I finished ダンガンロンパ 希望の学園と絶望の高校生 – and I’m glad I did because I enjoyed the second half more consistently than the first.
I I think it would be a very tricky learning-to-read game – but by the same token, at it’s best it’s a very fun reveling-in-reading game, because following a bunch of convoluted trains of logic through weird mysteries and zany minigame quizzes is a great way to remind yourself you can actually maybe really can read some Japanese! I just wish I liked the story or characters more…
plenty more ダンガンロンパ thoughts
If you don’t know what the game is, it’s pretty much a Phoenix Wright style linear courtroom visual novel but with a zanier set-up and more frantic trial sequences. For me, those trials are by far the biggest draw of the game, and I think the system generally does a great job of leading you through a sequence of twists and revelations and accusations while generating appropriate tension. My favorite part of the game was the first trial because I genuinely didn’t know what to expect next, and so it gave me a wonderful seat-of-my-pants sense of accomplishment as I cleared each step.
This game is a great difficulty level language-wise for me, because I can completely understand it, and never really had any problems with the language (the time limits are also more generous than they seem, and a lot of sequences are pausable), but it’s hard enough that I’m still kind of amazed that I can handle it, and there’s plenty of vocab words still here and there to pick up.
If I’d played this in English… I don’t know if I would have gotten through it… At the end of the day, questions like “but can you spell the word knife?” are a lot more exhilerating in a language you’re actively learning!
But the approach to characterization is… garish… in a way I don’t enjoy. Everyone is played very, very broadly, and while on the plus-side, that provides plenty of fodder for zany murder mysteries, and the voice actors are clearly having a great time hamming it up (especially Genocider Sho), it doesn’t really make for… compelling human drama. The hardest part for me to get past is that, although the characterization isn’t really ever that mean-spirited (pretty much everyone is portrayed sympathetically in at least some capacity), the art style really makes it LOOK like it’s going to be mean-spirited. Like, one character’s design immediately made me think “oh no, it’s a comic relief ‘woman who looks like a man’ character,” because the design extremely is that, even if the character turned out to be deeper than that, and strangely heroic. Another character is an extreme caricature of a nerd and I just found them intensely unpleasant to read about, rather than like, funny or likable.
This approach also leads to some very uncomfortable gender stuff. A character is ‘revealed’ in death to have been ‘really’ a different sex than the gender they presented in life, after having been murdered by the one person they confided in about that discrepancy, and everyone immediately switches pronouns to their ‘real’ sex. On the face of it, that’s awful! But like the other characters I was talking about, in practice it’s at least less horrible than it sounds, because the character isn’t portrayed as like, a real life trans person, they’re portrayed as a timid boy who decided to dress as a girl to make up for being timid? And they wanted to get strong so they could earn their boy status again? And afterward an AI version of the character hangs out with everyone still and is crucially helpful at times? Like, what I’m getting at is that particular characterization is really really troublesome if you try to apply it to real life (i.e. it reminded me of the high rate of violence against trans people which isn’t what I want to be reminded about by a video game) BUT it’s clear that the game obviously has no interest in doing that itself (i.e. ‘boy who wants to be strong but isn’t so dresses up as a girl and wants to train to earn being a boy again but gets murdered for unrelated reasons first and then becomes an AI companion’ isn’t a thing that happens in real life I don’t think, it’s a thing that happens in convoluted zany mysteries, and that’s all this is going for).
So it’s a really weird case where across the board I don’t have much of a problem with the substance, but have major qualms with the form, if that makes sense.
Anyway, my worst time with the game was the third case, because of all the stuff I just described, but more than that, because I made the mistake of guessing who the murderer was ahead of time, and I didn’t care about the details. It turns out all those fun tense quiz minigames get extremely frustrating when you actively could not care less about which numbered hammer was used for what step of a convoluted process where you’re already positive you know who did it. I hated that case because of it, and it’s the only one that I failed initially and used a walkthrough to get through it faster.
