Another month, another set of games coming and going from Xbox Game Pass. If you’re an RPG fan, you have a lot to look forward to, but if you’re a murder mystery fan, you’re quickly running out of time to play a real gem of a visual novel before it leaves the service.
As promised when the ports were first announced, Persona 3 Portable and Persona 4 Golden are joining Xbox Game Pass on January 19, with Monster Hunter Rise to follow the next day. If you’ve never played either of the classic Persona games, those are two meaty RPGs with great dungeon crawling, social elements, and banger soundtracks. While they might not be as modern as Persona 5 Royal, which launched on Game Pass back in October, they’re still really strong games in their own right, and these are the “definitive versions” of both games, and are the closest in the series to Persona 5 in terms of quality of life changes.
But as Game Pass giveth, it taketh away. Six games will be leaving Game Pass on Sunday, January 15, and one of them in particular is worth your time as a Game Pass subscriber to get the most out of your subscription. Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc is a murder mystery visual novel that spawned the cult-hit series that rapidly became an internet phenomenon in recent years.
For the next five days only, the first of the series’ murder mystery entries (there’s a spin-off puzzle shooter that never came to Xbox, for some reason) will still be available through Game Pass, but that first game is foundational to the other games. Danganronpa isn’t a series you can really jump into wherever you feel like, as the story of each game is deeply intertwined with its predecessors.
Trigger Happy Havoc is set in a high school called Hope’s Peak Academy, where students from around Japan are scouted for their talent in their respective field and promised further success just by having graduated from the school. But once there, the students find themselves trapped by an animatronic teddy bear called Monokuma, who tells them that, in order to leave the school, they must kill one of their classmates without being caught in a mock trial. It leads to some fascinating mysteries, twists and turns, and directly into the sequels that fine-tuned the format and created even more incredible mysteries.
Right now, Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc is just a few short days away from leaving Game Pass, but if you start now, you can likely finish it before it’s gone, and jump right in to Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair, which doesn’t seem to be in danger of leaving the service any time soon. I just got a handful of friends to finally try out Danganronpa on the heels of watching Glass Onion and looking for a good murder mystery, and they got hooked in the first case. Trust me, you will be, too.
The full list of games leaving Game Pass in January are as follows:
- Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc (Cloud, Console, and PC)
- Nobody Saves The World (Cloud, Console, and PC)
- Pupperazzi (Cloud, Console, and PC)
- The Anacrusis (Game Preview) (Cloud, Console, and PC)
- We Happy Few (Cloud, Console, and PC)
- Windjammers 2 (Cloud, Console, and PC)
