魔法少女ノ魔女裁判 (Mahou Shoujo no Majo Saiban) and Death Game Mysteries as Spaces for Mental Health Discussions

There was a time when death games were intended for teenagers. Before Squid Game, The Hunger Games movie adaptations, and Among Us captured the broader public's imagination, works like Mirai Nikki (trans. Future Diary), Battle Royale, and Danganronpa remained in the domain of middle and high schoolers. These stories often explored the traumas and anxieties that teenagers experience in a failing society.

In particular, the film adaptation of Battle Royale took liberties with the ending: the director called out to the youth watching his movie to "run" from adult society. Both the novel and the film appealed to the punk, anti-establishment sensibilities of children and told adults to fuck off.

While the genre is still popular with kids, I think its broader appeal has caused it to lose some of its specificity with teenagers. You certainly aren't thinking about big themes while playing Among Us, and the recent mainstream death games featuring adults with their general anticapitalist themes mean teenage issues get less focus.

There's something to be said about how genres and tropes associated with young adults have now been embraced by the general public. These fandoms have been overrun by adults and children who just want to have fun, which isn't a crime at all. But there's a tinge of tragedy when fandom spaces have become so commercialized that everyone can participate in it and the privacy of teenagers simply disappears.

But there are people who still believe in the idea of death games as a space for teenagers to address their issues.

Enter 魔法少女ノ魔女裁判 (Mahou Shoujo no Majo Saiban, henceforth ManoSaba), a crowdfunded visual novel by Acacia and Re,AER released in 18th July, 2025. Thirteen girls with magical powers are trapped on an island with a vigilant owl mascot and a prison warden. They sleep in separate cells, wondering when the next murder will occur. The perpetrator upon killing someone transforms into a witch: an undying and all-powerful version of themselves.

The player follows Sakuraba Ema, a self-deprecating girl who was once the target of bullying at school. She has been trying to suppress her darker side, which desires the death of everyone. Even though she feels wronged by the world and she doesn't know how to socialize, she tries her best to make friends in this brutish setting.

There are too many characters to introduce, but a few should be highlighted. Her close companions include Tachibana Sherry, a blue-haired, extremely happy-go-lucky detective, and Tono Hanna, a girl who dresses up in lavish green Gothic attire. The three of them spend so much time together that they're seen as a trio by the other characters who have their own pairings.

This diverse cast fits with the expectations of what a post-Danganronpa death game mystery should feel like: the characters are color-coded, and their archetypes are easily recognizable from their speech patterns. When the characters inevitably commit murder, their magic and personalities often play a role in what happens. Everything is tuned properly to keep the fast pace going.

In this regard, ManoSaba has studied its predecessors. It effectively explains the stakes of the mystery and story by emphasizing character traits and reducing downtime commonly found in earlier games. There is virtually no interactivity in the investigation sections. When players click on a highlighted section of the map, the characters immediately investigate and find relevant clues to enter into their smartphone apps.

The only real element of interactivity comes in the form of trials. Like the class trials in Danganronpa, the witch trials in ManoSaba are about searching for contradictions in witness statements and offering alternative interpretations.

This is where the game both shines and falls short. Since it has abandoned every other element found in death game mysteries, the weight of the storytelling hinges on how interesting and exciting the reveals are. The banter between the characters is fun to listen to; the many objections are consistent with the characters' voices, and I found myself intentionally going for wrong interjections to hear the characters' responses. These high-stakes trial sections reveal a great deal about the characters' personalities, so it's worth taking the time to listen to how they formulate their hypotheses.

At the same time, the mysteries are often too limited in scope to be memorable. While a few of the cases has some amusing murder methods, many cases don't have strong twists and turns. A few early cases bypass the whodunit problem altogether: either the perpetrator is immediately identified as suspicious because they lack an alibi, or the method is so specific that only one person could have carried it out. The motives are weak, though one could argue that they are diegetic: the characters lose control as they get closer to becoming witches. Weaker cases aside, the better cases don't have strong climaxes too. There's no mind-blowing twist that will elicit a standing ovation. All of the cases are just okay.

Well, except for one. The second case involves a character whose introduction is so poorly written that it seems as if the writers invented transphobia from first principles. That plot thread is also dropped unceremoniously in later parts of the game. The most charitable interpretation is that there were too many writers in the room, and one of them wanted to include gender-bender comedy. This inappropriate addition to what is honestly an interesting character caused many characters, including Ema, to treat her poorly. That scene, among the rather weak set of mysteries, gave me a bad first impression of the work.

