Topic: Danganronpa

@nessisonett People either seem to love or hate the ending of V3. It's VERY, VERY polarizing. I can see both points of view, although I very much lean toward loving the ending. Danganronpa 2 definitely has the best "classic" Danganronpa ending, if such a thing exists, and is much more immediately satisfying on a narrative level, but V3's themes and deconstructive elements will stick with me a lot longer.

BTW, even if the ending left you feeling a bit down, @johncalmc , don't neglect the amazing post-game content. It's effectively two different games (a digital board game and a JRPG) tied together by a card-dispenser mini-game. You kinda have to play all three 'modes' in unison to unlock everything. But the board game segment ends up being an amazing celebration of the entire franchise. Even characters from the Danganronpa 3 anime show up!

@Ralizah I've already deleted the game 😂 I didn't like the post-game stuff in the previous games so I just didn't bother. I might do at some point but unlike the previous games which I've played multiple times because I love their narratives, I can't imagine ever playing 3 again.

Even beyond the ending, I just didn't enjoy most of it. I liked the start and the first case, but after that I was mostly waiting for it to get going which for me it never did.

The previous two I thought had some lulls before building to pretty spectacular finishes, and I thought the same would apply here which is mostly what was keeping me interested.

I think they thought the final revelations were a lot cleverer than they actually were, which perhaps explains why the last trial goes on for what feels like twelve hours, but once it became clear that there weren't going to be any more twists or turns and that really was it I just couldn't wait for it to end.

@Kidfried I feel like we need a respectful argument thread where we make our cases for discussions like best ending or best bosses and such. Until someone makes the incredibly unpopular and divisive opinion that Days Gone is a good game of course 😉

I'm still annoyed about it three days later.

So as many of you may already be aware, this series is being ported to the Switch in the form of a collection and, in the process, the post-game modes in V3 are being fleshed out and made into a separate game called Danganronpa S: Ultimate Summer Camp. It also includes brand new interactions with original characters from Ultra Despair Girls.

Which makes me wonder: are they removing the post-game stuff from V3 on Switch, since it's being made into a separate game? Because I think that would probably shift me back to liking DR2 more than V3 overall.

Dangarompa is not for everyone. I loved all three. The ending of V3 shocked me, but then again dangarompa 1 and 2 endings caught me by surprise also. So I have no clue how they could do a Dangaronpa 4 and keep up the tradition of weird endings.

I've finished watching the anime Danganronpa 3: The End of Hope's Peak High School. Despite its name, this actually relates to the stories of Danganronpa 1&2, not V3. I watched it in release order, alternating between Future and Despair episodes, with the Hope episode at the end.

It was alright, but not great. Some of it gets too ridiculous, even by Danganronpa standards. There are some pacing issues, with the Despair arc taking a while to get going. Plus, many of the new characters would get into trouble long before they've had enough screen time for me to get attached to them.

On the plus side, I did like the extra lore. And the series does have its moments, particularly in the Future arc.

I have not seen the anime’s, maybe I should start.

@PSVR_lover OK, so, disclaimer.

There are two anime series. One is an adaptation of the first game, and it's terrible. The other, Danganronpa 3, is the canon sequel to the first two games and Ultra Despair Girls.

Danganronpa 3 is composed of two separate arcs, Despair and Future, that tell different stories. But the episodes were meant to be watched in alternating order, like how crimsontadpoles describes.

You can technically watch the two halves of the series separately, but doing so ruins a lot of the foreshadowing and narrative parallelism throughout the show, and certain plot elements will be spoiled for you that way, as the two storylines share certain characters.

@crimsontadpoles I actually really liked the more slice of life pace in the early Despair episodes, since I consider DR2's cast to be the best in the series, and it provides an interesting contrast with the insane bloodbath that arc turns into later on.

Future arc, comparatively, felt like diet Zero Escape. I'm not sad I watched it, but, in retrospect, it was definitely my least favorite part of the series.

The show probably could have been better, but, IMO, watching the episodes with a friend who is also a Danganronpa fan as they released in Japan was a lot of fun, as we bounced off a lot of stupid fan theories over the course of the show's run.

Still not sure if I'm more annoyed or amused about the english dub, which I discovered months later almost feels like watching an abridged series at times.

I actually quite liked the Danganronpa anime (the first series). I think it's kinda good and it gets the tone right but the problem is that it needs like twice as many episodes and it needs to flesh the characters out and the events that are going on. The game unfolds slowly whereas the anime is like BAM BAM BAM with twists and turns and who is this guy again and why is this person doing this?

I’m sold, I’ll start watching them ASAP. They sound wonderful.

