Danganronpa Vs. Ace Attorney: How to make meaningful changes

Pleaedon'tkillmeIlikebothgames

Source

Man, I really cannot get enough of Danganronpa, can I? If you follow me on Twitter (Wink wink nudge nudge) you'll know I've been obsessed with it ever since I started playing. I obsess with a reason, however. Now why is it that all the visual novels I play involving murder trials are so good?

Yes, ladies and gents, today I'm going to be examining and comparing Ace Attorney and Danganronpa, though not to say which one is better(not today anyway). That in mind, let's take a closer look at these, shall we?

Source

When it comes to these 2 games, comparisons may seem odd at first. One's a high school death game, the other's a law procedural. Though they share investigations and "trials, really even a passing glance at both would never have you making direct comparisons. Those who have played both also know just how different they actually are. So why even compare them?

Mainly because of the underlying gameplay loop, I feel. They both follow the same basic formula of the Setup-Investigation-Trial loop that repeats for 4-6 cases in each game. Each game takes the time to set up its own world, and more importantly, own tone.

Ace Attorney strives for a somewhat clinical tone in its story. Yeah, it's wacky and ridiculous a lot of the time, but when it comes to the cases you're rather... detached, in a word. You often don't have much emotional stake in them, and when you do it's usually a very special case indeed. It has at least a semblance of an orderly trial, with cross examinations and evidence presenting going back and forth. What happens in between is often, ah, insane, but fundamentally it is still a law procedural.

As for the other game in the ring, Danganronpa is the exact opposite, purely chaotic. There isn't any set procedure or process to go through. Cross examinations become debates with many participants. Your own life is on the line, alongside everyone else's. You interact with everyone constantly, and any one person could be a killer or victim. This is no law procedural, it's a psychotic death game.

Let's take a closer look at some individual elements, shall we?

Gameplay

Again, both games do share fundamental bases with the gameplay, being logic puzzles. They both give you a mystery, a bunch of clues, and tell you to work it out through deductive reasoning and step by step logic.

Ace Attorney takes this premise and puts it into a courtroom, perhaps the most fitting environment for such a gameplay idea. All the actual logic you need to employ is step by step and every cross examination has a single key contradiction in it. If you're not cross examining people you're using other gameplay mechanics, yes, but you're always looking for one single flaw, and matching the right piece of evidence with it. The actual gameplay actions you take are all simple button presses, with most of the actual difficulty mainly coming from the logic puzzles you need to mentally work through. 

Source

The gameplay of Danganronpa is a lot different, despite similar concepts. Danganronpa has you needing to actually physically aim your evidence at the weak points in arguments, desperately sorting through letters to form words, taking part in actual confrontations against others, and more. On top of all this, there are time limits that you need to stay under all the while. Another key difference compared to Ace Attorney is that you've never got a pile of evidence to sort through, and you'll only be given a few truth bullets (evidence) per round of debating.

(I'd put a Danganronpa screenshot here but I literally cannot find one without spoilers)

Danganronpa and Ace Attorney each have you solving logic puzzles in very different ways. The time limit in Danganronpa forces you to think fast with the few options you have, while a lack of time limit in Ace Attorney is offset by you having all of your evidence to use all the time. It's a slow and caculated approach, helped by simple button presses, where in Danganronpa the heated debates where everyone's lives are at stake are much better represented with you needing to get more physically involved. Speaking of...

Premise
You can't talk about comparing these games without talking about the premise. They're such a fundamental part of what gives them their identity and the basic idea is so tightly interwoven with every singe part of the game.

Ace Attorney is a law procedural, obviously. Everything's related to the courtroom. You invesigate and file away evidence, as the police mark things down and the prosecutors prepare witnesses. Everything has a way you need to go about it, a way to question witnesses, and a way you need to ensure a proper, well-run investigation.

Danganronpa is a lot more messy. You know every single murder victim and you know every single murderer, throwing the possibility of a clinical assessment of every case out of the window. It's a tense and emotional setup, and every single person involved with the case is a potential murderer. These are high school kids, and this isn't their job. Every investigation is sloppy and fast, with you having a personal stake (I.E living) in every trial.

The premise does a lot for the tone and motions of each story. Say in Danganronpa, each trial will have a lot of accusations throughout, since everyone wants a culprit found for the sake of their own lives. Ace Attorney stays realistic(ish) to trial format, and you're only allowed to make formal accusations when the time and evidence is right.

