Why Danganronpa 3 Is So Painful

hey everyone if you're tuning into this video as it's premiering and can't see the time code here's a little disclaimer it's nearly five hours long so that being said if you need to take a restroom break hydrate or get a snack i definitely recommend doing so talking about danganronpa's fun but staying healthy is even better as expected by the way this video will contain full spoilers for danganronpa 3 the end of hope's peak academy for both future and despair arc as well as the 2.5 ova and hope arc there will also briefly be spoilery discussion of the light novel danganronpa zero as always with this series danganronpa 3 has some somewhat sensitive subject matter so if you do badly with any of what's listed below then there's no shame at all in ducking out now we totally understand and we'll see you next time trust me you're good now then with that all being said let's get this bread [Music] everything comes in threes unless you're danganronpa in which case you come in four call it three and then add five just to be safe and also call it three two of those three are visual novels one's a third person shooter then your fourth which is three is an anime series released by an entirely separate licensing company than those prior games in two concurrent seasons which aired simultaneously with your fifth which is also three being another visual novel is it any wonder that people get a little confused with this step well either way danganronpa 3. with the subtitle of the end of hope's peak academy it sets the bar pretty clearly and highly when framed against everything that's come so far danganronpa cemented itself as an eclectic flawed but ultimately charming and very earnest series with its debut entry refined itself greatly on its second outing and even managed to expand upon its themes in interesting ways at its lowest with ultra despair girls danganronpa zero and danganronpa if proved to be wonderful additional content which contextualized both background information about the series past and also speculated about alternative features but when it comes to the real future of the danganronpa story creator kazutaka kodaka claimed there was only one way to depict that final act not through the medium of video games which it had mostly inhabited until this point but through the medium of a television anime whose trappings and tropes undoubtedly served as the primary inspiration for the series highs and lows as i alluded to just a moment ago though part of what makes danganronpa 3 so tied to its televised ambitions was the format in which it was produced with two congruent arcs airing at the same time those arcs are future taking place directly after the events of super danganronpa 2 and following the surviving cast of the first game as well as a new roster of characters from the future foundation and despair taking place across the span of time that encompassed the school years of sdr two's cast all the way up until their descent into super high school level despair this video if you couldn't tell is gonna be a little bit different than the last few in the retrospective for starters a beat for beat recap to coincide with the analysis just isn't really in the cards because of how many damn episodes this thing has so we're mostly going to be going broad strokes approach instead laying out the groundwork briefly at the beginning so we can focus on several topics of interest as we go along because these two arcs aired concurrently while focusing on largely different casts this also means i've roped in someone to help me out that being austin of vast airfame who you may recall appearing on this channel once before in a video all about vast error hello my name is austin otto you may remember me from other classics such as depressed freaks and trollian geeks a vast error story and max keeble's big move troy mcginty frog death hd today though i'm here to help talk about a different kind of disgraceful downfall and not inherently the type that involves gratuitous teenage violence love it as i may no no we're going to be talking about narrative suicide the likes of which only happen once in a neon pink moon one where so many baffling choices and retcons intertwine together until they loop around into a metaphorical noose for something you love to do a cool kick flip off of just before the chair of cohesion slips out from under it happy to be back marcy less happy to be talking about this thing but still happy i'll be handling future while austin handles despair after which we'll be coming together to wrap this all up with the extra ova episode super danganronpa 2.5 and hobart that means that obviously we've got a lot of ground to cover so we'd best get the show on the road already and of course if our already dower attitude doesn't disclaim as much we've got a lot of foul to cry about this show but as always needless to say this is not meant as a lambasting of its fans if you enjoy danganronpa 3 and find no error in its ways then i'm not trying to ruin your day or question your intelligence confusing as your taste may be to me i and austin both simply want to express our own disappointments with this it being part of a franchise we otherwise hold a lot of affection for and i hope everyone will remain respectful of that fact their own potential disagreements aside anyway that being said this is a retrospective review deep dive and definitive takedown of danganronpa 3 the end of hope's peak academy let's get it [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so to get us into the groove of things before we really get into what exactly we find so objectionable about the way the series is handled hey austin what do you think about dangerous iii i want to kill myself we first need to establish what's actually going on in it so that those of you who dismiss the spoiler warning can at least be tangentially aware of what any of these criticisms actually apply to and mean in the grand scheme of things so let's do an even briefer set of recaps than usual to set the stage future arc takes place in the immediate aftermath of super danganronpa 2 having escaped the neo world program and convinced hajime hinata and pals to continue living for their own sakes makoto nagi returns to future foundation hq and is promptly arrested for aiding and abetting the people who destroyed the world seems like he didn't think very hard about how to get himself out of it like he said he would on the boat huh accused of treason for hiding the shsl despairs naegi is powerless to intervene when strange things begin to happen at the hq building ultimately resulting in all of the members himself included being gassed unconscious though his origin and controller are unknown at this point it's clear that they're being attacked once again by monokuma who quickly points out that they're all now wearing battle royale style bracelets and would be forced to conduct another killing game despite naegi's objections to the same old song and dance he has very little ground to stand on after chisuyuki zomei turns out to have already been dead right at the start which infuriates vice chairman kyousuke munekata who will act as naegi's primary foil for this arc the killing game involves trying to find the traitor between each round of drug-enforced sleepy time with each passing round yielding more victims furthermore escape is impossible once again with the wristbands providing further incentive for cooperation through their respective forbidden actions which when broken will poison the person wearing it killing them by spreading it to half of their body and making one of their eyes bleed monokuma style in the process which is admittedly pretty sick aesthetically speaking the rest of the season basically falls into an endless gauntlet of shenanigans infighting and mysterious deaths from this point forward as most of the original characters bite it like the fodder they are and occasional twists are thrown our way a conflict between a trio of characters is explored red herrings are planted one of the members turns out to be a replacement android created by monica toa from ultra despair girls who was spying on the events but ultimately turns out not to be orchestrating them a main character death is teased but backed out of another main character death is teased but well we'll get to it despite this though it simultaneously feels as though very little actually happens in this story by the time kyoku kirigiri has been poisoned for her forbidden action allowing naegi to live past the fourth round naegi almost sinks into despair and in the process falls victim to the true method being used to perpetuate these killings as elaborated on further in despair arc naegi is shown a literal brainwashing video which has been making all of the characters who've been woken to see it so far commit suicide having barely survived a previous attack however juzo sakakura snaps nigey out of his slump long enough to interrupt the brainwashing smashing all of the monitors but dying of blood loss afterwards through a complicated rigmarole of last-minute information we discovered that everyone was dragged to an underwater replica of the entire hq building while they were unconscious the first time and the mastermind of this whole affair was the future foundation chairman kazuo tengen who was himself brainwashed by the video into turning evil or something by the late chisa yuki zomei also brainwashed evidently his motive was to spread enough to spare to get the attention of the video's reluctant creator and shy sad boy to end all sad boys ryota mitorei who he then hoped would be desperate enough to use said technology to brainwash the world into hope instead as kirigiri apparently dies everyone converges on the truth and the fate of the world's free will hangs in the balance everyone arrives at hq the sdr2 cast included to see whether meteori can be talked down from brainwashing the world which leads us to have to explain what the hell's going on in despair arc [Music] what the hell goes on in despair arc good question wish i could tell you despair arc takes place before the events of the first game focusing on chisha yuki zomei and her role as homeroom teacher to the 77th hyphen b class of hope's peak academy that being the cast of super danganronpa 2 sans hinata who is of course a student in the reserve department what a sad strange poor little normo he is just getting to model trains or something idiot this school really will accept just about anybody if they're quirky enough wanting to help her longtime friends munakata and sakakura improve the school yukizome doubles as a spy to look into the shady dealings of hope speak academy while she teaches leading her to stumble upon the ongoing research which will become the zurukamakura project being pushed along by the ever shady board of trustees aka the steering committee the candidate for this procedure is of course hyper-dejected baby man hajime hinata who has an inferiority complex developed over a long span of trying and always failing to cultivate a true talent that would set him apart and allow him to actually have a reason to live as himself despite his hesitancy to live and die by the meme he finds conviction to the cause after bonding with one of the main campus students a sleepy gamer girl named chiaki nanami you're you're not real they said you weren't real you're you're you're not supposed to be real okay sorry we we can't get into that right now this is supposed to be the one portion of this video where i'm more objective we have to save it after a lot of shenanigans happened that result in komita's temporary suspension and the permanent expulsion of several others yuki zomei is transferred to teach the reserve course and does so for about half a year this accomplishes nothing and is a waste of time for the cast and audience alike so we can get to the raw meat of things also twilight syndrome happened before this or something i don't know asking for sakakura's id for the sake of investigating the kamakura project she stumbles upon the work of the ultimate doomer herself junko enoshima and her sister junkuenoshima 2 mukurowikusaba she stinks did you know that jungkook will be sure to remind you if you forgot after finding the hot topic bunker of lost legend junko entices kamikura by promising that his boredom will be cured by the unpredictability of despair junko gets told to watch her tone and then gets concussed and racked with insurance debt before she has a fateful encounter with ryota miturai who while he has been largely absent due to health issues and had his spot filled in by the super high school level imposter is part of class 77 hyphen b as the super high school level animator seeing how influential meteorize anime is and the potential it has for subliminal messaging junko overtakes his work to create a brain washing video we'll get to it this video uses gorilla shock imagery from the very first killing game she enacts by forcing the hope's peak student council to kill each other while keeping kamakura nearby kamakura does not participate in these events remember this it will be on the test later when she leaks select information about this the reserve course is outraged causing the parade to occur and though junko is almost exposed by juzo sakakura she blackmails him into silence after she exposes that he's gay effectively threatening to out him unless he holds his tongue about her actions now uncontested junko begins using the video to brainwash class 77 hyphen b luring yuki zomei in the process and getting her to watch her youtube poop ultimately junko is faced by the beloved class representative and physical return of jesus christ nanami she lures the gamer there with the kamakura bait at which point she is killed tortuously in junko's deadly maze and winds up much like the original jesus christ but with a lot more than two spikes to deal with her death is spliced into the existing brainwashing video to further break and completely brainwash her peers creating the extended roster of super high school level despair though the 78th class tries to prepare a shelter within the school the principal is unaware that junko and her sister have already infiltrated their group and allow for the events of danganronpa 1 to transpire while beyond the walls a still brainwashed yuki zomei returns to the side of munakata and the blossoming future foundation while he is completely unaware of what happened to her i think i've gone cross-eyed and i'm not sure if my pants are stained with piss or tears give me a moment to change [Music] envisioned as the end to the hope's peak saga as established by trigger happy havoc and goodbye despair before it the future arc of danganronpa 3 was the primary component of this anime that series creator kazutaka kodaka was most focused on birthing into the world when he conceived of this whole idea in the first place even despite the difficulty of developing it alongside a whole other new entry in the video game franchise the dr team went on full steam ahead calling the opportunity something that does not come along often and yeah i mean i'd hope that developing two simultaneous seasons of television and a video game at the same time wouldn't come along often because that sounds like hell on earth to try to manage and manage it they sure tried deciding to create a suspenseful series that did not include any investigations or trials kodaka began to outline future arc and hoped that it would become a story that leveraged the unique strengths of being a television series to distinguish itself from the previous game entries arguably i think the final product we got could easily have been another visual novel perhaps even benefited from it so i'm not sure exactly if this approach was all that successful but that's just my multi-layered onion so whatever acknowledging that fans might call a happy ending to the series pandering kodaka went ahead with the story anyway saying that he wanted to give proper conclusive endings for the characters that fans had gotten to know inspired by producers over at lairt who had previously done work for danganronpa the animation and the animated cutscenes for ultra despair girls he decided this was the best route to take his ambitions and also decided to reduce the amount of action from previous works emphasizing a more psychological struggle instead furthermore the two arcs were separated between narratives following nigey's group and hinata's group to refrain from alienating newcomers who had maybe watched the first anime adaptation but not played super dang and ramba 2 which i don't know why he bothered considering future is so reliant on despair to make sense but um actually who are you what are you doing here oh i'm a stand-in a representative if you will you see both people in this room right now hate this sucker for all it's worth and that means we don't have a fair and balanced tmcr view of things from the perspective of someone who likes the anime oh so you're from the comments section guild the name is akuma at your service and i'm the super high school level devil's advocate you're gonna be seeing a lot of me before this thing's done oh goody all right well uh what do you raise cain to my good bear well you see futurock can still stand alone it was released separately on blu-ray by funimation after all and plenty of people watched the season separately it really can't it heavily cross-references despair and even saves a lot of its background info about its original characters for despair i know that people have watched it that way because let's be honest the way this show has been distributed has made things needlessly complicated for people going back to watch it nowadays but it's definitely not coherent if you only watch it by itself well it had a solo stage play adaptation right it did but that edits the story a lot there are like completely different survivors at the end of it and everything well you win this round but i'll be back after i go to bother austin oh no wait well not my fault director of the series was of course seiji kishi returning from his tenure on danganronpa the animation and the new and old characters alike were designed by original series character designer rui komatsuzaki while kodaka would largely plan and outline the plot of the anime he'd hand direct writing and script adaptation duties over to norumitsukai ho who largely wrote story scenarios for guilty gear before this as well as the school live anime and being an employee of nitro plus these sure are some facts about this show the game writers had a lot of trouble with the anime scenario meetings because of their lack of experience with the medium apparently with weekly script talks lasting around 8 hours per session while kodaka said he found the final product top-notch long-time voice of mokoto naegi and nagito komeida megumiogata said she found the anime quote too gruesome and criticized it for being too excessive as well as killing off its heroines while the reception was generally positive during its release the series has gone on to become more polarizing in the danganronpa fan community as time has passed with the final episode hope arc especially often receiving the most scathing critique but what exactly caused the divide what got people's jimmies in a wrestle and can i muster up an impartial attitude for this series can i perhaps even find good things to say about it or otherwise its intentions well i suppose that's what we're here to find out this is why danganronpa 3 future arc is so painful after these messages of course [Music] [Applause] as previously stated i loathe danganronpa 3 more than our host in fact i'd say it's to a shakespearean degree i want to kill myself alas poor hinata i knew him kodaka a fellow of infinite jest of most excellent fancy he hath borne me on his franchise a thousand times and now how abhorred in my imagination it is i know a lot of this might be coming off as hyperbolic at the moment but let me be clear loathe is the kindest word i have for danganronpa 3 between num and yuck the danganronpa franchise has always been messy in its execution pun not intended there have always been glaring problems with various characters concepts and details in the previous titles that occasionally threaten the works intentions but you always got the sense that there was purpose carried along with it even if it was undercooked the prior games were always trying to say something of value kazutaka kodaka may be a flawed writer with flawed ideas but he made danganronpa what it is warts and all and no greater is that directive presence missed more than danganronpa 3 zetsubohen or as it's most commonly referred to as the despair arc this isn't to say he had absolutely nothing to do with the process however even when he was being a little trickster on twitter and intentionally lying about details before the announcement trailers popped up in spring 2016. while details on production for despair are relatively scarce it should be noted that initially the idea for this continuation wasn't planned to feature any of the cast from super danganronpa 2 at all an anime adaptation of that story was already getting revved up at lurch to begin with and kodaka believed that the characters of that game had run their course their story said everything that needed to be said and he had no idea how he would handle its aftermath another class trial-centric killing game to conclude the plot was originally thought to be too painful for the students of hope speak academy to do again and kodaka had bigger conceptual fish to fry because around this time the joy that is danganronpa v3 was beamed into his mind and started taking up all of that prime real estate these connecting threads weren't just going to expand upon themselves though eventually the plans for a super danganronpa 2 anime were thrown out thinking of its concepts being too reliant on it being a game to work in a format the team felt could connect into a proper danube moth but if they were going to make a finale they couldn't just leave one third of their series on the cutting room floor with no adaptation to show for it the solution a prequel anime that coincides with their sequel anime one that expands upon what was set up in super danganronpa 2 without compromising the original game's identity and ties in directly with future arc for a unique viewing experience that interplays between the beginning and the end simultaneously every monday from july 11 2016 onwards you would get an episode of future and every thursday you would get an episode of despair and the viewer would alternate between each series and gain greater depth and context from both sides by doing so sounds like a novel concept right both sets of dangans get their time in the spotlight and all those vague burning questions get some much needed resolution except the spare arc goes against its original philosophy dare i say that even with its best foot forward it only winds up spitting in the face of that effort and the ripple effects of such spiteful saliva eventually not only compromise every scrap of nuance that super danganronpa 2 had to offer but damn the integrity of the series as a whole you know presuming its integrity was ever going to survive ultra despair girls anyway and presuming i was ever going to continue being objective past the synopsis um actually nothing is ever objective you don't need to go around stating the obvious you know oh hey the straw man i ordered finally came in i thought you got lost in transit months ago never fear my good sir where there's a will there's an argument against that will and where there's a defense there's a bear ready to rip someone to shreds so what's the issue with what i'm doing exactly what isn't you're going around blabbing out such a massive honey ton of vitriol that hasn't been seen since the bp oil spill isn't it unfair to assume that most casual fans will care about these critiques to begin with i'm not a casual fan i don't think i'm better than casual fans or better than people who like danganronpa 3 by any means but i'm not coming at this series from the perspective of someone who can just turn their brain off and accept what's there for what it is i don't engage with what i love that way and even if i did i don't think the material respects itself or its audience enough to warrant that response i'm gonna be upfront my sole purpose in this endeavor is to drag danganronpa 3's feet to the fire not tactfully not with grace and certainly not giving it any due respect because i have a vendetta and i've had it for nearly six [ __ ] years because while there are a few scarce videos out there in the wild tearing danganronpa three to shreds there's none that seems willing to really try and go into everything that makes it such a show so fine i'll do it myself partially but why even waste your energy on something you know you don't even like because i was in the danganronpa trenches man from its emergence during the first homestuck gigapaws on tumblr to the something awful paywalls to its greater exposure through localization in the west i bought official cosplay clothes for local cons i was in japan and got to see the trailers for danganronpa 3 as they came out in real time on my birthday no less i bought the original japanese special editions of the first two games to celebrate while i was there i watched both arcs week to week as they came out and didn't miss a single episode i've seen every tepid dirty danganronpa confessions egg joke i spent hours watching sprite edit videos of stand-up comedy skits i made memes and posted them to our danganronpa i shipped hinata soda ibuki because i could and i even co-wrote an original third entry to the franchise because this abomination disappointed me so much after it ended to have countless hours of time and energy spent with these characters and analyzing this plot up ended in something just barely cracking over 11 hours it was heartbreaking for me and worse yet it felt far longer than it actually was if you really hate it that much then why don't you just ignore it it's not like the other games stop existing and stop being good just because you think this one isn't no technically danganronpa 3 can't affect my enjoyment of the games that came before it there's just as many things to love about the franchise as there are facets of it that have aged like spoiled delicious milk but this is still definitively the canonical ending of the hope's peak saga and despite every leap in logic and shortcoming it has it's insufferably relevant i've bided my time in the shadows of skype chats and discord servers forcing peers to listen to my incoherent vengeful babbling for long enough with this i now have a platform and i'm going to use it to shut out every remaining bit of rancor in my system until my opinions echo infinitely among the great chasms of the funny murder bear game community and when all is said and done i finally rest and watch the sun rise over a grateful universe this is me tearing one of my least favorite pieces of media ever made apart this is my catharsis after a tailor-made despair this is why danganronpa 3 despair arc is so painful after these messages of course [Music] logical errors are not exactly outside the wheelhouse of future arc in fact i would say that logical errors make up a good 70 to 80 percent of the entirety of danganronpa 3's wheelhouse this house is full of wheels and most of them drift left into oncoming traffic which is just as well because the resulting traffic accident would probably leave you unable to ponder exactly what stands out is so inconsistent about this entry compared to its predecessors perhaps even that might not be able to save you from one of the most immediate and glaring inconsistencies of all though and that's the apparent time skip that the designs of the dr1 characters seem to be suggesting again the original character designer was brought on board for this production and acknowledged that there was a concentrated effort to make those characters look more mature here but there's kind of a problem that we're not addressing here isn't there you see future arc basically begins right off the bat with niagie and pals returning to the feature foundation hq with naegi being cuffed for his part in assisting the remnants of despair this is in theory a pretty easy to follow trajectory for the story to be taking as super dangerous 2 literally ends with niagi togami and kirigiri all getting on their boat from jabberwock island to return to hq with nagi himself noting that he'll likely be in a lot of heat for what he did and that he'll have to try to brainstorm an excuse on the way back only problem however is that the gang basically looks almost exactly the same as they did back in dr1 when they appear in sdr2 albeit rocking new suits because of their jobs in future arc they all look pretty notably different with perhaps the exception of togami who hasn't aged a day where is he when they arrive by the way wasn't he on the boat too why is he suddenly elsewhere what the most glaring of these of course is nike himself sporting a shorter haircut which in my opinion just looks worse on him than his regular do this is such a small detail to zero in on i realize but it's been like a day since sdr2 maybe a few if we're being generous when he get it cut um well obviously he could have cut it on the way doy theoretically i suppose but i don't know what he did it with but sure yes if that's all i had this would be a worthless complaint because we could still assume he did that unfortunately this is not the case because this problem goes deeper later on in future episode three we see a small flashback of naegi coming across azure kamakura for the first time presumably when he got his intel on the survivors that led him to super high school level despair in the first place this would likely be when their talks about the nia world program happened which would be shortly before sdr 2 and shortly after ultra despair girls and he has the short hair for some reason so yeah this sudden aging doesn't add up at all considering that as both sdr2 and ultra despair girls have naegi with his default design in just a suit with no other differences already a few seconds into the beginning of future arc and we have a certified retcon on our hands and i know hairstyle seems pretty low on the list of priorities and mistakes to point out but i don't think a little consistency is too much to ask for speaking of ultra despair girls this problem doesn't just apply to naegi later on we see the robot doppelganger of miya gekko gahara is being controlled by that game's antagonist monica toa and she looks pretty different too granted she has about the same design that she had at the end of that game's credits but considering that sdr 2 only takes place maybe a few weeks to a month after ultra despair girls as it concludes with kamakura retrieving the necessary parts of junko's ai to infect the nia world program and presumably going off to chapter zero of sdr2 there's no way monica should look as matured as she is compared to her previous appearance she's certainly still a child i'll grant you but she definitely looks a lot less baby than before which sticks out especially egregiously in the standalone ultra despair girls episode later in future arc which features a brief cameo of the other warriors of hope they look exactly the same as they did before with no visible growth like monica's basically even looking to still be dinged up from what happened to them at the end of udg which makes no sense in a different way since it is again at least a few weeks after that game transpired here that's not even to mention that she's also managed to build an entire castle for herself in that time and mentions being mentored by kamida for a while even though that's a pretty short amount of time to have just squeezed even just the latter into much less the former ideally these things should have been caught in early script passes or at the very least animation or design revisions but i'm gonna go out on a limb and say that between this anime and v3 resources were stretched pretty thin and people weren't double checking much this will become relevant a lot more as time passes speaking of the familiar becoming unfamiliar though [Music] danganronpa is a series that is in part recognizable due to its incredibly specific aesthetic style and design choices the games are drenched in psychopop and intricate character designs that were tailor made not just for the type of game it was in its genre trappings but also its thematic foundations these larger than life personalities with equally large talents and aspiring dreams would of course need vibrant landscapes to handle the bombastic actions and events they take part in and the talented team behind the games really put their all into making the world they envision come to life with pop-up effects gun reticles and just a few gallons of hot pink for flavor this makes it all the more confusing as to why next to none of this is retained in danganronpa 3. to an extent it makes sense as to why certain elements of the games wouldn't be very animation friendly those specific character designs look great on sprite and cgs usually but putting them into motion beyond tweens becomes a cumbersome challenge when you're balling on a budget rui komasuzaki's extravagantly detailed hands aren't going to make your work any more cost effective it's been talked about in the retrospectives prior to this but danganronpa and animation just don't really work well together hand in hand it's style isn't even willing to play ball with other mediums see the in-engine cutscenes and ultra despair girls in the rotoscoping and danganronpa the animation for more details on that so what did lurch decide to do in order to wrangle control of the medium well far be it for me to take a stab at a side that i'm not directly commentating on most of the time but in future the answer often seems to lie in smothering the screen in gerber baby barf green's greys and absolutely drowning it in blocky shadows that aim to poorly cover the fact that the characters hardly move in most shots where they stand around talking to one another about platitudes the pink blood that has incorrectly but commonly been thought to be a raiding sensor finally got the chance to show its true grip by becoming a deep red too but only stands to make the palette more muddy in despair the problems of a disgusting palette are mostly gone due to us going back to the series roots but are instead replaced with further issues of consistency i guess it makes sense that a lack of cohesion is this entry's most cohesive trait but while trading out the iconic looks of class 77 for more school and animation friendly ones isn't an egregious problem the design work is at the very least serviceable and they do still retain pieces of what made the original stand out the way they're utilized absolutely is especially when lurch has proved multiple times including by the end of hope arc that they can manage to do it half competently let's not mince words here the animation in danganronpa 3 is alright at best and absurdly slapdash at worst when you're not dealing with shot reverse shot shot shot with camera kind of tilted shot you're given a slow frame rate and enough choppy cuts to where you can't see what's going on at all this is especially prevalent in the few fight scenes that the show has where characters will often just jerk themselves around move into a close-up turn into shadowy figures or suddenly find themselves becoming rotoscoped there are also certain elements that just aren't drawn well no matter how you slice it particularly animals a lot of shots of the mascots and any character at a greater distance than two feet in front of you there are also a lot of strange stylistic and perspective shits at the drop of a hat details on certain characters that are often lost such as kuzuru's blush and need eyes intensity and of course an ever-present amount of animation errors and while almost every series has these some of danganronpa 3s are pretty laughable like munakata keeping his mouth held open when he's not screaming or this one we found where psyone g literally just vanishes danganronpa 3 also really loves its reused backgrounds and music cues many of which are poor reinterpretations of game elements such as when bodies are discovered but when exactly the series wants to use them as sporadic and really are only there to remind you that this is technically a danganronpa anime this continues on with certain moments that try and fail to reference the game's style without recognizing why it was used like a recreation of the climax inference when junko sends out chainmail to the reserve course or when kizakura suddenly does a you've got that wrong pose how the music is selected for a scene is also never entirely clear old world order is used so much that it practically loses any of its assumed meaning unlike in the games when new world order was almost always used to undercut a major reveal or a shocking piece of information it starts that way in future but gradually it just becomes the piece the series decides to toss out when it wants to feel more important than it actually is monacota ate the last hot pocket speaking of the music let's talk about that real quick while definitely less than any of his contributions for the games masafumi takata really comes in clutch with his 50 plus additions for both sides of danganronpa 3's original soundtrack a lot of it is too good for a series that doesn't even properly utilize it most of the time and will instead put down music from the games that don't even match the tone of the scene it's in hey uh why is trial underground playing here oh well well the cast and future they're they're under water so it's kind of a kind of like an uh some inclusions are a little head scratching in their own right though such as the specific use of give me wings during the student council killing game and the reintroduction of the main danganronpa theme the openings and endings are pretty good though for what it's worth they're solid tracks with decent visuals that really make you think you're going to be watching something with more depth than you actually get the symbolic renditions of the future's cast fates and dead or lie are very striking even when only a few of them have any deeper meaning and the shot recreating the beginning of danganronpa 1's opening movie was actually a really great choice the final stretch of it does sort of leave something to be desired though especially when it just cuts to the hope's peak academy vault door again for no reason i can think of in metaphor or otherwise recall the end isn't as meaningful