MURDERS-ARE-NECESSARY-TO-BRING-EVERYONE-CLOSER-TOGETHER.

[keltena]

Finished Chapter 3 of Danganronpa V3!

This was one of the most astoundingly, beautifully stupid things I've ever seen in my life, oh my god. Every single time I went "this is the most amazingly stupid case imaginable", they found a way to make it even more stupid than I'd expected!

More detailed reactions under the cut. (I briefly considered taking a leaf from rionaleonhart's book and just copying my live comments, but I'm way too tl;dr for that, so this is the mostly-summarized version.)


I'm amused by the thought that Monokuma's 4th wall jokes shtick has been recontextualized to function on an in-universe level in this game. V3 in general feels like it's had an overall tone of affectionate jokes at the series' own expense running in the background, which I like a lot. DR is a series that really needs to be able to laugh at itself sometimes, but its idea of laughing at itself tends to be less "have a sense of humor and self-awareness" than "preemptively mock the idea that anyone could ever be sincere and unironic about anything". V3 still has that problem in other areas, but its sense of humor about its own absurdity feels refreshingly sincere and in good fun.

The most fun part of exploring new areas is raising your eyebrows progressively higher at every object or environmental quirk that just screams "this will be part of someone's preposterously elaborate murder plot later". Conspicuously loose floorboards with a hole you can use to get under them? Three dimly-lit, identical, conspicuously empty rooms? A room with two locking doors that use different locking mechanisms? Thank god this is chapter 3; imagine having to use all of those just to kill one person! (Immediately after I commented on the katana, Kokichi jumped into the scene out of nowhere to go, "Oh man, you could totally use this as a murder weapon! :D" himself. Thanks, Kokichi!)

Tragically, the three identical rooms did not get used for a "the murder actually took place in the other room!" twist after all. Step up your game, Kiyo! I know you could have fit one last ridiculous trick in there if you'd tried.

I'm really not sure how to feel about Maki at this point. After two chapters of her staying stubbornly mysterious off in the corner, I was excited when her focus arc finally kicked off; but the whole first half of her storyline this chapter is full of such jarringly clunky writing, it's hard for me to engage with any of the things it established. (Kaito's part in it especially grates on me. I actually find Kaito pretty endearing when he's not being applauded by the narrative for condescending sexism—he was fantastic during the Chapter 2 investigation/trial, in particular—but that's basically all he does when it comes to his thing for Maki.) It's a shame, since she's a main character and I think I'd enjoy her dynamic with Shuichi if they'd given me anything solid to ground it in.

I hadn't thought much about favorite characters prior to the start of this chapter—everyone was still new enough to me that I mostly just had early impressions ranging from fondness or dislike—but Kokichi has definitely become my favorite. He's such an unceasing delight! ♥ After endless wavering because decisions are hard, I ended up splitting my free times between him and Miu this chapter, and I have no regrets. Kokichi's second event, in particular, is one of the most delightful things that's happened to me all game.

I was briefly surprised and disappointed to only get one Free Time slot, but it was explained in short order:

Where's my second Free Time slot, game
I guess one Free Time event with Kokichi is enough for one evening? :Y



Oh, never mind, Shuichi just wanted to make sure he has time to get laid

Shuichi did not, in fact, get laid that night, because Kaito brought Maki along to their date. Shuichi's life is hard.

I, uh, got really excited when the resurrection motive was announced:

Oh, now that's legitimately interesting!
I... man, they could do that, too?
I mean, I'm sure the deaths are still real (at least, barring any future developments somehow making that impossible after all), and there's no way they can actually bring people back to life because that would be incredibly stupid and DR would never do anything so self-defeatingly bad for their story, but they could absolutely make a new Kaede or Rantaro or so on. I mean, they did it once!
It would have to be a new "actor", so they probably couldn't make a perfect lookalike without going the route of "stupidly extensive amounts of plastic surgery", but... ...Okay, actually, they quite possibly could do that. What I was going to say was that they could probably handwave the returning victim being a little weirdly "different" as slight zombification side effects, pay no mind, but DR would probably be more likely to handwave it the other way now that I think about it.
(People pointed out that if the masterminds can alter memories, they could also simply edit everyone else's memories to match. Rantaro has always had blue hair!)
I was thinking about how they'd pass it off to the player, but you've got a point there too
I wonder if they can actually extract the real memories of the victims up until the point they died and give those wholesale to their "resurrected" selves, or if they'd just fabricate memories to match the events of the game they experienced on top of their pre-game backstory.
Or, third option, it turns out that whoops, your resurrected friends have lost their memories!
They don't remember any of your time together, how sad.
The "surprise, they have amnesia!" route seems most likely to me, since it's both an appropriately nasty catch to hit the characters with at chapter end, and also a source of drama, intrigue, and foreshadowing

...I can't believe past me actually believed, for any amount of time, that the third chapter of a Danganronpa game would progress the plot in a new and meaningful way.