But as I spent time reading the troubled backstories of Ema and her friends, the more my thoughts on the game have shifted. The game attempts to comment on trauma within the context of contrived death game mysteries and the history of persecution of witches.

While murder is obviously an objectionable act, the irony of witches putting other witches on trial is salient. The court is a sham, forcing the characters to take on the responsibility of finding the witch themselves. Many of their horrendous acts result from something triggering their trauma in this isolated setting. The cast is full of survivors of violence, and their magical powers often make existing societal harms worse and more apparent.

Taken as a whole, the work is less the yuri death game mystery I thought I would get and more of an indictment of society's inability to deal with children growing up. In a sense, the characters are persecuted like historical witches for not fitting in or for failing to live up to societal standards. They need to be quarantined and put into a death game supported by the state in order to whittle out witches from society.

So rather than being reminded of how derivative ManoSaba is of Danganronpa, I was more reminded of the sociopolitical and psychiatric dimensions of works like Battle Royale. The work is deeply concerned about the overall mental health of Japanese teenagers and how structural pressures and catastrophic events hinder their development. Traumatic memories are repressed, and unproductive coping techniques are formed. This environment leaves no room for discussing trauma. ManoSaba thus prefers to blast apart the techniques that let them avoid trigger points. If Danganronpa V3 fears how mysteries can unravel the trauma of its characters and cause psychological harm, ManoSaba recognizes confronting trauma and bringing it into the public forum is the only way to move forward.

This means the work cannot accept defense mechanisms like sublimation where people transform negative impulses into productive and useful actions. Instead, it strips them away, forcing the characters to look into their trauma in the eye. They must recognize their vulnerabilities and weaknesses and talk about them as openly as possible, even if the traumas are contingently historical.

I think this is what makes ManoSaba uniquely old and new school. The dystopia isn't an imagined authoritarian state, but rather it's the current censorship of mental health issues. They don't have the space to explore this at all. The only way to address these issues is through the lens of a witch hunt: an unfair process, sure, but it's a step toward actually discussing the problems teenagers face.

In a way, ManoSaba seems to acknowledge that the death game mystery genre is not the best place to discuss mental health, but it's still a safe space. Like other genre works, the game sensationalizes violence and trauma. However, because this genre is one of the few spaces where one can reasonably expect mental health and trauma exploration, the fandom it creates ends up being vital to teenagers who want to talk about this subject matter.

This is why the yuri elements are necessary. The game focuses more on developing interactions between characters than on the mystery, sometimes at the expense of the plot. The lesbian relationships help players understand the mental health aspects of the game.

Indeed, shipping characters, drawing fanart, and writing fanfiction are ways players make sense of the characters' personalities and find their own cathartic answers to the traumas explored.

After playing the game, I spent a few hours looking at fanart of my favorite pairings. Much of it deals with what happened in the story and speculates about the afterlife and their regrets. The characters' connections are so profound that I think it makes sense for people to explore and figure out what they mean.

The cute relationships depicted in the game and by its fans allow a wider, safer discussion on trauma and violence. When fans speculate about how one character will behave toward another, they're really thinking about how these characters can reconcile their past hurts. It gives players some space to exercise their creativity and think about how to find relationships in this troubled present. This exercise is, I think, healthy and very different from other fandoms of death games I've seen.

That's why I'm glad this game is popular among teenagers. It gives them an opportunity to think about the implications of the characters in their own terms. As a 30-year-old-something, I feel weird playing a game aimed at such a young demographic. However, it also reminds me of the anti-authoritarian young adult works I enjoyed and how important they were in developing my identity.

Once it's translated into English, I can see this game becoming the voice of teenagers all over the world. Although there are some issues with the game, I think its message is significant enough for teenagers to resonate with it. We still live in a world where mental health problems are recognized, yet still stigmatized. Until we learn how to talk about mental health, death game mysteries like ManoSaba will carve out a space to do it.

And ManoSaba does a pretty good job at it. It earnestly explodes how cagey we are about expressing ourselves, it makes us understand how teenagers suffer, and it encourages us to find love amidst the havoc it created. It may not be an exaggeration to say that this work affirms what it means to be a teenager in face of adult society the best since the film adaptation of Battle Royale.

I'm not a young adult by any measure, but I remember how difficult it was to find contemporary works that spoke to me. The works that resonated with me were older, and by the time more relevant dystopian works were published, I had other concerns besides alienation and mental health issues. I can but only reflect on how much of the nastiness is a result of not having a space to talk about this kind of stuff. I hope this game fulfills that purpose for my younger readers because playing ManoSaba made me jealous of the catharsis experienced by the younger Japanese and Chinese players.