Anyone watching Danganronpa 3?

[Don]

I think part of it is called the Despair Arc refers to how this is so bad that it'd put the watcher in despair. Unlike the case of DR1, I can legitimately believe that if people in the world of DR is forced to watch this stuff they might be compelled to commit suicide. The premise is that basically at set intervals Junko-tech incapacitates everyone besides the bad guy, who then murders someone while everyone else is incapacitated and then people can totally talk about who did it and try to catch the bad guy before he tries it again. I know the people who attempts murder in DR are generally morons but it'd be pretty hard to screw this up even if you're a moron. Originally I was hoping it turns into a battle royale since it's revealed several guys in the Future Foundation apparently could've fought Mukuro Ikusaba 1on1, and heck you might as well bring back deceased with Junko-tech and have a dream team match. I always thought the whole random high school kids dragon punching Monokuma mechs in Danganronpa IF is the only thing that actually made sense, as in if random high school kids can't dragon punch mechs and stuff then why would the world even depend on those guys to salvage the world from an apocalypse?

[Shrinweck]

I like both the Future and Despair Arcs. If you didn't play Danganronpa 2 then yeah the Despair Arc is going to be total trash. Episode one was basically all inside jokes and things that you would only care about if you had already spent time with the characters in the game. The style is also much different then Danganronpa 1 (and the Future Arc). While it remains to be seen if it will be able to stand on its own, there's really no mercy in episode one if you haven't played Danganronpa 2 and don't already know character relationships and in-jokes. Everything in it was there to appeal to the game player.

I imagine the Future Arc's first episode was similarly trashy if someone hadn't seen the Danganronpa anime or played the first game. The second episode revealed what's going to make the series interesting. Maybe the Despair Arc will do the same thing with episode two, but considering the subject matter being dealt with... I doubt it. So far the Despair Arc in particular is for fans of D2.

[Don]

It's basically a smaller scale of why FF13 was not successful where the premise seems to assume you'd somehow find the characters interesting in the first place to care about what happens to them. While it's impossible to say whether people will actually like Lightning or any other character, it's pretty much gambling on remarkably weak evidence that the characters carrying the main load of the story would be successful. At least DR1 most of the relevant characters are good looking. You can't even say that about DR2 because there seems to be a conscious effort to exaggerate the artistic style to far beyond what's considered the norm so you can't even try for the usual harem angle because those aren't the girls you'd want to have in a harem.

The background story of DR universe has always been quite nonsensical to begin with and the less they talk about it, the better. I got the feeling the author of the series must be someone who feel he's some kind of oppressed super genius even though he really just sucks at writing. Now you can suck at storytelling and still come up with a perfectly safe choice for a character like DR1 did but going out of the box just doesn't work when you don't have the talent. The cast of Azumanga Daioh is very eccentric in terms of Anime norms but then the author actually had significant ability and is one of the more successful quasi independent guys and Yotsuba proves that it's not a fluke, and it's an extreme exception to the rule so you shouldn't assume you could get away with someone with the personality of Osaka. People didn't care about Osaka because her special thing is that she's dumb and she has a funny accent. People care about her because she's Osaka and being dumb and having a funny accent happens to be one of her charms. While a lot of stuff trips up on this, DR is particularly egregious at getting the cause & effect wrong. A lot of characters are literally one dimensional slapstick caricature of some concept and most of the time there is just nothing to care about the character if you don't care about what their special thing is.

[Shrinweck]

I liked the second episode of the Despair Arc and it wasn't as heavy on the use of references to the game. I'm still not sure I would call it a good show but I found it enjoyable.

What will make the Despair Arc interesting is mostly (Danganronpa 2 spoilers)

Spoiler: show

1) What is Chiaki doing in the class with them? She isn't actually an ACTUAL participant in the DR2's killing game, so it can be assumed that she doesn't become a Remnant of Despair. On that note, what about her makes able to resist Junko?

2) This is going to be an anime about Junko Enoshima winning. Also what does she do to Hajime after his weird brain surgery to make everything go so wrong?

3) How do these kids go from being 'normal' schoolchildren to infamous leaders who plunge the world into Despair?

