Available on Steam, this is a role model for a dating-sim/visual novel game. Dangonronpa is a murder mystery investigation game with some amount of dating sim on the side where people gets killed and you've found out who did it based on your clues and testimonies. I don't mean the game is a role model in the sense that the game is simply far superior to anything else (though it's pretty darn good), but the way the game actually uses the medium. First of all, most dating sim games don't even have a gameplay outside of selecting some presents for the girls and selecting some choices that either make no sense or is so trivial that anybody can figure it out. If there is a gameplay it's usually nothing remotely related to the story in any way, because surely the Japanese Tolkien who wrote this stuff thought that if you capitalize phrases like "POWER OF LOVE" or whatever cliché enough times that must be true. Imagine if Zelda:ALTTP you're just told that you must use the silver arrow on Ganon but you don't actually fight him because everything happens in a cutscene, it'd be pretty unconvincing why you need silver arrow in the first place. Of course in reality it's readily obvious that you cannot hurt Ganon without the silver arrow and Danganronpa pulls that off quite well in the final battle where it's very apparent that logic goes out of the window immediately and you've to rely on the game's underlying theme instead.
Speaking of logic, Danganronpa is at least better than the Japanese manga 'It was Joe who mind controlled Bob who was Bub's long lost identical twin that killed Joe with the force choke in dimension X' logic that generally passes for murder mystery in Japanese manga. The funny thing is that some of the characters clearly have superpowers so really a lot of the murder could have been "Bob force choked Bub who was in the nearby room". It's actually pretty satisfying that you can figure out most of the game by just paying attention and if you missed something or a particular clue doesn't make much sense you can always just save and load and shoot at every possible combination of bullets until something works. I also like how the game handles difficulty as the battles are fairly nontrivial especially the first time you do it though you can just continue immediately at where you failed with full health (you'll get a worse score for doing that the score doesn't seem to do much besides achievement + number of currency you get for the extras), and of course once you figured out the whole thing you can also just start from the beginning and do one of those 'I swear I got everything right on the first time and knew where every trick shot is' deal. The game's stock 'game over' screen is pretty annoying though, as in if you do choose to game over it's always you (the main character) who gets executed. It doesn't matter if Bob says, "Hey everyone I'm the murderer execute me now!!!", if you failed to prove that Bob was lying, instead of doing the correct thing of executing Bob, the jury executes YOU! There should have been the option of accidentally executing everyone in the game, which is not possible because only the murderers (if you're correct) plus the main character (if you're wrong) can be executed even if you're in a debate where they're clearly trying to execute the wrong guy. You don't even have the option of going along with it because you hated that guy/girl because it's still going to be you who is executed at the end!
But that also brings up a serious problem I have with the game in that since superpower is so prevalent and the power levels are fairly equal, that makes the final encounter very implausible in the sense that if everyone has super powers and are all roughly equally powerful, then the clear thing to do as soon as the last boss show up would be a physical assault and that'd immediately beat the game. After all the notion is that every student besides the main character is Ultimate Something (the main character seems to be more like the Ultimate Guy Who Happen to Have A Gun) so the whole notion that a bunch of guys who are Ultimate Whatevers need to fight the Ultimate Final Boss in a debate because that's the only way to do it even though the Ultimate Final Boss would likely have a hard time beating at least 1/3 of the cast in virtually any field 1on1.
I was reading that in Japan there seems to be this subgenre of literature that's probably best described as 'gratuitously provocative', best summed up by the Fate anime series where they apparently altered the schedule so that a child getting her heart ripped out airs on children's day and a mother dies horribly on mother's day. That is, these are totally valid events that would've also missed the said holidays on a perfectly normal schedule, but I guess the author gets a power trip so he ordered the Anime produced in an altered sequence that'd happen to coincide with these dates and I guess that's supposed to be awesome for not being politically correct. I mean, I never thought the whole 'World of Warcraft children characters are immortal' is necessarily a good thing, but this is still pretty messed up. Until the end it's pretty much just a bunch of guys murdering each other for the usual motives, and then suddenly you got this all powerful Ultimate Final Boss who committed unbelievable atrocities and killed everyone's cats too. It doesn't take away the brilliance of the initial game but it's pretty disturbing and disappointing at the same time. You don't need someone who killed everyone's cats and defiled their ancestor's graves just because we need a final boss.
