Danganronpa is a murder-mystery visual novel with action elements. The player takes the role of Makoto Naegi, a new student at the prestigious Hope’s Peak Academy in Tokyo. Hope’s Peak is a high school that only admits the most talented students in the country, whatever their talent may be, but Makoto is unusual even among his extraordinary peers. He was admitted to the academy through a lottery, giving him the title of Super High-school Level Good Luck.
Makoto’s first day of school quickly takes a downhill turn when he learns that he and his 14 classmates are locked inside the school, and there is nobody else in the building except Monokuma, a sadistic, talking teddy bear with a black-and-white body. Monokuma offers the students a chance to escape, but only if one of them is able to murder a classmate without being caught. Once a murder takes place, a class trial will be held to decide the guilty party. If the murderer is not correctly decided upon, that student will be able to “graduate” at the cost of everyone else’s lives. However, if the students do find the culprit, that single person will be messily executed in an elaborate display.
Now living in the school building with no contact with the outside world, the students try to figure out who’s controlling Monokuma and how to escape to freedom. However, some of the teenagers do plan to take Monokuma up on his offer of graduation, and it’s up to Makoto to unravel the mysteries behind each murder.
The game is divided into six chapters, which are further broken into Daily Life and Deadly Life segments. In Daily Life, the player can engage in Free Time conversations, in which Makoto gets to know his classmates by selecting the correct options in their dialogue trees. Completing Free Time awards Skill Points that can be spent for various beneficial abilities during trials. This part of the game also includes exploration of the school building and scripted scenes. Once a murder has been committed, Deadly Life begins, and Makoto must scour the building for evidence during the Investigation. When all evidence has been collected, the game switches to the Class Trial, a fully-voiced set of cutscenes and action-oriented minigames. The player must then use both their reflexes and logic to present the correct evidence, debate with other students, and draw the conclusions that will expose the true murderer.
A year after the game’s initial release, it was given a discounted rerelease under the PSP the Best product range. This version contains some bug fixes, updated gameplay, and unlockable artwork, none of which were present in the original release.
