Is This Mystery Game The Next Danganronpa?!

And an introduction to what I'm calling the 999 Cakes Problem

The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy

New Games From Big Names

The big news of the week comes from the June 18th Nintendo Direct:

• Ace Attorney Investigations Collection is coming in September to PC and consoles. This is especially exciting, since the second game in the series was never officially translated into English until now!

• The creators of Danganronpa and Zero Escape have teamed up to create a brand new strategy RPG called The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy

• Originally published by Chunsoft in 1994, Kamaitachi no Yoru will celebrate its 30th anniversary with a trilogy release in Japan.

These are all HUGE announcements from the biggest mystery game developers.

Technically, the only new game is The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy — the others are remakes or ports of existing games.

But there is a very important question on everyone’s minds…

Will this game be the next Zero Escape?

Or will it be the next Danganronpa?!

I mean, that screenshot really does make it look like Danganronpa, doesn’t it?

Now that I have your attention, it’s time to discuss the elephant in the room.

Fans are really, really attached to these big-name mystery games.

Even this upcoming game literally has the writer, character designer, and audio director from the Danganronpa series working together, even though it’s absolutely not a Danganronpa game (because it’s actually not being developed by Spike Chunsoft, as some news outlets erroneously claimed.)

So, this is the absolute peak definition of a game that is trying its best to be Danganronpa, without actually being Danganronpa.

What will the fans think of it?

The Two Cakes Problem

As I’ve mentioned elsewhere, the four biggest games in mystery visual novels are Ace Attorney, Danganronpa, Zero Escape, and When They Cry. It’s not uncommon for someone to find one of those games, play it and fall in love with it, and then stumble upon the other three in their quest to find more games that are just like it.

The reality is that each of those four games are actually quite different from each other. But they all appeal to the same type of person — a mystery gamer.

For me, that game was Umineko, but I’ve gotten to know plenty of people whose first mystery game was any of the other three. So I know firsthand that once you play these games, it’s very hard to appreciate games that don’t quite reach their standards.

When you find an indie game that clearly looks like it was inspired by one of these games, and then you check the negative reviews, there’s usually at least one person who was disappointed that it wasn’t quite as good as Zero Escape or Danganronpa.

Now to be clear, everyone has a right to their opinion, and I’m sure some games are just poorly made. But what concerns me is if mystery games will forever live in the shadows of these giants, rather than standing on top of their shoulders.

One of the most common ways to market your upcoming mystery game is to share it with fans of those big games. It is a proven strategy that has worked well for me and many other developers. It guarantees that you’re targeting the right kind of person who will be interested in your game.

But the problem — and this is a big problem — is that they’re going to compare it to that big game, too. The game that (with the exception of When They Cry, an indie success story) was made by a full production team of highly experienced developers.

Add nostalgia to the mix, and your indie game doesn’t stand a chance.

Or as I prefer to call it, “The 999 Cakes Problem”

The audience goes in with extremely high expectations, which means you need to deliver extremely satisfying results. There are a great many indie games with intentionally low production value that end up successful (a topic for another day), but you can’t get away with that if you’re trying to please these kinds of audiences.

Even bigger budget studios run into this problem. The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy has been credited by games journalists with innovating the genre by taking elements from the popular strategy game series Fire Emblem, but the truth is that Process of Elimination already did exactly that last year.

If anything, Process of Elimination was the innovative game, despite the lack of coverage on it. And that game was made by Nippon Ichi Software, the same developers behind the popular Disgaea series. If they can’t get the word out, who can?

And to be very clear, I’m not trying to knock down the The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy, either. I hope it turns out to be a fun game that people enjoy. But their last collaboration resulted in World’s End Club, which was apparently disappointing to any fans expecting it to be anything like Zero Escape or Danganronpa. Even the creators of these franchises can’t escape what they’ve made, so I guess they have no choice but to go all-in. Literally zero escape!

What can we do to solve this?

Process of Elimination sure looks a lot like Fire Emblem to me…

We’ve discussed this a lot in the Mystery Gamedev Discord, and I don’t have a conclusive answer just yet. But I do have some advice for anyone wanting to make their own mystery game.

But first — for those of you playing the games, the best thing you can do is have realistic expectations. Don’t go into a new game under the belief that it needs to be exactly like (or better than) your favorite game. I’m not suggesting you lower your expectations completely, or even at all. But as the old saying goes, “comparison is the thief of joy.”

If you can learn to appreciate a game for what it is, rather than what it is not — and if you allow the developer enough breathing room to innovate instead of endlessly copy — then you will walk away from even the worst games with a good experience.

5 Tips to Avoid This Problem

Now for the mystery gamedevs among us, what can we do about this problem?

Because we are inspired by these games, we often want to imitate them. And while these games are incredibly well designed and we have a lot to learn from them, I suspect that our desire to be like them is also the biggest reason why we’re having so much trouble standing out on our own.

There are some pitfalls — some red flags — that we need to avoid. If we don’t, we’ll end up creating a game that is eerily similar to the Big Four games, but with all of the disadvantages and none of the benefits.

So, here’s how you can make sure your next game definitely isn’t the next Zero Escape: