[This post contains spoilers for the Danganronpa series.]
Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony is the third installment of the Danganronpa series. Released by Spike Chunsoft in 2017, Danganronpa V3 aims to continue the wacky yet gruesome mystery visual novel series which is targeted towards an older teenage audience. The premise of each Danganronpa game remains the same: 16 highschool students are trapped, have lost their memories, and find themselves playing a “killing game” to escape. If a student successfully murders their peer without getting caught, they alone can return to the outside world. The main character takes on the role of a detective to solve the murders before the verdict of the subsequent “Class Trial”. Now, beyond the initial investigation period, the game offers a variety of minigames and puzzles within these Class Trials that break up the murder mystery into smaller solvable pieces. Of the trilogy, V3 offers the greatest divergence in graphical capabilities, but its approach to the series’ gameplay—namely the investigation itself, the nonstop debate, and the logic dive/psyche taxi—detracts from the narrative and accessibility of the Danganronpa series.
Fundamentally, the investigation period is central to the plot of the Danganronpa series as the murder mysteries and overarching mystery are alluded to through these segments. There’s little to actually solve as you investigate, but the puzzle is introduced for it to be handled in the upcoming trial. Now, one of the main aids to the investigation in the first 2 games is the player can press △ to display circles that indicate places to click. V3 changes this feature so that all clickable items are separated, and a dark background appears instead. While the effect is toggle-able rather than quickly appearing, the settings in V3 tend to have dark lighting anyway, so items are not easier to find for the player. For victims bodies, you usually need to inspect multiple parts for clues, but it only shows up as one “item” on the investigation screen. The game restricts the player’s movement if they do not find every clue, so the difficulty in finding items can quickly become frustrating. Perhaps this was intended to add a greater difficulty to an easy part of the game, but it result in an unfair disadvantage to the players, especially during the final trial, which places a time limit on the investigation period. The imposed struggle of the investigation period takes the player out of the narrative because they are not solving a crime but rather fighting the game itself.
After the investigation, the Class Trial begins. The main gameplay during this is called the “Nonstop Debate”. The player uses their “truth bullets”—clues found during the investigation—to shoot through their peers’ faulty arguments. The Nonstop Debate demonstrates well the sporadic nature of the Class Trials, as they are real time with text flying across the screen. Ace Attorney—another investigation game with trials—by comparison still has a flare for the dramatic but runs under a formal legal system, so people are not talking over each other like the high schoolers in Danganronpa. This deliberate gameplay choice also puts the player on the spot like the main character who must solve the crime to save everyone’s life. Unfortunately, this sort of gameplay can easily become unreadable, which is in part intentional, but V3 adds greater limits with its change in font and added effects. The first two games had the same serifed text which was easier to recognize compared to the thick letters in V3. V3 also poorly localizes the game by including vertical text which can be read in Japanese but translates poorly to English. This again could have been an attempt to make the game more difficult, but this is a superficial way of doing so, which was avoided in the first two installments.
Lastly, one of the minigames was also abstracted. In Dr2, the “Logic Dive” minigame is introduced, which has the player “dive” into their mind, avoiding obstacles on a slope, and taking the right paths which correlate to correct answers to questions. Even in Dr2 this minigame is a bit of an odd break from the actual trial, but the image of diving into one’s mind is preserved. V3 completely redoes this minigame calling it “Pschye Taxi”. This minigame adds nothing to the narrative and furthers itself from the image of thinking. The player drives a taxi, collecting letters to a question, and must pick up the correct woman who corresponds to the answer. The game is significantly easier than Logic Dive with no real way of failing it, and the image of picking up girls in a taxi does not fit the protagonist who is a shy high school detective. There is no mechanic, dynamic, or aesthetic value in this minigame for V3 as a game.
