Squeaky Clean Anime Taste Test: Danganronpa: The Animation Episode 1

I said something earlier about not doing first reactions on short anime, didn't I? Well, this here is a different case (heheh) because I'm watching one episode a week of this with my school's newly reinstated anime club. Since 13 weeks is a good long while, I think this deserves a taste test. Okay?

We start off our story with our bland *sigh* main male character, Makoto. He seems to have a personality equivalent to that of Yuki Amano from Future Diary, being somewhat wimpy but determined to protect the girl he loves, who he actually just met. Him and 14 other gifted students enter Hope's Peak Academy, only to be trapped inside, and the only way out is to murder one of their classmates and to get away with it. The principal of this school, a demented stuffed bear/robot...thing Monokuma, seems to only have one purpose for this death game: despair. From what I've heard, this is actually a very poor adaptation of the original game, but because I don't plan on playing the game, I will somewhat disregard this when writing my full review. All the other characters have some sort of special talent that got them invited to the academy in the first place, whether it be academics, sports, or performing arts. Hopefully, this anime will establish the personalities of at least some of the characters in the anime.

The animation was done by Studio Lerche, who is actually quite new, and their only other notable work is another video game-to-anime adaptation, Persona 4. I guess I can't give too much credit for the character designs to Studio Lerche, but they are very unique. However, I will say whoever designed the characters was either a) determined to make each and every one of them look unique, or b) was ridiculously high. The set pieces all look fine, as there's nothing really exceptional about them.

For some reason, there is no dub out yet, even though it's been more than a year since this anime first aired. I'm assuming Funimation only has streaming rights to this and not a home video one. The Japanese voice acting is fine, but I will give special mention to the voice of Monokuma.
On the music side, both the opening and ending themes are quite unique, but seem to need an (ahem) acquired taste (I put that in italics because I'm not sure how else to word it.) AGAIN (ahhhh!) I didn't pay much attention to the OST, so no comment from me there.

Overall, I think this anime is going to suffer many of the same problems that Future Diary did (weak protagonist, a somewhat nonthreatening death game, horrible ending) but I did find myself at least somewhat engaged during the episode, but only because I was expecting a death right away, which did not happen.

So, those are my thoughts on the anime so far! Yes, I will review this when I finish it, so don't worry.

Cheers,
~Selena

Last Updated: 21 October 2014
Originally Published: 12 October 2014