Anime Review: Danganronpa

Almost every single season, there is this one Anime, that gets you hooked, just due to it’s Synopsis. It gets you hyped about just how much potential this show has and just how awesome it is going to be, but as soon as you start it, the doubts within you start to grow and you get more and more disappointed by how the show turned out to be, might that just be a main character that annoys the hell out of you, or a story that seems to be nothing but a huge pile of bullshit. The show just doesn’t reach your expectations and the more of it you watch, the worse it gets. For this season an Anime called Danganronpa holds it’s position as exactly this Anime with tons of potential in it, but failing at using it.

While going on Danganronpa gives a lot of pretty good Mysteries!

Story:
Danganronpa is a Death-Game Anime centered around the students of “Hope’s Peak Academy”. For those who don’t know, a Death-Game is an organized game that’s sole purpose is to kill everyone except one, who ends up being the winner. A really popular example for this one being the movie “Hunger Games”. The rules for Danganronpa itself is rather simple. There are 15 students trapped within Hope’s Peak Academy, forced to live with the other students until they are allowed to get out. This allowance though is only given to those who commit a murder and are able to get away with this. For the sake of finding out who committed the murder, the students get a little bit of time to investigate the place of death and the whole school, before all getting together in a Class Trial to solve the mystery of who committed the crime. If the students are right and get the murderer, the culprit is taken away and gets “punished”, meaning he gets executed in a really weird way! (I’d love to show you a video of it, but that would only result in spoilers and you hating at me so I guess I better not do that!) If they are wrong though, the culprit is going to be free and every single other student is going to die instead. Sounds interesting doesn’t it?

The Classroomtrials were by far the best part of the show!

The story of Danganronpa goes on in many archs normally consisting of 2-3 episodes. The archs are generally built the same way as they start with them leading a little bit of a normal life, a murder occurring, a little bit of investigating going on and then them coming together in a Class trial to solve the crime. Danganronpa’s story is equally centered around the murders and getting out of the school theme. While the first part of the shows has more focus on the Class Trials and culprits, the second part is more about the getting out of the Death-Game. Unfortunately, that has a huge influence on the quality on the story itself, as the murders in the first half of the show seem to have a lot more thoughts behind it than the ones closed to the end. On the other hand though, the story behind the whole death game is getting unveiled within the second half, which is getting more and more interesting. As we all learned from Glass Reflection’s Arkada though, the ending is Paramount and the ending that Danganronpa brought to us is nothing that would really help the show in total. I normally don’t really like talking about endings in a Review as it is hard to talk about without spoiling half the show, but let this be said: The ending for Danganronpa doesn’t seem to be well thought through. While everything makes sense and is completely plausible the problem that I had with it was that there were quite some points that I would’ve loved to get a little more background about since as they were left in the Anime, they seemed a little bit Asspool-ish. The plot in total though is rather solid and gets a quite good
7.4/10

The Cast for Danganronpa was pretty big, making Character Developement pretty hard to pull of!

Characters:
The characters in Danganronpa are pretty much what ruined the show for me. With people dying everywhere around them it is to be expected that there is at least a slight bit of despair creeping into their minds and with many people actually talking about despair itself, one would expect the characters to act that way too. The characters in Danganronpa though seem to be immune against any kind of these feelings. We have our main character Makoto Naegi, a pretty normal boy that had a lot of “luck” to get to the privileged school that is Peak’s Hope Academy. Just that this school didn’t turn out to be what it was in the end. Naegi is a levelheaded boy that always thinks rational and never loses his hope. More than once he is the one that gets everyone on the right way instead of accusing the wrong one. The other character worth mentioning is Monobear, who is the leader of the game. He literally is a bear and probably is supposed to be threatening. His problem: He isn’t! While at first he seems to be a little creepy, it turns out he never really anything people have to fear and his only reason to exist is due to him observing the game and then and when changing the rules. I am going to avoid further character descriptions, due to it probably going into spoilers as it would get obvious who is going to be surviving and who is not. The whole cast of people stuck in the school is pretty cliched, which is not a huge problem, if there was anything like character development Unfortunately though, the show doesn’t really bother concentrating on the characters and rather focuses on getting the story forward. There are a few characters that do get a little depth but they are rare and most of the characters remain uninteresting and undeveloped. I can see why it is that way though, as it is hard to develop characters in an environment that is supposed to leave the viewer in a suspense about who is going to die next. Character Development would have only made it more obvious who was going to stay longer.