It's really interesting to read people's opinions on the Danganronpa games since they've been recently reviewed on NintendoLife, particularly V3. I knew the ending is controversial but there were a lot of people who apparently outright hated it. I personally thought the ending was phenomenal because it did something I didn't expect at all and it was very daring. In this day and age when the majority of games literally plays the same, has the same structure in story, the same type of ending and so on, it was super refreshing to actually experience a different kind of ending. I'll always commend developers for trying something different and in this case, they did something you never see in a video game and that's awesome. I'm just so tired of having the same kind of experiences, you know?

This made me think of another game that also received a lot of hate for its controversial choices, which is The Last of Us: Part II. I've kinda already had that game spoiled for me but now I'm really curious to see what I will think of it when I eventually play it in its entirety. Because when I was reading those comments on NL, they gave off the same kind of vibe I felt when I read the comments for TLOU Part 2, i.e. hating on the game because it did something unconventional. I honestly think now that I belong in the group of people who love unconventional choices in video games and if TLOU Part 2 is just as unconventional as Danganronpa V3, then I think I'm going to love that game as well (hopefully).

@LtSarge If you just took Nintendo Life comments’ word for it then you’d probably end up a sexist homophobe who thinks that every single game in the history of the world is copying Breath of The Wild. I wouldn’t read too much into it.

@nessisonett Well the thing is that I'm not only looking at NL comments. I remember when V3 came out in 2017 and I was discussing the game's ending with people here on PS and most agreed that the ending was good. So to now read the complete opposite a couple of years later is a good way of gaining a different perspective on the matter.

But I do also agree that NL probably doesn't offer the most well-reasoned opinions, lol.

@LtSarge A large chunk of the Danganronpa fan community has hated V3's ending since day one. You're going to get that with pretty much any franchise that actually bothers to interrogate or challenge the preferences and preconceptions of the fanbase, especially when it involves deconstructing the conceptual foundations of the property in the first place. It's very much The End of Evangelion of the Danganronpa series in that respect, complete with the sense one gets from both that the creator has mixed feelings about the legacy of his creation.

Although, reading people's comments, I do also think there are still misconceptions about its implications. Namely, people still think it's retroactively "ruining" the games that came before it by stating that the events of the Hope's Peak Academy arc never happened. The important context is, of course, that V3's universe is a different one entirely, so the revelation that V3 has no actual connection to the rest of the series is no more to the point than Danganronpa being fiction in our own reality as well. V3's ending does nothing to alter the established lore of the broader property, even if, on a meta-textual level, it still ends up being pretty devastating to what came before it.

@Ralizah Yeah, it’s a pretty clear and obvious line being drawn between the audience in V3 and the fandom’s thirst for more games/more dead children. I didn’t think it was possible for that to go over players’ heads tbh

@nessisonett ...to some extent, sure. And that's probably also part of the reason a large chunk of the fandom hates it. But it's important to remember that, in V3's universe, Danganronpa has become a decades-old media institution that has taken to involving real actors (there's a bit of a fun dystopian flavor to it, since the outside world is directly stated to be perfectly peaceful, thus motivating the move toward incorporating actual actors to sate the boredom of the public). IMO, the audience is less what the developer thinks of his own fanbase, and more a satire of what he's afraid it'll become if Danganronpa keeps going on. Especially considering the strong send-up of capitalistic media excess in this game, which is reflected in elements of V3's own design, which intentionally included elements associated with long-running media franchises that are running out of ideas and past their prime. Thus the title itself, the absurd list of sequels, the ridiculous monocubs (they're sort of like the child characters often included in dying tv shows that are intended to reignite interest in the audience), and the sense that every 'season' runs on an unchanging formula.

@Ralizah @nessisonett Yeah I mean, I don't know if those people over at NL realise this but video games aren't actually real, lol. Just because the game itself is telling you that it's fiction doesn't make it any less fictional. Like when I got to the part where the old Danganronpa characters started showing up, it didn't ruin my experiences of the previous games at all because they still happened in the fictional world. V3 also happened. That doesn't change just because the game tells me it's fictional because I already know that. At that point you might as well just say that no story-based games that have ever existed actually happened.

@LtSarge Admittedly, I also initially thought it was retroactively nullifying the lore of the older games. It's easy to misread the ending as saying: "Hey, Danganronpa fan, the stuff you thought happened in this fictional universe? It was bogus all along. Also, you're a monster for wanting to play games where children are murdered!" Especially if others prime you to expect the worst.

It’s a great twist, actually. All three games are very shocking, why would v3 be any different?