If you’ve seen Spike Chunsoft’s mobile announcement, you’ll notice that two of these pieces of the story aren’t coming to mobile devices.
Here’s the actual timeline of the Danganronpa series as it relates to you, the new fan who is playing these games on your phone without a care in the world: So if you’re just starting Danganronpa 2, know that the rest of the story you’re invested in actually isn’t coming to your tablet. Well, that could not be further from the truth, because not only is Danganronpa V3 not the next installment in the series after Danganronpa 2, it’s not even in the same continuity. But when they consider what comes next, that’s where I (because no one who makes or translates this franchise will) must inform you that the next game that’s coming to your phone or tablet isn’t the next part of the story.ĭanganronpa V3: Killing Harmony is coming to mobile devices next, and while it doesn’t have a release date, the uninitiated will naturally assume that it’s the next part of the story. So as of right now, mobile players have yet to deal with any of localization’s tomfoolery. Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc kicks things off, Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair continues the story and themes in an honestly stunning way by the end of it, even as a mystery game where deception requires those connections to be obscured for most of the game. In a vacuum, the series handles its own continuity as best as it’s able given the cross-medium circumstances. Laying it out like this, it seems manageable enough, right? Well, it turns out, it’s not as simple as it should be, and that’s largely because Funimation, the company that helped bring the series’ anime to the west, and NIS America, the publisher that localized the games, have made these two sides of the series’ continuity feel like two separate entities rather than two pieces of one concise story. Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony, the latest game in the series is part of a new, seemingly self-contained continuity that is more of a commentary than a new story.
Because despite spanning four games and an anime, Danganronpa’s story never really stops being about the same conflicts and themes, and it makes each entry feel meaningful and imperative.īetween Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc and Danganronpa 3: The End of Hope’s Peak High School, the series gets in, says what it has to say, then gets out. It’s also my favorite individual game in the series, but over the years I’ve started considering the series a singular story rather than dividing it by individual games.
And now that the murder mystery series is coming to mobile devices, now seems the perfect time to give newcomers a PSA: Spike Chunsoft, Funimation, and NIS America’s inability to market the series in a ubiquitous fashion means you are about to stumble into the point where shit gets complicated.ĭanganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair is out today on iOS and Android devices, and, if it’s anywhere near the quality of the first entry’s mobile port, an argument could be made that it’s the best version of the game. I’ve been covering Spike Chunsoft’s Danganronpa series for a majority of my career in writing about the video game industry, meaning I’ve watched it go from obscure visual novel most people knew from a Something Awful thread to having a strong, worldwide fanbase.