Danganronpa’s First Mobile Port Has Surprise Launched on iOS and Android

While we’ve known for a month now that Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc, Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair, and Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony are coming to mobile platforms this year as part of the series’ 10-year anniversary, what we didn’t know was that Spike Chunsoft was going to be just dropping them on the App Store and Google Play Store without warning. For the first game, at least.

Trigger Happy Havoc, the first game in the series that spawned four games, manga, novels, bad anime, and good anime, is available now on your mobile platform of choice. As of this writing, the iOS version isn’t live yet, but should be whenever the App Store gets its act together. However, we can look at the Google Play listing for some details.

As previously announced, the games have been optimized for smartphones, complete with touch controls designed from the ground up for a device with no buttons or analog sticks. There are also new gallery modes to view sprites, in-game events, and listen to voice lines. The game costs $17.99 on the Google Play Store.

Danganronpa’s visual novel games are all murder mysteries, with a mock trial twist. Each follows a group of around 16 students trapped in a location (a high school, in the case of Trigger Happy Havoc) and forced to stay there unless they can get away with murdering one of their classmates. When a murder happens, you as Makoto Naegi will have to investigate the scene and ultimately pin the crime on one of your friends, resulting in their execution. It’s a dark story, but its themes frame the entire thing as a battle between the ideas of hope and despair, and even people capable of carrying out these crimes can carry both in their heart.

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Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc’s surprise mobile launch came as part of the first “Dangan TV” livestream, which is a series of streams with developers and voice talent from the series 10-year history reflecting on the series for its anniversary. These streams are both a retrospective and a chance to announce news, as not only was the mobile port dropped during the stream, but also a final installment in Danganronpa: Kirigiri, an ongoing novel series that has been periodically updated over the past seven years, was announced, as well.

These streams are set to happen monthly, so we might get word of Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair’s mobile port coming then, as the plan is to space the launch of all three games out. Will there be some cool cross-media promotion to help people understand they should watch the anime Danganronpa 3: The End of Hope’s Peak High School before playing Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony? Probably not, because communicating this when your games and your anime are being localized by two different companies that don’t seem to like acknowledging one another seems very difficult.