That said, it was mostly my fault, and the experience taught me to be more patient and attentive to detail in the later cases, and that paid off. A really really important thing to remember, is the “kotodama” are EVIDENCE BULLETS you shoot AT a statement you want to DESTROY WITH FACTS. You are NOT bidirectionally comparing points of evidence to find contradictions. It is UNIDIRECTIONAL. If you don’t keep this in mind, some sections can be really really aggravating. But once I did, I had no problems.
In the back half, the characters thin out to a largely stable crew of relatively likable survivors, and that helped a whole lot with the consistency for me. The resolution to the overarching mystery, I thought was fine I guess. I’m a little miffed at the ambiguous ending and I wouldn’t say it adds like, new twists you’ve never seen before if you’ve read plenty of mysteries before, but it works fine for what the game’s going for.
I have no interest in the dating sim mode that unlocks after you finish it, but I enjoyed the game enough in the end to certainly be down for the second in the series (albeit with plenty of things I hope they improve). It probably sounds like I was really negative about it since most of the stuff to talk about is what I didn’t like, but I really did get a huge kick out of the trials!
Next, of course, is 龍が如く維新, but to make sure my conscience is fully clear before I treat myself I might try to finish the game I’m playing in English that I’ve been neglecting (Shenmue III) first.
Part of what motivated me to finish Danganronpa was that trying to read it and the Honjin Murders at the same time really overloaded me on mysteries for a bit there… Gonna let the mystery gland relax for a bit and then give Honjin Murders the space it definitely deserves.
For non-game reading in the meantime, I focused on the next issue of Harta - which was maybe a mistake because it was an especially long issue (they vary pretty heavily from ~800 pages to ~1100) and I liked the start of it a lot less than I have the others. Finishing it tonight was a really nice cooldown from Danganronpa though, so hey!
ハルタ ８４号
This issue has, unfortunately, my least favorite thing I’ve read in ハルタ so far.
It’s an 80-page special about a boy detective solving a mystery on an island, and on the face of it, that sounds like something I’d really enjoy!
The problem though, is that the art style is… distractingly horny, is the only way I can put it. The boy detective is given exaggerated twink model poses, and one character gratuitously walks around in a sheer top that shows her breasts, which are drawn in that um, very tubular sort of hentai style.
I don’t really know what it’s going for, to be honest. It’s not my kind of my style, but I assume it’s someone’s?
I found it jarring because although the comics in the magazine have all been for adults, up to now it’s almost always been in the “… because a kid would find it dull” kind of way, not the “… because it could be mistaken for porn” kind of way.
It sounds like this is something like a quarterly installment of some kind of series, so I may grapple with my feelings about it again at some point. It’s a good reminder at least that I don’t actually know anything about the ハルタ editorial board and I shouldn’t assume I’ll like anything they publish just because I’ve enjoyed reading issues of the magazine in the past.
Everything else was the usual type of thing though!
One series I wanted to particularly shout out this time was “What Six Survivors Told,” the Terrace House X Dawn of the Dead style manga that’s been steadily growing on me. The first volume isn’t out yet, but when it is I’m sure I’ll grab it to catch up and likely recommend it fairly strongly.
Dungeon Meshi is tense enough right now that even if everything in the magazine were like that one story I didn’t like… I would still be keen to read the next issue…
I loved this one shot about 殭屍 by Madoka Matsuzaki a lot!
Eerie and melancholy in all the best ways, and I am always 100% down for some hopping 殭屍
In this issue and the next, they’re showing the results of a manga contest with a cool name:
八咫烏杯
(“Yatagarasu Hai”)
It’s an impressive grab bag of various talented artists. I think the most memorable to me were the cute romantic short story about the mystery of why someone might carry an umbrella on a cloudless day, and the oddly gender-y story about (roughly) a god mistaking a boy’s harem manga for gender-swapping ideation and reworking the world based on it (although I’m not sure exactly how I feel about that second one) - but there’s plenty of other cool stuff in the mix too!
