The First Dangan Ronpa Commercial Welcomes You to Despair Academy

The first commercial drops in with frequent head shots…also a dead guy.

The two most notable things about this are that they showed a murder victim already and that the blood is pink. Originally this was done in the game to keep the rating down, so I assume they’re doing it now for the same reason, or for consistency between the two. Either way the show seems to be making a smooth transition into being animated, so here’s hoping for an actually good game adaptation.

Dangan Ronpa: Academy of Hope and High School Students of Despair Preview Show

Once in awhile, something comes along with such a ridiculous premise that you have to check it out. The most recent thing to meet that criteria of mine was Spike Chunsoft’s Dangan Ronpa: a game where a bunch of gifted high school students are selected to attend Hope’s Peak Academy, the most prestigious high school in Japan where every student is “Super High School Level” in their respective fields, covering the wide gambit from “Cook” to “Hall Monitor.” However, when they get there, they’re trapped inside the school and told by the enigmatic Monokuma that they may only leave by successfully murdering a fellow student without getting caught. It’s sorta like… imagine if Ace Attorney decided to have a lot more character interactions high school anime style like Persona and the lawyering was bullets.

It’s pretty cool and a real trip to read. There was an LP thread for it not too long ago that was astronomically popular, but the thing just refuses to be archived, so you’ll have to wait a bit to read it. Not that you’ll have to wait long to get the story because there’s an anime, and there’s an event for it soon.

This was posted by the official Dangan Ronpa Anime twitter about a special preview event that is being held on the 23rd of June. A snippet of the first episode will be shown shown twice at the Toho Theatre in Roppongi Hills. Along with the preview is a little talk show like event with special guest Megumi Ogata, the voice of the main character Makoto Naegi who you might recognize for as a young Shinji Ikari. She’ll be talking about the development of the show and her role. Tickets are going on sale in a few days, so pop into your local airport for an international flight so you can head on over. Or wait for the news. That works too.