GAMING | CULTURE
Why Was ‘Danganronpa’ So Freaky?
I go pretty far back with the ‘Danganronpa’ series. I played them before they got official English translations and played the fan-made English patches on a modded PSP.
For those who don’t know, ‘Danganronpa’ is a game series about groups of prodigy high school students being trapped inside a school and forced to participate in a killing game known as the Danganronpa, where they must murder each other in order to escape. The game’s main gameplay is split between slice-of-life sequences and intense logic-based puzzle “class trial” sequences where you look for evidence and attempt to convict the murderers in a makeshift judicial trial.
I got into them after a friend recommended them to me once I fell in love with and finished the ‘Persona’ series.
I was voracious for more content like it, and ‘Danganronpa’ seemed to hit the spot. Both focused on forging bonds with side characters in a high school setting while something supernatural goes on in the background.
It didn’t completely curb my appetite, but I still really enjoyed the series, less so for the side character interactions and more for the crazy murder mysteries and the dynamic between each game’s main trio of characters.
For the first time since ‘Danganronpa V3’, I’ve been replaying the games as of recently. Given that I already know the main stories and don’t have to focus on every little environmental details or scour the class trials for clues, I began to notice things I didn’t notice before. Things like the interesting visuals, or the origami-like aesthetic or the smartly designed menus.
Or, most strangely, how absolutely atrocious the writing is when it handles its teenage characters.
When I say this, I don’t mean the main story. The murder mysteries and trials are consistently brilliant in providing twists and turns, and keep you on the edge of your seat. What I mean is how the games handle their jokes and dialogue writing.
Everything in this game is so freaky. Every line of dialogue in free time events is so sexually charged and just so incredibly horny that it physically makes me recoil.
Like holy shit, these games needed to tone it down exponentially. I understand that writing teenagers in games requires a bit of sexual tension due to hormones and all that jazz, but the fact that this series goes so hard on it and is written by a group of full grown adults who thought this was a good idea just makes me squirm in my seat.
For example, in the first game, Hifumi Yamada is somewhat of a weirdo in the sense that he makes some sexually suggestive comments that kind of just make you look at him funny for a second, but in the end he isn’t that bad. Literally the reason he dies is to help protect someone from getting sexually assaulted and is vocal about not standing for sexual violence of any kind.
However, things get significantly worse in the second game. Teruteru immediately starts the game by creepily hitting on all the girls in the Danganronpa and tries to get the other guys to join in to make him not look like a creep, only for him to be unceremoniously killed off.
And it’s not just exclusive to the dudes either. It’s arguably the worst it gets with the character Miu. She immediately establishes the protagonist as a sexual deviant after two completely unassuming lines of dialogue and calls any dude who talks to her a weirdo, only to imply that she forces herself upon the character Kiibo midway through the game, which — for some reason — the game treats as a joke. Disturbingly enough, Miu is weirdly beloved by the community.
While these specific characters are the worst examples of the bunch, almost every line of free time dialogue outside the class trials is either some dude trying to get freaky with one of the girls or one of the girls really awkwardly flirting or making innuendos with the protagonist or another character. Everything here is just a thinly veiled “joke” but I don’t understand how they were ever supposed to be funny.
I understand that jokes of this nature in teenagers is kind of common and it’s not too far-fetched to feel the need to represent that, but ‘Danganronpa’ blows it so out of proportion it makes me view the dev team differently. Like, did they know what they were doing? How did the dialogue end up like this?
And don’t get it twisted, I still really like the series. The characters besides this are written well and the class trials are still vastly interesting to me.
Despite my interest in the series overall and where it decides to go next, I think it’s important to bring this aspect of the games into the spotlight, considering the internal ‘Danganronpa’ community seems to brush this under the rug and the external media doesn’t seem to care.