[Don]

DR is closer to Star Wars than a high school drama and the weird thing is as campy as the story is, it apparently isn't willing to admit that you can just replace 'Despair' with 'Dark Side' and 'Hope' with 'Light Side'. That'd actually explain why a bunch of high school kids could destroy the world or salvage it, or why Makoto of all people seems to be immune to Junko's Force Persuade powers. I mean the only reason Junko could beat Byakuya is that she can use the Force, err, Despair while Byakuya cannot since Genocide Jill doesn't even find Junko's nijitsu or whatever she was doing when she turned from a Monokuma to herself to be all that impressive. I mean you already got someone like Mukuro Ikusaba who can probably fight an entire army head on and win comfortably (she can overcome almost all of Hope's Peak Academy's defenses controlled by Junko by herself, which is enough to fend off the total might of the Future Foundation who was supposed to be winning the overall war in DR1) so I don't get why they even pretend these high school kids don't have supernatural powers. Star Wars is never stupid enough to try to explain what The Force is. It is just there and you know guys who can use The Force are just way more awesome than the peons who cannot. DR, however, is dumb enough to try to explain why Despair or Hope somehow allows high school kids to destroy or rebuild the world. I'm actually willing to overlook this but the story really likes to dig its own grave by trying to infuse logic into a nonsensical world. DR would've been just fine if the apocalypse was some kind of freak accident and a stage to allow random individuals to hold up a bunch of guys and force them to murder each other for the lolz, since that sounds like something that's quite likely to happen if the apocalypse did happen and you're a twisted individual like Junko who happens to have some power (can easily be justified by the fact that she's got Mukuro on her side).

[Eric]

I need to check these 2 series out since apparently they're original stories.

[Shrinweck]

Yeah they're ending the Hopes Peak Academy storyline with these two animes. The Future Arc (that I keep accidentally calling the Hope Arc) airs first and is post Danganronpa 1/2 and stars Makoto Naegi and the Despair Arc is a prequel about how the Remnants of Despair came to be.

They scrapped making another game for whatever reason... At first they were saying that putting Naegi and crew into another killing game (i.e. something they could make a Danganronpa game about) wasn't going to work and that's why they were doing an anime but that seems to be what they did regardless.

They also said that the ending wouldn't work as a video game and is more suited to anime... which kind of just sounds like something you'd HAVE to say if your game proposal got scrapped and turned into an anime.

[Don]

Whenever I hear 'they couldn't let us do it in a game' that usually is just a way to try to hype things up, unless the plan is that Makoto pulls a Captain Hydra and shoots everyone and says 'lolz I'm the real Ultimate Despair', then yeah that probably wouldn't have worked well as DR3 where you potentially might have to spend money on versus being able to let it slide because it's some Anime you pirated anyway.

At any rate DR3 is not a killing game. It's just mindless slaughter. There's no conceivable way the killer with the advantage they have in DR3 could ever get caught even factoring the adjustment for the said genre. I seem to recall the makers of the Matrix Trilogy said that the machines have some fusion power plants to account for the fact that using humans as batteries is likely a very inefficient process. That's sort of the same thing here where we got this killing game where we got some killer that's supposed to outsmart the others while backed by Junko-tech that can literally come up with any scenario necessary to avoid detection, and the characters somehow aren't aware that they're already totally screwed given how rigged the entire scenario is.

[Shrinweck]

Yeah the rules in DR3 are definitely different in what I would call an interesting way. But still, honestly not killing off

Spoiler: show

the ultimate detective at the first opportunity is probably a mistake. The game this time is obviously for them to kill each other and without the consequences of a trial or even having to keep it secret the game this time is just to broadcast the Hopes offing each other for what could quite possibly be no reason at all (i.e. the mastermind enters and does it while they sleep and then leaves). I can't imagine them killing off Kyouko though. At the very least she would probably be the last one dead before Naegi figures it all out.

I guess the main objective of the mastermind is to convince everyone who isn't Kyouko (since I can't imagine that happening) to turn on Naegi with the idea being broadcasting that the Ultimate Hope is killed off by people so blinded by despair or whatever.

Still nothing on Byakuya or Toko which I imagine will end up being the comedic relief unless the Future Arc is supposed to just be 100% tension.

[Don]

Spoiler: show

Nobody could've solved anything in DR3 given the advantage the killer has, though that doesn't mean you should purposely ignore killing guys who might actually be a threat. The new guys who can fight Mukuro 1on1 is probably a bigger threat than Kyoko, in the sense that those guys could potentially just make an alliance and kill everyone else but themselves immediately. Note that if the killer is one of those guys the whole thing is already doomed because unlike the other DR there are no auto-death mechanism for the killer, so even if they discovered who the killer is there is no mechanism to get rid of the killer if he turns out to be one of those guys who can dragon punch a mech because you'll only be able to figure it out when you're down to 2 such super power guys and at that point whoever is the bad guy can simply just run away until the auto-kill effect kicks in and use it to get rid of the other guy who can fight him, and then at this the rest of the guys put together couldn't kill the killer no matter what.