visually but does have some pretty salient lyrics there just isn't a whole lot to pick apart about the loves me loves me not flower picking that naegi is being crushed under so i'm not gonna try is sort of a lo-fi calm before the storm type track that has changing visual elements as the series goes along i think the color palette here is actually pretty great interesting and i enjoy the use of common danganronpa visual motifs mixed in with the redraws of class 77's official character art i also think having the cast falling as a central point in both openings makes for a really interesting dichotomy that doesn't ever truly get utilized to its full potential and of course zettai kibo birthday is yet another beautiful magumiogata banger with a catchy sing-along chorus that refuses to ever leave my brain no matter how many times i decide to purposefully give myself a skull fracture the faux hand-painted visuals that slowly comes together with happy peaceful moments that the super danganronpa 2 gang shared during the prime of their lives are reminiscent of the class photos we see of the danganronpa 1 cast between chapters 5 and 6 of that game and that connection is a very bittersweet one to make um what exactly does all this prove about the quality of the narrative though it might break immersion a little but nobody is going to write about a few niche presentation elements i think a lot of these issues really pile up and not just that i think they go a long way improving the sort of strenuous conditions that i can only assume danganronpa 3 was produced in i'm gonna get a little conspiratorial here but it's something that hasn't left my mind since i began considering it please know that what i'm about to say is mostly assumptive conjecture on my part and isn't factual due to the lack of production details but i think looking at the roadmap between the end of danganronpa the animation and danganronpa 3 is telling of why so much of the content is rushed because it very clearly was here's how i think it went down danganronpa the animation released in 2013 the super danganronpa 2 anime was teased at the end of it with a waving monomy this is going to be our smoking gun for the rest of this assessment because i don't see any reason why they would show monomy to begin with if they had no intention of animating the second game assuming they didn't start work on the super danganronpa 2 anime immediately due to other obligations let's just say that pre-production drags them somewhere into early 2014 before work really begins especially considering they're doing work with ultra despair girls as well the team over at lurch worked on setting up and getting prepped for island time most of that year before kodaka or whatever a representative of his comes in and rubs the back of their neck before going yeah so we aren't doing that anymore danganronpa 3 is on by the time 2015 hits which is a pretty banner year for lurch in terms of production especially for a recently established and notably smaller production studio they have monster musume school life and a couple less notable series going on for that year along with assassination classroom season 2 an undefeated bahamit chronicle whatever that is slated for early 2016. as stated during the development history danganronpa 3 was announced by spring 2016 specifically in march the anime airs in july do you see where i'm going with this even with there being no super danganronpa 2 adaptation which i seriously doubt that's so little time for a 24 episode series and ova to be written voice acted concepted storyboarded animated composed for sound design produced mixed edited polished and quadruple checked before airing no matter how you slice it it's no longer than around a year and a half tops blu-ray sales for danganronpa the animation were also pretty pathetic that might have factored in but the end result looks like it would have been similar regardless danganronpa 3 was a spontaneous afterthought that was probably brought to life by people who were overworked and under budget you know like most anime a lot of this might have to do with kodaka spreading himself then revamping old ideas for new projects to the point where anything beyond an outline would start biting into his time elsewhere lurch was then in the exact same position forcing themselves to take every shortcut imaginable to get this thing off the ground and out the door they had a timetable and a deadline that needed to be met otherwise this project would conflict with literally everything else on their plate danganronpa 3 was an albatross around the neck of everyone's production schedule and it needed to be tossed away from them to move on to greener pastures i guess in that regard our justification for doing all of this aren't too dissimilar [Music] while digging into the minutia of what makes a story tick untick or worthy of ticking me off probably one of the most important factors to consider up front especially in a danganronpa story would be its characters the survival game genre is not new now and it certainly wasn't new when danganronpa first released what really managed to set the series apart from its contemporaries in that respect was obviously its twists on the typical genre conventions and its inventive wacky cast of characters future arc makes sure to bring back several of those characters that we know and love while also trying to introduce a slew of its own unique faces and does so to varying levels of success so let's get them out of the way so that we can all be caught up on what to expect to see around here returning from the trenches of dr-1's high school setting to have just as miserable of a time in their early twenties are of course makoto nagi who serves as the focus character yet again kyoko kirigiri who does a little bit of investigation but largely falls by the wayside aoe asahina who has no arc whatsoever yasuhiro hagakure who has even less than no arc whatsoever and byakuyatogami who is hardly even present and not even in the building most of the time also returning from ultra despair girls are komaru nagi who shares a spotlight with the dr1 lit professional tokofukawa and the most charming serial killer you know genocider show in their own standalone episode along with littlest dictator monica toa also returning from the same game honestly all of the dr1 cast gets either very little to do or often go completely backward from their previously established character arcs and in a way that feels just very thoughtless and flanderized the best thing about them here are honestly just their designs aside from niagara so i really just can't stand the short hair on him i know i made a stink about inconsistency with these before but i mean hey if i'm gonna be looking at them for a while i might as well say that they all look good between kirigiri and her sharp suit and hagakure with his more rugged bespectacled look there's a lot to love here for fans of hot people of course we also get our fair share of mascot rep in the form of the returning monokuma and monomy the latter of which retains a voice in takako sasuka but the former sadly does not yes indeed this is the first danganronpa project in which monakuma is not voiced by the legendary nobuyo oyama but for understandably good reason as around this time oyema began to struggle more noticeably with her dementia diagnosis even claiming at one point not to remember how she even did monokuma's voice thank you for your service ma'am you're a legend that will not be forgotten this left understandably big shoes to fill though which were then filled in by popular actress and singer tarako who i wouldn't necessarily say is my favorite take on the character but does a fine enough job filling in although it is pretty funny to have monokuma's first appearance framed as this uneasy moment where naegi recognizes his voice only to have said voice sound only vaguely like the previous performances this would also probably be a good time to mention before getting into the other characters that the dr3 dub is handled much like the prior funimation dub of danganronpa the animation stop this means that aside from a few key shared cast members like bryce papenbrook and johnny young bash many of the cast members are different and so is the terminology monokuma for example retains his anime-only voice of greg ayers as compared to the game's dub actor brian beacock and expresses his laughter through a truly displeasing as opposed to the more iconic pu-hu or u-poo very important distinctions there i promise this also means that the anime dubs retain the nomenclature of super high school level instead of ultimate and often have characters using each other's last names as opposed to their first this is a bit more familiar territory for me as a fan who predates the localizations but i can imagine that the inconsistency can be a bit irritating for people jumping from the english versions of the games to the anime seeing as this is a direct continuation of those games funimation at least had an excuse for these inconsistencies with their dub of danganronpa the animation because it was being recorded at the exact same time as the first game's localization was being done in an entirely different part of the country but this they had a couple years to get it figured out there probably should have been more thought for cohesion here um ain't you taking up a lot of time talking about this oh don't worry the other characters are so laughably shallow that it won't take long to breeze through them at all in the roster of original characters brought to the table we start with chisuyuki zomei the former super high school level housekeeper whose only personality traits appears to be nice and clean spotless walls we'll learn more about her and despair arc but don't hold your breath for that shallow end to get any deeper if you catch my drift next we have daisaku bandai the former super high school level farmer and owner of a squeaky voice that says random things as well as a questionably insensitive character design i wish i could tell you more about him but he's literally the first person aside from yukizome to die immediately how compelling the great gozu is the former super high school level wrestler and greatest fictional character to ever exist why does he wear that bull mask what were his wrestling days like we literally have no idea because they never elaborate and also he dies super early but he's stacked as hell and good at pep talks provided they don't kill you with an earth-shattering back clap so for my money he's the best everybody else go home juzo sakakura is the former super high school level boxer whose entire character is that he's gruff and hot-headed and punches real good often for the sake of munichata who he has a huge crush on because that's his only other notable character trait being the gay guy ironically enough kodaka apparently issued a public apology to junichi suabe who played sakakura for all the hate he received on the character's behalf noting that in development he was basically made to be hated for the way he treats naegi and ko but that he was at his most popular when his feelings from munakata came up that sure is a whole mess that we don't have the time to unpack right now kazuwa tengan is the founder of the future foundation having previously served as the director of hope's peak before jin kirigiri now only currently serving as captain of the jimmy neutron hairstyle enthusiasts club he's one of the few characters i have more to say about later so i'll save that for then kohichi kizakura was originally the homeroom teacher of class 77 before his job was taken by yuki zomei and served mostly as a hope's peak talent scout before moving on to the future foundation later of the few more fleshed out characters in this roster he has at least something going for him and that he was a longtime friend of jinns who feels something of a responsibility toward looking out for his daughter as a result he's also something of an aloof fellow who sure does love his alcohol but that's about all and he won't stop wearing that stupid hat so doc points for that kyousuke munakata oh boy is the former super high school level student council president and vice chairman of the future foundation in the current day he's a pragmatic stoic and determined individual who basically thinks all despair and traces of it should be killed without mercy in order to snuff out all whispers of the tragedy once and for all he's sort of the primary foil for naegi's more optimistic collectivist way of looking at things and serves as something of an antagonist for much of future arc again we'll get more into him later miyaya gekko-gehara is the former super high school level therapist or at least she was considering the gekko-gahara we see in the anime is literally just a robot who never speaks the real gekko-gohara dies before the events of the anime and is promptly replaced by an infiltrating puppet created by monika toa so there literally isn't anything to say about her we don't learn pretty much anything about the real person she was at all so check that one off the list rurika ondo is the former super high school level confectioner basically the dollar store knockoff of sdr2's sayonji and that her entire character basically consists of the mean girl persona with even flimsier justification for it and look i'm shallow i like mean girl characters who are tragically bad at communication but i do need a little more substance than this to actually care and you'd think the groundwork was there considering she's permanently attached at the hip to her boyfriend sonosuke izai the former super high school level blacksmith but his only character traits are eating rurika's candy and being her boyfriend he barely even has dialogue that doesn't amount to yes honey and their entire dynamic can basically be summed up as i'm tired of being in a life or death situation you want to make out and nothing else ryota mitorei is the former super high school level animator his entire character aside from being scared and looking like a little victorian boy who would die if you gave him an ipad is pretty much solely depicted in despair arc so i'm leaving the onus of explaining what his deal is on austin's shoulders until later and last but not least is psycho kimura the former super high school level pharmacist constantly wearing a medical mask to hide her brace face psycho is a worldly sickly little gremlin who does genuinely want to help people but is a pretty big pushover sharing some long time resentment with rurika over some business that happened between them that we'll get to later i don't tend to go out of my way to mention all of the 10 years of the japanese dr voice cast because if we sat here spouting off interesting trivia about all their other notable roles we'd be here quite literally all day but i think it's important that you know that she's voiced by saki fujita otherwise known as the sampled voice behind the sensational cybernetic pop star and creator of minecraft herself hatsune miku and there isn't even a single rolling girl reference in this anime and that's the real travesty she can also roid out on super pills and turn into sonic the werehog but don't worry about it and with that our stage is set we have all of these super interesting characters i'm sure i definitely won't be left wondering why we even bothered introducing half of them by the end of this but before we can get into exactly how and why their shockingly red blood will be spilled we first need to dial back to some people we've met before or at least i think we did though i certainly wouldn't have been able to tell by the way that they act [Music] danganronpa characters often fall into the trap of being boiled down to a few character traits and kicking any greater nuance out the door for the sake of its narrative or a numerous amounts of salacious fan fiction depending on who you ask while the latter can sometimes be a crime worth committing i can't say the same for when despair arc takes the essence of some of the most layered characters in the series and rings them out until they're left as a thin mangled pulpy shell of their former selves that's the character that's not the character it might be true that some members of super danganronpa 2's cast didn't reach anywhere near the heights of the standouts in that game but despair arc misses every opportunity it has to expand upon their roles and flesh them out believe it or not half of the anime that's supposed to be all about the background of how super high school level despair came to be doesn't actually keep all that much focus on the members of that group instead leaving class 77 sidelined in favor of developing characters that are meant to play a greater role in future or characters that have already been developed prior and don't need further extrapolation one literally having been explained to death twice this would all be well and good if there was any sort of balance or juxtaposition between the two casts but with the exception of yuki zomei a few brief run-ins with juzo and seiko and a smattering of meteorite going through the worst case of bystander effect i've seen since the seinfeld finale it doesn't even try to make the attempt all that convincing i'm going to be avoiding talking about a few key players here because they have their own sections down the line and i'd rather leave my bitching to when those [ __ ] are more relevant to the conversation much like in the games some characters and their motivations are more relevant than others and i don't think breaking them down to their bare essentials more than the anime already does would do us much good right now hinata kamakura komida thing one thing two the cast of future and her are just going to have to hold tight they will all have their time under my fire poker soon enough for now let's cross a bunch of names off our laundry list of soon to be island resort sweepstakes winners first name picked in the lottery is worst execution in danganronpa history winner mikan tsumiki i hope you got a kick out of the constant fan service she got in that game because that's all she amounts to here she's given a couple moments of arbitrary usefulness when it comes to diagnosing stress illness with imposter or being the first to follow the junko's nefarious emotional ponzi scheme but otherwise it's your usual bash vest mixed with innuendo and eye candy oh she's clumsy oh she has sexual trauma oh nobody likes her because she's useless beyond her body laugh let's go ahead and get terry territory with hanamura out of the way too while we're on the subject of somehow changing for the worse i can't believe that i'm actually saying this because i hate this slimy udon mascot looking [ __ ] as much as anybody else but at the very least in super danganronpa 2 he was given passion and pride for his talent and cared about his family he arguably even has a sense of moral standards granted that came after he tried to core sony into dubious activities but i would rather go through his free time events on repeat for the next 20 years then watch him prepare aphrodisiacs for doping and threaten to pass that he spouts double entendres brings on the meat bone for scenes requiring food lusts after magazine mizono and says celebrity names in shock oh right hiyoko sayonji about as crass and cruel as usual but we do actually get to watch her puberty take place in real time by which i mean it just happens while yuki zomei is out in the reserve course something that she's supposed to be involved in doesn't happen to her and instead she gets pooped on by a rabbit next mahiru koizumi is a character you would think would be more prevalent along with a few of her cohorts due to something very particular that involves her but really all she does is stand around unaware of what's really going on with the situation even when she's watching the events go down right before her very eyes she's kind of an odd duck love of my life ibuki miota makes faces and axes comedic relief maybe even screams a bit when required she's not involved in that event either but really i don't think i can bring myself to complain when she's one of the few that come away from this ordeal with my respect for them still left intact fuyuhiko kuzuriu and peko pekoyama have one dialogue together about the incident and it otherwise does not affect them or the school in any way kuzuru's job is to look badass and imposing in a couple shots maybe talk a guy down and get kabobbed pekkoyama's job is to act as some last resort muscle at komida's behest when they find junko's secret lair their roles are amped up a tad during 2.5 but otherwise they're functionally only there to make pictures that go hard akane owari and nekumarunidai are another package deal you'll rarely see them apart from one another and you definitely won't see them being useful they spar hard enough to destroy school property give each other goo eyes when hopped up on love potion and mutually active piss-poor disguises for the writer's fetishes or i guess in need eyes case it would be poor because that is yet again another joke driven right into the ground as far as the muscle woman stuff goes i can't say anything impostor is actually given a beefed up role as they establish a camaraderie with the other real member of the class ryota mitrai while he's busy slaving himself away to make the perfect ghibli bootleg impostor takes his place and no one is the wiser even though they look completely different and there shouldn't be a way their classmates haven't ever seen mitarai before their relationship is oddly sweet and it's one of the few things in despair i find enjoyable that said i'm not sure how they get away with starting the school year as togami and nobody seems to notice when he's just gone from the roster and reappears the next semester later on they reveal themselves when the going gets tough and pledged their allegiance to their classmates wanting to help by any means necessary and that's so crazy but nobody really gives a [ __ ] kazuichi soda almost makes his nist translation efforts seem tolerable [Music] when i think about how other people who only know him from the dubs hate him this is the version of him that i see in my mind he's a socially inept quippy obsessive unmotivated cowardly punching bag whose greatest achievement is the fact that he can recreate his extremely detailed sprites in real time what what do you mean i can't say that sued demonetized refund discount ugh fine tanaka the forbidden one is eccentric as ever even going as far as to change his name to suit his current mood the call of the wild aids him in cleaning classrooms and somehow getting real bears inside of them it stands to reason that his occult powers must be doing something to his mind if he actually thinks that whippy dip haircut is an upgrade sonia never mind and that's all the old gang i can talk about right this moment they don't amount to much and instead often act as filler to their own prelude it's a shame that almost all of the development that was noted in the prior games and even sometimes within danganronpa 3 itself doesn't care to be capitalized on there's something to be said about how even hope's peak loses its luster when the students don't even necessarily have to take classes or care about their education despite being accepted into a prestigious school to begin with there was an entire playground to toy with and the grand majority of the time we can't even get these guys out of the classroom much less involved in their own downfall um isn't it a little unreasonable to assume that every character in such a bloated cast could get decent screen time to begin with that was a problem with danganronpa the animation too they did the best they could with the time they had the difference between danganronpa 3 and danganronpa the animation is that danganronpa 3 was supposedly made with the format in mind first and foremost if you're going to put this story to the screen then you need to commit to the project that you're taking on despair was sold as a prequel to the events of the games and it winds up being that in name only it takes place before everything else but almost completely disregards the cast affected by these drastic shifts in their lives the most and instead takes the path of least interesting resistance to get them to where they have to be maybe it is asking too much to see junko work down each of them one by one but at the very least the series could have played ball with the ideas that its source material set in motion but didn't naegi say outright that they were brainwashed ask me that again in like a few hours anyway this is where we part ways into the not so distant future everyone else i could have mentioned like jin kirigiri natsumi and sato are either so irrelevant that i can talk about them when they come up or in the case of the mainstay no shows i have too much to say about them and i don't want to take up all of our time here when i could be taking up all of our time there besides there's this new game show i've been dying to watch i hear they've got this sweet gimmick it's like that one game yeah danganronpa how'd you know [Music] this is dengan rampa so of course we gotta have a game to play right yes indeed despite the fact that kodaka swore his impetus behind writing future arc was another killing game would be too painful to put the old characters through he went ahead and uh did it anyway yeah that sure makes a lot of sense you know what makes about as much sense the way the game actually works you see monokuma gives the whole roll out when he appears again for the first time at the beginning basically everyone has these little bracelets on their wrists which give them a specific action that they're forbidden from doing if they do it anyway it will inject a lethal poison into them which kills them instantly other than that everything goes in a pretty short order anime convenient cut down of the typical dr formula to make room for all that nothing that happens between rounds we've excised the need for free time investigations or even indeed trials leaving a lot of running around in dimly lit sickly green boring hallways for our trouble in this game the basic formula is just at the end of each round that someone's wristband will give them sleepy juice which knocks them out during that period of time the supposed infiltrating attacker or shall i say sussy imposter will be roused from their sleep and given the opportunity to basically kill whoever the game will continue in this manner unless the attacker is exposed basically making future arc a giant complicated game of among us and no i'm not kidding of course we actually learn later that every time someone is woken it's a different person who has then shown the brainwashing video created by junko enoshima and forced to kill themselves so that's certainly something it effectively means that there isn't really a clear reason for all these killings to be happening or at least not one that we can conceive of until our later mastermind reveal but that's a whole other can of worms to get into and we have to save some of the more dramatic things worth getting angry over until later don't we the forbidden actions themselves also just seem kind of like a waste of potential as most of them are either pretty obvious fodder commands like witnessing an act of violence which immediately serves to kill bandai in the first few minutes of the game or seemingly completely random like psychos letting anyone step on your shadow or rurika's someone leaving the playfield which only serves to make the story more dramatic by planting a red herring about whether rubrica is involved in its creation spoilers she isn't so it doesn't amount to anything some you could argue are at the very least somewhat ironic like sakakura is preventing him from using his talent or munakat as being that he can't open doors which if you were being generous you could interpret as some kind of biting critique of how munakata can't open the door to the future through his overly pragmatic methods or whatever but that's presuming the staff thought that hard when they were perfectly content with other commands like being pinned to the ground for a three count or opening your left hand the best ones in my opinion are nagi's hilarious inability to run in the halls which i'm sure was just for convenience and getting him to be a bit more vulnerable to all the action in the story but reads to me like one last posthumous gotcha from our favorite hall monitor and of course kirigiri's which is passing the fourth time limit with makoto nagi alive considering how close they are and how genuinely deeply their dynamic has been built up across the series so far since the beginning this is an excellent mean as hell command to give her and would only have made her apparent death later more poignant if they well we'll get to it when we get to it i think you could have taken all the commands to a level more like this one not all of them would have had to be super deep but they could have at the very least been more personal and touched on deeper aspects of the characters but i guess that would have required most of these characters to have deep aspects to touch on at the very least i can hand it to the anime team for trying to come up with something a bit more expedient overall when it comes to a killing game framework to make dr3 as an original anime story have to worry less about packing a giant plot into its run time but the trend of still having a huge cast kind of prevents this expediency from being taken full advantage of anyway we constantly have to cut back and forth between them so much that very few of them get any real development to speak of and even the ones who have the benefit of being fleshed out elsewhere come out of it seeming only a fraction as compelling as the previous game's characters did the lack of downtime also gives us no time to really breathe soak things in or have the intimate moments these characters really need in order for us to actually give a care about their deaths and that's really a deal breaker for a series like dr whose entire identity rests upon its ability to make you care for the characters it puts through the ringer the forbidden actions at that rate add almost nothing aside from cute ideas and ultimately end up detracting from what could have been more focused time spent on fleshing these characters out and giving us a reason to attach to them beyond small blurbs and introductory captions unfortunately i'd say both parts of dr3 have a tendency to gloss over the important details [Music] twilight syndrome murder case as you'll recall is the second motive given by monokuma during super danganronpa 2. it's based on the actual video game series of the same name and was used because spike chunsof had the rights to the series at the time along with certain members of danganronpa staff having worked on those games prior like akihiko ishizaka and even mixmaster masafumi takata in universe it's a retelling of an event involving the game's cast that actually happened and is presented as hope's peak's first major public incident or at least their first in a very long time as well as the major event that takes about six members of this cast from an idyllic school life into something far more recognizable to us tell me did anyone happen to figure out why this only gets about 15 minutes of screen time no then we still have a problem the events of twilight syndrome are set up as early as episode 2 and the post-credits singer at the end of my imperished heart for you in which natsumi kuzuri was revealed as a living human person to the reserve course class and the audience alike you see this and you start rolling around your sweaty palms in anticipation like oh yeah this is where it gets going then you remember that this arc is only 11 episodes long and that there's no possible way that they can fit a topic that took hours of game time into even a couple episodes worth of material without making some absolutely diabolical cuts for the floor to admire and as soon as episode 3 hits they become apparent nigh instantaneously most of twilight syndrome's story is tossed out of the window from the get-go as stated during their introductions girl a girl b and girl d have absolutely nothing to do with this interpretation of the narrative not even a shot in which they eventually discover the dead girl's corpse together with girl e guy f and his best friend only have a couple short moments together before and after recognizing the corpse in the morgue and then we're told that gurley's body is found four days later hinata tries to pick up the slack and get some answers but he stopped in his tracks by disney's favorite representation tactic who tells him to be a good little poor boy and make sure to drink his oval team so if we aren't actually going to see the bulk of twilight syndrome take place what do we get instead well danganronpa 3's answer is that there's a greater focus put on an unlikely dichotomy of similar aspirations hinata and natsumi's desires to join the main course at any cost on paper this doesn't seem half bad even though hinata and natsumi have less than zero chemistry at the route to work from they could have made a compelling argument about the links that they were willing to go to for their goals and juxtapose them against one another they try this but it never comes off as anything more than padding out the obvious with more of the obvious every time these two speak together on screen it's not to build an understanding between them it's just a manner of handing red flags back and forth until the inevitable finally comes to pass natsume is willing to get into the main course with her brother and prove herself even if it means that she has to kill another student to get there and that's me really hates that old fuddy daddy mahirukoizumi so she's on the kuzuriyu clan most wanted but uh oh get this another reserved courser named sado loves koizumi because they're girl best friends we start getting real soapy when sado thinks that natsume is about to make a check her ass can't cash so to keep her gal pals on her in the clear she goes to the gravel bank and makes a few deposits on natsumi's behalf i'm not sure if this is a take or not but i always thought the inclusion of a third party in twilight syndrome was a bit of a baffling choice and something that holds the second case back for me wouldn't it be more compelling if koizumi actually committed the murder to begin with have that loop back around why pekko decides to take her out at her master's unspoken behest because for whatever reason koizumi viewed her actions as the only right thing to do maybe but whether i like it or not sato exists and she needs to have a reason to go through with her swimsuit pervert cover-up and that reason is man i couldn't tell you she thinks koizumi's hot and likes her little bento boxes their relationship isn't given any weight even less than he not anatsumi's and i think if anyone's out here paying prices it's us for not being able to get into sato's head a little none of this comes together because we're never given any legitimate explanation in or out of the anime to believe natsumi and sato's suspicious hatred for one another we start with it already established even though natsumi couldn't have been in class more than a couple days with how she suddenly begins venting to hinata about her issues of self-worth of course it stands the reason that sato might just not like her surly attitude but everything involving nats me and koizumi is like it's picked just because koizumi has to be the main focal point of this narrative like she was in murder case natsume is given no reason to target her and sato is given no reason to be attached to her to the point of willingly white knighting so hard that it sends her spiraling with murderous intent even when natsumi makes obviously empty threats against sato her mind immediately jumps to protecting koizumi even though we don't grasp why that might be necessary even hinata says that it's just intimidation on natsumi's end and she doesn't refute it so it just makes sato come off as insane because natsumi needs to be killed it's almost like she goes out of her way to make herself suspicious when questioned too look at that crazed glitter in her eyes she's not even trying to hide it she thought it would be fun what's a little murder between friends she has no other motive beyond this happened to the video game so it needs to happen here um is that not what you've been asking for this entire time pick a side my guy either you want to see what happened or you don't it's not like you're missing details it's fine that we don't get to see all of twilight syndrome play out beat by beat but it's not fine that when we're presented an opportunity to get deeper context that it isn't taken if they wanted to keep the actual events on the sidelines so we can learn more about why it happened then that would be one thing but we don't know why it happened even the few concrete details that we got about how the murder took place or tossed out the window while that's me being in the reserve course to begin with isn't an egregious foul given that we never learned what distinction of hope's peak she was in during the case her being killed in the main course building's music room is an immutable fact we see it with the photo of her body it's proof it's used as decisive evidence if you'll recall in danganronpa 3 apparently she was killed in the reserve course buildings music room that they have for some inexplicable reason it's not like these people have talents they're just there to do mind-numbing busy work and pay out the ass for it how do the other girls even find her body naturally if this isn't even the building they go to school in who cares they aren't a part of this whatsoever all a farewell to all futures provides the audience with are means to ends where characters are tossed around and given any feelings necessary to propel the plot to where it needs to go regardless of how much sense it makes and i can hear that little devil bear in the background so i'll just make this argument for him well you've played the game so why should there be time wasted on showing what you know because you're going out of your way to give us more and having more of something in a story demands extrapolation of meaning all right twilight syndrome happened and got covered up now what nothing twilight syndrome has no consequence on the greater narrative of danganronpa 3 or the characters mindsets beyond a few of them looking a little sullen before their exams it doesn't become a lead-in to the start of the parade and it doesn't begin any