I find the dating sim aspect to be a bit lacking, mostly because whoever you try to romance has a very high probability of dying and then you've wasted all the time building up the relationship. I understand that all the murders are predetermined so if someone is supposed to die they can't survive by the time the final chapter is around but they could at least change the order of the deaths if you've romanced someone. Since it's really cumbersome to buy presents and you're generally basically just guessing at random who would like what, it's almost not worth the effort unless you already know who is supposed to survive or who has the best abilities unlocks via romance. There's pretty much some kind of de-facto romance going on anyway, in the sense that since you can't romance with a dead girl and the girls who aren't supposed to die, you'd generally know everything you could possibly want to know about them by the time you get to the end. I neglected one of the girls until the end and you go through your basic dialogue and it's literally like 'everything you're telling me about you is something I already knew via the main story' because the game probably assumes you'd try to romance them early on and the later chapters assumes you'd already know this stuff and you can easily work backwards to figure out what you're supposed to have learned had you romance the said girls. On the flipside there are characters who are interesting that you'd like to find out more but you're not going to find out very much more about the guys who died on chapter 1 because they're supposed to be the first person to die. It's a shame because all the characters have a lot of personality to them so if you like character-who-died-on-chapter-1, well he/she can't possibly offer more opinion on chapter 2 because he/she is dead. In Chrono Trigger whoever you have in your party and whoever is in the lead position has different things that reflect how they're involved in the game when you reach Lavos, and it's fun just to go thorugh all the possible combination and it's almost like you can create an entire different set of motives for taking on Lavos just for rearranging your party. Well this is the other way around because your party is always the same exact guys when you get to the end, so you're wondering what the dead guys would've done against the final boss except of course you can't find out because they're dead!
With that all said, I still enjoyed this game a lot. It's just good enough that makes the weakness stand out as a blemish. I mean, most dating sims is just something you put a heavy object on the shift key so you wouldn't even know what the plot was when you get to the end, so it's pretty hard to be disappointed on the last boss or why girl C isn't around to offer what she thought of the final encounter. But since this game is good enough to make me care about the characters, I do want to know what the rest of the students would've done at the end. Well, there's an alternative mode where no one dies and it seems like a pretty straight up dating sim, but I want to know what some of the characters would do if they survived while the other died, and knowing that you can't possibly know this is a big disappointment.
Speaking of logic, Danganronpa is at least better than the Japanese manga 'It was Joe who mind controlled Bob who was Bub's long lost identical twin that killed Joe with the force choke in dimension X' logic that generally passes for murder mystery in Japanese manga. The funny thing is that some of the characters clearly have superpowers so really a lot of the murder could have been "Bob force choked Bub who was in the nearby room". It's actually pretty satisfying that you can figure out most of the game by just paying attention and if you missed something or a particular clue doesn't make much sense you can always just save and load and shoot at every possible combination of bullets until something works. I also like how the game handles difficulty as the battles are fairly nontrivial especially the first time you do it though you can just continue immediately at where you failed with full health (you'll get a worse score for doing that the score doesn't seem to do much besides achievement + number of currency you get for the extras), and of course once you figured out the whole thing you can also just start from the beginning and do one of those 'I swear I got everything right on the first time and knew where every trick shot is' deal. The game's stock 'game over' screen is pretty annoying though, as in if you do choose to game over it's always you (the main character) who gets executed. It doesn't matter if Bob says, "Hey everyone I'm the murderer execute me now!!!", if you failed to prove that Bob was lying, instead of doing the correct thing of executing Bob, the jury executes YOU! There should have been the option of accidentally executing everyone in the game, which is not possible because only the murderers (if you're correct) plus the main character (if you're wrong) can be executed even if you're in a debate where they're clearly trying to execute the wrong guy. You don't even have the option of going along with it because you hated that guy/girl because it's still going to be you who is executed at the end!
