the way that the Punishment Times are dramatically more absurd than anything else in the show (yes, even than in this show) makes them surreal, which both helps and hurts the fact that someone is being brutally killed by the mastermind, even if for murder.

Personally, I actually like the Punishment Times for what they are, as they give a little more character to the show and are one of the few elements that really plays off how extreme the characters are, but I could easily see anyone despising them.

After the trial, more of the school is opened up for the students, and another round begins. Monobear once again provides an extra motive to spice things up (this time threatening to reveal each student’s darkest secret if no one dies soon), and sure enough another character turns up dead. This time it’s genius programmer Chihiro, who would have been another cute girl victim if it didn’t come out post-mortem that “she” was, in fact, a boy.

The boy with a terminal stick up his ass, Togami, notes that the crime scene resembles the handiwork of the serial killer Genocider Sho, and that’s the angle that’s initially followed up on. Sho, it turns out, is the alter-ego of the girl (Toko Fukawa) who has a crush on Togami. Genocider shares the crush, and has an extreme batty manner that goes above and beyond to make her look like some kind of monster (sharp teeth and miles of tongue hanging out at all times) and a surprisingly affable demeanor that lets her dismiss the charges on the account that neither the murder weapon (she uses scissors exclusively) nor the victim (she only kills ‘cute boys’, and believed Chihiro to be female like everyone else did, lamenting not having killed him when she finds out) match her pattern. But if not Genocider Sho, then who? Togami is of course a suspect, but admits to the lesser crime (which Monobear doesn’t care about) of having tampered with the crime scene to ‘make the game more interesting’.

Ultimately, Owada, the tough bike gang leader, incriminates himself by mentioning information that shouldn’t have been public knowledge, and the whole story comes out of how Chihiro came to him and asked for help becoming strong (owning up to his dark secret of actually being a boy), and Owada killed Chihiro in a jealous rage over this shrimp being stronger of character than Owada himself (as Owada was running from shame a long, not-set-up time). The guilty verdict is handed down and Owada is executed in perhaps the most bizarre punishment time, driving a high-speed bike around one of those spherical trick cages until he’s rendered into butter. Literal stick butter that Monobear later is seen spreading on toast.

Monobear opens more school, and hands out another motive, an offer of wealth for anyone who “graduates”. The kids also find a laptop left behind by Chihiro, containing an AI with Chihiro’s likeness that begins to help them. The AI, called Alter Ego, digs up some evidence that the kids have forgotten histories with each other before vanishing. Murder turns up soon enough as well, and this time it’s a double-dip with both overweight hamster-faced doujin artist Yamada and disciplinarian/hall monitor Ishimaru biting the dust in a rather scattered corpse discovery. Yamada manages to croak out a name before finally expiring, seemingly implicating Stage Magician Yasuhiro.

Despite the exceptionally odd nature of the killings, the trial seems like an open and shut case. And, in a way, it is. Yasuhiro is granted a solid alibi courtesy of Naegi, while Kirigiri breaks down some of the strangeness. The second accusation, by Naegi, fingers Celestia Lundberg, the goth princess gambler, who manages only a token defense before it’s revealed her real surname is also Yasuhiro and she takes her conviction with morbid grace, handing Alter Ego back over to Kirigiri (by location) and being ushered off to Punishment time. Her punishment is a “Versailles-Style Witch Burning”, complete with set, which would have been exactly to her twisted aesthetic taste were it not interrupted by a fire truck that runs her over. I’ve got to hand it to Monobear for abstract cruelty, but the arc is only two episodes, and that with a lot of Meta material rather than Case material. Maybe the problem with these characters is that they don’t and can’t get enough time in Danganronpa’s twelve-episode run to have the impact they need.

The next one is similarly short. Naegi finds out that Sakura (the top-level fighter, who looks and sounds like a buff and gruff man) is being blackmailed by Monobear to act as an agent. As Alter Ego finds out more about the past, Monobear announces as much about Sakura, and sure enough Sakura turns up dead in a room locked from the inside, getting us our classic “Closed Room” murder. The Trial is convened quickly and is actually moderately involved, with several characters having met Sakura and having to excuse themselves before her swimmer friend (devastated by Sakura’s death) tries to take the blame. Her confession is busted, though, and it’s ruled that Sakura actually committed suicide (her note replaced by Monobear specifically to rile up the Swimmer). However, there’s still a Punishment Time, as Monobear discovered Alter Ego and Alter Ego’s hacking and smashes it to bits with an excavator.

That is, essentially, the last “Loop” After hints of a sixteenth student, we find that personage dead without ever meeting them and, after investigating Monobear a little, get a sham trial where, after the evidence all seems to point to Kirigiri, Naegi is declared guilty by Monobear the moment he looks like he’s on to something. An echo of Alter Ego, though, interrupts his Punishment Time and keeps him from being squished by a stamper, which lands him in the underground garbage dump beneath the school instead. Kirigiri, with whom he’s bonded as much as they can under the circumstances of death game and her amnesia (which is to say, not nearly as much as you’d like to see for this segment’s character-driven action) throws herself down the garbage chute to rescue him and they make the long climb up. She’s also recovered some of her memories, namely that her specialty was Detective and she was the estranged daughter of the real Headmaster of Hope’s Peak before everything went to hell. When they emerge from the trash, they’re met by Monobear, who’s up for one more game at all-in stakes, challenging them to solve not just the death of #16, but all the mysteries of the school.

