Danganronpa V3 : Killing Harmony review: Back to school

Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony brings you back to Hope Academy for a whole new round of the killing game.

Developer: Spike Chunsoft
Publisher: NIS America
Platforms: PlayStation 4 (version reviewed), PlayStation Vita, PC
Release Date: September 26, 2017

You are a high school student who wakes up in strange surroundings. You don’t remember how you got to this strange place. You don’t really remember much other than your name. There are other students in this strange place as well, all with the same memory loss. Before you can even really get a handle on what is going on, a psychotic talking teddy bear forces everyone to compete in some insane game of murder.

That’s the basic setup of the Danganronpa series as a whole. But you can’t just start killing each other and see who is the last one standing. This group of people, who are always young students. must commit a murder without being caught. And when there’s a body discovered, there is a trial. The trial either ends with the killer being caught and executed in a spectacular and grisly fashion or if the wrong person is voted for, the rest of the group is killed and the guilty party goes free. This “killing game”  is supposed to go on until there are only two survivors left. But at the same time, there’s a mystery to uncover. Why is this happening? Who’s behind this deadly, sadistic game? Are they among you? All this must be answered while trying not to be horribly killed in Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony.

The murder and trial aspect is certainly the main draw of Danganonpa V3,  but there’s more to the game than that. You explore the area (in this case, a school) to find its secrets. Get to know your fellow students and learn what drives them, and get special perks that you can use in trials (assuming the student survives long enough for you to get to know them).

The trials themselves aren’t your run-of-the-mill trials. You gather evidence from crime scenes and associated areas, which become “truth bullets” you must use to shoot through people’s arguments. Minigames are used to put together theories.

If you have played Danganronpa before, this should all be familiar to you. Maybe even too familiar for some. Danganronpa V3 even takes place in a high school bearing the same name, albeit with a different layout, from the first game (the second took place on an island). It might have been refreshing to try a different setting for these circumstances to take place in. I played the first two games in the series on the Vita in short order and while I enjoyed both, it definitely felt at the time like a third go through with this formula would be really trying to get blood from a stone.

Indeed, the first couple hours of Danganronpa V3 felt so familiar and routine, I was pretty convinced that this was going to the same well far too often. And if you are new to the series, why start with the third entry?

But while it takes a little while to really settle into its groove, I feel like Danganronpa V3 is the most solid and streamlined entry in the series. By the third trial, I was pretty much hooked back into the loop of who would die next, who was the killer and the mystery behind it all.

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Some of that definitely has to be owed to the writing (though the voice acting itself I can take or leave) as the murders are incredibly well orchestrated, the trials have great twists and turns and the revelations about the larger mystery take some wild leaps that you don’t see coming. They might be ridiculous, but still make sense in the crazy and insane world that Danganronpa inhabits. It should also be noted that the music throughout the game is very good (though most of it is familiar if you’ve played the previous games) and really helps the tempo and suspense.

New elements to the trials themselves help quite a bit as well. I really enjoyed the use of “perjury bullets” where you actually have to lie to get closer to the truth in a trial, and the scrum discussion mode where half the cast is split on something is fun as well.

In addition, Danganronpa V3 has three minigames for its trial sections. Returning is “Hangman’s Gambit”, where you have to pick out letters that float around a board to make the correct word that you can only see in brief flashes.

New to the series is a driving minigame and a minigame where evidence is hidden behind blocks and you must remove them by matching colors. I actually really hated the minigames in Danganronpa 2 and was bracing for them to be equally bad in this new entry. To my slight surprise, these minigames were tolerable if not great, but that’s a huge step up from the last game.

Danganronpa V3 doesn’t manage to completely shake that feeling of “been there, done that” for anyone who is a little bored of the formula.

However, there are a couple slight issues that have plagued the series since the first game and haven’t really been addressed. Chief among these is the words and phrasing in the trials section. Maybe it’s due to translation, but some words and phrases for either using as truth bullets or especially in the hangman’s gambit minigame just seemed like words or phrases you wouldn’t use normally, so it felt more like sometimes I just had to guess until I got something right. It’s not that the game was wrong, but the way the words and phrases were used didn’t make it seem like the answer was what it should be, and that has been a problem since the first game.

Second is that the trials are long and seem longer with each entry. Want to finish a trial before you take a break? That’s a minimum three-hour commitment. That’s not counting the free time you have in each chapter to explore and build relationships with the other characters or the investigation of a murder when it happens. There is an intermission in each trial (but why should these be long enough to have an intermission?) and you can save at pretty much any time during them, but I think most would agree that interrupts game flow somewhat.

These are pretty minor things in the latest entry in this series that manages to still feel just fresh enough with a few new twists and turns. While it certainly isn’t necessary to have knowledge of the previous games, there are also some nice callbacks and reveals near the end for people who have stuck with the whole series.

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Danganronpa V3 doesn’t manage to completely shake that feeling of “been there, done that” for anyone who is a little bored of the formula, but that won’t be a problem for anyone new to the series. Anyone craving a wacky murder mystery/grand world conspiracy fix would do well to check out this latest entry, which while definitely iterative, is the most well-tuned to date. I’m still not sure we’d ever need another game in the series, but that’s what I thought after the second game as well, so I’m cautiously optimistic about any possible future entries.

A copy of this game was provided to App Trigger for the purpose of this review. All scores are ranked out of 10, with .5 increments. Click here to learn more about our Review Policy.