From what's depicted most of the guys in the Future Foundation don't like each other anyway. They should just be shooting each other because they don't like each other. It should probably start with someone who was under influence of Junko-tech dragon punching Makoto to death which sparked a war or something like that.

[Don]

So I did some game theory thing on how you should act if you're not the murderer and I get that all the strong guys (here, strong means you're able to kill everyone else who isn't strong easily) should immediately kill all the weak guys. Since these guys presumably have known each other for a while we'll assume they know if a guy can dragon punch a mech since that's still not exactly common even in DR. There really isn't a survivable scenario in the case where the killer is a strong guy because as long as the killer got rid of anyone else who is strong he can't possibly die even if his identity was discovered due to a lack of autokill mechanism. In particular, let's assume there are 2 strong guys left (more than 2 strong guys eventually becomes a case of 2 strong guys). Obviously at least one of those guy isn't the killer, but from his point of view, if he attacks the other guy who is strong, it's only 50% chance he might even win at all, and statistically it's only 1/X chance that this is the correct result, so it's 1/2X chance that this is correct. On the other hand, if he talked to the other strong guy into killing everyone else, there's only a 1-1/2X chance this is a bad idea (because the killer is the other strong guy). Note that both of the strong guys have close to 50% chance of dying next if they opted to do nothing because if the killer is someone who is weak they'll definitely need to get rid of guys who can dragon punch a mech in case they get discovered (a weak person might be able to hold off other weak people after discovered and still make a comeback but definitely not a strong person), especially if the killer was smart enough to figure out that the strong guys have an optimal strategy where they just immediatey kill everyone who is weak.

This also means if anyone suggest they should talk this out in peace those guys need to be killed immediately because that's what the killer would do too. Granted, you'll end up killing all the weak guys anyway to be safe, but you might as well start with those guys first in case you somehow didn't have enough time to kill everyone else.

So a bloodbath is the optimal solution for everyone, even if you're weak, because at least if a bloodbath occurred immediately maybe you can try to gang up on the strong guys and at least have some chance of killing that guy before he realizes that he should just unconditionally slaughter all the weak guys because all the strong guys will get targeted in the auto-kill rounds for sure.

[Don]

I've come to realize the problem with Danganronpa is that the author probably originally planned this to be the story of Makoto Skywalker and Hina Organa taking on Emperor Junko and Darth Mukuro in the Despair Star, and then was informed that this was supposed to be a murder mystery between high school kids. The story never was quite able to decide whether it's supposed to be about a bunch of high school kids or a day in the Jedi Temple for young Padawans. Of course, any murder mystery element would be pretty hilarious if the Ultimates turns out to be indeed superhuman like they are in DR3 and most of the side materials, as it'd go something like, "someone punched through a reinforced blast door and killed X. Who can punch through a reinforced blast door? Oh, everyone can do that, never mind."

[Don]

So my opinion so far:

Best girl: Juzo
MVP (Future arc): Juzo
LVP (Future arc): Makoto
LVP (Despair arc): Juzo

All I can say is Sayaka died while she was beautiful. Survive too long in DR and you end up like Kyoko. I hated Kyoko, but she totally didn't deserve that.

[Don]

I'm also rather shocked that a large portion of people seems to think cutting your hand off in a controlled environment leads to certain death just from the wound, because it's not like anybody's ever survived while having body parts amputated before. I'm actually thinking the producer of DR3 believes this too. I mean seriously, even most manga gets this right. The bleeding will stop and even bleeding to the death is still better than 100% chance to immediately die. You're talking about guys who literally have superhuman endurance that is afraid of losing their hand so much that they're willing to die instead!

[Don]

So it's finally over.

Despair Arc - Outside of what can best be described as tortureporn (Chisa, Chiaki) scenes it's relatively uneventful and watchable. I didn't actually care about anyone in DR2, so didn't have any strong feelings for that. They could have at least tortured someone who might enjoy it, like Junko.

Future Arc - Basically makes no sense and people died for no reason. Unfortunately Makoto still survived.

Hope - DR2 fan service, and not even good fan service. Would have been a lot better if Junko came back from the dead and pulled a Naruto and just resurrected everyone who's ever died instead. It'd have been less cheesy and made more sense at the same time.

By the way, I think Munakata, Chisa, Juzo, and Kimura can totally wipe the floor with pretty much any faction out there, so I don't really understand how anything opposing the Future Foundation hasn't been utterly destroyed. Juzo the Ultimate Heroine clearly is unaffected by stuff even like plot armor and the 74th class trio can likely easily overpower even all 16 students of any particular year by themselves physically, and that's before considering Kimura's miraculous drugs.