A comment from Keebo confirms that the level of technology displayed in the killing game is in fact beyond anything the characters have ever seen, which is interesting. So unless we're looking at very convincing special effects (...or evil TV producers are hoarding all the amazing sci-fi technology?), we're a period piece and don't even know it! :D

As soon as Angie hugged Gonta, I announced that there needed to be CGs of her doing it to every single other character as well, or else. Not just her successful cult recruits. Not just the characters who are still alive. Everyone. (Including the bears. Especially the bears.) I'm still gravely disappointed that this didn't happen. With the wax effigies, they even had the perfect opportunity to include the dead characters!



Unrelatedly, Kokichi has given me a new favorite reaction image.

I noticed a little into Chapter 3 that I'd capped out my monocoins without realizing. (I'm increasingly getting the impression that the average player doesn't immediately slap away all the furniture almost every time they enter a room, which is a strange and alien thought to me.) It was bugging me every time I earned more, so I traded them all in for casino coins and proceeded to get distracted by the prizes and then the games for an embarrassingly long time. I'm honestly amazed that all the irritating and/or boring trial minigames are actually fun in their casino incarnations? It's genuinely hard for me not to just play Mind Mine Imagination Excavation TREASURE HUNTER! Monolith forever instead of advancing the plot. If I could just replace the music with something less irritating, it would be perfect (but then again, then I might really play it forever).

I had coins left over after buying the only skills and theme I wanted (lovely as some of the presents are, they don't seem worth spending on), so I spent the rest on a Key of Love. This turned out to be good timing, because Kaito didn't even show that night and so Shuichi proceeded to not get laid again. (He spent the time commiserating with Maki over his crush on Kaito instead. Yeah, I don't think I'd call it "looking up" to him either, Shuichi.) Also thanks to my timing, not only did Shuichi break curfew to visit the love hotel, but Monokuma returned from his vacation just to give a tutorial on awkward dream sex. The fact that I ended up with Kiyo makes all of this either better or worse.

I spent my second free time slots with Miu and was planning to try Keebo for the last two, but he chose exactly that moment to start shunning me so I did more Kokichi instead. As best I can tell, Kokichi appears to be Supreme Leader of a school club.

It occurred to me the morning before the murder that I hadn't thought at all about who was going to die this chapter, so I did some impromptu speculation (if you want an example of why this post is paraphrased, see here) and... ended up hitting all the correct answers just by looking at the exactly three people who'd been conspicuously prominent solely for the duration of Chapter 3. Danganronpa may be just a tiny bit formulaic.

Also, I'd just like to share my absolute delight the moment I discovered the wax effigies + katana setup and realized how incredibly, beautifully stupid the solution was guaranteed to be. (I spent the next 20 minutes just brainstorming for the stupidest explanation I could come up with. The actual solution did not disappoint, though I wish they'd taken full advantage of the perfect opportunity for Shuichi to say, "Kaede's effigy did it!")

The first half of the investigation involved some... complicated emotions (and mental contortions) for me.

(After Kiyo proposed the séance:)
...
Okay, I mean.
... They can't actually just be going straight for "Kiyo did it"; he's the obvious guess.
So...
...
I mean. He is incredibly blatantly planning a murder right now.
I don't actually think you can spin that as not a murder plan.
But also.
It... sure as hell wouldn't be a mystery, so.
... Let's see how this turns out.

(After reading the séance instructions:)
I...
... Like, okay, Kiyo is the most blatantly obvious suspect imaginable so I feel there has to be something more to it
But, like, at the same time
So far, no one has acknowledged that he's obvious
So...
...
Look
All I want is for there to be, like, a horrible scream or murder noise or whatever from the darkness
And someone rushes for the lights and then yanks the sheet off the cage to reveal
...Tenko alive and fine but freaked the hell out
And then they glance over to the corner and Kiyo's dead
I would be genuinely impressed
It's. I realize this is... probably not likely.
But damn, that would be something.
... Honestly
The way to salvage this, actually?
Would be to have two murderers.
Kiyo is dead because someone else killed him in the middle of his second murder plan.
(Because, I mean. There's no way you could pass that off as not a murder plan.)

(The thing that kills me most about the séance, specifically, is that it's not just obviously a murder plan; it's a murder plan that you can tell every single step of before it's even happened just by reading the description in the book. The only thing missing is the murder weapon and the exact method beyond "and then he does some trick with the floorboards to get her while she's under the cage"!)

Kokichi, summarizing Danganronpa:



As someone pointed out, someone dying during an investigation would have been a genuinely incredible twist under any other circumstances. But unfortunately, putting it in Chapter 3 of a DR game kills the surprise all on its own (and that's even before you get into the séance being such an obvious murder plot, or Tenko just happening to make a sudden heartfelt, last words-type speech right before it starts).