character's path towards super high school level despair not even the three characters who it affects the most it's treated like a footnote when it should have been an encyclopedia entry and it's your first real taste of wasted effort for zero payoff at the very least i can find a shred of comfort in the fact that i'm not the only person that has to deal with that [Music] i don't think it should be a controversial statement to say that future arc has some pretty weird pacing even at the best of times despite the fact that its first episode is decently compact and introduces the actual conflict pretty well everything else sort of becomes a mixed bag the second episode is almost entirely composed of an explanation of the rules of few arguments and everyone having a nap it's left off on a cliffhanger of oh my god asahina died only to pedal backwards with the literal weirdest fake knife prank i've ever seen in my life like seriously what is that thing where was the knife it looked like it was lodged in her but then it retracted was she holding it in place with her boobs i'd say a good 50 or more of this plot is largely taken up by people walking around and occasionally having arguments with each other maybe a fight or two i know that kodaka talked about wanting a more psychological experience but psychological does tend to mean more than just we argued it has this weird tendency to kind of drag its feet along until suddenly holy [ __ ] giant sword fight whoa oh my god look at that blood dude this is hardcore oh um now we're completely leaving all this behind to go to the ultra despair girls characters this amounts to nothing but another red herring cool when you put the whole thing together to be fair it does seemingly scan in theory you can see the connective tissue between certain beats despite how ultimately convenient a lot of them turn out to be at the end but what you need to remember too is that the expected way people are meant to watch this was on and off again between episodes of despair arc where even more of nothing happens a lot of the time the pace of this thing ultimately ends up feeling pretty glacial when you get down to it constantly feeling as though it's prolonging the inevitable and not even dancing around it with proper development for its characters i don't think this is necessarily the show's biggest sin or anything comparatively it's actually not too worth talking about but it does ultimately make you question whether the actual run time is worth all this or could have been more focused if it hadn't been stretched taffy thin the red herrings do also kind of get annoying after a while i know any good mystery has them but the mystery here is so weird and unsatisfying that i don't really find any joy in trying to pick it apart in the first place much less waste time being misled by it i think the writing staff again probably just bit off more than they could chew by feeling like they had to have a lot of characters here like in previous entries padding it out to 16 just because it's the danganronpa number if they had focused on their more important players and found extraneous ones to shave off like bandai izioi or dare i even say it the great gosu i think they probably could have found a better middle ground between their ultimate length and perhaps giving more spotlight and gravity to the characters they feel were essential to getting the story the way it needed to be i feel like this is probably the same issue that plagued udg a lot of the time which was a lack of creative oversight and middle management basically allowing the scope of certain things to run rampant and grow beyond the point they reasonably should have speaking of things that needed some double checking [Music] there's a lot about danganronpa 3 that gets grading the more you pay attention to the details it provides but what's worse is when even the most surface level view of what's going on is just as unsavory as everything else certain elements of these scripts feel almost like they were made to reach for the lowest common denominator to find the easiest way out of a predicament for the sake of convenience in that vein i feel like there's someone who needs no introduction that loves to stick his nose in whenever this particular conversation comes around nagitoko maida everybody danganronpa's biggest poster boy outside of mr the kuma is back in action in the even further past to shed some light on this situation we all know komida well his name is practically synonymous with the series he spawned from and he has quite the reputation beyond it as a popular symbol of sexy men everywhere and general meme culture even if you've been living under a rock your whole life you know this guy's crazed glare hands and at least a few of his mikumiku dance moves but we're not just going to talk about komaida on his own here we need to get neck deep into his super high school level [ __ ] and really discuss what makes him who he is what describes komida on a base level many people would just cut their losses and call it luck and those people deserve to be dragged out into the street and shot like his parents that was a joke but what isn't a joke is the fact that komaida really is a lightning in a bottle type character that cannot ever be replicated not even by his own creators sorry to give you the truth a few months early oma fans but it's what my man would have wanted settling komeido with only any one attribute of his character is doing him a disservice because all of his worldviews and toxic tendencies swirl together in a crude mix of hope and despair that all define him equally his self-assuredly worthless good luck is only comparable to his bad look his conceptual hopes can only be brought together by immeasurable despair in the use of stepping stones to reach that potential even his self-loathing in the face of the super high school levels he loves can only be dragged out because of his immense ego affronted to those who are unworthy of his grace he's a walking paradox of righteousness in action and in purpose an undeniable antagonist who is willing to sacrifice anything if it means that those who he sees as worthy grow stronger even at the cost of his own pain body and life he is unwavering no matter what position he's put in and those who dispute his warped version of the truth might as well be dead to him not only that but he recognizes what these parts of himself do and uses them to his advantage to try and achieve radical outcomes most would think are impossible in danganronpa 3 it appears as though the bog standard approach of not giving a [ __ ] is taken where comedic circumstances happen around him rather than because of him supposedly this was done just so that people could see more of what he's really like but as we just established komida shouldn't have an off switch to begin with i mean in sdr2 his memory has been removed and he is still trying to blow people up and stab them under tables it feels just like another way to keep him in or out of the way as the narrative demands it half the time he's literally running into his conflicts and the other half he simply knows what to do because he has good intuition about the situation that he's barely been a part of his classmates still hate him like they're supposed to but instead of having any justified reasons for it it's just for the simple purpose of him being a weirdo and somehow not because he wants to make their lives a living hell for the sheer principle of it you'd think that the guy whose go-to problem-solving solution is writing threatening notes and rigging explosives for terrorist attacks might have a bit more of a rap sheet with his peers but who knows maybe the komahina crowd were onto something and he just needs a hug let's take a look at a couple examples and figure it out during the melancholy surprise and disappearance of nagitoko maida we find out that everyone's really sad about the murders they assumingly didn't take part in whatsoever before their annual practical exams that keep them enrolled in the school komida taps into his inner white woman who's interested in astrology and feels that the vibes in the room are off going up to yugi zomei during her office hours and asking her to move the exams back so that everybody's hope can shine brighter than ever pause komaida would never do this not in a million years for him now would be the time to sink or swim if you can't measure up to the task because you're having a little depressive episode what about when the future comes out swinging with something greater this would be a despair that needs to be combated by a greater hope and kamaya would aim to achieve this even if it costs an arm and a leg your talent is useless to him if it can't be utilized effectively at any moment for any reason at that rate you're no better than a hobbyist who excels at spectacle you deserve to be cast out with the rest of the tools that will only amount to a higher level of innate mediocrity there's a pipe bomb in your mailbox nobody will ever love you get owned idiot but not to worry he has a plan b in his pocket or rather he buys himself a manner of finding a little preparation h from seiko kimura not sure how he readily knows how to get explosives yet he can't seem to find a drug repository but hey we don't know what kind of connections this guy has either way the little devil is tricking his way into the back under the guise of needing something to cure his constipation with or no he isn't because later we see him walking out thinking he has laxatives at the ready when in reality he took the reanimating serum meant for rurika who i don't feel like talking about see marcy i can do that too why would he do this though even though later him and seiko swap bags by accident he already had bombs planted all around the gym and had the ability to detonate them at will what were the laxatives for is it so everybody hauls ass to bring the browns to the super bowl and nobody gets hurt in the event that they all go off he's never cared about that before so i don't see why he would start now i'd go into a couple other lines of questioning but i don't want to make it harder for this video to stay monetized than it already will be it's bad enough that we have giant pomeranians running around destroying things like my ability to see any of these events with a shred of realism actually why bother with faking the need for a laxative at all couldn't he actually go to seiko for a legitimate reason like i don't know trying to find a way to continue saving off his brain cancer that didn't just stop happening to him even if we choose to never acknowledge it eventually through wacky shenanigans kameida does get the rest of the exams pushed back like he initially wanted king of all centrist jin geary only winds up suspending him until the next semester because he sees promise in his incredible luck while seiko izuy and rurika all become stepping stones through their expulsion though because komaeda had none of this planned his victory rings hollow the anime tries to force unlucky circumstances onto him but it doesn't work when everything technically goes to plan and he doesn't get to act upon its aftermath instead he's banished to walk naked in the desert after a plane crash and a piece of his backstory that notably happened before he was a student at the school and has been either inexplicably moved up on the timeline or repeated wholesale to oversell the bit when he comes back the next year in the worst reunion by chance he has all of the answer to this junko situation he's never heard of figured out and tells pekko to subdue another woman he shouldn't know and finds the secret statue entrance to junko's hentai dungeon beneath the school by complete accident on a hunch that he got from nothing but luck it's strange seeing him refer to his ability with so much reverence when he finds it to be such a waste sure it often works out in his favor he knows it does but he's never praised himself or the guidance of luck before then again he's also never wanted to take out junko enoshima before and he's raring to do that here after making a dramatic show of what he must have brought back from the newly instated hope's peak octagon he's so smug about the fact that he could be the one to take her out despite the fact that he's been shown multiple times to want more worthy opponents to oppose her than himself and maybe that's because she hasn't plastered her visage all over the world at large yet but i don't really think komida of all people is willing to point a gun at anyone other than himself to the anime's credit he does initially talk about this all being a test to see if junko's worthy of being a stepping stone to begin with but it still reads as unnecessary on his part he could get other people to do that for him if he plays his cards right but even though they can't stand him for no justifiable reason everyone in his class obviously seems willing to take him at his word even when they blamed him for everything going south beforehand nanome does vouch for him after the fact because she was there for everything but it's still too convenient for me that they just run out and go along with it maybe he should have just considered talking junko out of making her new friday night funkin mod instead of helping lead all of his friends right into a trap he should have probably guessed that that would happen if he's able to make predictions that would get hagakurei reading the cheeks this all culminates in a standoff with kamakura which also makes no sense considering that in chapter 0 neither of them recognize each other and talk about that moment being the first time they've ever met komeida's gun jams and kamikura uses his stand to perform time stop for long enough to will the pistol into his hands he claims that if it's good luck then that's something he has too which apparently just means that you have super powers granted komida's abilities did have drastic effects in the games but they were only feasible through proper planning and effort with the rest of the cast doing most of the heavy lifting for the outcome to naturally happen some of it may be from the power of fortune in his favor but just as much of it as simple action and reaction bad luck happens good luck happens a poor situation becoming a beneficial one in the long run here the action is that kamakura puts a bullet in komida's chest and the reaction is of course he had his student handbook in the exact right place at the exact right time and is almost admired by his aggressor for the very trait that he despises so much i'd call it fittingly ironic if there was a shred of self-awareness instead of just being a half-baked attempt to justify contrivance there's nothing that grounds komida anymore there are no ideals that he holds over the heads of these people that he's willing to enforce by any means necessary instead he's uses a shepherd that leads whatever group the writer needs into the plot slaughter machine for them to get cut into conflict mutton and looks slightly off-putting while doing it i really do wish that this is the last we had to say about this grangley twink but as usual he likes to leave loose ends for us to tie his special ova calls into question even more of what's already dumbfounding about his actions here and we can't talk about it without greater context instead i'll let my friend tell you about three of the little sheep that he allowed to escape the herd [Music] the relationship between certain characters before the events of their respective stories has created a lot of the most interesting drama in previous dr entries the heartbreaking weight of kuzurio's insistence that pakoyama be her own person in sdr2 the perhaps less impactful but still devastating context of naegi and mizeno's missed connection in middle school prior to them meeting in a situation that entirely robbed them of the chance to communicate healthily and of course the dreadfully tense sibling abuse narrative that follows the if version of igusaba all of these things prove that dr can handle these types of interpersonal conflicts well and with a surprising amount of nuance so it pains me to say that dr3's attempt in the characters of rubrica ando psycho kimura and sonosuke zayoi was largely a complete failure to start from the top when we first meet these three there is a palpable tension between kimura and ando but there's hardly any actual tension coming from izuy like i said before izuo's largest flaw as a character is not unlike many others in future in that he's largely forgettable and doesn't tend to serve much purpose aside from standing around and in his specific case being yes man to his girlfriend um perhaps it could be part of that commentary you love so much izioi is ultimately punished for having no free will of his own while ando pushes her own onto other people and similarly suffers from her hubris because she can't trust anyone but herself and can't hold on to her own meaningful connections meanwhile an outcast like kimura never stands a chance in the society that she's been thrust into lord of the fly style and honestly i think that's kind of an interesting angle i don't know how intentional i believe it to be but with what dr has done in the past i could certainly see it at the very least the only problem is that no matter how interesting these ideas are on paper the execution is ultimately what tends to inform their quality if you'll recall i found a lot of ideas from ultra despair girls surprisingly insightful in their conception and even sometimes in their execution particularly with how its main antagonist was characterized but at the same time i do still find the ultimate execution flawed and that's what prevented it from tapping into its true fullest potential in my eyes in dr3 by contrast it feels like they barely even tried to tap into that latent potential and the whole storyline comes across as undercooked and phoned in as a result because obviously there's some reason as to why ando and kimura distrust each other and i hate each other so much despite being co-workers right well yes there is a big part of this is covered in despair so you'll have to forgive me for cross-contaminating so to speak but there's just no real way to discuss these two without doing so and yeah why don't we just say these two for expediency because izioi never really becomes involved beyond a surface level despite his direct involvement with the incident in question anyway ever since childhood these two have known each other because kimura once used her talent to try to save two dogs involved in a hit-and-run unfortunately while one passes the other survives and just so happens to belong to a young rurika ondo this moment would establish their friendship but also would ultimately establish the pattern of behavior their relationship follows namely that ondo expects to receive things from kimura and almost never gives anything in return for it which to an extent is fine for kimra since she's not really expecting in exchange but this becomes more and more obviously one-sided when she can't even manage to get a thank you for her trouble anymore the favors become more and more obviously for ando's own singular benefit helping her with things she's seemingly too lazy to want to do on her own or things that will give her an unfair advantage over others time and again she constantly asks things of kimura that she knows the shy friendless weirdo will provide her for the privilege of remaining even in name only friends after all kimura isn't exactly a paragon of socialites otherwise with that kind of exchange a streak of unspoken insidiousness often lurks of course there's this mutual understanding at least to kimura that if she ceases to be useful to ando or disappoints her there's a high likelihood that their interests will stop intersecting and she'll lose one of the only friends she's got we do ultimately learn that apparently ando only asked so much of kimura because she trusted her but even if that's entirely sincere she doesn't actually do much to convey her gratitude or even indeed imply that she cares at all by a certain point all of this is only emphasized by her constant insistence that kimura eat her candy as it's the only thing ando has confidence in herself about seeing as it's her specialty and the talent she defines herself by unfortunately there's a couple of problems here number one is that kamera has some kind of illness that constantly requires her to take medicine this medicine also interacts extremely badly with sugar and thus kimura's body can't really handle it with the underlying implication being that she might even die if she tried to consume it or otherwise be extremely ill even knowing this ando treats the issue extremely dismissively to such an extent that i honestly find the whole conflict surrounding it really forced it feels like they needed a seed planted early on for why kimura feels so constantly underappreciated by ondo and why ando herself doesn't ever fully trust kimra and she says that she doesn't trust anyone who won't eat her candy but if the refusing party literally physically can't then why should there even be a conflict at all sure i recognize that emotions aren't always particularly logical and neither are fears but this underlining the basis of their burgeoning dislike for one another is just honestly kind of laughable to me when the writers are capable of explaining it however they see fit well imagine it from her perspective chief keemer is an expert pharmacist right can't she just make something to counteract the effect even if just temporarily that creates a reasonable conflict right i mean maybe but we're kind of getting into speculative head canony territory there who knows if kimura might have been able to make something for it maybe she could but maybe it would still make her super ill afterwards and it's still just as unpleasant i mean imagine if kimra were throwing it all up afterward ando still wouldn't be very happy with that either i would imagine but then again maybe the risk is so great that she fears even trying it in case something could go wrong or ultimately lead to her accidental death as a result anyway it's just difficult to say if it would be that simple especially because it doesn't really feel like the writer's accounted for this seeing as it never even comes up even as something ondo herself might have expressed suspicion about it's completely left by the wayside so that makes me sooner think that they just didn't even think about that and therefore counted on all of the dramatic weight to come from that itself which like i said is just so unbelievably petty that it doesn't in my opinion at least form the necessary backbone for a drama like theirs to be as effective or hard-hitting as they seem to want it to be that's also not accounting for the second point of contention that ondo's candy is like insanely addictive apparently like so much so that it's been likened to drugs and later on we even see that some of her candy is literally capable of influencing or manipulating people like when she force feeds sakakura and commands him to attack people if he wants more of the chocolate of course he is broken out of his trance but if one of my friends came to me with their candy when my health problems already prevented me from having them and i knew that she was capable of literally brainwashing people with their narcotic tear addictiveness then honestly why the hell would i ever consider eating it it's just ludicrous of course like i said this is only the starting basis of their conflict there is another reason why these two are at odds and that's where despair arc really comes into focus you see kimura was at one point giving laxatives to comeida who we've already talked about in the previous section and this led to a goofy cartoon mix-up which while part of our favorite white-haired freaks already established ongoing character assassination also led to kimura's revitalizing drugs being mixed up with said laxative hi everybody this is editing marcy i'm just cutting in here real quick to say that i actually mixed this up a little bit the bag thing is more about uh psycho accidentally taking the bomb uh the mix up with the drugs actually happens earlier because komida accidentally takes the performance enhancing thing instead of the laxative that he's supposed to take so when ando comes and pressures kimura like i want your performance enhancing drug to do my test and kimura is like oh i was gonna use that for mine she ends up taking the laxative by mistake and it screws her over and yeah it's really stupid this means that kamida's silly little bomb threat kit ended up in kimura's hands when she went to assist ando with her plan to dope up her evaluation judges and if she weren't already exposed for cheating because she wasn't confident enough in her own base abilities to pass this grows more wildly out of control when it gives all of the judges the squirts ondo of course immediately jumps to the conclusion that kimura has betrayed her deliberately already expecting bad things of her for the candyslight despite the fact that she's otherwise been completely obedient to anto to a night obsessive extent before now and kimura jumps through hoops to try to prove her sincerity by rummaging through her bag unexpectedly revealing the bombs this gets the judges thinking that the entire trio of them were behind the bomb threat and this ultimately leads to them all being expelled which makes the rift of resentment between them grow even more hey maybe this could have been avoided if ando just oh i don't know used her mind controlling tear candy to get the judges to pass her why didn't she do that um well maybe she didn't know how to do that back then then don't just put it in the story out of nowhere later either it's a part of her talent or it isn't pick one anyway now here we are in the present day with them trying to kill each other over their suspicions having all started with an argument over candy and one of the single goofiest ooc comedy moments known to man this just sucks as an establishing conflict which doesn't make it any easier to take seriously when kimura goes warehog mode to attack them during the ensuing conflict of course kimura's forbidden action is discovered and ondo tries to take full advantage of it leading to this scene where kimra smashes all of the lights in the room and tries to break through the glass to tear onto a part as the pinkett watches on in horror kimra pounding with bloody hands at the glass the visual is striking and powerful for something ultimately so stupid as the glass shatters they both ask themselves internally where everything between them went wrong and with better writing this moment really could have shined as it stands in the final product though it stands as a testament to dr3's narrative trappings of ascribing depth and weight to something that never at any point truly earned it trying to milk my tears out of a dry well that they never bothered to give you any reason to fill to begin with unfortunately even with all of the necessary ingredients even with all of the necessary build up weight and context to make you care about something it seems like they couldn't even get that right either [Music] contrary to whatever belief you may have gotten from the earlier portions of this video even though i've been ragging on him the whole time hajime hinata and by extension nizuru kamakura are my favorite characters in this franchise i understand that being attached to the character you're sort of meant to project on to over the course of the game might set off a few alarms and in truth some of that love may come from me indulging in a spot of the ye old projection but i'm of the belief that the best protagonists embody the ideas and the thematic core of a work i set it in that interview for my comic and i'll say it again here if i don't find your protagonists the most compelling then why are they the protagonists it's a simplification on my end especially when sometimes the ability to fit into your snazzy projection boots is the appeal side characters can often be more interesting and at times even have more sticking power but that's because the weight of the main events are shouldered by the herculean might of a story's chosen few they have to act as an axis that everything else revolves around other characters shouldn't be able to exist as competently without them call it a matter of taste if you must i've definitely got hardcore protagonist disease but hinata and kamakura both tick all the boxes both are objectively emblematic of the opposing extremes that danganronpa will go to in order to get its messages across and i think that nuance can get lost in translation sometimes literally from the very beginning hinata is put in a different light to the other protagonists of this series unlike naieggy we don't know much about his life outside of what he thinks to himself about his situation and what he tells the other characters in reaction to their antics and while naiki is completely ordinary in almost every way hinata is immediately shown to be more contemplative and passionate about what he thinks he's far more of an introverted personality and many portions of the game even when he takes center stage to perform his protagonistic duties like in trials show him taking a more down-to-earth realistic approach to what he does in stark contrast to his wild island mates in wilder situation the way i like to rationalize the difference is pretty simple naegi is like the id hinata is like the ego nayaki is inherently trusting optimistic kind-hearted and even brave while hinata is blunt thoughtful understanding pessimistic and honestly more than a little cynical at times while that might just be how his personality reads and you could argue it's just some added garnish to another typical everyman type super danganronpa 2 goes out of its way to constantly reinforce and re-contextualize him the reason he's like this is because he's someone who knows what the real world is like whether he recognizes it in the moment or not he's not on the same level as those around him and the weight of his own lack of self-respect was constantly spurned through a ceaseless doubt instilled into him from school culture this broad idea pushed that unless you give up everything to reach success then you are nothing pope's peak is the symbolic spitting image of the meat grinder that is the japanese education system where some people will work until they become shells of themselves in order to obtain unreachable goals hinata respects this lifestyle because he's told it's the best for him and he believed it so strongly that he was willing to give up everything to become something he wanted to be among its talented ranks above all else in his life because that is this universe's standard of excellence he viewed it as the only way to attain happiness in a future he can call his own leading him to succumb under the pressure and get molded into the embodiment of that cold cruel reality i'd argue more than any other character in this franchise that hinata embodies what the hope speaks saga's core thesis is that shouldering the weight of others and society's expectations at large is untenable and makes people miserable the best thing that we can do is be ourselves and be good to those closest to us in the hope that we can find a better way to live and despair arc throws all that meaning away in his first scene right out of the gate we're treated with the series showing us a surrealist montage of hinata's inner turmoil anxiously letting his festering self-doubt get to him as he just stands there doing nothing also this is absolutely a tangent but while writing this section i noticed there's a line in here that says he not as parents are stupid which like what a thing for hinata to think that other people would say about him i sort of wish it meant something the only other information we have about hinata's parents is that they can't afford the fees for keeping inaudible in the reserve course which is a part of why he considers going through with the steering committee's offers but i always thought that not knowing where hinata comes from was very intentional in showing us how removed and isolated he actually is and instead emphasized the relationships he makes along the way okay sidebar over i can't avoid talking about her forever but i can damn sure try to keep it to a minimum it's here that hinata is quite literally run into by chiaki nanome who as we previously stated is somehow real we will not be explaining this at all because she has to make like an [ __ ] fan fiction an imprint on hinata as soon as possible to start gaslighting the audience into thinking they have a believable relationship dynamic they have an elongated meat cute section where hinata tries to strike up a conversation about a video game anime is playing and she gets real excited knowing that there's someone out there who not only knows about retro games but can even come halfway close to going through it as many times as she can and makes him promise to show her his skills sometime yukizome then comes barging in to collect an enemy for class and starts talking to hinata a little herself wondering if he's in the reserve course somehow nanami doesn't know what this is despite it being a fixture at the school for over a year and we get a brief exposition on how sad and boring the students are before hinata waxes a self-pity soliloquy about how the main core students aren't what he expected and how he wishes to have talent nanome tells him that having a talent doesn't make a difference and that normal people have the freedom to do and become anything they want which he then seemingly internalizes here's the issue having he not adhere this kind of reassurance at all butchers any valid reason he should have for going through with the zuru kamakura project to begin with he noticed far too level-headed and well adjusted to go through with something so drastic when it's obvious there's at least one person that cares about his well-being that's where his resolve comes from i know i'm making it sound like hinata shouldn't be given friendship or basic human empathy but danganronpa 3 constantly undermines the core of his identity his perceived lack of it nanami natsumi yuki zomei and tangen all latch onto him and while some of these interactions are minor they all paint a picture of hinata being a relevant personality instead of someone overlooked and ostracized by his school system nanome constantly tells him he has meaning natsumi spills her heart out to him yuki zomei offers him kindness and reaffirms everything nanami says tengen's elderly wisdom tells him that the kamikura project is a bad idea and offers him an out natsume may have been murdered but even that aspect should have given him pause because it happened due to her own pursuit of talent above the lives of others sure juzo kicks the [ __ ] out of him and tells him that he's scum for sticking his nose where it doesn't belong and his friends to be walk right through him in what might be one of the only good shots in this anime but there is still a shoddily made support system through it all there's still an enemy and all of hinata's agency in the story hinges on the idea of her approval he decides he wants to be zuru kamakura specifically for the sake of being able to make her proud and if we want to spend a little while in this blissful fantasy where that doesn't kneecap the legs his characters once stood on nanome doesn't even want him to do it he not have ruins his life to even have the chance to become acceptable to others and decides to take that risk on a whim because some beefcake put dirt in his eye and a girl he spontaneously grew attached to for a few days told him that she enjoys his company he does it for her because him anatomy are ship bait and this was their half-assed bid at trying to turn them into something more interesting now i'm not a betting man but if i were go [ __ ] yourself this is just one side of the coin however we now have to get into the dastardly alter ego that is izuru kamakura in all prior contexts kamakura is portrayed as an uncaring god figure the likes of which have never been replicated he's hope's peak's top secret exploitative pet project and a monument to all of the series sins standing at a precipice between intrigue and apathy he performs actions just to see what their outcomes will be and is often disappointed in their results he's not so much an antagonist as he is a force of nature with no obstacles that can stand in his way ever giving him challenge his path of destruction paved through an indomitable will to exist and a lack of empathy for anyone around him because he knows he is superior by design all of this ends up being stifled in danganronpa 3 to pull another run around the hope versus despair gauntlet where kamakura takes an interest in seeing what the world desires more and which path he should follow spurned when junko and mukuro break him out of the bunker where they shoot 9-inch nails music videos and try to court him onto their side by letting him see despair at work and a special surprise that they've set up for him hey remember when i said that there was a test in the summary pop quiz what does kamakura do during the student council killing game that's right he lingers around in the background in a pose until he force shoves who at first glance is seemingly the final survivor into his own chainsaw but his headless body still has a loaded gun inside a visual reference also junko catching him on tape and leaking his exploits out to the reserve course he not only doesn't participate in the cornerstone incident of this franchise anymore but it's also implied that all of his contributions to it were fabricated so junko could pin the blame on him fuel the fires she needs to get started and start picking the fruits of her labor however this creates a discrepancy about just how well-known kamakura really is in danganronpa 3 not only do all of the higher-ups including jin know who he is his background as hinata and what the project was meant for but the reserve course are sent into a frenzy after being shown him directly through junko's widely accessible video download which we know mentions him by name in danganronpa zero in that prequel that barely sees the light of relevancy kirigiri was tasked by her father to seek information out about kamakura but it seems like here he already has everything he could have possibly needed to know beyond kamakura's current location after the incident concluded while in super danganronpa 2 kirigiri still has no idea if he actually exists and is only able to bring up speculative evidence on his