Danganronpa is one of those games where it's hard to explain quite how good it is using words alone. So, barring a future interpretive dance piece, we'll sum it up like this - Danganronpa is far and away the best game on the Vita, and arguably the best "visual novel" game ever made. Part dialogue heavy "choose your own adventure", part murder mystery, and entirely awesome, it told the tale of a group of extraordinary high school students, who woke up one day to find themselves trapped in a school, with a demon teddy bear as the headmaster. The only way out, it turned out, was to graduate - a process which involved killing one of your classmates, and then making it through a class trial without getting found out. Putting your logic to the test (and tugging on your heart strings as it did so), Danganronpa was a game that didn't go light on the feels - and if you haven't played it yet, you really, really should (here's our glowing review - and a look at the game's sense of humour).
So, you can imagine the excitement we felt when yesterday, Spike Chunsoft took to the stage at Sony's press conference at the Tokyo Game Show to announce a third title in the teenage murder sim series, cunningly entitled "Danganronpa V3: Everyone's New Term of Mutual Killing". Before we go any further, you'll probably want to check out the trailer below, which has been handily subtitled with English captions:
Due for release at "some point in the future", the game will mark Danganronpa's first appearance on a home console, as it's set for a dual release on PS4 and PS Vita, posing a tricky decision for those who own both. While literally nothing has yet been revealed about the story or characters (which are far and away the most important part of a visual novel), it at least seems that this will be a proper entry in the series, and not another spin off, like the recently released third person adventure Danganronpa: Ultra Despair Girls. If you want our expert take on the game, we're fairly certain the bears you see in the trailer (the black and white Monokuma, all white Shirokuma, and gangsta Kurokuma) are probably just placeholders, taking their seats in the familiar class trial courtroom until the developers are happy to lift the lids on the characters.
Still, with our breathing already sufficiently intensified so as to make it hard to stay conscious, Spike Chunsoft revealed they have not one, but two Danganronpa games in the works - although if there's little revealed about Danganronpa 3, there's even less known about this one. We don't even have a name.
Tucked away at the very end of a trailer for Playstation VR, Sony's new virtual reality glasses, is a split-second of footage for what appears to be either a remake, or a spin-off of the original Danganronpa game. In it, you see a class trial taking place, with writing prodigy Toko Fukawa, rich kid Byakuya Togami, and crystal ball gazing Yasuhiro Hagakure (with the big hair) in the midst of an argument, and some Japanese text on the screen. Quite what it is remains to be seen, but one thing's for sure - all of a sudden, the idea of looking like a complete berk with a pair of tiny screens strapped to our face doesn't seem all that bad...
