Review of Danganronpa 3: The End of Hope's Peak High School - Future Arc

This review will contain spoilers, be warned. I love the Danganronpa series, both 1 and 2 were exciting, always kept me guessing, and had enjoyable characters, but I hated the endings for both. They were both inconclusive and used out-of-nowhere plot devices to sorta explain the bulk of the mystery(i.e the greatest tragedy in all of history) while also saying ehhh we'll fully explain it at a later time. Now here comes Danganronpa 3 promising to finally conclude this story with so many open plot lines like how did the greatest tragedy even occur? What happened to Makoto and Hinata after their game endings? Iwas intrigued yet skeptical.

The first big thing that popped out to me is that they decided to do this as an anime when the first two games were games, this was a big eyebrow shift, especially since the first game's anime adaption was heavily panned. The 12 episode anime was not a good call.

First off, the animation is ugly. The distinct character designs from Danganronpa do not translate well to this animation, if you seen the first adapation, it's more of the same. The color palette is also extremely bland and darkly saturated, heavily contrasting with how colorful the games were (though blood is actually red now).

The soundtrack is mostly from the games, though you will not hear most of the great tracks maybe more than once as this anime has no class trials. Overall, the music did not stand out when I watched this anime. The OP and ED songs are alright.

The characters... oof what a mess. So you have 16 characters, a few you already know from the games, in a 12 episode series. Thus, you will get short quick backstories to make you emphasize with this new characters before they die. It didn't work, I ended up caring for almost none of these characters. A lot of these characters quickly get into the new killing game and start attacking each other instantly and doing impulsive, unreasonable actions, it made me wonder how the Future Foundation lasted more than 1 day if all the top members were eager to kill each other at the drop of a hat. The big new character here is Munakata (Yuu Narukami lookalike), radical Hope guy that wanted to kill all despair. His motivations are thin and he's quick to kill all those he supposedly trusted for years. Towards the end of the anime, he's kind of thrown off into the sidelines and he gets a whatever conclusion.

The pacing in this show is everywhere. It starts with the killing game going rapidly into the motion, everyone is in fear of the others and someone dies every episode, looks like it's gonna be following the games in its pacing. Oh, but then forget about the killing game, it goes into politics outside the killing game and even 1 whole episode dedicated to concluding the Ultimate Despair Girls game plotline (a spinoff featuring Makoto's sister, which was an action shooter rather than murder mystery game), which wasn't much to begin with. When it comes back to Makoto and gang its not a killing game anymore, now we're figuring out who's behind it all. It doesn't help that the anime focuses on so many characters at once, rather than just the protag like the games, there simply isn't enough time for everyone. The series only had 13 episodes and it shows with how disorganized everything felt.

Now here's the big part, the plot. You know what I was saying about all the open plot lines and mystery explanations? The writers address them terribly. The great tragedy leading to the whole world thrown into chaos and despair is basically the result of a new character, Mitarai (Ultimate Animator). Enoshima convinced him to make a video that could brainwash people to despair. Literally, that's how the world went to hell, a high school genius was able to single handedly create a video that could destroy the world's social order. It seems like the writers wrote the games as they went along and didn't really think of a way to explain everything and kinda just pooped something out in the recent weeks. The killing game for the Future Foundation members was a plan by the FF chairman all just so Mitarai could upload a video that would brainwash everyone in the world with hope instead of despair. The chairman seriously thought killing all his top members just to convince one to upload a video of hope was a good idea, alright. The climax is disappointingly generic, Mitarai is at the countdown for the hope brainwash video to broadcasted, Hinata comes and is like there's still hope come with me, Mitarai. Mitarai says okay, cancels the hope brainwash broadcast and that end this whole ordeal. The anime was good at keeping me hooked, it always surprised me with new mysteries or crazy cliffhangers, but when it was time to explain these, well it didn't turn out so great. The ending gives some closure by showing the world is finally a good place, so that's something but the journey along the way is roughly-put together and overall disappointing. I hope Danganronpa V3 learns from this long, convoluted plot-line by making a self-contained world with plausible explanations.