whereabouts according to this anime all of it is easily accessible and she should be well in the loop about it not only that but it completely calls into question how kamakura was able to enter the neo world program to begin with especially when they erroneously show him speaking to nayegy before they could have met but maybe it's too much for me to ask that danganronpa 3 cares about any pre-built internal logic when it can instead make its own held together by monokuma stuffing an aphrodisiac suit oh look the forced love is back in the air when the real kamakura inside cries without realizing it after seeing nanome struggle with taking her pepto-bismol but the only thing i feel when i see this scene is the strange burn of resentment knowing that a character whose whole purpose was to be engaging through subtext be gradually stripped the layers that made him compelling kamakura is the product of an aborted romance doesn't have any stake in junko's plots and only commits the deeds he does in the games because he wants to see if nanami's hope can find a way to shine through in him again to top it all off when he nodded his tease during future they make it clear that the ending of super danganronpa 2 only affected him one way after deciding to live on and face whatever consequences lie before him in the interest of creating a new path through life hinata goes back into the real world confident in himself to live as he actually is however it turns out this is only half true because kamikura still resides in hinata purely through his knowledge and talented abilities there was no toll to pay for hinata's prior choices and actions and instead he's been given a hall passes of all of his and his friends problems without recognizing what brought them to that point in the first place not only is this an abysmal direction to take him it effectively renders every shred of nuance and weight both characters had utterly meaningless so much for not needing talent anymore when clearly it's there to solve all of your problems when you need it the most by the end of hope hinata is no longer a representative of what it means to accept yourself in your circumstances he's a paragon of virtue who made it through the tribulations of life unscathed and now has everything to show for it even though what he went through now means nothing no matter what positive spin the series wants to use to interpret it differently hinata is still as much of a hollow shell of his former self as he once was the reasoning just took an unfortunate turn for the literal though he's not alone in this apparently even the most important newcomers of this series aren't free from the cycle he was put into [Music] when it comes to characters with big setups who have very little continuous payoff kyosuke munakato really is one of the most dreadfully despair inducing you could ask for isn't he as the former super high school level student council president and current vice chairman of the future foundation he's responsible for construction of new facilities expansion of the organization and took on similar duties trying to expand hope's peak academy back during despair arc as one of its alumni while also trying to expose the secrets of the steering committee well it turns out he isn't a very good detective nor is he very interesting as a main foil to our protagonist as usual makoto nagi there's a lot of potential set up with murakata from the beginning as obvious as it was that yuki zomei was raising death flags in her first appearance it was also obvious that they shared some kind of deeper relationship and though it may be thought of as a way of strengthening his man pain it did make his following dedication to his own rigid ideals somewhat potentially interesting you see munakata's whole deal is this idea of pragmatism in the face of adversity nuance and thinking about grey areas beyond a person's surface level perception are not exactly within his interest because he sees them ultimately as distractions munakata takes immediate umbrage with naiki's decision to try and rehabilitate the shsl despairs not because he necessarily thinks deliberate treason is indeed occurring but because even the idea of helping his enemies is tantamount to treason itself he's often cold showing an authoritative attitude over those he's in charge of but he's also apparently influential considering the loyalty he gains from sakura and yuki zomei though we don't ever actually see that apparent charisma when he's on screen indeed the only glimmer of his influence that we can manage to see in the story is relayed second hand in the form of kimura's words that when she was cast out of hope's peak munich was the only person to look out for her and give her a place to go which explains why she's so insulted by the idea of attacking him as demanded by ando though of course we never see kimura going through this even briefly with munakate even though there was feasibly a time or two where she could have been shown alongside him in despair arc after a said incident had occurred after the tragedy of course he becomes more the monokata we see in future arc itself rigidly radical in his belief that the only way to defeat despair is to totally destroy all traces of it no matter the sacrifice that is made in the process he holds a lot of resentment toward shsl despair in favor of killing them all because not doing so would only cause their influence to spread this pessimism ironically causes him to only focus on despair itself and he scolds nigey for having the naivety to hold on to hope which in a way turns him into the ultimate unknowing puppet for the despair he so desperately wants to destroy ooh very interesting the potential to be very interesting the only problem is that even as a thematic foil for naegi munakata takes way too much of a center stage for somebody who is ultimately not the mastermind oh yeah if you came to this video with no knowledge of dr3 i'd have forgiven you for thinking that perhaps they would have gone the route of making this guy the main villain killing everyone in a misguided attempt to destroy what he views as compromised thinking it will destroy despair but ultimately creating it instead because doing so would honestly create a pretty cool in-game conflict but nope munakata is just another one of many red herring culprits that has lingered on throughout futurak's story and perhaps more egregiously than almost anyone else seeing as munakata's way of thinking his conflict with naegi's group and his madness caused by yuki zomei's death are all spurred on from the very beginning though he does progressively become more embittered and captured by his madness as the story goes the inciting incident behind it has already occurred by the start of the second episode and all of his other reasons for loathing despair so much are basically left ambiguous if there was anything more to them than just hating the apocalypse which yeah i mean i guess everyone here does man this means that for a majority of the ark's run time we are left in a constant back and forth of munakata chasing naegi munakata catching naegi munikata yelling at nayagi munakata losing niagi's trail somehow even though they were in the same room together munakata fighting other people because he's paranoid rinse repeat and on and on he preaches about one thing platitudes oh spare me the talk of hope and despair little man you're just waxing on about useless platitudes that don't help anyone this is like his mantra and honestly if it had any degree of subtlety it could actually work because to a degree it's true hope and despair have become such exhaustive terms in the canon of this series that frankly by the time we've reached this point they have already started to feel a bit like they've lost any and all meaning right an interesting inversion is pointing out how this has become the case even for someone like naegi himself what kills this though is that by having municha just spout the same crap over and over again for 11 episodes straight and more or less have a static arc until nearly the very end of these episodes we are treated to platitude this platitude that for hours every time he's on screen and i know everyone says this about him but it's true he turned the word platitudes into a platitude which basically turns every conversation he's involved in into how can this be for the greater good how can this be for the greater good and i don't find this interesting or ironic i find it painfully dull because he's like a broken record that was only mildly interesting to listen to the first time and just becomes dumber and dumber the more i'm forced to listen to it especially as things continue playing out poorly for him and i know munakata is supposed to be to some extent characterized as stubbornly driven by his own hatred and only able to realize he's wrong once he accepts yukizome's death allows himself to grieve and still admits that he loved her for who she was despite the imperfection that he would have argued she deserved to die for before if he had known what happened to her he was willing to nip every bud but if he had known about yuki zomei would that have been the same he argues as much to tengan during their fight but who knows if that would have actually been the case if he knew while she was still alive that's all well and good but you can only repeat yourself so many times before your character begins to devalue itself by virtue of having nothing new to say or anything interesting to bring to the table munakata spends the entire story doing the same things over and over again saying the same things over and over again and only eventually stopping when he realizes naegi has similar man pain to him which also is one of the funniest scenes in the entire anime because of how it's animated his guttural scream accompanying a completely static keyframe where his neck is craned like a wolf howling at the moon the rest of his body unchanging this is also hours after he had the entire time been having a measuring contest with naegi about his trauma by saying that since he was stuck in the killing game he never knew about the horrors of the outside world and what he and the rest had to go through might i remind this man that naegi emerged into the outside world afterward what do you think he was doing that whole time eating saltines in a closet he joined the future foundation and we even see later that the foundation was watching the broadcast and picked up the survivors almost immediately afterward he saw the killing game naegi almost dying himself watching his friends kill and be killed by each other and grapple each and every day with his survivor's guilt and you're telling me this grown-ass man literally thought it necessary to have an argument of no i have it worse than you with someone who was that many years his junior it just makes him look like a tool with zero perspective or ability to understand others which makes it even more baffling that anyone conceivably looked up to him or loyally followed him for years in the first place especially when his paranoia leads him to attack the only loyal friend he has left after taking kimura's drugs he threatens to be interesting at times all grant and i even really find this other bit fascinating where he talks about whether naegi is consciously a traitor or not he still doesn't trust him because he thinks naegi is a perfect pawn for another to infiltrate through by using his influence to spread through in a way it's a perfect inverse reflection of the way junko enoshima herself was a flawlessly charismatic ideologue the very thought of everyone deferring to one person's voice isn't a risk he's willing to entertain because when people become loyal and unquestioning to a single leader that's where things inevitably go downhill this might mean anything at all if he wasn't himself so self-absorbed short-sighted and ultimately really really dumb and hypocritical and this isn't to say that an antagonist can't be hypocritical but his hypocrisies only serve to make him less interesting not more interesting and that's what really kills it for me on a thematic level if he had been the main antagonist and not another fake out if he had been able to preserve his thoughts and motivations for a reveal later on in the story thus removing the need for him to rattle on and on about them for the whole arc's run i think munakata would be a lot more of a solid character and you wouldn't even have to change him too terribly much but as it stands there's just too little here for the lot they're trying to make him the face of another casualty of features need to stretch thin something that barely has enough substance to last this long and as a result i just can't be asked to care about him or his development this come to think of it as a problem a lot of his peers share isn't it [Music] the deciding factor in how danganronpa 3 was paced is in this idea of a duality that informed the ideas of one another despair and futures plotlines inevitably collide to create hope interlocking all of their disparate elements to make a singular story there's no way you can weave some 40 odd characters together naturally without flubbing the direction trust me i would know so other avenues are often taken to ensure that those who are less relevant still wind up getting some form of meaningful development or otherwise extrapolate the hows and whys of who they are after we get a peek behind the curtain something like this would work for a spin-off game or even a side plot elsewhere but having the anime only futurecast and despair to fruitlessly piece together what little bit of character puzzle there is in the present was a lopsided idea from its conception none of them have any prior connections to the characters that are supposed to be our main focus and wind up becoming an alienating presence in a story that while seemingly not about them somehow ends up being too much about them and even still won't give any of them enough depth to warrant their inclusion characters like bandai great gozu and gekko gehara have no place in the story and as such don't appear at all that's three characters that will never have any greater identity or relevance whatsoever munakata tangon and kizakura are all delegated to minor roles on the sidelines mainly to dish out information or in kizikura's case make strange comments about jyn's daughter this is more acceptable because the bulk of their use is in future itself but it's still not ideal rurika seiko and izuyoi technically get a spotlight episode where their plot overtakes the character we were actually there to see but marcy already gave them a thorough dress down so i think they're squared away that leaves us with yuki zomei juzo and mitarai these three have the most baggage and take up more than a bit of despair's run time so we'll focus on them wait a pick in minute i'm confused what are you even arguing for bub did you want the future cast to have less screen time or more screen time i wanted the future cast to be realized characters in a way that didn't actively usurp what i wanted to see from this series both sentiments are true for me because having any of them be here in a relevant capacity to begin with was going to cause problems the idea is flawed and because of it we don't end up with a have your cake and eat it too situation it's a nobody gets enough of anything so we all starve one but ain't that the real beauty of what the more relevant futurecast folk are here for characters like yuki zomei are all about aiding your knowledge of what class 77's ho-hum school days were really like let's talk about her first then we start and end the series with her in the theater watching everything play out after all yukizome died at the very end of episode 1 of future for the purpose of getting to know her retroactively here and she does immediately have an end to just about everything she could possibly need to get this half on the ball as the former super high school level housekeeper she's not only a proud alumnus of the school but she's also there working as a spy under her boy toy before she immediately gets promoted to class 77's homeroom teacher when kizakura falls on some self-afflicted alcoholism-induced hard times this is where the problems start to come in yuki zomei is a jack of all trades character in a milford vessel seriously how do your boobs work instead of having an actual stance on anything she instantly proves herself worthy and determined to help her students shine in whatever way is the most malleable for her even unwaveringly stubborn characters like kuzuri tanaka and komaida all find her methods appealing on her first try a lack of identity in favor of service could have been an interesting flaw if there was anything to comment on there but her actual personality traits only run so deep she's devoted to munakata's cause and she cares about her kids and she's willing to get her hands dirty for either of them which constantly lands her in hot water when questioned about why she's doing what she does her at the ready answer tends to be that she just believes in munakata or believes in her students or even worse believes in what an anime can do for her students juzo is in a similar but different position he too is forever pinned under the weight of munakata splendiferous business bishi plans but unlike yuki zomei he said [ __ ] them kids and seems to enjoy using his talent to beat teenagers to a pulp as a campus officer dude probably puts back the blue stickers on other people's bumpers during his free time he aids yuki zomei and her spy game against the school's higher ups but it's only because of his own yearning for man meat rather than actually caring about what's going on this comes back to bite him when he solves junko enoshima's riddles 3 but she gets her twitter followers to ratio him and call him slurs until he backs off in actuality she threatens to out him publicly even though she kind of already does that in the very scene that she threatens it in i know this choice is one that's more contentious but while it's definitely not a good one to me it does seem like something junko would do if she knew it would be able to give her leverage over the situation our bisexual homophobic queen really isn't all that picky about her method so long as they work and work they do because it shuts juzo up and gives him a pretty serious complex about being complicit in starting the tragedy it's easy to proclaim that juzo should have just nutted up and told munakata the truth if it meant stopping the death of millions but at least juzo has a conflict of interest sure he's still munakata's lap dog either way but at least he's being told what to do on his own terms i guess on that note i see no better place to give our mvp of questionable life choices the time of day let's talk shop about our tired eyed tiny tim by way of miyazaki wannabe ryota mitarai mirai is a strange case because he both plays a major role in setting everything in the series up while simultaneously not managing to leave a lasting impression in fact most of his actions don't really read as anything beyond an oddly selfish negligence on his end there are a lot of implications made about how his role as the super high school level animator comes from a place of an escapist passion and how he wants to be able to make a film that brings joy to others in the same way that anime he watched brought joy to him when he was going through tough times in life which is tied to bullying and some implicated latent daddy issues that never really get touched on again he works himself to the bone to the point of onset illness from the stress and stops attending school altogether his dreams strike a chord with the super high school level imposter who finds refuge with him they have similar feelings about wanting to be known and acknowledged as they actually are so they make a deal they take up meteori's role in class while he stays behind to finish his animated rendition of gone with the wind provided he continues going to the hospital for treatments after he collapses from malnutrition it's here where mitori quite literally runs into two tone bear enthusiasts junko enoshima in a manner dubbed as a despairfully fateful encounter this is the second time that randomly bumping into someone has led to ripples in the plot with despairfully fateful encounter itself being a fancy way of saying yeah we need this to happen so just roll with it we aren't given any justification as to why junko feels that miturai is worth something to her or why mitrai feels so defensive over his interests and talent throughout his appearances in both despair and future so far while occasionally passionate he's shown to be passive to a fault and unable to stand up for himself or others it's one of the many reasons why he feels guilty for what he's done in the past and why he believes he's a weak coward of a man this is also why tengen feels the need to spurn the future foundation game to begin with so what makes junko so special she does taunt him but there's no reason why he should get angry instead of curling up into a ball of anxiety and pitifully roll away after getting him worked up he takes them to his depression den where he reveals that he can effectively manipulate emotional responses and actions through the use of color eye movement sound and whatever else in his work this brings both junko and her pig breath sister to ugly tears and proves the junko that he's a worthy asset to have on her side though she doesn't actually convince him she just says that she shares the same goal and he thinks he's gained an understanding of her even though only a few minutes earlier she was talking about how stupid anime is on the whole junko then gives mitarai an underground studio courtesy of a trustee she killed earlier and leaves him to do her bidding in secret until it comes time for the grand reveal that she was using him some people have phrased it like she held him hostage down there but i think the blame is squarely on his shoulders for not asking a single question about the situation out loud until it's too late even when junko and mukuro commit several minor acts of battery on both each other and his estranged classmates in front of him he eventually finds junko's red room fan cam and gets jumped on by the token assault victim before the twins threaten his classmates with brainwashing if he doesn't comply in helping spread their chain mail completely refusing any responsibility until kamida anamy let him out of his cage by pure chance and then he runs and cries and falls and gets shamed by our enoshima stands while junko actually makes some pretty salient points about his involvement mirai believes the idea that he was forced into the act but that threat could have only been made a couple hours ago at most so instead of killing him junko just tells him that she's going to do what she said she intended on doing anyways and that he should just keep running because that is his despair after beating bush zone act 1 he takes a nice refreshing swim and realizes that anime was a mistake before washing up on the riverbank and wondering why he couldn't do anything to save himself really wish i could feel sorry for him and understand his plight to stand on his own two feet but he really did do it to himself there's nothing to feel sorry for because meter i is a sponge who exists as a macguffin keeper before he commits to a character trait his main purpose outside of handing the antagonists what they want is to pose meta-textual questions about how anime affects people's lives in a finale prequel sequel to an esoteric visual novel series that never translated well into this format to begin with and then didn't even have the courtesy to have insight on that he's a ploy to sell sad boy tickets to the plot device convention and unlike him i'm not such an easy sell but it is true that not everything is his fault there's no way he could have known that the anime was this bad when he didn't understand that danganronpa 3 doesn't like to treat its third person shooter spin-off game with any respect either [Music] ultra despair girls was a polarizing entry in the danganronpa series to be sure and if you still don't know anything about it i'd highly recommend watching the video i made about it for this retrospective beforehand but that all being said polarizing or not it still sets up quite a few things that would ultimately have been pretty weird to leave hanging in this series if it was supposed to be a conclusive follow-up to the hope speak saga this means that suddenly without warning seven episodes into future arc we have an episode that's basically dedicated to following up on ultra despair girls and honestly despite its many problems which we're about to get into it's probably my favorite episode of the entire series only because it's so detached from the general vibe or even the ongoing plot of the rest of it that it feels at the very least like a refreshing change of pace the episode once again follows komaru naegi tokofukawa and serial killer genocider show as they work their way toward a mysteriously quickly built base created by the villain of that game monica toa the reason for this is because they have reason to suspect that she has something to do with the killing game currently being conducted at future foundation hq and of course why wouldn't they monica tried at the end of udg to turn komaru into the successor to junko enoshima but failed and was ultimately chosen to strive for that position by komaida she was then taken somewhere given a makeover and last shown preparing for the day in question where she would cause more mayhem and well now here we are it's really easy to assume monica would be the new face of despair considering she all but visibly accepted the position and seemed eager to pick up where her big sis left off but as i'm sure you can tell this creates a bit of a problem for following the typical strictly decided danganronpa formula that's right it would make it way too easy to guess who the mastermind was right from the start and therefore it would erase the tension of a potential mastermind reveal which is something danganronpa is known for by this point at least in its killing game scenarios this means now that the story can't not do anything with her because leaving her unaccounted for would beg the question of where she went but they also can't do anything with her really because it would be too predictable this means she once again has to become a red herring and to explain her away we're really gonna have to jump through some hoops to start off while i would argue that this episode has the best aesthetics of any of the others by a country mile it still has a lot of questionable design choices starting right off the bat with monica's little dictator uniform complete with an ss hat and look i know monica is unambiguously a villain if anything this is just an over-the-top way of expressing that she's the bad guy and a murderous kid probably would pull some edgy bs like this but outside of any canon in universe justification you could make for it this is still a deliberate decision by the writing and design team and i don't exactly think it's in the best of taste i mean hell it was already pretty overbearing that she had swastika eyes to begin with but like sure if you want to make her so obviously the antagonist i guess you can effortlessly telegraph it that way these things combined though it's just overkill and it just feels too i don't know flippant it feels like it's making a joke out of it especially with her big mickey mouse gloves to accompany it this isn't nearly the only issue with the episode but already to start off it makes me cringe a little bit getting on the topic of something a little more egregiously obvious though we have more of dr3's patented regressive character writing erasing all nuance from its cast that previously existed we'll get more into this later but a great example lies smack dab in the middle of this episode toku fukawa isn't exactly the most popular character among dr denizens these days despite how much i love her but one thing most people tend to agree on if they've played udg is that she grows a lot from the beginning of dr1 to the end of that game while still cynical and moody she's come to accept the niceties of others more easily and her paranoia and persecution complex have simmered a bit furthermore while she is initially quite rude to komaru she eventually comes to appreciate her a lot more and even works on speaking less hurtfully after she begins to briefly create a rift in their relationship this only solidifies the relationship even more by the end when they have the undying trust in one another and are able to lift each other's spirits enough to defeat their enemies together realizing that neither of them have to be alone and resulting in fukawa's conscious decision to stay behind into a city with komaru as opposed to leaving her behind even if she doesn't necessarily want to stay there by contrast in this episode of dr3 fukawa has an extensive fantasy about her many children with togami in which she visualizes komaru as a brainless third wheel who she insults for her own amusement and to impress togami himself instantly all of her character development and the development of her relationship with komaru is dismissed completely out of hand and made to look like fukawa hasn't even grown as a person in the slightest to me this is as obvious a sign as you can get that the writers either only played the bare minimum of the games that these characters came from or otherwise only read a wiki summary hell considering how closely udg's release was to the work timeline of dr3's production it wouldn't surprise me if that's really all they even had time to do but hey the inconsistencies don't stop there there's also the time skip confusion i talked about before udg logically speaking couldn't have happened more than a month before this so why is monica suddenly going through puberty why does she have an entire building that she made from scratch why does she still have monokumas to work for her despite the destruction of the toa factory and her controller being stolen from her why while she looks slightly older do the other warriors of hope look exactly the same why did they look so exactly the same that they look practically identical to their cg at the end of the udg credits where they're roughed up in the game's immediate aftermath despite this being at least several weeks later again this is also logically slapdash and obviously made as a quick way to get monica out of the plot that it fails to stop for even a second long enough to figure out the logistics required to make it work but of course none of this truly prepares you for the weirdest parts of all first let's address the elephant in the room miya gekko gahara is revealed to be a robot controlled by monica herself there are other several weird plot holes this introduces into the equation but i'm going to save talking about those for later for now let's focus on a simpler question why yeah i know she says it's because she wants to get a closer look at the man who defeated her big sis and probably cause a little mayhem along the way but quickly into her infiltration she realizes that something's already going on internally that she isn't causing and decides to just stop and observe i guess this would imply that she's the one responsible for actually murdering the real gekko-gahara by the way but they never explain when this happened where she was or how it occurred not to mention how monica even managed to make a flawless robot replica of her and get it into the building in the first place but okay sure monica made a robot infiltrated this killing game that she didn't know was happening and then everyone got gas to sleep in wait gekko gaharabot can't be gassed asleep she's a robot did the mastermind really not notice that did monica not pay attention while this was going on when she was watching from her camera view wait holy [ __ ] this doesn't make any sense okay so then presuming she just blacked out for a few for no reason then she decided to observe nigey for a bit got outed got confronted and now here we are okay well sure how do things proceed from here how will her final showdown with komaru and fukawa turn out she gives up no i'm serious she says i'm out of here throws her hands up and turns tail she proceeds to get into a big pod and blast herself up to space where she can quote be a neat and listen i'm actually a little conflicted about this because on the one hand this is actually hilarious to have an antagonist built up for so long who's legitimately compellingly chilling in the previous game only to have her not turn out to be related and even just completely bored with the whole idea of fighting anymore it's pretty damn funny she even admits that after listening to kamida yammer on about hope and despair for so long that she's basically decided the whole conflict was stupid and mirrors the final dialogue we ever heard her brother haiji utter at the end of udg but ultimately in a different tone while haiji said that he no longer cared about hope or despair either way utterly broken after being robbed of his power and not having his whiny man-baby anger validated monica takes a more neutral disposition towards the matter she doesn't care anymore not because she didn't get what she wanted but because what she thought she wanted she decided is actually kind of stupid ironically more mature than her abuser ever was in a way it's kind of fitting for the successor to junko and oshima to be so taken over by her patented boredom that she reached the heights of boredom her idol never could by becoming bored with her own cause in its entirety i guess that's kids for you there are so many little things about this that kinda work and that's why ultimately i guess i'm not too harsh on it as a decision plus i mean hey she basically said this anime sucks and i don't want to be in it anymore and that's completely valid but i do still think regardless of the potential funny and interesting contrast it provides her character it is still ultimately unsatisfying junko resisted narrative convention for the sake of the contrary and did so with enough gravitas and emotional truth that her function to the story still proved more interesting for its execution than it would have without but this while spinable is something good does still ultimately read as a bit of a cop-out a way for the writers to deal with monica without really dealing with monika and as much as i can like about it there's just as much that leaves me disappointed or even utterly confused they wanted to have their cake and eat it too and ended up tainting their punchline a bit by having monica get too involved with the plot sheet didn't have much of anything to do with ultimately begging way more questions than it actually answers i guess ironically it captures a similar feeling to the game it's based on but even then it still falls below the ambition of udg itself and that's a pretty harsh indictment in need while monica may have at the last second shown an interesting swerve of her idol's characteristics though i can only imagine that it was an accident to a certain extent because if one thing's for sure it's that the writers of danganronpa 3 really have no idea what junko enoshima is all about [Music] let's go ahead and cut the sh junko enoshima is a weird character and one that isn't even remotely easy to get right every time you think you know where she might be coming from she throws you a curveball it fractures your skull she posts your concussion on several esoteric web forums cuts your head off after you've been put under anesthetics and would then toss your body off of a high-rise building and put your disembodied caved in dome in an applebee's toilet kind of a shame nobody thought of that approach when she got one of her own in the middle of this train wreck could have saved us a lot of time there are some people who get soured on her fairly quickly and it's not just because of her actions if i had to describe the problem people so often have with junko it would definitely be presentation she's just so much a bombshell blonde who wishes for nothing but erratic pain and misery for the sake of it runs it through an instagram filter and covers it in heart stickers there is no logic behind what she does unless it fulfills her goal of attaining despair and even then they do not curtail when presented with emotion or even the most basic need of self-preservation it's violence it's panic it's suicide it's hidden sadism it's boredom and sometimes it is nothing she presents herself as the final boss of ego a carnivore who rips and tears into others for sport instead of sustenance not even childhood love family or care can stop the driving incessant need for despair does that make it meaningless it depends on your perspective she certainly fights for it and plans around it even if just for the sake of it with that in mind it's more indulgent a method of destruction born from an unexplainable need the reason junko yearns for despair is because despair calls to her she uses it as a vehicle for all of her other actions not the other way around to some people that sucks and they're allowed to be wrong because i find the lack of explanation to be what's so compelling about her nothing she can say or do would actually suffice as a logical reason for what she's done so why even bother picking up the pieces is your problem not hers and boy oh boy i don't even think she left adams this time to discuss junko's role in the narrative we first need to bring up an important but seemingly unrelated question how far is the anime willing to go maybe that sounds pedantic but i'm not just talking about the actual in-universe methods of her actions i'm talking about the way that danganronpa portrays its own events to pivot focus mid-animate how junko began the tragedy means doubling up the hoops and logic to try and rationalize ideas that were purposefully left vague what you come up with in your own mind is more than likely far more intense and severe than what the actual situation was danganronpa zero provides explanations for memory erasure and ultra despair girls expands upon how monokumas were produced in the active spread of despair itself but never anything deeper there was a clear logic behind certain choices to give the idea that there was something greater to emphasize a sort of cunning and sadistic mindset junko would have needed to allow these events to play out all signs point to her having expertly plotted every last detail in advance while playing the role of a cheery classmate trying to aid those around her