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

I'm going to kind of melt in Future and Despair side, as they are intended to be watched at the same time, but I'm mostly directing my attention to Future. I used to be a big Danganronpa fan. I got the VITA for the sole purpose of playing the games, when SDR2 was only getting translated by some random people on the internet and the first game had just gotten localized. I've spent a lot of my time on Danganronpa, analyzing it, doing fanarts, discussing theories with other people, reading the fan-translated novels, playing Ultra Despair Girls, and although it had some flaws, I really theDanganronpa series overall.

But when I knew that they announced an anime, I just had this bad feeling. Danganronpa: The Animation wasn't really good, as the quantity of episodes was just not enough for the hole plot and it tried to fit like 20+ hours of gameplay in 13 episodes of approximately 25 minutes. 20+ of gameplay, details, plot, characters, into less than 6 hours approximately of an animation. And obviously, the adaptation wasn't really the best. But I thought, "Hey, they won't make the same mistake twice. Besides, two arcs? That's a total of 24 episodes, so maybe it will be different!"

Oh, how wrong I was.

Both despair and future side just tried to throw in a bowl and mix a lot of characters, random plot ideas, deaths with no meaning, and terrible death flags that screamed "hey lol i'm gonna die now". One of the major things about Danganronpa that I liked was how ridiculous, yet interesting the plot twists were. Even if you expected some of them, it was interesting to see how the dots connected, the contradictions, the solutions, and the characters going through that trip to the truth. And sometimes the twist would make you go "holy shit", because you didn't really get to see them coming.

Danganronpa 3 didn't include any of those. Instead, the supposedly "plot twists" were so predictable, they basically screamed to your face "enjoy this characters because we are going to kill it". All the raising of death flags was painful to see, it felt like watching a Blue's Clues episode of how obvious everything was. A lot of cheap and mediocre tactics to get the ratings up, including unnecessary weird fanservice (although I kind of can let that pass because almost all animes do that), fake deaths of loved characters to keep the "cliffhanger up", and most of the "cliffhangesr" were basically thrown out to hell next episodes as they killed the hype.

The new cast was basically introduced to just fill the background. There was almost no major development except for a few things, but most of them were just to basically boost up the stage for survivors of DR1, specially Naegi, who doesn't really change a lot and gets very repetitive. And there was almost no development on characters, mostly just good designs but empty shells. They just tried to throw plot ideas that ended up contradicting the canon stuff, forgot about some of the novels, and a lot of other pointless stuff. And the ending was literally out of Danganronpa's character. No bittersweet, no guilt, no sadness to see. Only a rainbow colored happy world, contradicting so much stuff, done for only fanservice and to end the "kibougamine arc" (which will be probably be brought back again anyways, as there's even an OVA coming with the new game).

The anime just killed the essence of Danganronpa itself. No surprises, no cliffhangers, no plot twists, no character development. Just a terrible ripoff of Dora the Explorer with murder and some crappy hope vs despair plot.