It manifests in the little things as well. The manner of the number of people on the stand at once makes Danganronpa more chaotic and Ace Attorney more confined. There's the threat of legal oversight on your actions in Ace Attorney, while anything goes in Danganronpa. Ace Attorney also stays static in trial format while Danganronpa whittles the cast down, slowly making the trials smaller.

Characters
Ok, so I think by this point we've got a general idea of how a core idea behind a game does not a similar game make. Logic is executed on and used in very different ways in a court and a murder school. For the last part of this examination, let's see how characters impact the core ideas and mechanics behind the game.

So Ace Attorney's characters are firmly rooted in the law procedural, once again. There are a lot of characters but for the reoccurring ones, the most important thing to note is that they do this for a living. It's their job, it's what they do every day. Every trial is met with a certain amount of familiarity and confidence. All the lawyers are usually divorced from the case emotionally, and approach it as such. Ace Attorney is mostly made up of an adult cast, as well. Things can get quite crazy overall, but there's always this veneer of professionalism and respect everyone shows. All this is a textbook law procedural, like I keep saying. The characters are shaped and molded to fit this approach.

I don't even know what you'd call Danganronpa on the other hand. Maybe a murder mystery death game? Is that even a genre?

Anyway, the characters in Danganronpa are all high school kids who really, really don't want to be stuck in this death trap. For the purposes of comparing it to Ace Attorney, this is what that change does:

- This is an abnormal situation for them
- They have no experience doing this
- There is no expectation of professionalism

It's not like the characters know what they're supposed to be doing or how. Every investigation and trial is filled with some level of bumbling around and mistakes. As a result, the pacing is a lot more inconsistent, speeding up and slowing down at will depending on how the characters are acting. Ace Attorney stays consistent due to the nature of the characters, Danganronpa adds to the tension by making everything inconsistent, in no small part due to the characters.

We also see how points 1 and 3 seep into every aspect of this game. People are panicking and unsure of what to do. Remember the last time you were in a situation foreign to you and you had no idea what to do? The abnormality to the characters informs how they present themselves and how you need to interpret them. Everyone has something to hide in Danganronpa, while it's really only ever the guilty parties that are maliciously hiding info.

It's truly interesting to see how 2 very different series can have 2 very different tones despite the core gameplay ideas being pretty much the same. I'd say it's a great example of how your idea for a story, or gameplay mechanic doesn't have to limit you in any what whatsoever.

Danganronpa and Misdirection

Writing a good mystery is very hard.

Source

It's commonly said that comedy is the hardest genre to write, and honestly I'd have to agree with that. However, if you asked me what the 2^nd hardest genre to write is, I'd undoubtedly say mystery. This stems from a variety of things, but foremost in this is the sheer number of mystery stories that have been told. A mystery isn't mysterious if the audience knows what is going to happen, of course. It was a heck of a lot easier to write an engaging mystery even 100 years ago simply because less stories had been told and as a result, more new ideas. This is only exacerbated by the era we live in of information, where anyone can write a story and have hundreds of people read it easier than ever.

So what if you do want to write a mystery now? One way to do that is the most obvious: come up with something never done before. With your enemy being thousands of years worth of human thought, though, you're probably fighting a losing battle. So this leaves aspiring writers to pull on a variety of other methods to make their stories effective. My favourite technique out off all the ones I've seen is misdirection.

It's so simple at it's very core. What it entails is basically pulling the audience's attention away from what has truly happened. Now, you can do this in a variety of ways, with a wide range of fairness. You can gloss over all the important details. You could pull the audience in one manner of thinking, when in actuality that mindset was wrong from the start. You could even (rather unfairly) just never show what the important details are. Bur regardless, the common thread, the one that must be followed to successfully pull of this trick, is leaving the true solution out there while making sure the audience pays no mind to it. I love it when a story does this, and the absolute best execution I have ever seen of misdirection comes from Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc.

Spoilers follow, obviously. Seriously, don't spoil this masterwork of a mystery for yourself. I'm also assuming you've played it so it won't make much sense otherwise.

So Danganronpa is the sort of premise that if I was a fiction writer I'd be terrified of. A story where there are 5 separate murder mystery arcs AND an overreaching mystery to solve? A single mystery is already hard enough! Of course, as you know if you've played it (RIGHT?) the game somehow manages this feat, and manages to do it splendidly. I'm not here to gush about this, however. Today I want to take a comprehensive look through the first case of Danganronpa and look at how it plays with player expectations, tropes of the genre, and of course, how it misdirects you.