when in actuality she poisoned the well with her agenda and changed the course of history itself to her liking she's calculated methodical devious hedonistic and occasionally even beyond comprehension and all of those were used to oil the gears of her despair machine and blood our first meeting with junko is of her casually throwing a grenade in the back of a taxi an action that would be traceable by any halfway confident forensics team i think we've found our answer the danganronpa 3 is often willing to go farther than necessary to emphasize something and a lot of the time it leads to excessively cartoonish levels of exaggeration kind of the whole series mo there don't you think i mean you've seen the executions before haven't you not like this ain't part of that wheelhouse there is more than a bit of goofiness in danganronpa and i'm not arguing against that but there is such a thing as too much the executions were often silly to add to the horror of the situation yeah everyone knows that moments like mondo butter become certified what the [ __ ] beats but the reason it works isn't because it's randomly zany for the sake of it it's because it's degrading it shows that these characters in their lives are just props for something greater toys to be thrown around and broken there are more casual elements of the rest of the series that are ridiculous or corny like how luck works for the mono beasts or the fact that ghosts apparently exist but it's still based in a moderate realism or at least a character action your murder apocalypse story loses me a bit when you bring out the 50-foot dogs terminator wheelchair ladies and kung fu grandpa you also start to lose me when junko's plans start going off without a hitch under the assumption that she came to hope's peak just to enact it by the time her and mucro arrive she's already killing trustees guards and other personnel and nobody bats an eye or questions what's going on you put the answer right out into the open they're dead bucko who are they gonna tell does hopes peak not have cameras overnight security it's enough of a stretch that they're using a classroom and don't get caught but what do the students in the dorms not get to hear mukuro singing over the intercom how about junko getting consistent access to hope's peaks underbelly to begin with actually let's analyze that for a second things i can reasonably believe hope's peak has underground hallways and laboratories for their less savory projects so they can keep their workforce under wraps from the law and government at large things i cannot reasonably believe junko single-handedly builds a trial room and an underground death maze maybe she used her analyst ability to steal ideas from the super high school level legends of the hidden temple enthusiast the choices are yours and yours alone at least before i could reasonably speculate that the remnants aided junko in her plans like soda building all of class 78's executions but she must have made monica get her some toa building permits or something the papers get to jin's desk and he's like oh yeah i don't know makes sense to me i could use a few more torture labyrinths no no no wait even better i bet tangan did it when he was expanding the overseas building and this is just another notch on his belt of foresight i don't know i don't think the anime does either and we haven't even gotten to brainwashing yet in fact we can't for some time because much like the despair arc i forgot that the spare sisters are twins for a second we've been talking a lot about some laughable choices so how about another joke mukuro ikusaba no really that's what she's reduced to all season she's a pathetic gutter punk whose only worthwhile trait is her ability to kill people real good and when you don't get that you're either getting uncomfortably lustful lambasting towards her sister or her acting like the psychophant that people wrongfully assume she is yeah if isn't canon and the material we do have about mucro does lead to a few unfortunate conclusions but to reduce her to junko's pet when the subtext practically screams familial abuse victim doesn't really paint you in the best light especially considering that her narrative in if was so compelling it made her believably flawed while still human and call her yearning for affection cliche if you must but it certainly got a lot more bite and dimension to it than whoever the hell this miserable tool is you're in danganronpa honey not the newest grodiest edition of ori emo in both zero and danganronpa 1 it's shown that jyn is suspicious of what she's capable of with her talent and goes out of his way to suppress information about her they also go out of their way to insinuate that mukuro was against junko's plans to start with and she was just powerless to stop it once they were already in motion her options were to follow jungkook's orders and maybe live or disobey and die for sure not exactly inspiring choices here it's as if junko brainwashed her before she even got her acrylic claws into meteori actually if she had planned for this the entire time but it only went the way that she wanted to because of that one moment then what the hell was she going to do if that didn't work out there is no explanation because the idea that you could ever put a catch-all in place to understand everything that danganronpa tried to do just isn't feasible and undermines any ideas posited by the rest of the series i like answers to things but sometimes the less is more approach makes all the difference there doesn't always have to be a specific reason except of course when there does at which point it might behoove you to you know finish what you started [Music] speaking of botched explanations for things let's talk character arcs a character arc is a pretty simple but fundamental thing in a piece of media it tracks the trajectory of where your character is going to go from one point in a story to another usually across its entirety or at least in different entries in danganronpa 1 naegi was still somewhat static but underwent a transformation from an unconfident normie into someone who could at the very least view his optimism as something to be proud of and wielded for the greater good sonic the hedgeboy undergoes an arc in his first live-action film from a lonely outcast afraid of exposing his power to using it to protect his newfound family which extends to him taking more responsibility in the second film and becoming the hero he's meant to be all of these examples and more are just one of many ways you can develop a character over the course of a narrative and even do so again for a follow-up narrative it just depends on where your character's at and where they need to go and just because they've gone somewhere before doesn't mean they don't still have room to grow from there so what's the problem with danganronpa 3 then well it doesn't exactly pull this off i guess you could say that isn't to say that no characters have arcs while there are certainly fodder characters who solely exist to die the cast who are original to future more or less tend to have arcs of some sort even if they exist at a very surface level or are interrupted by death munakata does eventually realize the error of his ways after empathizing with naegi's man pain for example sakakura finally overcomes the fear that allowed him to fall prey to junko's manipulation ando sabotages all of her relationships until she dies alone in a horribly [ __ ] up way and mitorei gets that hug he's always needed i guess but when it comes to other characters perhaps ones we're more familiar with the ball definitely gets dropped for starters togami basically has no arc to speak of because he's barely around and the same generally applies to komaru and fukawa the latter two are a bit more excusable in my eyes because they're basically only around for one episode though and their arcs were largely contained within the game they actually had screen time in the same sort of applies for monica though as we discussed before her resolution is pretty anticlimactic and reeks of convenience aoi asahina has almost nothing to do in this plot whatsoever aside from run back and forth and carry naegi she seems to have more confidence in naegi now seeing as they have a history together that informs said trust but none of her dedication to becoming stronger inspired by sakura ever comes up and she is otherwise just a glorified cheerleader who gets very little to do um well like you said her arc was basically completed before why is there a need for her to have another one there isn't necessarily but if she's going to be present for so much of this story it just seems like a waste doesn't it i mean she's around for so much time that you'd expect her to have more utility than not dying and being the resident piggyback ride giver i really like asahina as a character and i find her development in the first game compelling even if she's not necessarily the deepest character of that cast so i think there was still plenty of opportunity to give her some kind of trajectory here maybe focus on the fact that because of her need to fulfill the ideals she adopted from sakura she pushes herself to her limits but needs to find out in the process that part of living and striving is also learning how to balance it with taking care of yourself i don't know i'm just thinking out loud here it's certainly a better option than just having her stand around in my opinion besides that i think this might have been a good opportunity to bring up her relationship with her brother who we only saw for five minutes until he died in udg if you were already going to bring up elements of that game but that just doesn't get brought up at all either i have less of an idea of how you could do that but it does seem like a bit of a missed chance i'd say kirigiri carries a similar vibe albeit with a bit more functionality to the actual plot because of the nature of the game itself her role is severely undercut when compared to her general constant presence in dr1 and even her own moments largely take a back seat to the characters those moments are in service to like kizakura or naegi again we'll talk more about her fake out death in a future section though one of the largest victims of this issue is undoubtedly yasuhiro hagakure though my poor boy what have they done to you if you'll recall in danganronpa 1 hagukoresark was pretty simple he was a lax semi-cowardly dumbass who in addition to being funny relied pretty often on his bunk fortune telling skills to try to get through things however by the end he had changed due to all the adversity he'd been through and adopted more of a hopeful outlook on the world because of niagara most notably he even says that he's done with fortune telling from that point on and decides only to rely on his gut feelings so what do they have him do in dr3 well nothing basically he doesn't go into the building with everyone else at the beginning for some reason so when everything goes belly up and the building is in lockdown mode he gets trapped outside with angry helicopters from then on every time we cut to hagakure it's mostly just for brief comic relief scenes and we see him trying to help by using his fortune telling skills oh my god one one character can we not have one character who retains their character arc after it happens i mean i already knew that the writers of this series probably didn't play sdr2 or ultra despair girls but are you telling me they didn't even play the first danganronpa now i mean god it's like you're gonna tell me the staff over at larch both completely forgot about dra and only watched a danganronpa abridged series to do their research these characters regress more than simpsons characters in modern seasons hey now that's uncalled for i mean you aren't wrong but season 32 is better of course though aside from some other characters we'll have to get into with hope arc the one that suffers the most from this lethargy and aimlessness in the big plot is big man makoto naegi himself what happened here i guess they realized that coming off the heels of sdr 2 nige didn't really have anywhere else left to go because boy did they give him absolutely nothing to do in this plot aside from being the person to eventually convince munakata of the error of his ways which isn't much considering munakata isn't even the mastermind naegi does jackal he walks around he gets attacked he talks on the intercom about how he thinks everyone has more to them than their tumblr call-out post and that this is the future foundation for real justice and that's about it mod naegi has been removed even when it comes down to the final act where we hint at the struggles he's gone through because of his survivor's guilt we barely get any exploration of that or even much internality beyond his brainwashing video nightmare this could have been a meaningful aspect of his character to dig deeper into but sadly it like many other potentially interesting aspects of future arc just gets completely left on the cutting room floor not to spoil the hopark stuff before we get to it as well but he barely has any involvement in the final conflict either he doesn't really do much of anything to convince meteorite not to go through with his plan and this is instead largely left to hinata who i can understand has some significance what with hinata being the one who needed the most convincing before when he was at his lowest but it feels like a missed opportunity not to have the two protags team up here as opposed to just having naegi stand outside the door like wait what was i doing here again even the stage play adaptation must have realized this was an issue because in that version naegi is the one who talks down mirai almost completely by himself he even delivers his trademark you've got that wrong to really wrap the whole thing around and i know this is likely because issues of casting and budget prevented the dr3 stage play from even touching the despair arc stuff much less having an entire sdr2 cast present but in the end i think this works to the scene's benefit and just spells out that much more how useless nagi seems to be in the anime's plot by comparison it's pretty disappointing because as milk toast as a lot of people often find him i think naegi is genuinely a pretty good character a little plain at times sure but he's taken on a lot of unique dimensions over the course of this franchise and i think some of the most potentially interesting aspects of his character are totally ignored here he even starts to buy into his own luck and position as the super high school level hope here which are things he previously never thought very highly of himself about he even continues to downplay it in udg and sdr2 so what happened here honestly i think it would have been more meaningful to explore in combination with his guilt over his peers deaths the enormous weight he feels around his shoulders with everyone treating him like he's a symbol when all along he's just been a person with the same fears and struggles as anyone else this i think would tie well into his conflict with munakata as he resists the notion of being any kind of icon or aspirational figure resists the notion that he isn't allowed to grieve like any other person because of it but of course dr3 has much less aspiration in this regard and i'm only left wondering what could have been instead because of this but hey if you still don't believe me when i say that it feels like the writers didn't do their research for this thing how about the fact that they seemingly forgot where to place an entire canonical entry to the story [Music] to start off this section i'd like to begin with a writing exercise that is my actual job after all unlike your girl i don't do youtube most of the time and i can't start letting my english degree follow the wayside you know so here's what we're going to do you're going to listen to this little excerpt of a scene i wrote from the knowledge we have about the student council killing game while we do this visualize it to yourself and see if your mental image of what i wrote matches the visuals that danganronpa 3 provided of the situation here we go the silence was deafening louder than any sound that could have been the still washes over all of us that remain i'm strewn in a desk that has somehow managed to keep upright for the past four hours the others have all managed to find somewhere too tucked away in a back corner huddled into their knees pulling fingers hard enough to nearly fracture their joints looking down at a clean spot on the floor where the blood hasn't hardened yet me and my fellow members of the student council were brought here under the guise of working through further development of the academy's overseas operation there were 15 of us then there are four now and one monster red iris hidden invasive shadow hardly pays any attention to the standstill that he's permitted us he isn't waiting for any of us to make a move he knows that we're all too tired and too powerless to stop him he's playing with his food toying with us even after his sick games drained the adrenaline from our bodies he's hardly said a word since it all began only implying what he wanted from us by action or example like a test of our will to see how far we would let ourselves go until we couldn't take it anymore we learned almost immediately that it was a foolish choice to go against him we would only survive if we listened and we would only survive after that if we were cruel if we were willing to sacrifice someone else for the sake of being able to grit our teeth a couple hours longer before taking our own last breath an eye for an eye i have done horrible things tonight i will never forgive myself i would kill myself if he'd let me why the thought brings out the question in me naturally i feel my lips quiver out the stumbling quiet word before i can even recognize that i'm saying it i can feel all of the eyes in the room turn on me as though i've trampled on our tainted peace like i'm now their enemy for questioning the uncaring orchestrator of our suffering why i'm asking it again louder i feel the tip of my shoe accidentally step on the super high school level historian's wrist the chair i had just beaten him to death with jostles ever so slightly when i found myself standing why i'm screaming now the people who i once called friends cower and fear at such a simple question one that hitches in my throat i can feel myself choke on the last syllable while tears i shouldn't show stream down my cheeks there's still no answer but i can't just stop until i get something anything from him why why are you doing this to us what are you getting from this we don't know you we don't know joko and oshima i'm stepping over the corpse i made with my own two hands with my resolve to live that is all but withered away as i try to find closure from a man who has changed a teacher's table into a grotesque throne he doesn't even look at me his mouth doesn't twitch he doesn't move a muscle the echo of my words hangs in the air for several seconds maybe even minutes it's nearly cathartic to hear the drop of his shoe to the tile i can't remember his name i can't even describe the way he moves it's alien he doesn't walk he lumbers forward back slouched head held down until he spots the body of the super high school level treasurer there's a knife lodged deep into her gullet because she was naive enough to believe that her life was worth something to him he pulls it from her intestines the same way a surgeon makes an incision i can smell the rot wafting towards the back of the room and i'm so used to it that it doesn't even make me gag anymore it's nothing to me death is nothing to me my life is nothing to me the only thing i want before i go is to know what heinous reason this man has for doing all of this he gets closer to me his arms hanging loose at either side the weight of his presence consumes me before he even gets close enough to do anything but when he does all i'm allowed to hear are his cool controlled breaths my knees threatened to go limp in a final subservient plea but i hold myself upright and bite my tongue i know it won't help me all i can do is wait out the inevitable i wait and wait and wait and wait until i'm finally given what i want but it was the last thing i wanted to hear i don't know i hardly notice him move before i realize my throat has been split in two i've forgotten how to breathe i've forgotten how to think the silence is definite were you able to picture what happened in danganronpa 3 with this writing no that's because this was written from the knowledge we got of the worst largest incident in hope speak academy history from danganronpa zero which danganronpa 3 entirely omits or otherwise radically changes to avoid it mucking up their far worse idea on how to handle its concepts here the student council killing game has started because junko and mukro send them a threatening letter busting with a bunch of random items and contraband weapons and have doctored video evidence of junko sleeping with all of their mothers this drives them all to poorly recreate battle royale together while on the wrong level of the school where this event canonically took place as much sings a song that was utilized better in evangelion 2.0 how did this happen where did we go so wrong we should probably briefly recap what happened in danganronpa 0 to understand just what we're working with and what the danganronpa 3 staff clearly weren't this summary is going to be a little truncated because marcy has been chomping at the bit to potentially cover this in full someday so i wouldn't want to spoil all of her fun i can practically hear her frothing at the mouth to have this section to herself but she can't it's mine [Laughter] oh uh spoilers for danganronpa zero obviously the pros only light novel follows ryoko otanashi super high school level analyst who suffers from anterograde amnesia because of her short-term memory loss she's been taking an excessive amount of notes to remember things on doctor's order from her best friend and childhood sweetheart the cold shouldered yasuke matsuda the super high school level neurologist during her checkup she becomes familiar with the strange uprisings happening around hope's peak academy referred to by the student body as the parade apparently the parade is in reaction to an incident where the student council were all murdered by a mysterious figurehead by the name of izuru kamakura and this information was leaked out despite the school's attempts to cover it up otanashi then becomes caught in the middle of a school-wide conspiracy apparently involving the despair sisters who are responsible for the leak and wish to expose the actions of the school's steering committee responsible for the artificial creation of kamakura himself meanwhile kyoko kirigiri investigates kamakura on orders from her estranged father and otanashi receives the help of the perverted secret agent yuto kamashiro all the while she is pursued at every turn by the brothers matarai a group of bodyguard octuplets who mistake her for kamakura and are subsequently fended off and killed by mukuroikusaba as the story develops and otonashi learns more about the mysterious plans of the despair sisters she comes across strange experiments where people are being forced to watch footage of the student council killing game caged in strange bare-faced helmets until they're violent towards others or themselves at every corner she is mocked and pursued by what seems like the very essence of enoshima herself until the cat slowly crawls its way out of the bag by the time we see matsuda seemingly murder the student council president the only survivor of the kamakura massacre it's already too late all the pieces are beginning to add up ryoko otanashi remembers that she is in fact junko and oshina having gotten matsuda to experiment on her to test a method of memory wiping for a little plan she's had freeze-dried for a while now matsuda always looked out for junko since they were kids and reluctantly fell in love with her because he had no one else so masada tried to cover up for her trying to keep her sedated as otanashi so that she could live peacefully but that was never going to work junko then does what she does best and brutally murders her lifelong love but not before telling him that she was the one responsible for his childhood isolation and dependence on her in the first place just another building block in the jenga tower of despair with her results properly documented she then goes on to use matzah's neurological genius to wipe the memories of one class 78 enabling the events of danganronpa 1 to begin in earnest later down the line it's a fascinating character study of danganronpa's biggest baddie filling in some of the holes while leaving things vague enough to be satisfyingly speculated about and even manages to have some compelling original additions to the cast even if not all of them are winners looking at you bread boy the spare art completely fumbles the same task that was already written out he doesn't even respect zero enough to factor its events into the plot in a way that makes any sense at all the characters from it have cameos in various episodes but they may as well not show up to begin with because there's no place in danganronpa 3's timeline where these events could have taken place with how the story is paced uh who gives a damn about some crummy light novel just a bunch of lousy pros if you're playing danganronpa and your biggest concern is that zero has too much text then i think you might need to reevaluate some of your life choices kodaka outright said it plays a role in understanding both danganronpa 1 and super danganronpa 2. i don't see why getting more of something you already enjoy would be controversial who cares if the creator says it matters you shouldn't have to dig into supplementals to enjoy a story to begin with trying to force people to care about something that isn't part of the main franchise is a real lousy move let's talk about the contradiction there you're watching something entitled danganronpa 3 the final entry in a trilogy predicated on two 30 to 60 plus hour visual novels a third person shooter mid qual and yes this light novel if you chose not to read it that's fine but if you don't understand the way the plot is supposed to work it's on you just because you didn't give something attention doesn't make it less relevant or impactful it's the least accessible piece of official media by far boss there's no english release and not everyone wants to go out of their way to search through a form archive done by some overzealous schlub there's probably a reason they dropped it like an expensive vase it must not have mattered that much actually many of the conflicts in danganronpa 3 are better explained in zero to begin with which sucks more because it feels like certain elements were cherry-picked in the planning phase but somehow they still weren't deemed relevant enough to actually pan out they're invalidated and written around because the use of zero's plot would inherently interfere with everything danganronpa 3 has planned it's niche it's deadly squat and i highly doubt most of us labia types even bothered there's no reason to account for it if it's just gonna make the narrative more confusing if the idea was to streamline danganronpa's narrative to make it less confusing than if they acknowledged zero they did a poor job of it certain elements are still adhered to but don't have any function outside of the vacuum the show apparently takes place in junko and mucoro directly instigating the student council killing game doesn't line up properly despite something like it being originally alluded to and they would have had to have given kamakura an in to begin with it's not directly explained in zero either but it was clearly an event planned far in advance and definitely couldn't have had either of them there in person in despair the two of them blackmail the council individually before threatening them all in person in zero the leak that they made stated that they were allegedly coaxed to go to the newly manufactured overseas facility to study abroad something that wouldn't lead to a paper trail or a direct interception of what led to the incident hey what about those monokuma helmets you mentioned in the summary doesn't that sound like an illusion to what happens in the anime to some fans it would seem to insinuate that the brainwashing methods used in danganronpa 3 were actually always relevant at a glance but this is contradicted by their use in ultra despair girls with the monokuma kids being enforced bomb devices made to keep them playing along with the warriors of hope and also through lines about how junko broke every last super high school level despair one by one with any emotional foothold she could step on we do see something like them used on random citizens and video footage of the outside world from danganronpa 1 but they aren't the exact same design it comes across as an alternative approach with the greater populace in the event things didn't go to plan but mostly wasn't needed due to just how widespread the tragedy became it was a failed experiment junko's influence didn't end up needing a movie to go with it maybe they were just dedicated cosplayers beyond that we've already gone over how lousy it is that kamakura actually had no skin in that first killing game and is instead made into a morally dubious bystander but shockingly enough this is actually inconsistent between zero and two zero goes into a few students particular deaths in detail like the chair battering while in super danganronpa 2 alter ego junko simply states that kamakura killed them all himself well there you have it maybe that was something they used to their advantage here in order to show how duplicitous junko really is to achieve her goals it's not exactly like she's the honest type or anything to begin with problem being there are ways for both answers to be true i already demonstrated it kamikura likes to force interesting scenarios to see what happens and while he might not have been the direct cause of every student's death i think it's safe to say that he made them do it to themselves by force it's supposed to have been a trial run of the actual mutual killing game so he could have easily been playing the administrative role in making it play out as he wanted junko is deceitful on purpose a majority of the time but i see no reason for her to flub those details when she's trying to get hinata to remember what he was and bring kamakura out it's just another instance of danganronpa 3 being avoidant of the information and pretending like it somehow knows better if it knows better that's probably because it had its bases covered even if most folks didn't do it the same argument applies here that applies to twilight syndrome why show it if we can already see it elsewhere it could have easily come and gone in that six month time skip no it couldn't have the parade happens right after the student council massacre and before you say anything junko waking up in the hospital with a head injury could have only happened after she was told to watch her tone by kamakura because they only sneak out of the school to start the student council killing game after that happened even then it doesn't work because class 78 would have already been instituted to the school by the time zero took place but they don't appear to the start of their term in the anime until after yuki zomi returns from her tenure in the reserve course and class 77 finishes its sophomore year even the official danganronpa 3 timeline posted on its website doesn't know how to correlate its events with how they're utilized here beyond posting the book's cover art and calling it a day it winds up having about as much relevance to this anime as gaiden killer killer does which is to say not a whole lot it's honestly just mind-boggling how some of danganronpa 3's answers get accepted just because it makes gestures towards the original concepts even though they're always shoving the squares possible tags in the round as possible holes in fact they can't even get their original ideas right [Music] no pun intended but you're gonna have to bear with me here because it's time to talk about the bread and butter of dr3 plot holes and inconsistencies obviously i'm not going to be mentioning them all here some will have come up already organically and others are still yet to come in other sections because they are tied to a larger issue that deserves more focus i'll also be treading carefully in how much i cross contaminate with despair arc here as well as save the 2.5 and hopark stuff for later as usual still even with that all being said dr3 is filled to the brim with ch that just doesn't make sense even disregarding its wealth of inconsistencies with its previous titles which you know you shouldn't it still creates plenty within its own original story as well let's start with the setting of feature arc the future foundation hq building one of the big twists of the plot is that the building everyone is running around in is in fact an underwater one-to-one replica of the entire building underneath the original one this right off the bat raises so many questions it's mind-numbing for starters i suppose this was all set up by the mastermind tengen for use in this whole plot but if that's the case how did nobody especially munakata notice either the money being spent to build this facility or at the very least construction um well originally this place was supposed to be part of them overseas hope's peak buildings that monakata was overseeing right and maybe he could have built it back then well that still begs the question of how munakata himself didn't notice it furthermore how far back are we talking here seems like if despair arc is anything to go by the whole overseas hopes peak thing was abandoned once everything started going to hell and we know that the school itself basically ceased operations at this time under jyn's order thanks to the letter from dr1 confirming as much so i can only imagine this would be well before yuki zomei got tengen to look at her funny cat video if that's the case there's no reason for him to have had it built back then because this whole duplicate facility is basically only useful for this specific plan it even has monokuma decorations in it speaking of the underwater building how in hades did tengan drag everyone down there by himself they were all gassed and tengan is present at the time let's go out on a limb and say he was somehow able to avoid the gas himself because he was aware of it beforehand but then that still leaves him with the responsibility of migrating 15 grown adults into the underground facility placing them in the identically matched conference room exactly as they were when they passed out getting everything else ready and then getting yuki zomei to do her chandelier dance all before any of them woke up you're asking me to believe a lot here and my suspension of disbelief can only reasonably take so much oh god this rabbit hole just keeps getting deeper hey speaking of rabbits monomi right we know she's being controlled by the infiltrating monika how does monica know who monomy is how does monokuma know who monomy is if he's being controlled by tengen who wasn't present for any of the sdr2 stuff how does monokuma even interact with monomy much less hack her if monica isn't in on the killing game and his messages are pre-recorded his messages being pre-recorded is the only way to make sense of tengen being present in the room with everyone and not speaking obviously into a speaker in the corner and getting caught except oops that doesn't make any sense either because despite apparently being pre-recorded messages monokuma interacts with everyone in real time responds to their questions and statements in a perfectly timed manner and again hacks monomy directly despite not knowing who she is or even being aware of monica's involvement in the first place i'm a time traveler and even dismissing all of that and just blindly accepting that all of monakuma's segments are pre-recorded how did tengan even record them in the first place does he just have a monokuma laying around full sets of the hope's peak academy gym did he draw all of those little pixel animations himself did he do this in gmod or something oh my god my brain hurts and i'm not even that deep into all the stuff i could mention i'm fairly certain by the time this is all done i'll still be realizing things that don't make sense about this show hey how about kimura making an antidote for the poison yeah that thing that she apparently does so that it can be used later as a deus ex machina amplified by sumiki to save kirigiri's life when did she have the time to do that no i'm serious i don't care how talented she is it takes weeks to make antidotes for things and that's presuming that you even have the time to study the actual poison and the proper lab and equipment to make it happen the entire time kimura is on screen and most of the time that she's off screen she spends either hiding in corners or going beast mode on ondo and easyoi so when exactly did she get the downtime to do this never explained oh sure that's fine i would have liked a proper explanation for why one of the major character deaths is subverted at the last minute but yeah i guess i won't worry about it actually how did kirigiri even get her hands on the antidote how did she know what it was for does she just go around swallowing strange liquids that she finds in people's pockets i know she's a bit weird when it comes to her investigating but i think surely that qualifies as a potential health hazard that someone as smart as her would not just flippantly risk speaking of health hazards one would think not risking one is the reason why mitori is anxious about disclosing his forbidden action when kirigiri asks him about it but thinking back on it no it actually doesn't add up at all mitori's forbidden action is not using his talent and as we all know his talent is i make it the good cartoons which i fail to see how it is even remotely applicable to the situation in any way with people like juzo asahina or even izioi there is a practicality to not disclosing your forbidden action because it can easily be used to threaten you there's a good chance that if someone knew what it was they could force you into a situation where you'd be at risk of breaking the rule and getting poisoned with meteorite though there is virtually no reason at all for him to be wary of showing it to anyone i mean what are they gonna do strap him to the cold murky floor and demand that he make a new steven