But can you SPELL the word "knife"?!
Mar. 4th, 2019 05:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
keltenaSo I finally got back to Danganronpa V3! I play slowly as always, but I've finished Chapter 2 and I'm excited to keep going. Some thoughts on the chapter, in no particular order, under the cut. (I know I haven't talked about any of the earlier parts of the game on Dreamwidth; I figure if I tried to recap we'd be here all day, but feel free to ask my thoughts on anything I didn't cover here if you want.)
Chapter 2 was fun, and and I had a fun time solving it (even if the five month break meant I had to go rewatch some earlier scenes to be sure I had the order of events right...). This ended up being a case where I never had to wonder about the whodunit; Kirumi set off so many death flags at the start of the chapter that I had her down as either culprit or victim off the bat, so I was already primed to notice every further point of evidence against her. As a result, I was focused pretty much solely on trying to pin down the exact logistics of the crime in advance—which unfortunately involves the part of mysteries I'm worst at. I think I did okay all things considered, though.
I do feel the need to be offended on principle that Kirumi had a zipline and an inner tube to use with it, and she just hung it from the cable and sat on it. Like a normal person, carrying a corpse through the air over a pool to dunk it in a tank of piranahas the way boring, normal people do. A real ninja maid would have tied the corpse to her body for safekeeping, threaded the cable through the inner tube, and slid down that way, don't you think? (On a related note, the "no touching the water after nighttime" rule was my favorite from the moment I saw it and I'm glad it got used. I still wish someone would think to use it as a murder method, though! Come on, guys—you have the opportunity to make the bucket-over-door prank fatal!)
One of the people popcorning at my efforts mentioned that when they played, they'd been dead sure until the very last minute that Kaito was the culprit and had been playing Shuichi like a fiddle the whole time. Kaito as Sayaka 2.0 is an amazing concept. Shuichi is just legally forbidden from catching a break, I guess.
The part where Monokuma cuts into the discussion to go "DID SOMEONE SAY 'DISAGREEMENT'? SOUNDS LIKE ANOTHER JOB FOR OUR NEW MINIGAME MODE :D", and everyone just groans is one of the best moments in the whole game so far. I'm still laughing at it.
I really love the idea of lie bullets—they're such a cool and appropriate mechanic for the class trial setting, and an easy one to slot into the existing flow of gameplay—but I'm continually frustrated by their implementation. Who decided they should be impossible to even view without being penalized, and why? I just.. don't understand. Someone linked me a spoiler-free list of them all early on, and I'm eternally grateful. (Not only does it suck the fun out of the game to have to make guesswork at what my options even are, but some of the extra ones are hilarious? How could you keep "Insect Flee and Plead" from me, game?) I also had some issues this case due to having very different ideas from the devs about what I could reasonably expect a lie bullet to mean—I assumed the lie version of "Maki told me she was alone all night" would be along the lines of "Maki told me she wasn't alone all night" (the bullets are titled Maki Alone and Maki Not Alone), which seemed like a pointless and unverifiable reiteration of the claim we were trying to prove, so I tried the My Alibi for Nighttime lie bullet first, thinking Shuichi could fabricate some kind of corroborating account. It turned out they wanted Maki Not Alone, which results in Shuichi saying "actually, I have an alibi for nighttime and I heard Maki with someone while I was there". This... feels off to me on a couple levels.
Ah well. I hope future trials continue to take advantage of the mechanic more, because I honestly do love it in theory. I just hope they do it a little more smoothly.
I should mention for context: my working theory, since around the time I finished the prologue, has been that we've all been kidnapped for secretly-reality TV. It's clicked incredibly well with basically everything so far, so unless I've fallen victim to confirmation bias and started reading innocuous details as incredibly on-the-nose foreshadowing again, I feel safe working under the assumption it's true. Either I'm right, or this will be hilarious in retrospect! (Also possible is that I'm right, but I've also drawn bizarrely obtuse conclusions about some of the details without realizing it. That seems to happen a lot with me.)
I bring this up because I want to state for the record that the in-universe writers are absolutely making up the entire overarching plot and backstory of this show as they go. I realize that this may or may not be the (actual, real-world) writers' intention, but I'm convinced that it's true either way. The writers just ran through the surviving cast together once they reached the motive video arc, and gave each other the biggest high fives when someone had the idea to make Kirumi the Prime Minister of Japan. They have no idea what the huge, terrible secret behind the entire plot is actually going to be yet, just that it will totally live up to six chapters of hype. They literally just came up with the phrase "Ultimate Hunt" and a vague post-apocalyptic setting in advance and then told themselves the rest would develop organically. I bet if anyone in the cast starts irritating the audience enough to affect ratings, they'll spontaneously gain a new tragic backstory just in time to be tragically killed off.
This reading may get completely jossed before the end of the game, but I hope it doesn't, because it's my new favorite thing.
Oh, and this isn't news, but Keebo's eyeroll sprite is the best sprite in the game:
Chapter 2 was fun, and and I had a fun time solving it (even if the five month break meant I had to go rewatch some earlier scenes to be sure I had the order of events right...). This ended up being a case where I never had to wonder about the whodunit; Kirumi set off so many death flags at the start of the chapter that I had her down as either culprit or victim off the bat, so I was already primed to notice every further point of evidence against her. As a result, I was focused pretty much solely on trying to pin down the exact logistics of the crime in advance—which unfortunately involves the part of mysteries I'm worst at. I think I did okay all things considered, though.