Official anime character weights in a single image. Sometimes, when I'm looking at the characters' report cards, I notice their listed weights and get distracted all over again. (The only V3 girl who even hits 120 lbs is Miu, including 5′8″ Kaede and 5′9″ Tsumugi and Kirumi. Gonta is supposedly 207 lbs, despite being 6′6″ and enormous; Twogami is 6′, looks like Twogami, and weighs all of 286. Kaito's cough of death is so bad, he can be 6′ and built and still weigh less than me. Junko is 5′7″ and weighs 99 lbs, and that's why she destroyed the world.)

I can't believe Kokichi gets to pretend to be both the victim and the culprit in the span of one case! God, I love this kid.

I'd actually forgotten until I went back over my logs that Keebo casually mentions there's someone talking to and/or mind-controlling him on a regular basis? Oh well, I'm sure there's nothing to worry about. It's probably fine.

Downsides of the third trial: featured two of the most jarring "wait, did you proofread this at all??" moments of the game. I mean, I expect some degree of "how did the writers consider this a logical solution" from any game in this genre, but two separate instances of answers that say the exact opposite of what the script claims is an achievement.
Upsides of the third trial: features the best Hangman's Gambit in the series.

i
w
wh
wha
what the hell was that second word for

it's not even just a dumb hangman's gambit solution
it's
it's a perfectly normal and sensible hangman's gambit solution miraculously and inexplicably MADE INTO an impossibly dumb one????

(A friend helpfully linked me this in response.)

I especially appreciate how everyone keeps repeating the phrase "seesaw homicide" for the entire scene following. "Seesaw homicide" is my new favorite phrase.

Like the resurrection motive, the whole "two different killers, one of whom survives and it's incredibly awkward for everyone involved" concept is a really interesting one that I wish they'd actually explored, instead of raising it solely as a hypothetical to facilitate a completely formula case. (I hope fanfiction has explored some of these, at least!)

Argument Armament always frustrates me—not because of any inherent flaw in the game itself, but because on the PC controls it uses the WASD keys, and I do not have the location of those keys hardwired into my muscle memory the way I do for most game controllers (or for the arrow key directions they represent). The upshot is that I have to use all my concentration on translating letters into finger movements as fast as possible, and I barely have time to focus on the actual rhythm at all. It's not a big enough problem to actually prevent me from getting through the game, but it really makes me wish I could play it properly. (Somehow I've still gotten As on all of them so far; but then, I've also gotten As on literally every other minigame in all three trials, no matter how widely my performance has varied. I'm beginning to think the scoring is as broken as the difficulty settings display.)

And ooooh, Kokichi's figured it out, hasn't he? He makes some very pointed jabs at the fourth wall at the end of the trial; there's one extended bit in particular, about how people sure would get a kick out of watching this, that sounds too purposeful to be just dramatic irony.

Reflecting back on some things now with that new context in mind... I'm not sure how he knows, or how long he's known or if he just figured it out recently, but this could cast some of his behavior in an extra new light. I'm increasingly getting the impression that, in addition to his general... Being Kokichi-ness, another reason he's been so consistently Like That may be to play to the audience? (I mean, if so, it's clearly working!) And also that, in retrospect, a nonzero amount of my favorite character's lines may have been cheerful veiled implications that I, personally should go fuck myself, which is frankly fantastic.

"Wow, aren't killing games so much fun? :D"
"Ooh, ooh, I can't wait to play more trial minigames! :D"
"Hey, it sure would be fucked up if someone was watching us die horribly just for their own entertainment, wouldn't it? :) [pause for laugh track]"

(Kokichi's final act of rebellion before dying will be to painstakingly devise the most infuriating to play murder possible. Oh, is it time for Shuichi to guess the cause of death already? I sure hope the player knows how to spell METHACRYLOYLOXYETHYL ISOCYANATE! :D)

Finally, since I'm going into the back half of the game and the cast has been pared down increasingly close to the bones ("bones" here meaning "main characters"), I thought it would be a good time to attempt some serious death/survival predictions. For anyone who likes that kind of thing, here they are:

We're down to 9 people now, with three chapters left including the final one. Shuichi, Kaito, Gonta, Kokichi, Keebo, Himiko, Maki, Tsumugi, Miu.

Out of those:

• Shuichi definitely survives; the only way he could potentially die is literally as the ending to the game, which I don't quite count as the same thing anyway (and I don't think is all that likely)


• Maki, I'm also putting down as pretty confident she survives; I don't think the pacing and prominence of her character arc makes much sense if she just dies before the game is through anyway.

On the flip side:

• Gonta dies, Chapter 4 victim, it's the biggest tear jerker in the game, we've been over this before.