universe episode i could go into other things like how juzo survived his injuries for so long or why tengen singles out hagakure as being someone that apparently nobody likes and then never elaborating but whatever we've got plenty of ammo to roll with here and still stuff that i've gotta save for later sections like tengen's motives in general or more stuff about kirigiri or more stuff about materai hey where did komita's cancer go [Music] [Applause] brainwashing as defined by the encyclopedia britannica is a systematic effort to persuade non-believers to accept a certain allegiance command or doctrine a colloquial term it is more generally applied to any technique designed to manipulate human thought or action against the desire will or knowledge of the individual for danganronpa 3 brainwashing is used in conjunction with particular animated videos that reuse assets from danganronpa the animation or other moments in the show that lead to specific long or short-term results for the characters put under the transit permits now not to put on my pretentious glasses but in writing we call words like brainwashing a crutch turn as it doesn't actually invoke or explain the concept you're trying to portray beyond a vague sentiment crutches are meant to be used as a placeholder until you come up with something more definitive to support the weight of your intentions and i don't think this series got that memo this is by far the most pronounced criticism that people have about danganronpa 3 but for most i don't think they understand just how bad it truly is if it were just used one time such as for the reserve for suicides or class 77's transformation into super high school level despair then while it would certainly be a step back from the interpretations the rest of the material left it would just be a problem of concept rather than compromising the entire work's identity i wouldn't like it and i would still think it sucked all the life out of the character's road trip to jungkookland but i would understand why it needed to be done unfortunately it's not that simple is it time yet can i go ahead and ask yeah do it yes finally i've been really working on my delivery for this one um didn't nigey literally say class 77 were brainwashed during sdr2's sixth trial he did but as the definition states brainwashing can take many forms it can be done through mind manipulation just as much as it can through an external force but as much as i am loathed to say it there is a precedent for subconscious coercion and danganronpa before this point and a certain event does make slightly more sense as to how it happened with the use of it though for the one minor issue that using direct brainwashing fixes there's another 50 that come to take its place when you consider how it affects the story at large if we don't count rurika's addictive mind controllable candies then we're left with a whopping 4 brainwashing techniques spread across the entirety of the show's run the suicide video the despair video the video and the hope video and we're going to go over all of them how they're utilized and what exact problems they do or don't fix with their inclusion the suicide video is arguably the least egregious of the four it was made by junko altering mitra's original film after studying it using her analyst abilities and giving it the old enoshima spin in order to get the violent juices flowing and break the resolve of those watching it the suicide video is reused in the future foundation killing game because tengan didn't have the budget to make his own so he must have went to live league and ripped this for his own personal use this video actually does solve the one legitimate issue explaining how the reserve course all committed mass suicide at the same time do i think it's the most interesting way it could have been done no not really but it's reasonable and it happens to a bunch of hardly rendered nobodies it's a serviceable choice to reach a foregone conclusion but it starts getting dicey once we start applying its role into future tengon must have ordered the building to come with suicide monitors probably through the same contractors at toa that worked with jin to get those torture labyrinths though killing on the whole is initially made out to be an obstacle in tangan's game the chosen attacker for that round will always wake up and be guided by a pre-recorded message from monokuma to watch the video and become driven mad until suicide while the power could have always been found and turned off this gave insurance that at least a few foundation members would die no matter what and scare meterai into unleashing his true power on the world but while the methodology of the video isn't always inconsistent how exactly it gets results is even though we technically see it happen i'm still confused and impressed about how great gozu strung himself up like an acrobat unraveling the world's biggest ball of twine seiko embedding herself in a wall in such a way that would make junji ito proud and rurika beat herself down with concrete still haven't entirely figured that one out i also haven't figured out how juzo wasn't also driven to suicide when he tries to save naiki considering how powerful the material is shown to be we are told that he destroyed most of the other monitors in the facility and he doesn't seem to be looking at the screen directly but other characters have been put in the transfer less we're shown how exactly the video works when hope boy gets himself tied down and goes to test his theory about it the video stimulates the brain to relive old traumas until those memories go the victim into committing the deed and naegi is greeted by a whole bunch of familiar faces and yet another close call at being visually interesting it's nice to see these characters one last time and show they still have an effect on naieggy but while it's not a bad choice i can't help but find it to be kind of cheap whenever i'm not laughing at i can't believe it's not mondo because it doesn't actually feel like something naiji hasn't or couldn't have overcome by now it should still make him upset but i doubt even when put in the scenario that he would crumble so easily to circumstances he seemingly already accepted this sort of makes you question what would allow you to break out of the trance too in most other cases it seems like brainwashing is permanent without extreme recourse but juzo snaps naegi out of it with a big bear pep talk is it possible for anybody with a strong enough will to see past the bull because if so you better bring great gozu back this instant or i swear to god that i'll the suicide video isn't terrible and it isn't horribly egregious did it need to be here no but for all the trouble it causes it's not that imperative of a plot device either which is almost just as bad as being terrible i'm not mad just disappointed 4 out of 10 monokuma knives to keep it real now here's the big one the despair video so i've been sitting here racking my brain trying to figure out how exactly this video actually got made because here's the thing i get that junko's analyst abilities are sort of insane but in zero she actually had to undergo being memory wiped herself and have matsuda's research and development on hand to study how to do it while in danganronpa 3 she goes cross-eyed uses her copy sharon gone and understand meteori's life's work and one fell soup of watching his wolf children knock off so junko created the suicide video in secret using his techniques she's in a mirror room or some such slaving over her smile hd remaster but even though she seemingly already got everything she needed to duplicate the effects on her own she still seeks meteorite out to aid in further development of the despair video even though it seems like it's already there mirai finds it and inexplicably isn't affected i guess because it isn't finished even though it's clear that mekong is and was even when it was in the prototype phase he's threatened to stay and continue working but it couldn't have been for long seeing as he's released no more than a couple hours later the only other notable change to the format is that nanome's execution is being played alongside it which seems to be the catalyst in actually getting the despair to hold for class 77 i think i'm going to hand wave how it's expressly stated that junko willingly brought class 77 to her side we already mentioned it and there's no use crying over spilled potential i'm also not going to cover the concept of why junko didn't just broadcast the spare video at large because there would be no purpose in her doing that as the unpredictable nature of the act itself is what she revels in danganronpa 3 gives us the impression she only does what she does here in order to start the domino chain not to knock everything down it still doesn't work and goes directly against her character but there is a reason so instead we're going to discuss the inconsistencies of how despair under the effects of the video operates in the games despair takes many forms depending on the individual but a few select facts hold true notably that it makes you have a similar thought process to junko enoshima herself a complete disregard for life and human emotion that makes you into a warped hedonistic nightmare person who is only appeased with pain internal or external it's a rot from the mind and to the body which probably explains all the stolen limbs and organs although it doesn't explain a decent bit of this holds up from what we see of class 77 but mikon yuki zomei and tengon all have eccentricities that remove them from the usual despair mold namely in that they can all seemingly hide it for long swaths of time without anyone ever noticing something is wrong with them mikon wasn't for nearly as long as the rest so she can be given a pass and we do see that yuki zomei partook and despair on the side we don't know exactly how long ago tangan imbibed the virtual spirit of agony but it seems pretty non-negotiable that he and yuki zomei both had to put up facades for years so nobody figured out that there was evil afoot in their base of operations which is incredibly inconsistent with how it's been portrayed up until this point but even more than that is tengen himself whose despair seems to be that of obsessing over finding true hope you might think this puts him on the same level as komaida but komaida's despairer virtually leaves him unchanged because his own ideals are despairful in their own right and that's the only reason he appears to be normal at first glance we don't get anything substantial enough from tangan to understand why this would be how he works though he was once the principal of hope's peak and heads the future foundation we don't know much about his tenure and he didn't ever seem to enforce something so broad beyond the occasional cover-up practices for the school's image none of the other remnants act remotely like this but there needed to be some reason why he went out of his way to run his own killing game i think if they emphasized how his masterminding was different to junko's or even just left his brainwashing state ambiguous it could have done a lot more for his reasoning but i'm sure marcy will have some more words about that what about that video he was fighting for well i regret to inform you that in the last few minutes of futures final episode and moving into hope that there is actually a secret extra video that i mentioned at the top the video now you might be thinking that you've never actually heard of an video but i guarantee you that it is very much real it's only mentioned in a throwaway line but this is the video that mirai uses to temporarily force others into becoming mindless zombies that follow his objectives by showing them shapes and colors the likes of which i've never seen there isn't much to say about this one other than that it's virtually indistinguishable from what we believe to be the hope video and it actually ruined my train of thought because for the longest time i believe this was the hope video and that the countdown timer was just for when it lets meter i know that the entire world was brainwashed which i then would have said completely negates the actions of class 77 when they come to the rescue given that 99 of the world are still dopamine doped but i guess this was just like a palette cleanser to get everyone on earth ready for the hope video broadcast but if that's the case then why didn't mitsurai just air it and tell everybody to stop doing terrorism for a little while your guess is as good as mine alright so how about that hope video yeah well we don't actually know what it looks like or how it functions beyond the concept that it eradicates to spare and turns people into little manic rays of sunshine that can't feel negativity at large which is effectively no worse than what junko did but in reverse and that is the quandary of putting something like this out there obviously tangon as a remnant believed this rash play was the only option with the world in such disarray yet even though the plan is to make mirai grow some stones and forcibly commit a genocide of ego not only does tengan not think that reinforcing the idea that meteorite's talent is bad might not work out for him by making it his forbidden action but somehow meteorite never comes to the conclusion that this should be done on his own even though he's the one that made the [ __ ] video do you have less than zero empathy have a freaking heart big guy he's out there trying his best and he's clearly traumatized he doesn't think he can actually help people so he wads up heaps of stress and remains indecisive it's a perfect storm of anxious sadness that's shown to us several times that's what the whole foundation game shabang was made to fix it's not a matter of trauma it's a matter of inconsistency with his intentions if mirai is so guilty about his actions and he decided to make the hope video with the express goal of fixing the problems that he helped cause to begin with then why would he not have the strength to do it he already had it in his back pocket by the time the killing game rolled around and while it's still a poor decision you're telling me he couldn't rationalize that he made a cure hell they even show him slaving away working on it during killer killer but that's what i do when i've worked on something for months on end and turn myself into nothing but dust i don't show it to anyone for no reason they could have at least made him bring it up as an option and have someone like munakata shut it down and that would have led to a more natural conflict between him tangon and the rest of the council did he seriously just find a way to reverse the byproducts of despair and then decide to never touch it again hey here's my impression of meteorize character arc claims to have no agency makes poor choices anyway tries to fix mistakes made from those choices refuses to use what he created to fix those mistakes does not elaborate what a god damn king i said earlier that there's a reason why i didn't want to get into the idea of why junko didn't just air the brainwashing video on a grand scale to accomplish her goals and i said that it's because she enjoys the lack of logic and despair that she takes pleasure in stealing hope away as a virtue in of itself the same goes for devising reasonable concepts that explain character actions and the reason why this sort of brainwashing comes across poorly is because it takes accountability and personal interest out of the equation there is nothing satisfying about watching people become broken just for the sake of being broken there has to be something more to it or else it just becomes a facade of intrigue it's an anti-climax it's the unseasoned chicken of motivation and while it might have been too much to ask that we get a whole series of watching junko twist every character into her personal plaything they should have at least alluded to the idea of it because otherwise this may as well not have happened at all despair arc's ultimate goal was to explain why class 77 is the way they are and show the world's descent into madness and it can only accomplish this by throwing away its own text and incorporating the most boilerplate concept for evil you can put to the page this is danganronpa not a gi joe joe's cobra subplot got one of our own again that despair video is nothing but trouble there were a million different ways to handle this and they went for the easy out i truly genuinely do not understand people who have decided to be okay with this as the ultimate resolution to who these characters are because they have been and always will be more than lab rats who were at the wrong place at the wrong time to me i wouldn't even want this for teruteru you already made him into his head surely there was a way to enunciate that in a manner that doesn't paradoxically make him less of one so how many problems did introducing anime brainwashing actually solve for danganronpa one how many did it cause several a grand thesis i know but it's such a shame to watch all of the personality and color from the series ideas get scrubbed away with imagination bleach i say we call a spade a spade and admit to ourselves of this entire series brainwashed itself [Music] well we've beaten around the bush of talking about him for long enough despite having alluded to the subject here and there but let's finally talk about the mastermind of futures proceedings kazuo tengan yeah the old guy with the toothpaste hair is our diabolical schemester and how does his plan fare when compared to other masterminds before him well it kinda completely sucks we've already talked quite a bit about how logistically speaking the lead up to his plan and even some of the details of it don't really add up when you think about them logically for even two seconds but unfortunately this isn't the end of the complaints we have to go through you see the reason tengen goes off the deep end despite being the head of the foundation is about as uninspired a reason as you could possibly imagine if this leads you to wonder wait did he just get brainwashed yeah he just got brainwashed specifically because the already brainwashed yuki zomei showed him the despair video at some point or another well now hang on a second chief was he brainwashed maybe he just decided to do this on his own they never show specifically whether he watched the video and yukizoma even told him what was on each usb she gave him see i was thinking about this too but no we can't escape from this the killer killer manga unfortunately directly confirms this fact not to mention junko saying that yuki zomei quote drove him mad he's definitely brainwashed so i don't think i need to belabor this point any further but it's seriously such a hackneyed stupid motivation for your main villain of all people to have oh he saw a cursed e-bomb's world video that turned him into a twisted psychopath well cool i guess but at that point it has about as much narrative weight as saying he's evil because well just because i don't know and needless to say that doesn't exactly strike much of any kind of emotion within me so what exactly is the endgame of this plan well tengan apparently wants enough ruckus to occur to scare the living daylights out of his apparent progeny resident glass-boned paper-skinned twink meteorite and for this to stir him to action what kind of action well apparently the action of using his talent to televise a reverse engineered hope video to counteract the effects of the despair video which will then catch everyone's eyes on a global broadcast and effectively wipe out despair by brainwashing everyone in existence into a peaceful bliss there are quite a few things to question about all this first off let's bring up something that we already touched on a bit before this whole thing was set up for meteorite to be the big hero why i guess tengen saw the potential in his technology but if this was really what he was banking on he made some pretty questionable choices first of all he invites meteorite to the death game that he has planned beforehand if mirai had died in this game which was entirely likely his whole plan goes up in smoke well to be fair he seemed surprised when mirai showed up he probably wasn't exactly planning for him to be there because he never showed up to these things anyway like sure but then at that rate why even invite him at all it seems like a pretty stupid rookie mistake to leave that element up to chance if you could just as easily have said hey mirai don't come to the meeting knowing me torai i doubt he would have been against the idea of being left out anyway so what's the problem well maybe this was the problem the fact that despite monokuma claiming at the start that the game is being broadcast live togami later clarifies for the niagara crew that it is in fact not being broadcast at all that this statement was some kind of love okay so then if the plan was to stir me to ride to action through all of the carnage but he wasn't supposed to be there and risk his own life in said proceedings then how was he supposed to know that anything was even happening at all if the whole building is locked down and everyone is in a secret underwater replica of the building and nobody can get information in or out of the building then as far as he's concerned what is there to worry about why would he feel pressured to use the video if he literally wouldn't have a clue what was happening did this guy give his evil plan draft a second read before finalizing it or what furthermore once midori is in the game may i remind you that his forbidden action is using his talent which is the exact thing that tengan wants him to do i'm getting some seriously mixed signals here man speaking of mixed signals why in the mother of ass is tengan trying to manipulate mirai into brainwashing the world with hope anyway he's the mastermind of a killing game he's been shown the despair video and has become a remnant of despair why would his motive twistedly executed as it may be in any way resemble spreading hope through any means he seems to care about the future enough to want to do this even if the manner by which he's doing so is completely screwed up but if he's infected with despair just like all of the other victims of the video the same one that evidently turned class 77 into a bunch of lunatic serial murderers why is he trying to make things better for the world hello can i please get some damn consistency in this story for once is that too much to ask that things make even a little bit of sense please and i mean sure you can point out all you want how brainwashing everyone into hope isn't necessarily any better being that it still robs them of their free will and may even be similarly horrifying when you get down to it but it still doesn't add up why wouldn't he just want to convert everyone to despair if he's already a remnant of despair again all i want is some internal consistency here furthermore this whole rigmarole just seems needlessly complicated anyway even discounting the multiple contradictory factors at play pray tell explain to me this if his whole motive is needling midori into airing the hope video why does he need to kill all of his co-workers in a roundabout fake killing game setup with a fake alternate underwater building poison game bangles and among us sprites just to accomplish that why doesn't he just hear me out steal the video and then air it himself that seems like it would be a way more efficient than any of this and would be way less elaborate and stupid to pull off hell the only time meterei has ever stood up for himself and the entire story before this point was when junko insults anime in front of him so maybe tengan should have just said that spirited away was overrated but no we need there to be a killing game so we just have to contrive a reason for it to happen without even considering the multitude of reasons why it's completely unnecessary for the antagonist's plan to begin with that's definitely good writing but isn't junko kind of a shallow villain in the motive department too you said yourself in your first retrospective that she intentionally avoids ever explaining what hers are stupid or not tengen still has one doesn't he junku enoshima didn't exactly have superbly compelling motives when we first saw her but i could at least appreciate her function to the story she had a very weighty thematic build behind her she represented something and she carried it all out with an efficiency and malice that made her the perfect villain that danganronpa needed her to be tengen by contrast is a bored-old fuddy-duddy who seemingly fails time and again to even form a coherent thought much less anything resembling a plan whose motives amount at best i don't know dude i was just bored which he even claims on camera at one point and whose own internal logic is so blindingly stupid and self-contradictory that trying to make actual sense of it is an exercise in absolute futility he is easily the worst most boring villain in danganronpa history and his place in the story really only goes to further hammer the final few nails into its coffin he is at least funny though right oh no yeah he's an absolute laugh riot comically gaunt looking face the weirdest inspector chelmy looking ass slouch he looks like he should be wearing ronald mcdonald shoes he looks like he should be in the newest despicable me spin-off when he's leaving behind his diabolical endnote video that he recorded beforehand for me to ride which come to think of it that's really weird too he's like yeah bro when you get old like me sometimes you just get so bored that you want your colleagues to die and what's the most hilarious about that is that frankly i'm surprised it took him this long my man worked at hope's peak academy home of child dust grinding self-worth destruction murder cover-up and casual hot topic branded human experimentation but until he got into a comparably tame office job he was like your life's good his mustache is as square as a blackboard eraser he looks like santa's less successful nephew he looks like he knows who the zodiac killer is but he just doesn't feel like telling sometimes in background frames i could swear he looks like he swallowed an entire frog he is pathetic and yet he will never die morbius weeps when he sees this man and longingly contemplates what he can never be i guess what i mean to say is kazuo tengen bottom text and shockingly he's not even the best character when it comes to this i've contained my rage for as long as possible but i shall unleash my fury upon you like the crashing of a thousand waves begun gamer girl [Music] is far and away the worst thing about danganronpa 3 and it's not even close some people think it's the brainwashing some people believe it's the pace some even think that it's just the fact that a new cast comes in and clutters all the actual intrigue from the characters they want to see but i could forgive all of this all of it if they completely removed nanome from the narrative her sheer existence in the events of danganronpa 3 withers the foundations of everything she touches and she is indicative of every fault the anime has on the whole what is a god to a non-believer no what is a god to chiaki [ __ ] nanome i've been dodging her as much as possible because to go into nanome's role in danganronpa 3 in earnest means to pick apart everything about it i've been spending so much of my time dancing around and digging into the particulars but nanami is the cherished donkey of despair arc hoisting everything and everyone around her even when she has absolutely nothing to do with it whenever nanome is not on screen all of the other characters should be asking where's nanome oh and they do everyone in this anime has a bond with her in mind heart body and soul she is the one who unites and the one who decides and even her own death is only for the sake of ensuring the eventual fates these characters share she's danganronpa's personal simulacrum of hope friendship and love and if naegi knew her like these guys do he would have wept but i'd be remiss not to state that she has this creator's pet status in super danganronpa 2 as well just speaking personally rather than with any critical lens for a moment i think she's plain but serviceable in that game to me she's always been and i hate to use this word overrated she's there the whole time and aids you throughout nearly the entirety of your journey but she's only there to serve that one function to make sure you aren't lonely and are finding all the necessary evidential clues to your murder mystery and all of the major sidekicks in danganronpa fulfill this nanome isn't special for fulfilling her role but it's a far cry from the weight of kirigiri's role in danganronpa 1. kirigiri's stoic personality and cold contemplative rationale is only a mask that she uses to keep others from getting too close and therefore leave her with an uncomfortable bias that would hamper her investigative abilities over the course of that game niagara and her gain trust in one another through their work until it comes to a head in the fifth chapter where naegi has to decide how much that trust is really worth an enemy is meant to mirror what kirigiri was but she doesn't reach her same heights because she is mostly a passive force she has a careful personality that doesn't really break the bank she only shifts into occasional bursts of eagerness when someone talks about video games or yawns before she gets tired otherwise you catch her aiding and investigations off hand or helping the rest of the cast prior an enemy is there she does things she's not unimportant but unlike many of the other recurring elements in super danganronpa 2 it feels as though she's there to fulfill her narrative role before she actually gets to be a real character she's the closest thing to what i could call a proper player surrogate though less in the sense of i am them and more wow i sure feel better knowing that i have a gamer girl of my own by my side a grand majority of this isn't really an issue however after finding out her primary function as an observer meant to aid in watching over class 77 during the heartthrobbing school trip her purpose was to act as a mediator and resident backpatter for the class and ensure they're doing what they're meant to collecting hope fragments and getting along her personality is neutral because she was made to sort out situations on the inside not necessarily guide everyone along like usami and naturally this predilection would lend itself well to nanome aiding the class and other even less favorable circumstances you could easily brush the lack of an outstanding personality away as being a quirk of her being an ai it was a cute idea to have a character like this actually be someone inhuman and it matched the meta textual ideas that super danganronpa 2 had about games having an effect on our lives and how we think when experiencing them it's not that nanome had nothing it's that she had a function to serve nanome was what she needed to be and she did what was necessary of her with just enough depth to feel like she meant something to the player in order for them to recognize what she meant lines of code or not she still has meaning to the player and by extension the remnants she was made to service she knew better than anyone what it takes to find meaning in a situation that's so dire and because of that she's like fine her character does what it needs to do and she delivers an effective speech to wrap everything up in a nice bow at the end she's like a low b tear on my super danganronpa 2 giving a [ __ ] in a vacuum tier list but once you start giving her any more than those two dimensions it all starts to unravel making chiaki nanome a real person comes with baggage from the outset as you not only have to answer for a greater depth of character due to her being a real personality but also have to account for why that personality didn't translate into the neo world program i'm sure you could think of something but no matter how you slice it it would be going against the established text before her execution she says that it's possible that she could have gotten her kind-hearted personality from their dad and big brother chihiro and alter ego respectively tossing aside any of the chihiro gender bull for the sake of staying on topic if it were just alter ego that would be one thing but the implication that shahiro was involved in her creation is a dead ringer that nanome like usami was made for this particular purpose the neo world program is acknowledged as being a collaborative effort from multiple hope's peak students even beyond chihiro including matsuda and gekko gahara supposedly usami is based on gekko gahara herself but there's no exact source on that it's not like she can tell us so i'm just going to say it's nothing or explained extremely poorly but this gives more than enough justification that nanome had no other backing beyond her role as an observer a joint creation made to mold herself to the tasks that she's given i'm not even gonna let this be a debate nanome isn't and was not ever intended to be real from the outset there was no foreshadowing or secret plans to ever have this be the course her character took no matter how much he not his memory tulpa tries to tell you otherwise right nope and then how come no it's always say one more word and all of your stuffing is going to find its way inside of a throw pillow wow so much for the tolerant left someone says something you don't like and you come out swinging with the threats oh it's not a threat it's a promise when komaida confronts monokuma to verify the integrity of the files he earned as a result of his high risk game of russian roulette inside the final dead room matakuma says he made a fake page for the traitor specifically so nobody could guess who the traitor is immediately because if they didn't have a fake page they would have no student profile you know why because the trader wasn't an actual student that existed at hope speak academy there is no room for benefit of the doubt or retroactive extrapolation here the choice to make nanome real immediately nullifies her purpose in super danganronpa 2 and solidifies itself as a thoughtless retcon which danganronpa 3 is certainly no stranger to but i'd call this one of the most notable and by far the most egregious this isn't taking a story element and retroactively tweaking it to serve a different purpose this is actively rewriting the identity of a character and trying to make them something they were never meant to be but all right let's pretend to be charitable here maybe monokuma was just being a stinker as usual and pulled an extremely ballsy double lie by including nanome's real school profile and her acknowledgement of chihiro as her father is strictly under the basis of her seeing them as her creator in an observer state she has the means to be a real person in the real world and a part of class 77 why does nobody in the neoworld program remember her how does she differ in personality from her ai counterpart does she have any family or friends what did she accomplish to get her talent scouted by hope's peak if you think any of these questions are getting answered you're as delusional as this show needs you to be to enjoy it when we are formally reintroduced an anime in the first episode of despair her only character traits are a tired awkwardness and her focus on playing video games the exact same things she sported in super danganronpa 2 but to an even less believable degree the only extrapolation we get on her title as a gamer is that she definitely plays games she knows about different genres and titles not obscure games not games that require years of expertise or particular techniques to become the best at not speed running or bug fixing or exploiting or anything that would drag her to a super high school level she just likes video games and gets tired and is full of love in episode 2 they try to give her a flaw due to her not having any friends or people that really acknowledge her but not only does this not work when she's enrolled in an elite campus for elite eccentric minds but it's also a problem that ends up spontaneously working itself out over a few rounds of mario kart and drugged up hot pot drugged up hot pot that apparently she isn't even deeply affected by and she can shake off with ease to send territory straight to the moon these two things immediately get her recognized by yuki zomei as a go-getter who can handle anyone or anything so long as she puts her mind to it and though she immediately doesn't want to accept everyone already loves her so much that they have to stop having thoughts of their own and mindlessly agree that it's for the best this is where her presence becomes downright unbearable even from the beginning you're given all of the signs that nanome is the crux of this series she is the glue that holds everything together and she is the linchpin that will make it all collapse she is the harbinger of doom at the end of despair arc's opening and she is the collage that makes up everyone's happy memories during the ending she's the one who imparts wisdom on deaf ears to hinata she's the one who the class can count on to make themselves feel whole away from or in spite of a crisis and she is the chewy moral center whose only true flaws that she cared too much funnily enough a good portion of this misplaced reference can actually be attributed to yuki zomei another character that class 77 gains too much respect for in too little time instilling it in the others when she goes to leave for the reserve course all of the weight is put on nanome shoulders to keep everyone in line by the time she returns leaving any moments of meaningful development between the enemy and the rest of her classmates effectively moot because we don't get to see her put in the work or face adversity until khmeida barges back in with his insider knowledge in episode 8 barring a planned party for yuki zomi's return in episode 5 and waiting like fry's dog from futurama for hinata that never comes in episode six nanome doesn't even feature all that much of the show that tries its [ __ ] heart out to make you weep for her and yet everyone is always praising her and putting her thoughts and feelings first paco can't even decide where to put a box of komida supplies without kuzuriu suggesting nanome's input pekko pekoyama the assassin that didn't even need to be told to kill koizumi because she could just feel kuzuri's intent now is alright with deferring to anatomy's judgment and you know it would be one thing if i actually had anything interesting to say about how bad nanome's choices are