Ah, yes. Something I wanted to talk about for a while now.

Danganronpa turns 15 this year, and it seemed that while we won’t get a new game from the series, we’ll get one from the same writer and with same artist, which I’ll talk about later in this post. And this is the nth attempt of a spiritual successor but to me, it only shows that the game is still so influential in its niche that we can’t just shake it off, we all need a new game, and skirting out this way just make the fans demanda new game.

Real quick: Danganronpa (literally translates to “bullet rebuttal”) is a ‘high-speed mystery action adventure’ series of visual novels created by Spike Chunsoft, making its way to multiple platforms. There are many games and other media which I’ll go over quickly.

The premise is this: the main protagonist finds themselves trapped inside a school, with another 15 students, where a half white and half black bear called Monokuma declares that if they want to leave school, they need to ‘graduate’ by committing the perfect crime, murdering another student and getting away with it. Once a murder happens, a class trial with the surviving students occurs, who investigates the case and then vote on whodunnit. If they are right, the killer is only one that dies. If they are wrong, the killer is only one that doesn’t die and is allowed to leave the school.

The game is divided in three parts: “Daily Life”, “Deadly Life” and “Class Trials”. In “Daily Life”, you control the MC walking around the place, and talking with your fellow classmates, getting to know them better. In “Deadly Life”, you investigate for clues so you can use at the Class Trials as ‘Truth Bullets’. Once that’s done, you move to the “Class Trials”, where a series of minigames and full voiced discussions happen, where you need pick the right option and/or Truth Bullet to fire back at statements and uncover the truth.

Danganronpa: Trigger-Happy Havoc (Subtitled Academy of Hope and the High School Students of Despair in Japan), the first game, was released on PSP (remember those?) in 2010, later ported to PS Vita in 2013, with an official english translation in the same year, hit PC via Steam in 2016, PS4 in 2017, mobile in 2020, Switch in 2021 and Xbox One in 2022. Class 77th deals with the Last Killing Game, a battle of hope vs. despair.

Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair (Super Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair Academy in Japan), the second game, was released on PSP in 2012, PS Vita in 2014 with english audio, PC via Steam in 2016, PS4 in 2017, mobile in 2020 and Switch in 2021. DR2 deals with Class 76th, trapped inside of an island, forced to participate on a new Killing Game.

Danganronpa 3: The End of Hope’s Peak High School is not a game, but instead, an anime, aired in 2016. It has two parts: Side:Future, dealing with events post DR1 and Side:Despair, dealing with events before DR2. It is considered the end of the Hope’s Peak Academy Saga.

A spinoff called Danganronpa Another Episode: Ultra Despair Girls (Zettai Zetsubō Shōjo: Danganronpa Another Episode in Japan) was released on the PS Vita in 2014, english audio in 2015, and PS4 and PC via Steam in 2017. This is a third person shooter, very similar to Resident Evil 4 (the original one, not the remake).

Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony (New Danganronpa V3: Everyone’s New Semester of Mutual Killing in Japan) was released in 2017, the actual 3rd game on the franchise, for the PS Vita, PS4 and PC via Steam, in the same year. It was released on mobile and for the Switch in 2021. It is essentially a new saga, with many similar elements to the previous game… DR2. It has plenty of minigames.

There’s also a ‘new’ game called Danganronpa S: Ultimate Summer Camp, an enhanced stand-alone version of the Ultimate Talent Development Plan minigame from Danganronpa V3. Came out first on the Switch in 2021, then for PS4, PC via Steam and mobile in 2022.

Yes, you read that right. The last mainline game was released in 2017. Wild. But since then, many things have happened. The creator Kazutaka Kodaka left Spike Chunsoft in 2017 to make a new studio called Too Kyo Games, and took a sizeable chunk of the DR team with him, including the artist Rui Komatsuzaki, and music (god) artist Masafumi Takada, as well Zero Escape’s writer and creator Kotaro Uchikoshi. This essentially means that DR is at best in limbo and at worst dead.

That didn’t stop either Kodaka or Spike Chunsoft from trying to make spiritual successors.

Please note: I’ll list official titles from either Spike Chunsoft or Kodaka’s new team, as well any official releases, not any fangames (because I’d probably here writing for days).

Zanki Zero: Last Beginning

The first one in the list is Zanki Zero: Last Beginning, made by Lancarse and published by Spike Chunsoft, with several remaining DR team members that didn’t leave to Too Kyo Games helping them. It was released on the PS Vita, PS4 and PC via Steam in Japan in 2018 and outside of Japan in 2019, with english audio.

The premise is very different: On an island live eight human clone, humanity’s last survivors. To ensure their survival, they have to develop facilities for daily life, raise their levels, explore dungeons, collect items, fight enemies… And, whenever necessary, revive deceased team members via cloning. This is because clones have a natural life span of 13 days, but they get to keep their memories.

This is a dungeon crawler in first person, how you walk around in Danganronpa 1 and V3. It’s not particularly amazing. It doesn’t have the same charm as DR, or the music. It’s also not bad, the story is quite interesting. The English version has an easier difficulty option that allows you to skip the gameplay and only get to the story (which is not amazing but interesting, as I said).

This is the least DR spiritual successor out there, it only has the first person exploration bits from it. If I was gonna give it a rating, it’s say it’s a solid 6/10.

Master Detective Archives: Rain Code (Plus)

Master Detective Archives: Rain Code is an Adventure video game co-developed by Too Kyo Games and Spike Chunsoft, written by Kazutaka Kodaka and Takekuni Kitayama, with other Danganronpa crew members involved in the production. It was released in 2023 for the Nintendo Switch. In 2024, it was ported to PS5, Xbox Series and PC via Steam, as “Rain Code +”

Finally, a game that is essentially closer to Danganronpa, and by the same writer!

