Danganronpa: The Animation

By every conceivable metric, Makoto Naegi is the most average guy alive, which makes it weird that he's just been accepted into Hope's Peak Academy — a school exclusively for the most talented students in the country. Turns out he won a lottery. Lucky him, right? Except when he walks through those doors, he blacks out and wakes up in a sealed-off school with 14 other students and a sadistic robotic bear named Monokuma who lays down one rule: if you want to leave, murder someone and get away with it. If the other students figure out you're the killer during a class trial, you get executed. If they guess wrong, everyone else dies and the killer walks free. So now you've got a bunch of teenagers with wildly different personalities and talents — a pop star, a martial artist, a gambler, a programmer — all locked together, slowly losing trust in each other as the body count starts climbing. The psycho-pop art style is genuinely striking, all neon pink blood and bold colors clashing against some pretty grim subject matter. Each murder plays out like a locked-room mystery where you can try to piece together clues before the trial. If you liked the mind games in Tomodachi Game or the survival tension of Btooom!, this hits a similar nerve but wraps it in a school setting with way more personality. At 13 episodes, the pacing stays tight. Based on the visual novel by Spike Chunsoft, animated by Lerche. Don't expect everyone to make it.