Danganronpa and The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy are the types of games it’s hard to get a big company behind. One’s a murder mystery about teenagers killing each other, the other is a sprawling visual novel with 100 different endings. Kazutaka Kodaka, the lead on both these projects, explained how he gets games like this out the door, and it sounds like the key to getting a teenage deathmatch murder mystery approved is lying to your bosses.
During an AMA on X, a fan asked Kodaka how he managed to get projects like Danganronpa approved when most big game companies would scoff at the idea, to which he replied that deceiving the company is your best bet.
[Translation via Automaton]
“You’ve got to deceive the company,” he wrote. “Pursuing creative work while in a company is impossible if you’re someone who does whatever the company tells them. Even if it means that you have to pretend to obey, keep doing what you like. Use your company. And if something goes wrong, the one who hired you is to blame anyways lol.”
I have often wondered how Kodaka managed to pull off some of the swings he takes in the Danganronpa series. The third visual novel, Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony, has a particularly bold, anticapitalist message that pokes fun at companies who keep churning out the same franchises every year, and I would have been surprised if Spike Chunsoft cleared that when it makes the company look bad. That hasn’t stopped the company from trying to pump out more from the series, though, including a weird gacha spin-off called Danganronpa S that was pretty universally maligned by fans. A new enhanced remake of Danganronpa 2 is coming later this year called Danganronpa 2×2, which includes a new “what if” scenario with new murder cases to solve.
