In āDanganronpaā you play as the student Makoto Naegi, who gets accepted into Hopeās Peak Academy, a school full of talented students. After arriving at school on his first day, he loses consciousness but soon wakes up to the faces of other students. It turns out that they got locked up into the school and the only way to āgraduateā, to leave the school, is to murder another student without being found out.
Class trials are being held at the end of each chapter after a murder took place. Once you find the collectible evidence you proceed to the court room, in which the trial will take place. The students have to determine throughout the trial, who the āBlackenedā student, the murderer, is. During the class trial, students confront each other in several debate phases and put together pieces of the collected evidence.
At the very end, the āClosing Argumentā takes place. The āClosing Argumentā is an unique element of the āDanganronpaā series. Through a comic-like story, it narrates the events during the murder, how and why the murder actually happened.
Opposed to the aesthetic component of āNarrationā, the closing argument gives you a fragmentary comic, which you have to complete. Below, the player has a broad selection of different illustrated round frames. The information in the upper left corner serves as an indicator of how many pages you have to complete with the suitable frames given. In this example, the mechanic is that you have to sort the frames into the comic by dragging it in the appropriate panels. However, youāre given more than ten frames of which some display incorrect information. So you have to decipher which illustration matches with the already filled in panels. If youāve inserted one frame incorrectly, the story plays out until the panel youāve filled in wrongly and subtracts one of your life points.
Depending on which game difficulty you started out, the indicator in the upper right corner gives you a time limit in which the trial, including the closing argument with the comic, has to be completed. This aesthetic component of āChallengeā gives the player a certain kind of achievement if they finish the trial more quickly because you get a specific grade depending on how fast you finish it. After the frames are properly rearranged into the right order, the story plays out. Accompanied by the main charactersā narration, the now finished comic visually tells the event of the night of the murder.
