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This anime should NOT be watched before playing DR1 and DR2.
This anime SHOULD be watched alongside Mirai-hen one episode at a time.

DR3 appeals to quite a niche audience and they'll watch it regardless of how good it is. I know I did. Let's face it, as an anime, Zetsubou-hen is pretty mediocre and decent at best, but the story it set out to tell is still as interesting as a Danganronpa story should be. Unfortunately though, I have to review this as an anime.

Zetsubou-hen is equipped with fully realized characters and a good outline of a story, but its execution is...pretty poor. A lot of ... it is just exposition with meager attempts to convey emotion via mundane dialogues, lacking in any sense of stakes or scale and full of cliches. The characters are treated as plot device and less as actual human beings, those of class 77 especially. The anime spends most of its time holding our hands through every bit of detail in the story, expecting us to not be able to pick them up ourselves. Frankly, I had this issue with the games as well, but it wasn't nearly as apparent then.

The anime appears to be a show of a turn-of-events and just that; history. Scenes are drawn out past their relevance and feel pointless where they could've been used to build characters past what we already know about them. The story rises with mostly slow pacing to a dissatisfying payoff, and most of the enjoyment was makeshift inside my head by analyzing the story and characters way past what the anime could've possibly intended.

Expect cheap animations, sub-par screenplay, nice but underused characters, and some classic DR fanservice. If you're not into DR, why bother. If you've played or read DR material before, treat this as a 12-episode cutscene instead. It'll give you some closure to questions and loose ends you probably have, but that's the only incentive I can think of.

Loved the opening song though. Also <3 Junko xoxo