You know what Steam needs? More horrible anime nightmares. Thankfully, Spike Chunsoft is willing to provide one in the form of Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc. Danganronpa, as best I can tell, is a mishmash of Persona, Phoenix Wright, and Saw, which are three things that I never really expected to put into a single sentence before.
A creepy murder-bear turns an anime-school into a hell-prison, and you’ve got to courtroom-drama your way to freedom before the rest of the students go kill-happy. At least, that’s what I can squeeze out of the trailer and the Steam page description. I do know that the visual novel reviewed pretty well when it escaped Japan a couple of years ago, and that this is the first time a Western release for the series will hit anything besides the Vita.
Despite my general lack of familiarity with the series, I’m pretty excited to see what Danganropa’s all about. It seems like the game industry grew out of its anime phase about the same time I did roughly ten years ago, and the absence of sincerely weird Japanese-ness this decade has been a real bummer. These niche localizations have had a home on Vita for years, but it’s terrific to see them moving toward bigger potential audiences on PC.
Valve’s increasingly lax submission policies have led to mountains of terrible, low-effort games on Steam, but they’ve also helped to usher in tons of weird, wonderful stuff that never would’ve been on PC even five years ago. The death of Japanese development has always been grossly overstated, but hopefully the lower barrier to entry will help keep development relevant in the land of the rising sun.
Danganropa: Trigger Happy Havoc is available right now on Steam for a discounted price of $23.99. It will return to its regular price of $29.99 on February 25.
