I quite liked Danganronpa, and so I was eager to try something else similar. 'Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors' (referred to hereafter as '999') was an earlier game from the same studio, Spike Chunsoft, which I'd heard I should try next.
Both of these games feel like they hold the promise of a masterpiece, and both of them fall short. 999 feels like it has the more promising premise, but I think that Danganronpa is the better game.
At the core of my disappointment is the vast gap between the fantasy of each game and the gameplay.
999
In 999, you are trapped on a sinking boat, and you must solve puzzles to get through a sequence of numbered doors in order to escape. When I see this premise, I want to personally engage with the questions in the story:
-Who is doing this? Why?
-Who is responsible for the murder of a certain character?
-Why have each of these characters been kidnapped?
I want to address these questions in gameplay. In a way, you can, but it's so indirect that you don't really have any agency to do so.
At a number of points in the game, you are given the choice to go through one of a set of doors. Which choices you make determines what ending you get, and the endings contain the answers to these questions. The issue with this system is that there's really no way of knowing how your choice will change the ending. There are only 6 endings (really only 5), and so 90% of the paths you can take lead to a bad ending where the main character dies and you get basically no new information. There's really no way of logicking out the path to the best ending, you're best off looking it up.
I've heard that the remake makes some changes that makes it much easier to enjoy the story (and allows you to skip playing through the same rooms over and over and over...), but the original is painfully lacking these. The ability to make these choices and have them affect the outcome feels like it promises the ability to engage with the story and 'solve' it, but at the end of the day, the story is just something the game delivers to you, much as a film or book would, and attempts at interactivity simply make it a frustrating experience.
The gameplay in 999 is fun, but not complicated. It's basically like a series of simple escape rooms. They involve simple maths, pattern matching, sokoban, and 'figure out where this thing you found goes'. None of them ask you to consider the wider story of the game. Each room is completely self-contained. A lot of the puzzles make really good use of the DS, although some of them have needlessly clunky design.
The gameplay is pretty much air-gapped from the interesting puzzles of the story, which is what was so disappointing to me.
Danganronpa
In Danganronpa, you are trapped in a High School with a number of other students. Everyone is told that in order to leave the school, all you need to do is commit murder and get away with it. The questions that I'm interested in here are:
-Who committed this murder? Why? How?
-Who is controlling Monokuma?
-Who is responsible for this whole situation? Why are they doing it?
The interesting thing about Danganronpa is that while it doesn't actually address these questions in the gameplay, the structure of the game causes you to think about these questions and encourages you to put together all the evidence you've found. While the courtroom gameplay does spoonfeed you the solution, you'll already have spent plenty of time coming up with ideas before you get there. For me, most of my engagement with these questions took place outside of the game. I remember going for a walk one afternoon and simply turning over all the evidence for the case in my head, hoping that I could figure everything out before the game told me anything.
In this way, the game is leaps and bounds ahead of 999 as far as fulfilling the fantasy is concerned.
That said, the gameplay is still extremely minimal. Where 999 is a visual novel puzzle game, Danganronpa is pretty much just a visual novel. Strictly speaking, you don't have to think about anything. The game will prompt you with the right thing to do at the right time. I don't think that there's anything about the courtroom gameplay which is fun or interesting in itself. It seems as though it's there simply to maintain the façade that it's a game. The gameplay outside of that is very simple and unchallenging, but I quite enjoy it. The process of exploring the spaces of the school and finding clues is actually very rewarding, basic as it may be.
I would have liked it if the player had some degree of agency in the process of solving mysteries.
Imagine if the player actually had to synthesize, somehow, the solution to each of the murders. Imagine if failure to do so would result in the wrong person being accused. Imagine if befriending different characters could result in different sequences of events, e.g. befriending a character could make them reconsider committing murder. Imagine if you could plan out and execute a murder of your own.
For the non-murder mysteries, I would have liked some more thought and action to be required to piece things together. The game already has a good setting for adventure-style gameplay. I would have enjoyed finding secrets around the school in my free time to gradually put together what's going on. Perhaps even some puzzles in similar style to 999, but spread out over the course of the game.
Many of the previous suggestions would have been implausible to implement without overhauling the entire game's structure, but some of them, I think, would be relatively reasonable additions which would elevate the experience.
Story
The broad structure of the story of 999 is excellent. It's a great concept, and provided you actually get through all the endings without trouble, it's well presented. Most importantly, the premise of the game arises naturally from the core concept, and the questions that arise from the premise point back to this core concept.
The broad structure of the story of Danganronpa just exists to support its premise. There isn't a glimmering idea at the heart of the story from which everything else arises. The story is really about the murders, and trying to guess at what's going on in the world is pretty much pointless.
It should also be mentioned that while 999 has good characters, Danganronpa's are much better, and the fact that Danganronpa could make me feel for characters like Ogami more than 999 could make me feel about Akane or Clover and Snake speaks volumes.
Conclusion
It's odd for me to say this, but even though 999 is far more substantial both in gameplay and story, Danganronpa is a better game. Despite the minimal interaction, Danganronpa got me more involved in everything that happened. I was barely able to put it down.
I'm very eager to try more games like these, but I'm also craving something that has a more robust branching story, and more dynamic interaction with the world.
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