how she herself fails as a character in the narrative but somehow danganronpa 3 nanome manages to make her a.i counterpart feel more like flesh and blood than her real self ever did we're at episode 8 of 11 an enemy's most defining trait is that the rest of the cast say i should like and respect her due to what she means more than she ever goes out of her way to do something worthwhile these next couple of episodes up until her death don't have anything of note that i haven't brought up before either she follows komida through junko's latest doom wad discovers that hinata is now kamakura and leaves to rally the troops before mikan and yuki zomi tag team bait her into her untimely fate they gratuitously batter and beat her down as though it's meant to make up for the hours of time wasted not developing her taunting her as she reaches out towards an unachievable goal extreme graphic violence does not bother me in the slightest no matter how senseless really i am desensitized to my core but nanome's death is just so pointedly agonizingly over the top and cruel because they literally couldn't get you to give it any other way certainly does suck to see some poor kid bleed out on the ground long after they should have had their heart stopped tripping and stumbling through their own blood in a desperate attempt to cling to their life i'm not unsympathetic but if that's what you've got to lean on in order to make me feel anything about a character you failed at your [ __ ] job you're now just guilting me into feeling something because you were too sh to make it work any other way nanome dies a sacrificial lamb that everyone just can't stand to see slaughtered like she meant the world to them all it took was a double dragon reference and a pep rally pleasantry the important bonds that she's supposed to have that make her the backbone of class 77 and their time in the neo world program are only ever implied because any of the ostensible growth between them is still off screen so we can get that laxative bomb fun time where junko enoshima's funky plot contrivance convention she has virtually no recognizable sentience as a person she's a drawstring toy that says what the plot needs her to say and then gets put back in the box when everyone's cried out yet another one of danganronpa 3's flaws exemplified with her inclusion even kamakura can't help but weep for her deep down and ache so hard that he carries out his own ideology in part on nanome's behalf kuzaria wept more tears for anatomy than he did for his own [ __ ] sister and for what because she exists because she's nice because she sat in the back of the classroom to play march of the minis and gave one word of input in the span of a year hey kishi kaio do either of you know where you kept the crack pipes because i think i'm about ready to take a few bowls of whatever the hell you were on passing this through part of me wants to feel bad that i'm resorting to uh what kind of idiot drugs were you losers on but i can't convey the sentiment in any other way they took a character that was already flat and somehow in trying to make her this divine beacon for all that is good they forgot to put in a drop of substance like if professor utonium decided to make the powerpuff girls using an old boot nothing else and then started wondering why nothing happened this isn't defensible it isn't i know i already shut akuma up but there is no possible argument that you could make that can explain away what makes nanome who she is um what i i know you already kinda sorta mentioned it at the top is something you don't believe explains nothing but uh doesn't the memory of nanome living on through hinata mean anything she needed to be real for the second observer to be based on anything to begin with right so why is it so wrong that she exists and makes an impact on everyone if that does what you wanted and explains why she's the way she is in game because it doesn't matter barring the inaccuracies i've already listed about ai nanome's creation you don't get anything of value from knowing that nanome was real you don't get to say that everyone had her in their hearts and minds and they wanted to see her again when there was no reason she needed to be seen in the first place real anatomy is a guiding force to inevitable doom and presented to you as though she's some adorable lost cat that you need to cherish unless you want the guilt to hang over you forever i don't give a sh about how the characters feel about her because i don't feel anything you can have junko enoshima herself groveling at nanami's feet to beg for forgiveness and i still wouldn't stop presenting her inclusion because she's the biggest thorn in despair ark side barely anything in this entire season is worth a damn but much like she's meant to be for her slobbering acolytes she's the adhesive paste holding all of these rough edges and poor choices together yeah she's not the actual reason class 77 gets brainwashed but she is the reason they feel despair to begin with she didn't directly push hinata to become izuru kamakura but her existence is what fed that desire no she didn't kickstart the tragedy or cause so many of these bad choices but this plot in these characters are all a response to what she's moralized and yet in being everything to these characters and this story she has made everything of interest and i do mean nearly everything so much worse well hey at this point if you and her think you both know so much better why don't you just fail to outclass it on your own time if you don't like these ideas do your own you know what maybe we will just you know not during this retrospective give me like a year or two to de-stress but it wasn't my job to make danganronpa 3 and it wasn't my job to make these calls i might have gone into this thing with the intention of publicly lambasting it but it's not like i enjoy doing nothing but saying it's bad and i hate it this video isn't like five hours long for our health but i do hate shiaki anime as she's portrayed in danganronpa 3. i cannot stand her what she represents in the show and what this one single choice did in defining everything the franchise seemingly stands for she is a carelessly made retcon that adds nothing of value while being paraded and showered in praise for it because the story demands it be so any associative iota of what made her compelling in the game she starred in has been sucked out of her and she took the rest of the series with her because chiaki nanami the real living breathing chiaki nanome is a black hole that pretends to have a light at the end of the tunnel but all of that light is trapped inside of her and snuffed out the moment it enters she might not actually shoulder the burden of her friends in the world like the anime tells you she does but she does carry the weight of danganronpa 3 and when you look at it that way it makes me glad that she's dead [Music] to close the book before we move on into recalling the end let's reflect on our feelings about future arc as a whole shall we at its best danganronpa 3 the end of hope's peak academy future arc is a mere vignette of potentially impactful ideas it has a handful of decent character designs some of whom have interesting hooks attached to them like pieces of bait strapped to fishing hooks these hooks were then cast to the sea but unfortunately never retrieved by a suitable fish some degree of thematic intrigue shines through and at the end of the day you can see in the very broad structure of the show that some attempt was made at having a cohesive interesting through line the talks of ideology and how you can spin nearly any good intentions for bad ends are an insightful thought worth exploring dare i even say within a danganronpa framework hell i'll even give one smidgen of a compliment to the concept of brainwashing here as opposed as i've always been to it throughout this video because even though i think it robs this story of a lot of the gravitas and nuance it deserves the concept in a vacuum is still quite suitably horrifying hope's peak is already a machine which has taken so much from these people and to literally turn into its gears forced to keep spinning yourself until you burn out and explode it's the epitome of the grind and the grind costs more than we as human beings can often afford to pay at that rate who's to say brainwashing the world with hope would be any better than brainwashing them with despair at the core of the conflict between the two an unspoken element is always at play and that's a choice to rob someone of that choice makes any potential allegiance meaningless in a sense doesn't it these are conceptual fish that are frankly much too big for future arc to fry however it quickly mires itself in a multitude of problems most clearly exacerbated by its pacing and even further than that its own disinterest in telling its story all possible shortcuts and foibles future arc could have ventured to stumble through it does so with gleeful abandon it relishes the thought of smacking face first into a door it could have avoided with even a hint of foresight its characters are half-baked shallow and monotonously repeat their given lines until it's time for them to come to their often awkward forced resolution and by then it's usually much too little much too late if they even get a resolution in the first place the killing game is so streamlined it loses the intrigue that danganronpa is even known for in the first place the show's setting is drab and lacking any familiar pizzazz even the poppy pink blood which once adorned the story with a palpable sense of twisted humor has now become a dull red which calls to mind why it was even necessary to spice up the original game's beta concept so many years ago distrust began its development as something with promise but grew into something great because it had a willingness to adapt to stylize and to grow its concepts outward to become more than the sum of its parts future arc by contrast took its building blocks hoarded them away and when production crunch came knocking they hammered as many square pieces into circular holes as they could manage just to meet the deadline at the door its plot twists are pathetically nonsensical its mastermind is a joke its best ideas are left to rot on the cutting room floor while what remains are husks of tropes that barely even make the necessary effort to justify themselves if this is supposed to be the future i'd sure as hell hate to see the past i don't want the angry video game nerd to take me back there because this game is enough i've had my conflicts with danganronpa before but this is the first time where i can legitimately say this does not feel like dengan rampa this feels like the horrible chain restaurant version of danganronpa complete with them getting your order completely wrong and on top of that you even get food poisoning good luck in the bathroom you'll never get clean i think what's so disappointing about it is that it had every opportunity to be great if the right ideas were pushed and the right amount of time in the oven was in the cards unfortunately neither of those things seemed to be true and what we got as a result is something that spends 90 percent of its run time meandering around wondering what it wants to be while the other 10 rushes to play it as safely as possible and ends up skinning its knees on the pavement i hate to say this but it's basically the sonic 06 of denganrompa uninhibited ambition meets production crunch and everyone suffers the consequences the feature's looking bleak indeed and i hate to say this but it can get worse [Music] i came into this knowing exactly what i wanted to do to unravel the years of hate i've had for this anime and especially this half of it i've done that in both script and in real time i've spent hours mulling it over in the vain attempt to understand what makes despair arc so terrible to me and it's a lot of things but it's also a lot of the same things there's so much of this that's just stating the same problems over and over again to get another five minutes of material and it's not even gratifying to start tearing apart the shreds i've made with tweezers anymore i look at this thing and honestly i just feel tired of trying to figure out its problems as of writing i've watched danganronpa 3 in full no less than five times since 2016. and that doesn't count all the homework i did to help with this endeavor which is four times more in some change than any normal person should invest their time into this destitute gutter of television as you can probably tell despair arc doesn't have my endorsement but that was never something that was going to change you listen to me ramble and complain to figure out the hows and whys so how and why is it the way that it is if i put the root of all that distaste into a word i would call it unwilling despair arc is an unwilling piece of media that acts like a petulant child whenever you try to make it take accountability for itself it's unwilling to trust in its cast in its audience in the works it revolves around and even in itself it so desperately wants to be a show stopper that finally gives die hard some background knowledge but actively refuses to understand that when you try to bridge these gaps you have to be responsible with the material you use to do it with everything comes at a price and the entry fee you have to pay at the spare arc's doorstep in order to find any enjoyment in it is your narrative comprehension there's next to nothing of value here it's made to be a step stool to the half of the anime that while just as bad clearly had far more time and attention put into it it exists to answer questions that people only asked because they wanted to think and gave the most thoughtless answers possible it turns characters into bastardized versions of themselves for the sake of upholding its own shoddy renditions of known events or events that it claims to portray but instead makes up with its own justifications to bolster ideas that were definitively never present to begin with be it in gamer girl messiahs or mind drains to callbacks and visual cues it's a wolf in sheep's clothing it's a show that looks like danganronpa but actively refuses to act like it unless it leads to something that it wants it's a feast of bad decisions leaps in logic maligned and mismatched concepts that actively detract from the experience of everything else in the franchise including its own sister series and i'm a glutton for [ __ ] punishment i'm talking about the damn thing like it killed my oversized dog and you know what i almost wish it did because i wanted to be far more angry than i actually got to be i revile despair i wanted to make it pay for even allowing me to consider that it once ruined something that i hold dear but i just can't anymore because the spare arc even as a long-term fan who has drank the kool-aid and gotten myself entrenched in even the most minor minutia that the franchise has to offer doesn't accomplish anything its existence isn't one of purpose but of self-enforced obligation with itself it's not bad in the extraordinary way i once thought it was it's bad because it's pathetic it's pitiable it doesn't make you want to tear your hair out it makes you want to take it out back behind the wood shed and give it a mercy killing it's an anime that lives as its own monument to failure and i don't regret what i did here but i recognized that in the end it was a futile endeavor to accomplish my goal because i gave despair what it was looking for too i gave it my time and energy and it chewed me up and spit me back out because i dared to give a [ __ ] i got what i wanted so did despair and somehow neither of us won and we still aren't done yet there's two more hurdles left to run out of breath and stumble over so let's finish last with whatever dignity we have left it's time we talk about danganronpa 2.5 have you ever heard about 2.5 by the way if you haven't i wouldn't blame you it's somehow more niche than danganronpa 3 is already considering the fact that it was released independently of it 2.5 is an ova that takes place right before hope arc and was bundled with no not the anime but with the japanese limited edition of danganronpa v3 inscrutable bedfellows come in equally inscrutable packages apparently in this very special episode we are led through the deepest layer of nagitoko maida's twisted mind there he lives in a strange alternate reality of his own making ware instead of being the super high school level good luck he's cruising around as a normal boy who still inexplicably has bad luck but it improves the luck of those around him totally normal things that are mundane and not at all uncommon or equally as weird as his good luck from the regular series was totally evens the playing field komita spends his days with his classmates which for some reason does not include nanome thank god and gets up to his regular old shenanigans like seeing sonya accept a date with soda only for him to be murdered in cold blood with kuzariu vowing to avenge his soul brother very normal things he also begrudges talent here for some inscrutable reason thinking everybody would be better off if instead of being chained to societal expectations they could all just find contentment as fellow norms of the north however everything begins to unravel when we learn this is all the work of hajime or as we come to learn not really either this is a weird alter ego offshoot created by hinata to raid the brains of his comatose cadaver classmates and retrieve their egos from within the machine because apparently when you die in the neoworld program you don't suffer brain death like super danganronpa 2 literally told us you did but instead retreat into the recesses of an estranging copium-laden abstraction of your past manifested from hidden desires to process such a traumatic death the only way to pull someone out is to slide into your mental paradise and ruin it by killing everyone you love you know i think maybe you should drink some orange juice maybe it'll calm you down resident bot account hourly izuru kamakura quotes basically does just that until komida gets fed up enough to try and kill him sherlock boomerang style using a baseball he got from leon kuata because of course and it destroys an entire building with the both of them inside once komaida emerges from the rubble he's wearing the outfit from the game he's from for once and he ridicules the world that's falling apart around him as he realizes how not in line with his established character it is and resolves none of his deep-seated issues in the process thought nada tries to imply that his hatred of talent was a possibility that existed for coamina and is maybe how he really feels deep down but it comes across as shallow introspection for unearned schmaltz there's no organic build up to this in any of the material that previously established his character if anything the other entries consistently doubled down on his beliefs regardless he wakes up and emerges from his tube gets inducted back into the group seamlessly despite the fact that when he last saw these people he tried to get them all murdered and somehow gets a robot hand in the five seconds it takes him to wake up and join everyone else out on the beach if it seems like i'm skimming i barely am it really is just that inconsequential but i still intend to rant about it anyways as you could probably guess now that we've laid the groundwork let's get into the minutia starting with the main fixture of this whole mess komida's mind palace the concept revolves around the enigmatic inner machinations of komida's mind actualizing loose concepts that don't actually work and while this does for once explain why nobody is in character it doesn't do a damn thing when this cognitive realm has nothing to do with komida from the outset we're given this wacky slice of life comedy tone before being shown naegi being a confident bad boy with maizono two characters that komida should only know about from brief glances in virtual dossiers there are also hope's peak staff he hasn't met student council members he hasn't met characters from zero to make me feel that much more bitter the warriors of hope pudgy princess and some reserved course chuds beyond that he thinks about soda and kuzuru being his best friends despite the fact that none of them have had a pleasant interaction with each other in despair or super danganronpa 2 in just about any way i know that none of this is supposed to be rationalized because these sorts of subconscious trappings don't follow rules which is why i'm not going to say anything about komida somehow still being in class 77b despite the fact that he's meant to be seen as a reserve course student the problem here isn't so much the lack of sense as it is recognizing komida's actual feelings and desires they try to play it off as though these are all real things he could have actually wanted in some form and i don't doubt that on some level komida does want to be respected by his peers this just isn't the way that it would be portrayed komaida despises who he is and only accepts what he can do because he knows that he can be used by greater means for greater people we've already discussed that even in the most pressing circumstances there is nothing that could or should dissuade him from feeling that way because his actual thoughts on himself and what he does all come from the same pool of ideas calmida wouldn't want to secretly live in a happy-go-lucky sitcom where everything goes right he would want to live in an era of prosperity where he's whipped and dismissed he wants to see others prosper from afar and he even says in this very episode that he wants nothing to do with being a leading character and that much is true because komeida only cares about what others can do he only cares about results and it's because of that the whole concept falls flat on its face i have a hard time believing komeido wouldn't simply snap himself out of it if these are the flimsy rules holding all these abstractions together and knowing the absurd luck he sported through the series thus far i don't think it's that much of a far cry to say that he could have just come out of that coma on his own at this point i would have accepted that more than the actual terms they get laid out for us but far be it from exclusive for kamida to have problems here let's talk about hinatabat as well shall we i know he isn't exactly hajime hinata in the flesh or even the hazard suit but this is still supposed to be some approximation of our boy right so what exactly is his deal here his role is honestly one of the more messy and thematically confusing in this whole episode and trying to suss out what they were going for here continues to puzzle me so alright he's meant to purposefully destabilize these convenient mind palaces in order to awaken people the reason they are now comatose no longer has much to do with you know the fact that they experienced realistically simulated death but because said deaths were mentally traumatic and make them want to hole up and indulge in fantasies and the best way to heal their wounded hearts is to violently crush their fantasies into dust by simulating the murder of everyone they love am i getting all this right because honestly that seems like the shittiest way to wake someone from a dream possible oh i'll fix your traumatically induced fugus date alright by making it worse you'll have no choice but to wake up from your coma because being asleep will suck so much more if only that was an applicable strategy in real life yeah well it's basically uh like tough love you know gotta wake them up from their fantasies because pulling up in a fantasy isn't any more healthy than just wallowing in sadness right i think there's merit to this discussion but i think it's a little more complex than that and furthermore it's way beyond the pay grade of danganronpa 3 to talk about this subject much less in one 25-minute ova again they really are shooting themselves in the foot by having a concept that demands a lot more exploration than they're affording themselves the time to actually discuss as it stands bot hinata just comes across like a merciless weirdo who does neo-matrix stuff until he's bullied a mentally ill creamsicle into a baseball grave at which point he can pat himself on the back and say i bet you wanted this didn't you too bad you'll never get it how inspiring that really makes me feel better about the fact that i tried to get you all killed speaking of neo-matrix stuff it was really a weird choice to have him just go around floating on buildings making jump-scare phone calls and literally using class trial reticles to 360 no-scope people off of buildings like he's some kind of eldritch superman i get that he's supposed to be this weird unearthly destabilizing force but again it doesn't really do much to reconcile his image as a good thing for kamida nor does it really even bring izuru kamakura much to mind either because yeah i mean he was all talented but i'm pretty sure despite the super saiyan 3 length hair he could not fly granted i'm not sure he'd want to if he could though he'd probably get bored of it pretty quickly also calling him world ender as a nod to monokuma's pet name for the future foundation in scr2 may actually be the deepest cut into the actual text that this anime has tried to pull off so far i don't really think it means anything but i have to give them this one because it means they presumably at least played up until the start of chapter 2 of that game now we finally know where they gave up and started reading a wiki summary anyway i'll grant that hinatabat certainly isn't the worst part of the ova that honor goes to the starring lad himself but he certainly doesn't make it that much better and speaking of not making things better at the end of super danganronpa 2 we're told by naiki and company that the surviving members of class 77 and hinata have elected to stay on the real jabberwock island and work towards being able to wake up their dead friends they note that this is a nearly impossible task but naegi has hope that they'll be able to make their way and decide for themselves regardless the key word there should be hope as in this is not basically assured to happen but it could and just because something can happen doesn't mean that it should happen because we learn as soon as komida is out of coma therapy that he's the last man out of an 11 character winning streak of brain revivals hinata uses intelligence stemming from his tenure as kamakura with no side effects beyond heterochromia to raise them all from their stasis and prepares to usher his gaggle of incredibly normal superhumans to their final battle so first off before we even get into the meat of this how the hell does hinata know what's happening over at the future foundation headquarters to begin with we've already gone over how the broadcast was a bluff and he seemingly has no direct contact with anybody else does kamakura powers include clairvoyance too actually scratch that in this series it most definitely does but that still doesn't answer why future foundation is so willing to work with them even under togami's orders of doing so even he showed doubt if their changes actually stuck and naegi was put in cuffs for doing anything to help them at all so gami and kyrie geary not getting the same charges has always been a little odd to me but having who knows how many soldiers in that fleet just be willing to bow to one guy who says oh yeah man i think they're cool is absurd in the best way possible regardless of how much they changed up until and even past now the future foundation was willing to kill them on site at all costs and in hope they send out specialized hope speak alumni task forces to counter them sure meter i brainwashed them but apparently these guys were all just cool with letting them play avengers even before that point they don't even get trojan horse they just pop in and start doing whatever they want maybe i was wrong to assume they didn't have any more despair full urges and they just killed everyone on board perhaps i can be forgiven for my sins whoa whoops the time skip differences are also incredibly funny with the super danganronpa 2 cast in particular this is supposed to be no more than a few days after super danganronpa 2 concluded and not only did he not go into creative mode and type revive into the console for all of his friends but they somehow magically have absolutely no differences in their actual bodies from when they were despair except for komida and kuzuriyu who are the two they obviously couldn't get away with beyond injury none of them look older either in fact i'd argue some of them look even younger than they did in despair arc and they act like it too well the whole episode is about how the world ender went into the deepest abstractions of their mind and snapped them out of their funk maybe he eradicated many of those more unsightly elements of their personality in doing so that makes this issue worse not better it doesn't seem like komida has forgotten about who he is or what he did by the sound of his last little speech you have the excuse that hinata woke them up with their neo-world program memories intact but that doesn't automatically mean that they would all just be like they never were despaired to begin with territory who still killed imposter mekon still never got the cure for despair disease and had her old memories when she died she never actually changed do you really expect me to believe that the girl who killed two of her classmates in vr in the name of her girl crush would just double back on it again when she's alive it's not like they were realistically able to tutor her to be a decent person again within this time frame and this goes tenfold for komida himself did everyone just decide to forgive him for everything he did in the program because of their shared circumstances he did it for fun he did it because he thought it would be the best way to see his gnarled version of hope shine through and even beyond all that once he found out the truth of their situation he turned on everyone and hated them with every fiber of his being and created a master plot hell-bent on making an unsolvable case to kill everyone except nanome for being despairs in the first place he was never healed he was always like this and yet when he comes out he starts hugging soda and kuzuri like they really had some kind of special connection the only moment they really had together was being blown up in the lobby with a bomb komida planted nobody questions komeida's allegiances nobody has doubts about one another there is no tension what it would take to legitimately rehabilitate these people isn't a question that 2.5 wants to face and instead they want to get them to the foundation's headquarters at blistering speeds that's just what's there however we have yet to really press the hot button on this issue so i'm gonna go ahead and launch the opinion nuke now i think reviving the super danganronpa 2 cast is a horrible writing decision yeah yeah that's right yeah i hear the boos i hear the booze shut up it's really nothing personal i love most of these characters and i would love to see them have more stories but only if they're willing to grapple with the reality of the situation i don't think most people and especially danganronpa 3 want that they want comfort food they want to see these people get better without acknowledging the responsibility needed to have that happen not once in this entire show past the first episode and some milk toast ideas of atonement is the idea of the harm that class 77 caused ever confronted with any weight or understanding all it does is make for these smarmy feel-good kodak moments with characters that never underwent any further development or even a pretense of recognition towards what they became it makes their desire to become accepted into society again have no weight it makes their choice to take that responsibility for something they didn't do later on for no reason have even less purpose and it makes the tribulations they fought through in super danganronpa 2 worthless because all of their development is hand-waved for the sake of pretending everything is better and as we meander to the finish line of the hope's peak saga that sensation will only grow stronger until it blinds us at the end with unearned sentimentality and pop rock so now here we are at the final gauntlet hope arc is the 24th and final episode of danganronpa 3 and it wraps everything up how well well about as well as you'd expect given how things have gone so far having broadcast in japan on september 29th 2016 this special has almost no real plot to speak of for the most part it's all incredibly straightforward compared to the swerving web of plot threads we've thusly dealt with so far the whole thing is half action set piece and half stern talking too the beginning focuses on how all of the future foundation security personnel are brainwashed by meteori no not through the despair video but by the end video and basically just being told to disarm or even kill anyone trying to interfere with his plans to air the hope video however meteorized plans are interfered with by the returning class 77 led by hajime hinata who all somehow got through the fleet of boats we last saw them being aggressed by with apparently no trouble no they're not going to explain it and who all have a mountain of fan service moments to dissolve the current situation they also all look exactly the same as they did in sdr2 even though the opening montage shows us all of them looking way different during their time as remnants which they should still look like since they were all put into the neoworld program like that and are only just waking up from it but fine whatever it's not like aesthetic consistency or even general consistency has been a point of focus for this anime so far so why would it be here well at least gundam finally gets to say his first name for once in this anime i suppose sunrise must have let up on the anime copyright long enough to allow for it and he even mentions a rising sun too so i'm willing to bet that this was the case anyway it's already been discussed just a minute ago why their return feels cheap but it really does bear a little bit of repetition while i can understand the impulse to turn one's brain off and just enjoy seeing your favorite characters back in action the whole thing feels so unearned and contradictory to what came before it that i just can't bring myself to enjoy it without feeling a little dirty inside sure i love these characters but their arcs rub against this decision so much that seeing them have their little moments to shine just feels wrong even if in a better context i might be tempted to crack a smile at them and i think that what's so alluring to so many people about this episode on a surface level compared to the rest of the series is that it's a very tempting piece of entertainment to in a vacuum try to enjoy if you want some kind of closure to everything that's built up to this point but unfortunately i've been thinking up until this point which naturally means i get punished for it anywho they all bust in on meteorize upload and basically have a short talk which amounts to meteorite talking about how hope has to be forced on everyone because people suck and are weak willed and inherently bad and they'll always lose to despair and henata counters that uh i sucked too and i turned out just fine eventually mirai continues to argue that he just sat back and let juko screw up the world to which everyone tries to assuage him of his guilt despite the fact that he's basically right and then ultimately get him to hit cancel on the big fancy microwave two seconds before his reheated plot pizza is finished leaving him to cry into the imposter's arms for a few seconds before they all walk out as mentioned previously naegi does nothing exchanges a yaoi gays tm with hinata and then returns to his pals while the dr1 gang is convened stands kirigiri they discover that in the two seconds since the sdr2 gang departed on their friendship boat with mitorai they've created a video taking responsibility for the attack on the future foundation so that the world will spare them the scrutiny and continue to follow their lead in the struggle against despair in the future despite the fact that again this whole incident was never actually televised so they could have just gone without saying anything about the whole thing and nobody would have been the wiser hinata gets a talk with the ghost of anonymi sumiki clarifies that she found kimura's [ __ ] medicine and fixed kirigiri's deadly poisoning and we flash forward to a rebuilt hope speak academy where naegi is principal and kirigiri is his tradwife secretary the end oh boy where to begin you see the problem with fan service like this is that it basically just undermines everything for the sake of making clippable moments they think people will like every little beat in this episode from a worry eating meat to need fighting with little mekamarus to kameida waving his robot arm to say hello there feels purposefully devised in the way that lazy mcu cameos do solely so that people could screenshot them post them on twitter and be like oh it's the thing and i don't think i need to tell you that this combined with the lack of substance to actually set it up makes this feel incredibly vapid not only that but the dr1 cast still barely gets to do anything here heltogami even apparently survived the entire building crashing on top of him and it happened off-screen and they don't even attempt to explain it beyond wow good thing you just didn't die from having a building fall on youtube nagi literally just stands there outside during the final talk to meteorite and i know i said this before but oh my god they really couldn't think of anything better for him to do speaking of naegi he finally gets to meet kameida here and komida can't stop himself from fanboying about naegi's look what hold on i'm sorry what the hell are you talking about his luck are you joking you mean to tell me that kamida wouldn't immediately start raving about his position as super high school level hope no he'd be fanatic about his luck of all things you know the talent that they share that komida has historically called a worthless talent that means nothing to him that he barely even considers a real talent worth acknowledging in the first place the thing that he constantly undermines and has always been part of why he views himself as lesser when compared to his peers that luck holy sh dude what are we even doing here how did we get here and of course honestly the less i say