After a longer than usual (but still brief) investigation in which we learn that the whole cast spent a year at school together, the memories of which were stolen from them by Monobear, the trial is called, and Monobear is accused of killing #16. What’s more, Naegi has figured something else out. The true identity of Monobear’s controller is none other than Junko Enoshima; the “Junko” we thought was killed early on was actually #16, her twin sister, taking her place, and the body was recycled for the sham death later. Junko, owning to the true title of “Super High-School-Level Despair” emerges, a many-faced psychotic who flips through extreme emotions at the drop of a hat, and initiates the show’s final debate, between her Despair and Naegi’s Hope.

Now, at least with what we have in the anime (I’ve said before and will likely say again, I don’t know about the game) this came off as a good attempt at a twist, but a poor execution. While I don’t know the game Danganronpa, I can’t help but compare this moment to a game I do know – 999: 9 Hours, 9 Persons, 9 Doors – which I’ll try to avoid spoiling because it’s a good game and you should all play it if you can. 999 also features a deadly game (though it’s not a Death Game), a mysterious Game Master, and colorful (but not painfully, overly colorful) characters with lots of hidden depths. Almost every character deploys some sort of late-game twist, depending on what ending route you’re on, and this includes anyone you could consider the main antagonist. It feels like the idea of Junko’s appearance here is similar to an idea used in 999: we get to know a character, and that should make it more impactful when they’re reintroduced as someone different than the person we thought we knew at the 11th hour, rather than having to throw a totally new character who wouldn’t be presaged or built up in any way.

The thing is, Junko might as well be a totally new character. We never really got to know her first incarnation, since she died so quickly, and her real self is a completely different kind of loon not at all related to (not even precisely counter to) the “Junko” that her sister was playing. So, really, we don’t have an attachment to her or know much of anything about her going in to the final trial that makes Junko more important to the audience than her Monobear persona was. When 999 deploys a major character twist and then tries to do something with it, it’s always a good twist, a play on the character that you didn’t see coming but that makes sense in retrospect. The game uses characters it’s built up heavily, and it uses the emotions we built with the characters to help define what we feel in their post-twist state. They’re the same people, but now with a new earth-shaking truth applied. Junko is just a loony psychopath – what we might expect from the controller of Monobear and inventor of Punishment Time, if a little less of a planner than that figure could have been – she doesn’t have any relation to the hot-tempered gyaru we knew for a pathetic episode and a half (in which she had little screen time).

It would be as though 999 tried to make a big moment land solely with the 9th Man, a character who dies so soon after introduction that we don’t even get a proper name for him. 999 doesn’t do that and neither should Danganronpa.

In any case, Junko does her best impression of The Dark Knight’s Joker while flipping through animations every time the camera cuts to her, attempting to break the will of the assembled class. She reveals (and it’s confirmed by Genocider, who’s not amnesiac, just insane) that the outside world has descended into a total Old-Ones-Return level anarchy with a Monobear iconography, thanks to some unspecified incident caused by Junko overwhelming humanity as a whole with despair. Junko, biding her time in the school that was meant to be a safehouse for the best and brightest, killed the Headmaster, erased everyone’s memories, and started up the Death Game just to break their spirits too. She sets the dramatic final vote, holding it between Hope and Despair. If the entire class votes for Hope, they’re forced into the outside world, but if even one goes for Despair, Naegi will be executed and the rest will be sealed in the school forever. Naegi stands up and gives his individual speeches to inspire everyone with Hope (using an even more over-the-top bullet imagery than usual), and of course they all vote his way, prepared to face whatever’s out there.

In the process, I think this show says “Hope” and “Despair” enough times to hammer even through the thickest skull that it’s the theme, doing with quantity what you really want quality for, in terms of conveying a message.

Junko revels in her own despair, giving up the exit and submitting herself to her own punishment time, grinning as she’s put through slices of literally every previous execution, and the surviving cast exits into the unknown. The end.

Danganronpa is a show that never exactly fails, but that does stumble. The problem is, it stumbles constantly. Most of the cases just don’t get quite the time they need, and the characters are poorly built between. There were attempts made, but none of them were quite full enough to really carry the weight they needed to. Part of why I keep repeating the mantra that I haven’t played the game is that I don’t think any problem in this show is insurmountable, and it’s easy enough to imagine that they could have been induced by the adaptation process. Even when game design is giving a huge boost to one element of the show, the transition from a video game where the only time limit is the player’s patience to a 13-episode anime that has to tell its story in a little more than 5 hours cut into chunks that themselves need a reasonable internal structure can lose a lot in translation. The only part that feels like it still wouldn’t land if only we got more character scenes is the final trial; it would also have to drop the Hope/Despair message truncheon and do a lot more in the contained time of a trial with True Junko… not impossible, but a taller order.

I have to rate the anime as the anime, though. And for what it is, it’s a C. It’s a really well-structured and well-run death game, and while it often can’t be good or effective it at least tries to be entertaining at all times. None of the issues with the show’s execution are deal breakers on their own, even if they do add up over time. I wouldn’t personally recommend it – I’d play the game or watch a better show if able (or play 999) – but if you’re really itching for a Death Game and Danganronpa is what you’ve got, you could do a lot worse.