• I am also pretty damn sure Kokichi dies, because... look, can you picture the endgame arriving and Kokichi just casually being alive and present for it? Like, he pretty clearly knows too much to be allowed to live. He has to die so he can take a sufficient amount of that knowledge with him to give us the world's biggest headache figuring it out ourselves.


• And... I think I was leaning survivor until the end of Chapter 3, but wow, hi there Kaito death flags! Kaito is super dead now. Like, super dead. I am pretty sure it is a physical law of the universe that his only remaining option is to either sacrifice himself in a super dramatic and touching manner or die trying.
  In retrospect, it was probably a bad sign the moment he made himself Shuichi's new love interest. Guy's got a serious fridging problem.

(At this point a friend commented: "shuichi is a low self esteem mess, but he's also the protagonist, which means the universe has turned him into a dark hole where it makes people gravitate toward him/love him then makes them undergo spaghettification so their confidence/reassurance can get forced down his throat while he cries about eating the corpses of those he cares about"
Which is the best, and most accurate, sentence I have ever read in my life.)

Anyway, okay, the remaining characters on that list:

• Let's start with Himiko... So, Himiko is in the position of "literally all logic says she should survive, because her character arc would have no damn point otherwise", which means I'm putting her down for survivor. The only reason I didn't mention her above is that... DR has a history of doing exactly the opposite of what all logic says in some situations like this, so while I'd be surprised if she dies, I wouldn't exactly be shocked. But let's hope.


• Tsumugi... Why is Tsumugi even here.
  ... We've got two main chapters plus a finale to go, we can probably bet on a total of four more deaths give or take one, we've got three characters marked for death so far and I imagine at least one more of the remainder dies. I'll come back to Tsumugi after the others.


• Miu... Mm, I'm in the same position as I was at the start with her, honestly, just maybe with the odds tilted a little more by virtue of our dwindling numbers. Miu surviving is completely believable, but I also don't have any reason to actively expect she will. I'm... inclined to say she survives, just because I can very easily picture her being used to fill out the group dynamic of any set of survivors—especially considering the personalities of the ones I've speculated so far—but I wouldn't be surprised if she died, either. (And I can imagine her potential for both wacky murder plans and a crazy execution being appealing to the writers, considering her talent.)


• Keebo... you know, good question. This is another... hm. Actually, coincidentally enough, I think my thoughts on Keebo are very similar to my thoughts on Miu here? I could easily picture him surviving; I could also easily picture him being one of our upcoming victims or killers somehow (prrrrrobably for Chapter 4? could also be 5 though, who knows), and I can see the writers wanting to use his talent in a murder. I'd say my bets for Keebo are maybe the reverse of for Miu, in that I'm leaning slightly towards him dying over surviving, but again, could go either way.
  (... I'm going to take a very tentative bet, on a spur-of-the-moment thought here, that they don't let both Miu and Keebo survive? Solely by virtue of their having kind of an established relationship—I'm thinking more for the potential "one of them is the victim/culprit and the other knows something that turns out to be crucial in solving the case" than for emotional impact, though the latter's also possible.)
  (This is less something I actually think and more something that spontaneously occurred to me as a possible line of thought, but hey, that's the most fun kind, right?)

And that brings me back to Tsumugi...
Okay, I've currently got three deaths I'm confident on, and a "if I had to guess, at least one of these characters also dies, maybe?", which makes four

Case 4: Gonta; presumably someone else
Case 5: ... Placing a bet on Kokichi going here, because Case 4 seems too early for that to land. (I could theoretically buy him dying Case 4 depending on how the rest is plotted out, and it might actually be interesting—but, uh, jesus christ Kokichi, please don't kill Gonta)

So I need... let's estimate one other person for each case, though that's not really a guarantee
I think one other person for Case 4, definitely, at least
... Hm.
Kaito, I... I'm going to withhold final judgment on until I see how the start of Chapter 4 goes, because depending on what note they start from after the end-of-Chapter-3 reveal, it's possible Chapter 4 is actually his last one?
I'm inclined to say he survives until closer to the end than that, because I feel like with his role and prominence in the plot, his death probably has to hit at a fairly near-climax point, but I really don't know yet.
That line of thought would put him in Case 5, or the less-likely wildcard guess that he sacrifices himself dramatically in the final chapter—which I think is actually a little more likely than it would be for other characters due to his whole tragically fatal cough situation? But still a wildcard guess.
chapter 5: kokichi finally provokes kaito into strangling him to death
kaito pleads justified homicide then dies on the witness stand

... So, Tsumugi.
Tsumugi can go ahead and become relevant any time now.
Maybe if I'd done her free time events I'd have a better read on her?
Anyway, Tsumugi can go ahead and get her focus arc so I can figure out what's going to happen with her.
Thanks.

I'm very excited for Chapter 4! Things seem all set to kick properly into gear now.