I played Trigger Happy Havoc three years ago. I liked it. It was Saw meets Ace Attorney with high schoolers and could have taken far more risks than it did, but you know what, I enjoyed it. I also played Goodbye Despair, which I liked more than THH. It had the same amount of non-risk taking but it had better characters and more variety in locations. I own Killing Harmony but before I play that, I wanted to watch the animes. Will they be good? Nope. But I’ll watch them anyway!
First up is Danganronpa: The Animation and wow this is a horribly rushed adaptation that is way too short and represents my problems with the constraints of anime length.
The idea of adaptation is to translate a property from one medium into another. Danganronpa should be one of the easiest visual novels to make into an anime. It’s not long (for a visual novel), it’s a very clear-cut story with no branching paths, multiple sequences are already animated. So what the fuck happened? A 13-episode order, that’s what. Structuring this into 13 half-hours is what ultimately killed this adaptation. Does that mean I think it should have been 26 episodes? Well, no. That would be too long. Anime series (for TV) have to be structured at either 11-13 episodes or 22-26 episodes. Of course anime can have more cours, several have them all the time, but the point is that if it’s 3 cours then it has to be 36-39 episodes, if it’s 4 cours then it has to be 47-52 episodes and so forth. For an anime adaptation of Trigger Happy Havoc to truly work (in the way this show WANTS it to work), it needed like 17-19 episodes. Or have the episodes be longer than 24 minutes (hell, the last episode is 34 minutes on the Blu-ray, which I would have preferred if every episode was that long). But you can’t have either of those in anime! Not in 2013 at least. If it had to be 24 minutes per episode, I think I honestly would have preferred if this was 22 episodes and had a shitload of filler. Because I like these characters! I want to know about them from the anime. I had to pause after 4 minutes of the first episode because I couldn’t stop laughing at how the characters were introduced. They shove EVERYONE RIGHT IN YOUR FACE and everything is shown lightning-fast. I can’t imagine someone who hasn’t played the games to know who these characters are based on the anime. I should feel something when someone dies but I really don’t because I’m not allowed to get to know someone unless they’re about to die. In the game, there’s a WHOLE PORTION OF THE GAME dedicated to you going around and picking someone to talk to so you can learn about them. The anime does not allow you to breathe, IT’S TIME TO GO KILL SOMEONE ELSE! After the first three episodes, the pacing gets gradually better now that it doesn’t have to introduce everything, but it’s still too fast. I don’t entirely blame Makoto Uezu for this structure (I blame whoever only gave them 13 episodes) but it’s still the worst part of this adaptation.

The second worst part is the fear of change. In the process of adaptation, it is expected that you change things so that they make sense in the medium that the adaptation will inhabit. For Danganronpa, keeping the story identical is fine, but what should have changed is the PRESENTATION of the story. The investigations are ignored so that they can get to the trials. But that means that when evidence is brought to the trial, all I can think is “WHERE THE FUCK DID THAT COME FROM?!” Every “discovered murder” is hand-traced from the game and presented identically, it is not possible for me to stress how much the executions are the EXACT SAME with some slightly more fluid animation for character models. The trials reference things like the minigames which look stupid in the anime, but even stupider is the truth bullets, which should not have been anywhere near this adaptation.

Since I figure people will want this, I’ll bring up some technical qualities about the show. The animation is fine, but not exactly “great”. When it’s not copying the game it does the job well. The music is identical to the game but THAT’S common for visual novel adaptations so I’ll let it slide.

Danganronpa: The Animation is an amazing anime, in that it is somehow exactly how you should NOT make an adaptation. The first few episodes are “so bad it’s good” levels of extremely rushed, and I think I would have liked it more as an unintentional laugh riot had the pace been the same. Being forced to squish this story into 13 episodes makes it a rushed mess that people who haven’t played the visual novel probably wouldn’t enjoy. It is far too much like the game and far too short to do the story justice. I recommend playing the game for Danganronpa. If you don’t want to play the game, then watch a walkthrough of the game instead. It’s not funny how much of a disservice this anime does to a game THAT WASN’T EVEN THAT GREAT BUT DAMN IT'S A HELL OF A LOT BETTER THAN THIS.