Danganronpa is a visual novel—a type of dialogue-heavy, largely text-based adventure game popular in Japan. It’s about a group of students who think they’ve been invited to study at an elite school called Hope’s Peak Academy, but have in fact become unwitting pawns in a sinister, deadly game. Trapped in the school by a mysterious villain called Monokuma—who appears in the form of a terrifying mechanical bear—the only way to escape is to kill another student and get away with it. The students have been carefully hand-picked as the very best in various fields including programming, martial arts, singing, and, er, writing fan fiction. You, on the other hand, are a nobody. A completely average student with no special skills who randomly won a place at Hope’s Peak in a lottery. This earns you the title of the ‘ultimate lucky student’, but the irony of that label soon becomes clear.