I really liked some of the Characterdesigns…her’s probably was my personal fave

 

Another huge fault that the show has, is it’s atmosphere, which is mostly provoked through the characters. Even though many people within the school (mostly Monobear), do talk about despair and even the Japanese name does include the Japanese word for it, the characters never seem to be afraid of what happens. Of course there is quite some sadness and even a tiny bit of despair after each execution, but outside of those scenes, the students seem to live their ordinary live and really don’t seem to care about the death game surrounding them. That is the reason, this Anime doesn’t feel threatening. It does not feel like an actual life-or-death game, but more like pure mystery Anime that only focuses on solving the murders and the mysteries surrounding the school. There are moments when the Death-Game theme is done well, but those scenes are way too rare and those are the only scenes the characters actually shine in. Heck even at the end of the shows, there are characters surviving that don’t even seem to have any sense except for we needed someone else to survive! This is where the show fails and this is why it’s whole potential is lost!

5.2/10

The classtrials are partly done in a style that I thought to be pretty interesting!

Animation:
Danganronpa has been done by the fairly new production Studio “Lerche”, who don’t really have any other works except Carnival Phantasm and has been directed by Seiji Kishi, the man responsible for shows like Angel Beats and Persona 4: The Animation. The Animation in Danganronpa really is for the most part nothing special, as it is quite decent but nothing outstanding. The only part where it really does something different are the classroomtrials, where it often keeps a bit of the style the game has and uses things that I didn’t expect to come and the execution as it only uses the censored cutscenes from the game. Everything else stays fairly standard and doesn’t really stand out from the masses of shows that are coming out every season. The character Designs that the show has, sometimes are really weird but to be honest, I rather liked those and am happy they kept them the way they were.
5.9/10

Sound:
The Soundtrack for Danganronpa is rather generic on it’s own and even in the Anime it didn’t seem to make a huge difference within the Anime either. I barely noticed it while watching the Anime, which is not really a good thing. It was composed by Masafumi Takada, who does not have any other works he has composed. The Opening was quite okay, but something you can easily skip, if you don’t want to see Monobear’s sexy dancing. The Animation for it is done in a visual Novel Style with every character getting introduced and a little bit of extra animation that isn’t to interesting (except Monobear’s dancing of course). The ending on the hand has some quite cool music and even though there is no animation at all and instead only shows the characters that already died, I couldn’t bring myself to skip it due to the cool song.
5.2/10

In total, Danganronpa is an original and pretty cool concept that fails in it’s execution. Nonetheless it was quite entertaining to me, not for what it tried to be, but for what it was and the Classroom trials were a lot of fun to watch while they were going on. Otherwise it failed at delivering the decent story it had and had the wrong feeling to it, due to the illogical actions of the characters.
Now as I calculated the scores I gave Danganronpa (Story, Characters, Animation, Sound and my personal enjoyment), I came to an average score of 6.16/10. It fails to deliver what it wants to be, but still is at least entertaining for what it is. As it stands now, Danganronpa has been licensed by FUNimation, but has not been published yet, as it is rather new! It is available for streaming on both Crunchyroll and FUNimation’s webpage though.
With that, I hope I was able to help you out and see you next time!

Related articles

• Danganronpa: Fail School Mystery Anime (ahotaku39.wordpress.com)
• Danganronpa: Kibou no Gakuen to Zetsubou no Koukousei – The Animation Review: High School Survival Game of Despair (animeanemoscope.wordpress.com)
• Danganronpa: Kibou no Gakuen to Zetsubou no Koukousei – The Animation (nerdgeist.com)