I do feel the need to be offended on principle that Kirumi had a zipline and an inner tube to use with it, and she just hung it from the cable and sat on it. Like a normal person, carrying a corpse through the air over a pool to dunk it in a tank of piranahas the way boring, normal people do. A real ninja maid would have tied the corpse to her body for safekeeping, threaded the cable through the inner tube, and slid down that way, don't you think? (On a related note, the "no touching the water after nighttime" rule was my favorite from the moment I saw it and I'm glad it got used. I still wish someone would think to use it as a murder method, though! Come on, guys—you have the opportunity to make the bucket-over-door prank fatal!)
One of the people popcorning at my efforts mentioned that when they played, they'd been dead sure until the very last minute that Kaito was the culprit and had been playing Shuichi like a fiddle the whole time. Kaito as Sayaka 2.0 is an amazing concept. Shuichi is just legally forbidden from catching a break, I guess.
The part where Monokuma cuts into the discussion to go "DID SOMEONE SAY 'DISAGREEMENT'? SOUNDS LIKE ANOTHER JOB FOR OUR NEW MINIGAME MODE :D", and everyone just groans is one of the best moments in the whole game so far. I'm still laughing at it.
I really love the idea of lie bullets—they're such a cool and appropriate mechanic for the class trial setting, and an easy one to slot into the existing flow of gameplay—but I'm continually frustrated by their implementation. Who decided they should be impossible to even view without being penalized, and why? I just.. don't understand. Someone linked me a spoiler-free list of them all early on, and I'm eternally grateful. (Not only does it suck the fun out of the game to have to make guesswork at what my options even are, but some of the extra ones are hilarious? How could you keep "Insect Flee and Plead" from me, game?) I also had some issues this case due to having very different ideas from the devs about what I could reasonably expect a lie bullet to mean—I assumed the lie version of "Maki told me she was alone all night" would be along the lines of "Maki told me she wasn't alone all night" (the bullets are titled Maki Alone and Maki Not Alone), which seemed like a pointless and unverifiable reiteration of the claim we were trying to prove, so I tried the My Alibi for Nighttime lie bullet first, thinking Shuichi could fabricate some kind of corroborating account. It turned out they wanted Maki Not Alone, which results in Shuichi saying "actually, I have an alibi for nighttime and I heard Maki with someone while I was there". This... feels off to me on a couple levels.
Ah well. I hope future trials continue to take advantage of the mechanic more, because I honestly do love it in theory. I just hope they do it a little more smoothly.
I should mention for context: my working theory, since around the time I finished the prologue, has been that we've all been kidnapped for secretly-reality TV. It's clicked incredibly well with basically everything so far, so unless I've fallen victim to confirmation bias and started reading innocuous details as incredibly on-the-nose foreshadowing again, I feel safe working under the assumption it's true. Either I'm right, or this will be hilarious in retrospect! (Also possible is that I'm right, but I've also drawn bizarrely obtuse conclusions about some of the details without realizing it. That seems to happen a lot with me.)
I bring this up because I want to state for the record that the in-universe writers are absolutely making up the entire overarching plot and backstory of this show as they go. I realize that this may or may not be the (actual, real-world) writers' intention, but I'm convinced that it's true either way. The writers just ran through the surviving cast together once they reached the motive video arc, and gave each other the biggest high fives when someone had the idea to make Kirumi the Prime Minister of Japan. They have no idea what the huge, terrible secret behind the entire plot is actually going to be yet, just that it will totally live up to six chapters of hype. They literally just came up with the phrase "Ultimate Hunt" and a vague post-apocalyptic setting in advance and then told themselves the rest would develop organically. I bet if anyone in the cast starts irritating the audience enough to affect ratings, they'll spontaneously gain a new tragic backstory just in time to be tragically killed off.
This reading may get completely jossed before the end of the game, but I hope it doesn't, because it's my new favorite thing.
Oh, and this isn't news, but Keebo's eyeroll sprite is the best sprite in the game:
no subject
Date: 2019-03-05 07:33 am (UTC)Like a normal person, carrying a corpse through the air over a pool to dunk it in a tank of piranahas the way boring, normal people do.
This is a delight of a line. Honestly, I was disappointed that she didn't just zipline the corpse over the pool in the desperate hope it would somehow end up in the piranha tank.
The part where Monokuma cuts into the discussion to go "DID SOMEONE SAY 'DISAGREEMENT'? SOUNDS LIKE ANOTHER JOB FOR OUR NEW MINIGAME MODE :D", and everyone just groans is one of the best moments in the whole game so far. I'm still laughing at it.
He's so excited!
Being unable to see what lie bullets actually are is definitely frustrating.
If you're curious about seeing someone else's reaction to the chapters you've played so far, without any future spoilers, I posted chapter-by-chapter entries while playing this game: first impressions of characters, chapter one, chapter two. There's obviously no obligation to read these, but I personally always go 'I WANT TO SEE OTHER PEOPLE TALKING ABOUT THIS GAME BUT I DON'T WANT SPOILERS' when I'm playing things, so I thought I'd provide links in case you had the same affliction!
no subject
Date: 2019-03-05 10:54 pm (UTC)Same! It was my first thought when I saw the cable (what better use for the handcuffs, right?), and I felt so let down when I realized it was too logistically unfeasible to be the intended answer. At least Miu appreciated the concept.
I definitely have that affliction; thanks a ton for the links! :D ... And oh no, I'm so sorry about your Chapter 1 ship. That must have been devastating!
I have to quote this because oh my god. Every part of this concept is beautiful.
And the "ropeway" thing was such a bizarre choice of word! I messaged my brother about it the moment I finished the minigame, and got the response "That's not even a word in pig latin." (Apparently I'm an outlier for having at least heard the word before, but that just left me going "wait... that can't be what they want, that's the same exact thing we just suggested" and gaping incredulously when it was. I had to stare at the Wikipedia page for like five minutes before I realized what distinction they even thought they were making.)