about hinata at this point the better he literally opens the episode wistfully talking to the corpse of ikizome calling her sensei despite the fact that they met maybe a grand total of three times at max and says that everything that happened to him sure did suck but maybe it was worth it because what he got from being turned into izuru kamakura helped him save his friends yeah i know we talked exhaustively at the end of sdr2 about how he was exploited lobotomized and turned into a soulless husk all for the sake of obtaining more talent and how talent was ultimately something that was borderline worthless when compared to actually seeking your own future and happiness with the people who love you but sure maybe being lobotomized and exploited by the school you looked up to tortuously morphed into a hollow shell and then made to indiscriminately murder thousands was actually a good thing because at the end of the day it's a perfect deus ex machina to reverse all of my problems that's a really great message guys jesus what does sdr2 even mean anymore at this point they've completely screwed away any ounce of thematic relevance it could have possibly had you know all of those terrible things that hope speak did the things that set them up perfectly to be taken advantage of by junko and set all of this conflict into motion yeah they weren't so bad actually who cares about it oh you know how all of the sdr2 kids made terrible mistakes no just kidding they don't have to take responsibility for any of their actions because they were all brainwashed hell that just makes their final talk with midori even more baffling because they spend the whole time trying to talk him down about his role in enabling jinko by countering that they've all made terrible mistakes too and this could potentially mean anything at all if they did but they were brainwashed how the hell are they supposed to take responsibility or even meaningfully reflect on their personal failings if said failings are the result of brainwashing they literally aren't at fault so this means nothing oh god i gotta tag out for a second take a moment to breathe austin can you handle this for a bit yeah sure after hinata effortlessly bypasses several meteorized goons and blows a hole in the launch facility's door with his super high school level laser beams he starts dealing with meteorites desperate fleas about how people are inherently weak unlike him and the rest of his classmates a little strange considering that you're just like the rest of them entitled dude but sure you're the lost puppy that got kicked around by life he uses this excuse on both niagara the most average man to ever live and hinata who was even more normal and didn't even have a talent to begin with the rest of class 77 starts to trickle in and stand behind hinata like they're his backup vocalists as they try to get meteorite to hurry and break down crying already so we can wrap this up we don't learn anything new here just more and more of the same tired this is all my fault i'm doing this because i'm weak shtick that he's been parroting this whole time everyone talks to him about how important it is that they work to do better for themselves for their own sake and that running away doesn't work but it all comes off as shallow because that's literally what class 77 ended up doing and even though mirai was technically a part of that class too none of these characters have an actual bond with him it's the finale equivalent of some dad hugging a kid he just meant calling it his son and maybe that aspect isn't the point since they offer him to join them in fighting the good fight wherever anyways since he's in a similar position to them but none of these points flow together coherently it's pathos without substance oh and of course hinata starts to get through to him by talking about his relationship to nanome too because that's all he is now whatever mirai stumbles over his words about how he's alone they invite him to travel the world he gets his wounds licked and everyone congratulates him for not being a maniac using callbacks to their original sprite poses to seal the deal and after one final nod between our joint protagonists that's nowhere near as good as the jimmy timmy power hour send off and a final fumble of komida's character naegi comes back to a round of applause for doing nothing they cite his hope for being something that worked wonders for them while watching the video the former remnants didn't have to make somehow get done in the same building they just left they all probably just went back to the boat to get their film gear set up though i gotta say this is probably the worst psp commercial i've seen yet psp it's like a nut you can play with outside the rest isn't anything remarkable in the slightest just some more fluff to pad out the runtime as we're given a bit more anatomy worship for the road just before ever free by hyde begins to play us out one last time after getting deified by munakata for some reason before he walks into the sunset we're given a final end-game monologue from niagi as is tradition that stumbles through the final message the series failed to convey that nobody can truly recognize what is hope and what is despair in the moment and even though it's scary that we always move towards uncertainty that we have to think of the people we love and worry about today with the prospects of tomorrow being better it's a worse version of a moral already laid out to us in super danganronpa 2 that holds no real bearing on how anything in danganronpa 3 played out because nobody the audience immediately cared about learned anything or lost anyone of value oh right yeah kirigiri is still alive apparently only having been in a coma from the forbidden action bracelets poison dude we're taking kimura's convenient anti-toxin don't ask how mekong knows how to rouse comas or why kyrie geary didn't at least sustain a scratch on her from it happening i mean don't just take my word for it consult kirigiri's actual funimation voice actress's opinion on the topic yeah i don't get this either pretty sure i died that was a real blooper on the official simulcast for a while by the way legendary incident all of this is just too goddamn sweet sickeningly so and not in an endearing way you know what i'd call this i'd call it a platitude great job munakata looks like your catchphrase came through with some legitimacy after all it's as if an a.i read the scripts to all the other games and novels and was asked to put together a lesson summary in less than a paragraph but at least meteorite finally gets off that damn phone so i guess it was all worth it in the end [ __ ] off one would think that i could not make an entire section about something that ultimately makes up less than two minutes of actual on-screen real estate but if that's your suspicion you're a fool you're a coward and i'll fight you in the denny's parking lot next saturday at 4 36 p.m eastern standard time show up don't mess with me i have the power of god and anime on my side i couldn't put it more succinctly ditto anyway that being said let's chit chat a little about the final part of this final episode to reiterate we end danganronpa 3 by seeing the familiar visage of hope's peak academy with texts specifying that this takes place only a few months after everything in future arc before this little time skip we saw that munakata and nayagi briefly exchanged words where he ultimately resolved to atone for what happened between himself and juzo and also letting yukizome go the way she did while he asks naegi if he knows what he's going to do next naegi resolves that while class 77 has purposefully saddled themselves with the burden of carrying the image of despair for the public he must do similarly and carry hope forward like he's resolved himself to do since the end of the first game so now we see how he plans to enact this by rebuilding the institution that started all of these problems in the first place to make things worse we even panned into the school to see him sitting at a desk a clear callback to his waking moments post-memory erasure in dr1 and see that kirigiri comes in to call him principal he didn't just ignore the sins of jinn he's here to take up the mantle and boy do i hate everything about this i just don't know how to articulate this without getting exhausted especially because i feel like i've set up everything that makes this suck extensively before this point but i'll give it the old college try makoto naiki as a protagonist has sure never been superbly deep but he was always the one trying to do the right thing understand people and carve a path forward by inspiring those around him he purposefully stands against the tide when he thinks it isn't going the right way having stuck his neck out for class 77 despite their horrible decisions that's right i said decisions because again the brainwashing is a [ __ ] retcon and protected them from the future foundation because he believed in their capacity to be helped and made better was this hope naive too forgiving to outright evil one could possibly argue as much and perhaps that should have taken greater thematic focus in this anime to begin with but ultimately one can still see how naegi examined the faults of the systems around him and worked to do the right thing regardless of what was expected from him he's been doing that this whole time even when it came to simple things like not playing his hand too early when he learned of sakura's status as the mole of dr1 so that he wouldn't create unnecessary conflict the more i sit on it the more i believe that while naegi isn't one of the worst things about danganronpa 3 he is the most genuinely disappointing they had all of the puzzle pieces in a row for them to put together he could have and should have done something that defies who he so often is have him break and gain only the kind of resolve a person who's gone through his particular trauma can where maybe instead of fighting for the good of others for hope for the ideals of mankind as a whole he decided to put a stop to this denouement because he personally cares and will do whatever it takes for him to keep going no matter what's ahead niagi is seen both in and out of universe as a vestige of sorts this plane vessel with shoes for the watcher and other people to slip their feet into and feel like they're doing something great like they too can be hope if they follow his example but naegi does have a character he has a personality and he has thoughts of his own and instead of recognizing that he always gets made into a big hope effigy that's made to burn bright as a beacon for everyone else without actually thinking of the fact that if they keep doing this to him that there's eventually going to be nothing left but ashes this ending is the platonic ideal of that self-destruction where to continue to make hope he recreates what it's supposed to represent without any thought it's seen as good because it's supposed to insinuate that nature is healing and instead shows us that once again the poor guy is getting used to greater means that he never had anything to do with and this is the nigey who's already gone through sdr2 he knows everything about the failures of hope's peak academy what dismissive evils they stood behind enthusiastically and what they did to hajime hinata he knows about the student council massacre he knows about the cover-ups he knows about the steering committee and how the academy's own sins were used as a noose to pull them up for display by jinko enoshima he knows how all of those sins coalesced into a perfect storm riling the world against them so hard that the whole enterprise caved in on itself and caused global atrocity to become commonplace and what does he do at the end of the story despite all of that knowledge he erects a replica of it he restarts the whole thing he says you know i know how it went last time but maybe we've learned well hey maybe they have shirley hopes pique isn't going to be run this time the same way that it was last time yeah yeah alright easy to say but do you seriously not get how tone deaf this reads do you not grasp the idea that honoring hope's peak enough to carry it into the future is the completely wrong step to take what good has come from this school even when it was at its most peaceful they still had campus officers who giddily beat the [ __ ] out of normies and the instructors behind the training of kamakura are quoted as saying that people without talent are basically worthless scum that hardly deserve to live it is the picture-perfect encapsulation of elite posturing self-aggrandizing nonsense and the fact that they call their students super high school levels is just the cherry on top of the sunday of overzealous ridiculousness the entire series so far has gone out of its way to show just how much hopes peak academy sucks how much it reflects the broken school systems that grind our youth to pace and in its final moments we've suddenly reversed course 180 degrees into pretending it was a good idea why what could have possibly convinced you of that they should have really gone in on the idea that naegi ends up not giving a [ __ ] about hope or despair and instead places all of his value and trust in himself and those around him because he's not a representation of a platitude and he's not a bastion of goodness he's just a guy and he had all of those expectations and ideas put onto him by these outside forces in fact doing this solidified munakata's half-baked arguments against him because now he is a representative symbol that can be twisted he now holds the weight of hope's peak on his shoulders not because he wants to but because he is beholden to a past that repeats and will inevitably be taken advantage of again as much as i hate to say it by the way i'd kind of get it more if kirigiri were the one behind this sure it would still suck but at least she still has some relationship to the school beyond what naegi conceivably would this is her father's legacy he was the previous principal after all she's had a very conflicting relationship in regards to her feelings about him and now through trial after tribulation she's finally come to sort of accept those feelings warts and all by contrast naegi has just about zero skin in this game he only got accepted into the school because of a raffle sure he theoretically enjoyed his time with his classmates before the dr1 killing game but that's all he really got positively out of that experience a regular old year of high school he has nothing to do with anything about the history of hope's peak and the only association he'd really even have with it at this point is death and torture and yet ruling over a replica of it is his arbitrary reward for being the series designated hope boy and what a great reward it is recreating the same institution that trivialized lives for talent for over a century and brought about the end of the world hope's peak [ __ ] him up too junko [ __ ] him up the people constantly fighting him and looking at him as less than human for having basic empathy during a worldwide crisis [ __ ] him up and instead of him recognizing that and rising above it danganronpa 3 just keeps him in the same place with the can't we all just forget the past approach to adversity because it needs to have a happy ending where everything can come full circle when there was no circle that could ever properly connect to itself or if it did it's the wonkiest circle ever put to mind by man i wanted to see makoto naegi slip i wanted to see him break down and get angry and second guess himself i wanted to see him denounce every stinking ideal this series had ever thrown at him because the reason he's above it isn't because of the fact that he's greater or bears hope's burdens it's because of the fact that he cares and accepts other people for who they are and is willing to work to fix the mistakes of the past no matter what that does to the future that's why him and junko are different that's why her ideology loses while people like munakata and enoshima are out there suffering in the depths of depression and depravity because of the fact that it's easier than a recognition of the truth makoto naegi is supposed to be out there doing the [ __ ] work one day at a time makoto naiegi was human and now he isn't he's a symbol for hope and talent and he has nothing more than his experiences he does not rise above he does not change and he will never know better maybe you could have i don't know built a memorial to all of the people who died because of hope speak how about that i can't overstate how much this sucks as a coda to the danganronpa story it's the final middle finger to everything of nuance or depth that this series even had to begin with it takes the last vestige of thematic integrity that was still hanging on and burns it to cinders makoto nagi may have survived yet another killing game but only an image because this is not my boy hell maybe not even an image may i remind you of that stupid haircut hold up macaroos i'm not quite done yet oh boy haven't you said enough not quite i have a contractual obligation to stand in your way before you can get on that final high horse of yours i'll defend my position until the cows have no home to come back to then could you go ahead and get it over with i've got places to be errors divast and all that allow me to do just that my goodbart man have you folks maybe just considered that this series ain't for you clearly there are plenty of other people who like it so why not just leave them to it because it's the conclusion to something i do like and care about is this even a question worth asking just because i have thoughts and feelings about this anime that are negative doesn't mean i begrudge the people who feel positively about it it's not like me having a different opinion can take it away from them nor would i want it to that's just the lowest kind of discussion shutdown tactic i can think of forget it well maybe you just don't get what it's going for you're so focused on your own vision of what the series is and what it's trying to say maybe you just need to turn your blinders off and see it for what it really is i think if we've made anything clear over the course of this journey it's that we've given more than enough due to what danganronpa 3 is trying to do even i was willing to yield to some of his ideas but it can try all at once that doesn't mean it succeeds or that it doesn't blatantly contradict what came before it we're allowed to be upset that it wasn't what we wanted it's an opinion i can keep going maybe kodaka's ideas were worse did you ever think about that i'd rather not humor any hypothetically for the sake of argument tier statements today please i already deal with that enough elsewhere maybe none of it matters why are we even getting upset about this in the first place it's just some dumb anime about a dumb video game fundamentally speaking nothing matters but last i checked all of us still find something to yammer about day in and day out i don't want to be that guy and say that bitching about things that don't matter keeps the world turning but if the shoe fits well all right hot shots how about you try this one on for size huh what if and stay with me here what if the series was bad on purpose to give you despair what did you just say oh god what the [ __ ] have you done what did you just say marcy marcy i know we've both spoken pretty colorfully over the course of this thing but there's no reason to let him rile you up we gotta keep no i want him to say it again marcy i dare you to say that again all right i don't know how long that's going to hold her nice going spin um it's not my fault she's not willing to listen to reason you die hards are all the same be real with me for a second do you even actually truly care about danganronpa 3 or is arguing in favor of what everyone else hates just like your day job i'm here to fight the good fights that nobody else will it doesn't matter how much i do or don't care about the material itself it's the principle of the matter if you hate it i argue for it i'm a creature of habit isn't that kind of disingenuous of you it's in the title pal i wouldn't have gotten to the top if i wasn't good at it man it's just a [ __ ] she's out on purpose it's bad on purpose are you insane what kind of [ __ ] wastes thousands upon thousands of dollars to produce something that's bad on purpose nobody do you not even logistically understand what making a television series is like much less an animated one that takes so much time and grueling effort nobody seeks to make an anime like this if they don't at least have some smidgen of confidence in the end product i really cannot stand people who give such [ __ ] cave out answers like this when they have no legs left to stand on even if it were bad on purpose as completely stupid and up its own ass that would be it still wouldn't even matter because whether or not something's bad on purpose doesn't change the fact that it's bad now does it who gives a [ __ ] if it's on purpose well have you considered at least that the people who worked on it are just that people i have considered that as much crap as we've given this thing it's true nobody sets out to make something bad i haven't shown any of this until now but i'd like to take a moment to put up for your viewing consideration some of the production art made by the dr3 team it's fun a lot of it's nice including this one especially that one it's clear that they were going for something here even if it didn't turn out well at least some of the staff had to have enjoyed their time working on it too because well otherwise this art wouldn't even exist i really don't want to discount the amount of work that it probably took to whip this thing into an even remotely complete shape for as much as we complain and think that the writing is god-awful and accomplishes nothing bringing danganronpa 3 to life was not i imagine an easy task for anyone involved all art is made by human people and because of that it's just as flawed oftentimes as we can be and damn are we just that and hey at least the dub's hilarious dear boy if our speculation about this anime's production schedule holds any water as well that's even more reason to refuse to discount the art and effort that went into making this thing happen to begin with dr3 is accountable for its choices but it was very likely kneecapped from the start then again so was sonico6 and people have been whinging about that for the past 16 years it's not easy to make anything good just because it's attached to another piece of work it's not easy to tell stories it's not even easy to make concepts that haven't already been done to death but when you put yourself into a project you're working with everything you can to make something you're proud of and given the assumed circumstances the people at lurch should still be proud that they were able to do anything at all but this is about more than danganronpa 3. this whole thing is about more than any one piece of media possibly can be about this is about asking for it and i demanding competency in your media because it's really the least that you can do it's not worthwhile to just accept whatever answers that something gives you just because it's part of something that you're supposed to love danganronpa has always had its flaws and i've never shied away from criticizing them but i only hold it to such a high standard because i know that it's reached those standards before and even surpassed them when it really felt like it so no it doesn't just get a pass to spontaneously become terrible because it's convenient for it and even expecting that sort of treatment from something to begin with is more than anything i think a flawed visualization of what it means to enjoy something danganronpa 3 isn't bad because it didn't care enough or it didn't try or because it didn't have any ideas and certainly not because it wanted to give its audience despair on purpose danganronpa 3 is bad because it didn't respect itself or its own material and refused to account for its own concepts we make art to express ourselves to communicate with other people and if your only intention in making art is to close yourself off to give easy answers that get people out of your house sooner then why'd you even invite them in the first place why'd i even set foot in here you can't just pull the wool over my eyes with familiar faces you can't just stir emotion with old musical cues you can't just end something while understanding nothing about what came before it and that's why i can't enjoy this show and i refuse to turn my brain off just to attempt it i don't love things like that and if you do i won't scold you but i'd implore you to maybe at least consider expecting better from the things you love because i've been burned too many times unless kodaka wants to lower my casket into the ground it's safe to say that i'd prefer not to waste my time being let down by him anymore well after i finish this retrospective anyway just because it isn't good doesn't mean that it lacks value we watch and read things to search for our own feelings first and foremost and when something doesn't pass the smell test we instead inherit it as a learning experience i learned a lot when i watched danganronpa 3. in some ways i think it made me better because it showed me the do's and don'ts of expanding narrative concepts and characters and even though i do hate it as a finale to the hope's peak saga and i will never be watching it again after this point i still can't say that it wasn't a worthwhile experience to gain that understanding watch danganronpa 3 form your own opinion and decide what it means to you but don't be like us and make a multi-hour long video essay never be like us and especially don't be like akuma nobody likes akuma [Music] speaking of which hoo boy new danganronpa v3 is next huh i bet we've got plenty poetic to wax about that don't we pal we yeah good luck with that one i don't have enough sunk cost with that entry to waste my time with it you're on your own deuces oh well uh [ __ ] man i hate the evangelion c do you think that this actually happened during the rebuilds the citadel is on full alert i've never seen anything like wow gendered bathrooms and you call yourselves the future foundation oh yeah you oh god i had the worst dream that i was in this really bad anime obviously i was there when super danganronpa 2 farewell despair academy came out for the psp i too watched oren high school host club i forgot that this means that you're going to be alive like this whole time shut up this is laced with arsenic the the super high school level imposter factkins everybody do you think he would do the jared leto thing where he starts like emailing everybody animation so don't you blush like that get out of here they have balsa wood on sale this one girl that i had a couple of interactions with would probably want me to get this lobotomy how is she holding it like that hinata has found love is no more we then find out this was all set up by like the [ __ ] madagascar penguin well boys we did it wow somehow that felt like really long you should kill me you should kill yourself now i'm just gonna back it up well because like the rest of the the room is like not adjusted to this perspective shift at all so it just looks like they're standing on the edge of like some chairs or something why are you here you were so useful the last time hey remember this from danganronpa 2 no no he literally wasn't she was like i i hate listening to you i'm going to kill myself i'll kill a thousand children no it is no the fact that this is like played as a joke she's gonna get a stand like in a couple seconds this is implying she doesn't have one already that's that's fair why is her gallagher pin tooty why is it why is it just printed on her hair i'm your teacher which means that i stalk you and learn all of your personal details [Music] the enemy forces of donkey kong what if we were all girls blush emoji and we were playing bomberman 64. i start going into like the star wars emperor [Laughter] you know they said that darth plagias could destroy any anime that he wanted but just by looking at it how did i know it was going to be combina oh yeah good job spongebob natalie i hope you know that your smile will help me through the lobotomy you're like how was it stuck cleavage hi everybody this is makoto nagi i would like to tell you all my precise location so you know where to come to kill me now say for the sake of argument that i really was on the remnants of despair's side i love the way his skin looked in the sunset he told me that he watched game grumps just like munakata busted into the room right then yeah munakata's more of a markiplier kind of guy you know naegi you're kind of like the onus to my eyes nike please tell all the viewers at home what is up my cranky crew [ __ ] did you know that markiplier's five nights at freddy's just passed 60 million views are you the man behind the slaughter oh he's going on cool math meetspin.com and island.com maybe you should stop meeting murderers and or people who get murdered you're so much smarter than me and you're good at gallagher you know i think you would be a lot cooler if you were cute i'm so cousin you please wake up i need you to kill myself like you always do you should confess your crime now dude she was so freaked out she just like died i think her body just did that wait look apart well look at territory in comparison too there what is going on she's so homophobic just call him a slur you should get that lobotomy no no i'm going to get that you should keep doing that while you can because i won't be able to on account of the lobotomy you're not just the super high school level gamer you're the super high school level gamer that told me to get them they were just like walking around and then he was all of a sudden like i can't help anybody everybody always suffers around me and they're like bro who asked we are about to record a tattletail let's play for my new youtube channel go fund me to release myself from the future foundation personally i'm subscribed to john wolff on youtube i think they shouldn't have canceled jontron i just missed the old game that's how you realize that he's the bad guy why is he doing like a street fighter pose don't worry i've played half-life 2. i know what happens when these barrels get she was his queen god help anyone and give everybody lobotomy where's nanamin kamida like yes i was able to poop flawlessly thank you oh yeah absolutely i love drugs he got caught up in a bit of a problem oh no the lights that are hooked to the shift key on this keyboard there are so many other kids out there who need lebron not your allergies quote unquote again you don't understand you don't understand ultimate imposter i'm making all or nothing i got 50 000 dominance you don't understand i'm making sugoi quest for kokoro it's going to be my masterpiece stop oh my god is this the bite of 87. by the way did this man just turn to keira gary and go you should smile more queen bro this is just like five nights at freddy's security breach ruined she got hit in the head with two coconuts attention all gamers damn that gay little hand squeeze though hey marcy uh-huh dang it around for three mm-hmm it's bad yeah our money doesn't grow on trees is that what you're worried about they were just like 13 people died and they're like hey we're getting scammed i'm so lucky shut up sweet an ipad you can use this to catch up with the latest markiplier video hey come in and run do i have to what what what i think that should probably kill her i clocked out a while ago i freaked myself of markiplier no you're a liar you would never do that ow bro [Laughter] well he doesn't move at all it's so good and then it goes back again it says his mouth's still open even though he's not screaming munakata you don't understand junko and oshima also liked markiplier okay watching the scene in danganronpa 3 is like the exact same experience as someone telling you that someone died who you have no idea god stop it don't do it don't why are you still alive bro you were watching it they're in that school for like three months dude i was catching up on all of the markiplier videos that i missed he's the only youtuber who's still going during the tragedy i actually kind of like the idea instead that munakata downloads all of markiplier's videos as they come out and so when the tragedy starts and markiplier dies he just starts watching all of markiplier's videos one by one daily pretending that they're still coming out markiplier's dead what no he uploaded a new video just yesterday it was about five nights at freddy's 2. like yuki zomei like puts a hand on like the other person's shoulder and it's like just just let him believe it it's not hurting anybody you know niagie homestuck is a lot like what we went through painful have to stop taking from the three back at the ranch bro you've just posted cringe bro i found markiplier he's in my [Laughter] i found markiplier he's alive and in here you should come see him he really wants to meet you since you're his biggest man hey you know before the world collapsed i used to post on pony chat yo when they had the rick sanchez background that was so epic you can't stop watching markiplier that's tengen's trap i did that i did that it was me i just loved it then everything didn't get robbed do you remember that truck that nearly hit comeda i was driving it do you know the plane that commander was on the crash i didn't you know how the plane was hit by a meteor i created the meteor briefly i astral projected into the fourth dimension and i spoke to a man named kazutaka kotaka and i convinced him to make a series called tangent rump whenever tangan's not on screen everybody should be asking and then all i have to do after that is kill myself in front of sherlock holmes it will really freak him out garutero is the only person in this equation that i cannot account for i created everyone else in a bio lab by my own hands but he just appeared out of nowhere one day what if he zoo just pushed junko off right now i put hajime jin have you ever read the killing joke it's kind of like that in that comic batman and the joker you see they realize that they're not so different from each other that's how i feel when i see you you are young and now i am old which is kind of like being good and evil by the way i'm also the one who put finn inside that rocket well you see joko and oshima flipped the switch that was supposed to open the rocket and put him inside of it but what she didn't see was the split second where i actually pushed him inside of it myself i just moved really fast what you didn't realize kisakura is that back then i was actually running really fast back and forth from upstairs to downstairs i was the one who was pushing them all what they don't understand is that i dis-installed counter-strike swords well you see what actually happened was that junko threw the wrench but then in a split second i caught it and threw it again but i was so fast that she didn't see me wasn't actually the one in the robo justice suit it was me i hid in the locker and felt on account of the dialysis treatment [Music] i molded myself like nezuko from demon slayer you've seen demon slayer right all three of them were me simultaneously in fact none of the characters in danganronpa were actual characters they were just me in costumes moving really fast i was the volcano in the distance this was the one instance in which it was not me it was actually territorial all of the scenes of terror terror were him i wouldn't debase myself like that i made that title sometimes when i'm alone and i do mean truly alone i like to look at myself in the mirror and shout brain blast jimmy neutron is my idol actually he's the one who inspired me to do all this the first time i woke up from my hypnosis i have done the chicken dance you see the reason the tragedy happened is so i could appease poetry oh no it looks like the soldiers from seiler are coming in uh yes the uh ever convenient worldwide broadcast button why does it have a countdown because everything has to have a countdown so it can be stopped why was every droplet of rain there was only one droplet of rain but i was repositioning myself really fast we've degraded so severely hey comedy and now we're going to stop thanos you should have gone for the head i was the one who delayed duke nukem forever hey it's me tangent just wanted to check in don't say it mr tengen kill him send him to the principal's office and have him expelled pushes her off blaze he's like who are you and then munakata was never seen again look at the water effect on this it's so bad what it's like he dropped an anvil in there how hey hey hey samiki would you mind uh explaining how you did that [ __ ] you it was me i was the logo at the end hi there everybody thank you so much for watching all the way to the end if you did this video needless to say was a gargantuan undertaking i've never made a video more exhausting to edit and get prepared than this and i hope for the sake of my health that i won't again for a very long time a huge thank you of course goes to ostinato for basically doing half of all the legwork here that wasn't editing related between scripting recording and plenty of notes and suggestions in between there's really no possible way this video could have happened if it weren't for him so give him some love and read his webcomic if you don't already obviously next up on the slate is of course danganronpa v3 don't ask me when it's coming out i can't tell you right now but i've got some cool plans for it so i hope you will all stick with me until then as always please make sure to leave a like and a comment if you enjoyed the video or even if you didn't you know productive discussion is always nice uh subscribe and ring the bell if you'd like to know when i upload something new and head over to my patreon or kofi if you'd like to help support the further creation of my work also follow me on twitter if you're so inclined or wish to tell me how wrong i am that's all for me i need a million year nap peace

Channel: NezumiVA

Views: 234,116

Keywords: dangan ronpa, danganronpa, dangan ronpa review, danganronpa review, dangan ronpa 3, danganronpa 3, dangan ronpa 3 review, danganronpa 3 review, nezumiva, nezumiva danganronpa, nezumiva dangan ronpa, nezumiva danganronpa 3, nezumiva dangan ronpa 3, dr3, dr3 review, danganronpa video essay, dangan ronpa video essay, spike chunsoft, anime review, anime video essay

Id: K8BDPRyoCbU

Length: 297min 4sec (17824 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 23 2022