Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc

A masc looking person scratching their chin. Dialogue reads 'Ah, I see. So she was actually a he. Interesting. Thank you for confirming this fact.'.
Imagine you’re back (or still) in high school. Painful, right? You know what would make it more painful? Literal murder.

Yep, Danganronpa is a fun mix of school drama and murder mystery – kind of like Riverdale, only with fewer amazing coats* and more problematic gender stuff (trigger warning re: gender identity for the discussion of all of this, really). It’s unfortunate that there were parts of this game that I genuinely enjoyed. There was some witty banter, some interesting mechanics that involved putting your classmates on trial for murder they may or may not have committed, and some need for skills of deduction. All good things. What isn’t good, is having a character that everyone addresses as ‘she’ until they PHYSICALLY GRAB THE CHARACTER’S DEAD BODY and find a penis, and then immediately start calling them ‘he’. It’s revealed that (spoilers) they’ve been ‘living as a girl’ for a big chunk of their life so that people would stop thinking of them as physically weak ‘for a boy’… because girls can’t be strong? There are just so many problems with the way this whole thing is handled that I’m really only scratching the surface. The character themselves doesn’t get to discuss their actual gender identity with you –they’re dead. But putting that aside, there seems to be a fundamental misunderstanding of how gender actually works. And that’s without acknowledging the stereotypes, the sexist comments, and the genuine overtones of ‘ickiness’ that plagued this game. I wanted to like it, and it had such promise, but… there are just some things you can’t get past. Or, I couldn’t, anyway.

You should play this if…

You think you can get past some gross mishandling of some themes of gender identity. It’s pretty bad. There are many parts of the game with genuine merit, and there are a few really interesting characters and genuinely intriguing plot twists, but to enjoy them, you have to be willing to forgive quite a lot. I was somewhat fueled by a relationship between two female characters that read as very queer, though I’m not sure that was intentional. Anyway, it’s up to you to decide.

*I won’t apologise for my referencing and love of this show. I have a lot of feelings about Cheryl Blossom and her hunting coat.