artwork by 江ノ内愛

/!\ Spoiler Disclaimer/!\

This is meant for people who have played Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc, Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair and Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony to completion.

If you haven’t already I highly recommend closing this, shutting down your favorite social medias for a month or two and buying those games right now.

Danganronpa V3 is Available on Steam, PS4 and PSVita

“ Why do we consume media?”

Books

Movies

TV Series

Games

Those are part of our daily lives, media is part of our culture and we consume it more now than ever before. The exponential growth of technology allows us to create and consume more and more art. With things like Youtube and other social media websites, more and more people get their chance to create their own work and show it to the rest of the world.

The appeal of media varies a lot, for some it’s about forgetting their everyday life by shutting themselves inside a well crafted world full of action, laugher and interesting developments. In short: it’s the opposite of their uninteresting, boring and repetitive daily routine

However, the inverse is also true. I, for one think that fiction can carry powerful messages that can apply to our reality and help us with our daily lives. ‍ A good story can make us laugh, cry, feel anger, envy, pity and much more. Despite being fictional, the feelings we have for those is very real and because we can hold a story so close to our heart we will be willing to look at things differently. ‍ Humans tend to naturally reject what is different from them, kids get bullied at school for having different taste and habits than what is considered the norm in our society, different beliefs can lead to wars and current movements are still actively fighting against racism, sexism and other forms of bigotry.

‍

Although we, as a society, are constantly learning to grow more accepting of the differences in our own kind, we aren’t necessarily willing to take a step out of our comfort zone and try to understand why some might think what they think and be the way they are.

‍

We stay in our very limited vision of the world, observe a situation, think about said situation and make our own choice. This choice is precisely what we will find ourselves calling “the truth” even if this so-called truth is nothing but our own perception of it all.

Fiction has the power to make us think differently and seeing things under new perspective because it isn’t real.

Fiction can interest us and make us grow more accepting of things that we would normally not find value in.

Fiction despite not being real can make us realize things about ourselves and our surroundings, or to put it simply: it can change our reality.

And it’s with this in mind that Danganronpa V3 comes in.

Betrayal and murder. this is what Danganronpa is all about.

The battle between hope and despair, good and evil, darkness and light, you don’t need to read it to know how it ends.

The evil is defeated and justice prevails.

‍

Danganronpa V3 is a mystery visual novel with a simple premise, a few ultimate high school students finds themselves stuck in a school, Monokuma shows up and the killing game starts.

The rules are the same as they have ever been.

In order to graduate and get your freedom back, you have to kill one of your schoolmates. Once the body is discovered, an investigation and a trial will take place to determine the culprit.

If the culprit isn’t found, they get their freedom back and everyone else is executed.

On the other hand if the other participants finds who dunnit, the killer will be executed and the killing game will continue

After a long break of 5 years without a main Danganronpa game, Danganronpa V3 comes with a new refreshing theme on top of the battle between hope and despair.

Truth vs Lies

Danganronpa V3 asks this question: Is the truth really all that worth it? Should we really bother finding the truth if it can eventually hurt you more than a lie?

Wouldn’t it be better to lie to ourselves in order to feel better?

‍

Danganronpa 1 and 2 were really intense games, it was extremely satisfying to finally pin down the killer and get to the truth of it all, you were doing it for the sake of hope and you were a hero.

The music had this pretty aggressive tempo, building the tension up for the truth you were about to expose.

However when it comes to Danganronpa V3 it seems almost wrong.

it’s all so sad, it’s something you have to do for the sake of your friends, you’re not exposing the killer for the sake of hope, hope is already long gone, your protagonist is already all too tired of it all.

The truth is always painful and lying to yourself won’t do any better.

You are not reaching out to the truth anymore, you’re fighting against it until there’s no choice but to admit it.

Lies can feel just as good as the truth, just like truth can hurt just as much as a lie.

The more you play, the more it all falls apart.

Kaede calling herself the protagonist was all a lie

The promised hope outside of the school was all a lie, everyone is already dead.

All the “Ultimate Highschool Students” are actually talentless.

And then the game just does it: Danganronpa was all a lie.

The characters?

They’re normal people whose memories have been altered to believe they’re characters.

In this universe Danganronpa is a fictional series just like in ours, all they did was add a layer of fiction above it all.

‍

Danganronpa Trigger Happy Havoc was a game, Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair was a game too, Danganronpa 3 was an anime and so on until Danganronpa V3, which actually stands for “Danganronpa 53”

‍

In their universe Danganronpa is a really popular series and the latest ongoing season is a TV reality show with real people who chose to be part of it themselves.

Their whole life was nothing but a lie.

However at this point of the game, you learn that the truth is worth embracing, no matter how painful it may be.

This is the message that managed to transcend fiction, this is the message your protagonist got of it all.

If what the outside world wants so badly is to have an exciting final confrontation against despair, we will simply do nothing.

We won’t be slaves anymore.

Even if it means death, even if it means the end of the road, they won’t subject to the ridiculous story they are part of, they refuse to exist purely for the sake of entertaining the outside world.

and then…

this is it.

K1-B0, a bad pun to say “Kibō” (Hope in Japanese) was the real protagonist of Danganronpa 53.

He was the will of the outside world, an audience surrogate with an “inner voice” revealed to be no more than audience surveys who was designed after the first protagonist of the series “Makoto Naegi” as a fun reference.

And he was also the one in front of the cover all along.

It was not Kaede nor Shuichi, it was him.

In the end it really was a battle between fiction and reality, showing us that even if they aren’t real, even though this story was all a lie in the end, the experience we felt was very real.

For them the story ends but it won’t stop them from continuing to live on in our world.

Danganronpa V3 asks us to think about what we just experienced and make it our own, to learn from the struggle of those once fictional characters and make them live on in the real world.

‍

In our heart.

‍

Be good to yourself, be good to your surrounding, improve yourself and never underestimate the power fiction can have over one’s life.