The premise is this: The main character is an young amnesiac boy called Yuma Kokohead (really), a trainee for the World Detective Organization, who sets off to investigate a location called Kanai Ward, a mysterious city with rain and neon (and many cyberpunk vibes, honestly). With the aid of the death god Shinigami, and other detectives, Yuma uncovers the truth behind several murder cases, first with his colleagues’ special abilities in the real world and then inside Mystery Labyrinths, alternate realms that mysteries materialize and take a life of its own.

As I played all the Danganronpa games, this is essentially two of the larger bits of those games: The ‘Deadly Life’ and ‘Class Trial’ bits. These have been redone as ‘Investigation’ and ‘Mystery Labyrinth’, functioning about the same way. Investigation is much longer in comparison, as you have to move Yuma around, and it can show up in different areas too. As for the Mystery Labyrinth, it is the Class Trials without Hangman’s Gambit (thank fuck!) and modified a bit to not include any student stuff or Monokuma. The outcome is the same though, Shinigami killing the culprit.

I really enjoyed my time with Rain Code, despite being strangely formulaic because of the obvious Danganronpa connections. But it is a full on spiritual successor, because the idea is pretty unique, the lore is great, the visuals are cool, and there’s so many implications for other detectives, while having some bits of Danganronpa that I enjoyed. What I like it that it takes itself somewhat seriously, while not calling attention to the fact that it’s a not-Danganronpa game. I think this could be a great new franchise that should go further and continue to make more Master Detective Archive games. My rating for it: 9/10

Inescapable: No Rules, No Rescue

Oh boy.

I’ll just copy the Steam page description. Game came out in 2023.

Inescapable: No Rules, No Rescue is a social thriller set in a tropical island resort: you’ve been kidnapped and forced to participate in a twisted reality TV show with 10 strangers. At the end of their stay, they’ll each receive $500,000… If they survive.

I have many things to say about this game, but most of them isn’t very positive. And I’ll refrain from saying everything I want to.

This game is an almost completely rip-off of Danganronpa (even has pink blood!) but none of the charm with the characters. It also tries to fill a quota of DEI by forcing it and not making it natural. I’m not against DEI, I’m against making it sound like you just opened a spreadsheet and decided to do a checkbox. “Oh, we need a mysterious character that is only mysterious and nothing else”, that’s not how you do things. A diverse, equitable and inclusive cast is almost a necessity for a Danganronpa-style game, you want people to relate to them, and even when villains get a “well, that’s too bad for them” treatment, you did your job right. The cast of this game instead has triggered the Eight Deadly Words (“I don’t care what happens to these people.“) on people thanks to the demo.Now, let me tell you, a game about a diverse cast that players don’t care about is a game that will never sell in any capacity.

While it does have some story branching depending on what you focus on, it’s nothing new with the genre. The novel idea that if you decide to treat the game like Danganronpa so it turns into one, if you decide to be a ladies’ man, it turns into a Dating Sim, and if you try to unite with the people there, it turns into an Adventure Game is nice, but with a cast you don’t care about? Not happening.

I understand they wanted to fill in the gap left by DR with this game but… This looked and felt like a ripoff from the start. And it didn’t sell at all, from what I could see in SteamDB. I personally didn’t like the demo, because that would be the full game, and it definitely showed. Rating? I’d say that 4/10 is good enough for this.

Kumitantei: Old-School Slaughter

Another unapologetic Danganronpa game, but this time… It’s card based? What?

I’ll admit that I only heard of this game while doing this post, and it seems that it has a demo that came out in 2024. Maybe I’ll give it a shot at some point, but this isn’t so much a Danganronpa successor as it is just Danganronpa but with X instead.

It has no release date for now and I prefer that it releases once it’s ready. So when it comes out, I’ll check it out, probably in a separate post.

No rating for now.

The Hundred Line -Last Defense Academy-

A new game from the same creator of Danganronpa, and also with Zero Escape’s creator (I’ll talk about that series eventually!) in tow, with the music and art to match. This might actually be essentially Danganronpa 4…

Until you play it. It has a demo, and it comes out on April this year for PC and Switch. So I’ll update this with more information. However the demo shows that they only got the Daily Life part down, because it’s a Strategy game, Turn-Based attacks with units and even Tower Defense segments.

The demo closes off at day 7, and the game proper will go all the way to day 100, and I found it enjoyable enough, but it has poked enough fun at itself with a meta girl called Darumi, which is a mix of Junko from DR1 and Ibuki of DR2, and by mix, I mean that she’s insane. Her VA sells the work perfectly but too many meta jokes. Oh, and this isn’t a killing game, so it’s not DR… But it has the music, visuals, writer… So…

The demo gets a 7/10 from me, not bad, left me wanting more, but I’m not sure it’ll be better than Rain Code.

Closing Words

I’d love to write or make something close to a DR game, the concept is fun, and it can work if written well, but writing 16 characters that are all different from each other is hard, and it’s clear that it’s not for the faint of heart. But if Kodaka can do it, and not only once but multiple times, I think I can manage.

While we didn’t get a proper DR4, we did manage to get many versions of it, and also games that don’t work clearly, trying to fill the gap of it, but it only shows that we can’t have a good thing forever. It’s fine if we let it die for new things to flourish.

And if we kill a Killing Game, another will come to try to take its place. Will it succeed? Well, we’re now at the Class Trial stage, picking them apart and judging them with facts. Can it make the perfect murder and squash our expectations? One already failed. Let’s wait for the contenders to show their arguments.