But that also brings up a serious problem I have with the game in that since superpower is so prevalent and the power levels are fairly equal, that makes the final encounter very implausible in the sense that if everyone has super powers and are all roughly equally powerful, then the clear thing to do as soon as the last boss show up would be a physical assault and that'd immediately beat the game. After all the notion is that every student besides the main character is Ultimate Something (the main character seems to be more like the Ultimate Guy Who Happen to Have A Gun) so the whole notion that a bunch of guys who are Ultimate Whatevers need to fight the Ultimate Final Boss in a debate because that's the only way to do it even though the Ultimate Final Boss would likely have a hard time beating at least 1/3 of the cast in virtually any field 1on1.
I was reading that in Japan there seems to be this subgenre of literature that's probably best described as 'gratuitously provocative', best summed up by the Fate anime series where they apparently altered the schedule so that a child getting her heart ripped out airs on children's day and a mother dies horribly on mother's day. That is, these are totally valid events that would've also missed the said holidays on a perfectly normal schedule, but I guess the author gets a power trip so he ordered the Anime produced in an altered sequence that'd happen to coincide with these dates and I guess that's supposed to be awesome for not being politically correct. I mean, I never thought the whole 'World of Warcraft children characters are immortal' is necessarily a good thing, but this is still pretty messed up. Until the end it's pretty much just a bunch of guys murdering each other for the usual motives, and then suddenly you got this all powerful Ultimate Final Boss who committed unbelievable atrocities and killed everyone's cats too. It doesn't take away the brilliance of the initial game but it's pretty disturbing and disappointing at the same time. You don't need someone who killed everyone's cats and defiled their ancestor's graves just because we need a final boss.
I find the dating sim aspect to be a bit lacking, mostly because whoever you try to romance has a very high probability of dying and then you've wasted all the time building up the relationship. I understand that all the murders are predetermined so if someone is supposed to die they can't survive by the time the final chapter is around but they could at least change the order of the deaths if you've romanced someone. Since it's really cumbersome to buy presents and you're generally basically just guessing at random who would like what, it's almost not worth the effort unless you already know who is supposed to survive or who has the best abilities unlocks via romance. There's pretty much some kind of de-facto romance going on anyway, in the sense that since you can't romance with a dead girl and the girls who aren't supposed to die, you'd generally know everything you could possibly want to know about them by the time you get to the end. I neglected one of the girls until the end and you go through your basic dialogue and it's literally like 'everything you're telling me about you is something I already knew via the main story' because the game probably assumes you'd try to romance them early on and the later chapters assumes you'd already know this stuff and you can easily work backwards to figure out what you're supposed to have learned had you romance the said girls. On the flipside there are characters who are interesting that you'd like to find out more but you're not going to find out very much more about the guys who died on chapter 1 because they're supposed to be the first person to die. It's a shame because all the characters have a lot of personality to them so if you like character-who-died-on-chapter-1, well he/she can't possibly offer more opinion on chapter 2 because he/she is dead. In Chrono Trigger whoever you have in your party and whoever is in the lead position has different things that reflect how they're involved in the game when you reach Lavos, and it's fun just to go thorugh all the possible combination and it's almost like you can create an entire different set of motives for taking on Lavos just for rearranging your party. Well this is the other way around because your party is always the same exact guys when you get to the end, so you're wondering what the dead guys would've done against the final boss except of course you can't find out because they're dead!
With that all said, I still enjoyed this game a lot. It's just good enough that makes the weakness stand out as a blemish. I mean, most dating sims is just something you put a heavy object on the shift key so you wouldn't even know what the plot was when you get to the end, so it's pretty hard to be disappointed on the last boss or why girl C isn't around to offer what she thought of the final encounter. But since this game is good enough to make me care about the characters, I do want to know what the rest of the students would've done at the end. Well, there's an alternative mode where no one dies and it seems like a pretty straight up dating sim, but I want to know what some of the characters would do if they survived while the other died, and knowing that you can't possibly know this is a big disappointment.
“I would unite with anybody to do right and with nobody to do wrong." 
^100 = 1 in 5 billion. Besides the fact that you wouldn't have the authority to force someone to take a test like that even if they're already arrested (and they're not), obviously the killer was dumber than a box of bricks to purposely miss all 100 questions instead of just refusing to take the test, and even then, I'm not sure that's sufficient evidence. I mean you can say whoever miss all 100 questions obviously knows a lot about what happened in the crime, but I think another got 70 out of 100 correct so it's not like the people involved have no idea what's going on.