OK, so first we should look at the relevant elements before this case even begins. First and foremost is the setting, or rather the important part of it: the killing game. For our purposes, we'll hold the game here as the motive. Fairly self explanatory. Next, of course, is the eventual victim of the case, Sayaka Maizono.

Sayaka is an interesting element for many reasons, but let's just stick with her before her eventual death. To the player, Sayaka is initially presented as an ally, but more importantly someone the protagonist has a prior connection to. What she serves as is an element of stability and relief.

Following Sayaka is of course the 13 other students, ones that at this point we know very little about. A glimpse here or there, perhaps, but in the end our knowledge of them this early on is limited at the best. They're rogue elements.

Finally, there are 2 key events I want to examine as well. These are the CD reveals and Makoto and Sayaka swapping rooms. I'll call these the catalysts.

Seriously this is your last chance before major spoilers if you didn't listen to me before

So we'll fast forward to the events right before the investigation. Sayaka and Makoto swapped rooms for the night, and the next day Sayaka shows up in Makoto's room, murdered by the hand of someone in the group.

Now, this basic setup is great for a few reasons. First, it gives the other characters a reason to totally think on the wrong path in-universe. Obviously, if you're not Makoto, the primary suspect is him since the victim showed up in his room. This is the first way the game misdirects you, by having the actual characters be misdirected, giving a believable reason for it, and most most importantly, disallowing you yourself from thinking that line of reasoning is correct.

That last point is the most important because all the discussion around the case is going to be focused on that line of thinking, meaning you know it's wrong but the game isn't letting you develop other lines of thought. It's intentionally steering you away from the truth, and it's not doing it with any obvious roadblocks either. It's also a nice bonus to raise the stakes.

Another thing the game does that I really like is that it takes full advantage of the point of the story it's at. I can very easily see a scenario where a case similar to this happened later on in the game, but there is no way it would work as well because by that point you'd know more about your fellow students. At the start of the game, however, you've got 2 basic relationships in the game: you know nothing about the others, and you likely trust Sayaka. And then Sayaka is murdered. So you're left in a position where you can't trust anyone but the dead person lying on the floor.

Until you can't even do that.

I'm skipping ahead a bit, but eventually it comes to light Sayaka was the initial aggressor, and in all likelihood was just being friendly and open to Makoto to use him for said purpose. This is great, and I was absolutely freaking out at this revelation because it's brilliant storytelling for so many reasons. Primarily because you probably didn't think of this possibility, right? Everything thus far has been presented as fairly straightforward: Sakaya is trustworthy, nobody else is. But as it turns out, that's exactly what you were supposed to think, and as a result you never even thought of the possibility of her being the true aggressor in this situation. It's also brilliant at a few other things like making you trust nobody and letting you know the usual tropes are not in effect, but that's not what this article's about really. The misdirection is so prevalent not only in this case, but throughout the entire game.

That's Danganronpa's M.O. It's so simple but it works so well. You see it crop up with the Sakura's "Locked room" murder and even intentionally invoked with Byakuya's Genocide Jack troll(for lack of a better term). It's most clearly set and seen in this first case, however, which is why I chose to examine how it uses misdirection. The usage of this little trick isn't braindead, either. They carefully develop it each time (See Genocide Jack reveal) or cleverly bury the important details in the evidence (See Sayaka's motives).

It sees use in many ways, but again, the game is essentially at it's core always trying to get you to look and think in the wrong directions. There aren't many cases where the facts are all there and you simply need to piece them together. There is always some active effort to prevent you from doing so on the part of other characters or the plot itself. You'll notice if you look a little deeper how the actual mysteries wouldn't be that mysterious on their own. "Girl tries to kill man but in struggle man kills her" or "Person commits suicide alone in room" aren't exactly original twists nowadays. However, muddling the story with previous relationships or having actual attacks before the suicide contribute to you not going down the right path and getting sidetracked or interpreting things entirely wrong.

So I hope I've helped you see misdirection in action and how it can immensely help a story. Danganronpa makes liberal use of it and the second I finished it I immediately started to use it as an example here, I don't think I've ever seen a story use it quite so much. I could seriously go on and on about how Danganronpa uses storytelling tricks and gameplay elements for a long time, but I'll cut myself off now. I hope you enjoyed reading, and have a great day!