I apologize in advance. I'm going to be *that* kind of fan. (A/N: This post is spoiler free!)
This was one of the titles that I was most excited to see this season, but in my personal hype I forgot that I've yet to watch a good anime adaptation of a video game. I also should've paid more attention to the staff, since the director is also responsible for the Devil Survivor 2 anime, which was derided by fans of the source material across the board. I watched that show on a whim, and even without having played the game I could see why fans were upset. Unfortunately, Dangan Ronpa falls victim to the same strange adaptation decisions.
Most of the problems seem to come from the assumption that everyone watching this show knows that it's based on a game, and therefore are already familiar with the game's setup and characters. To this end, the anime recreates aspects of the game mechanics that are unnecessary in anime format, such as the "Investigation Start" that flashes across the screen and the memory minigame during the trials. However, that's all they are: game mechanics. They have little purpose in a medium that uses different visual cues and methods to get information across.
One of the strangest instances was how they rendered the trials from which the game gets its name, where the main character metaphorically "shoots" a weak point in an argument to pieces with a "bullet" that represents a clue. I was curious to see how they would handle this, but now I think it might've been better if they left it out entirely. In an exact replica of the screen from the game, "verbal bullets" are loaded in the corner (apparently putting in the actual clue names would take too much time and money for this production), but it's only relevant maybe once or twice in a trial episode. Naegi's "You've Got That Wrong!" has more than enough of a visual impact to get the point across, so this strange halfway effort sticks out.
But where certain aspects of the show are oddly specific recreations of the game, the rest of it seems to miss the point. I wasn't interested in watching this show to see if the minigames would make it in; I wanted to see how it would handle the characters and the story, and it fails on both ends. The clue-gathering in the lead-up to the trials are mostly glossed over in favor of a clip show listing the most important clues with little explanation. Earlier trials rely on knowledge of the rules of the school, but the majority of them are not mentioned until they come up in trial, making them appear like convenient excuses when the opposite was true in the game. Recently, even before the investigation begins, the show would randomly spotlight what was important, making the solutions obvious before the trial. There is no pondering, let alone the chance for the audience to try to solve it along with the characters; there's a murder, a checklist, and a resolution pulled from thin air. The anime feels like a someone's badly edited Let's Play video, with someone taking out the "boring bits" when they're actually pretty vital to understanding what's going on.
Similarly, most of the character development seems to have been thrown out the window. When the novelty of the crazy stereotypes wears off (and there's only so much "wacky" you can get away with when your premise involves high school students killing each other), what's left over? This was the main thing that sold me on the game series, since there is ample time to get to know these characters outside of the overblown tropes that they inhabit. There are tons of little quirks and insights into their pasts that make the characters much more human than they first appear. However, all of that has been thrown to the side for the sake of pacing, and the story is all the weaker for it. What were emotional punches to the gut in the game are dismissible in the anime.
In a way, I can understand why these choices were made. The staff has a lot of game to cover in just twelve episodes. However, there had to be a better way than this. There are moments of brilliance in here; they got Monobear down to a T, and I loved that they used him for additional fourth-wall jokes, like eating out of Winnie the Pooh's honey pot. I also love the ED, which nails the "video game" feeling far better than the actual show. It also has a red herring that isn't obvious unless you know how this all turns out. Why couldn't the same amount of thought be put into the rest of the show?
However, I can't completely knock this show as a bad method of exposure, since I've seen people on Twitter and Tumblr engaging with the anime in the same way that I initially did with the Something Awful Let's Play. To those people, and to others who liked the premise but dropped it because of the bad execution (har har), if you liked the story and the characters here but felt that they were lacking something, I encourage you to pick up the game and get the full experience. A localization was announced not to long ago for the US and Europe, and I hope that the anime's misguided direction doesn't impact that.
TL;DR: The game is better, so don't bother with the show.
Images from Funimation.com and Hulu.com.
