Side Despair's problem is that it's boring, safe, predictable, and pointless. As a companion piece to Side Future it does its job fairly well, but in every other regard it's an absolute failure. Danganronpa and Super Danganronpa 2 left several questions unanswered, mysteries left up to one's interpretation. DR3 Side Despair aims to solve these riddles and provide answers to what exactly happened to Class 77 before SDR2's events.
This was a terrible idea.
Class 77's backstory is largely shoved to the background in favour of crossovers with Side Future and an insider's view of series antagonist Junko Enoshima's infernal machinations. When the time finally comes for their big defining moment, none of them have had the development to warrant it. Instead, aside from outliers Nagito Komaeda, Chiaki Nanami, Ryota Mitarai and the Ultimate Impostor, all of them are mushed into one entity. Class 77 is no longer a cast of different characters, but one singular plot device the series has been chained to. Most of the Class 77 segments is spent building up to the demise of the one student missing in SDR2, and when it finally hits it's neither impactful nor entertaining.
Junko Enoshima herself has also lost all of her charm. In the games, she appeared only at the very end of DR1 and SDR2. Now she's a main character in Side Despair, and it really hammers home the point that she's best used sparingly. In short, she's just not a very interesting character when you get down to it. She's evil because she's evil, and every single one of her evil plans always goes off without a hitch. What she ends up doing to plunge the world into despair is also incredibly stupid and hokey. The charismatic supervillain who capped off both games on their victory laps is now an omnipresent, transparently evil mwahahaer with little to do or say except ensure that all of SDR2's major backstory beats are hit. The one shining beacon of hope is one of the new anime-original guys, Juzo Sakakura, an excellently written character with a compelling and tragic arc. However, most of his big moments happen in Side Future, though vital setup occurs in Side Despair. Juzo is one of the best additions to the series yet, and his presence alone saves the show from being scored even lower.
In the end, I liked SDR2 better when I didn't actually know what happened before it. Every answer we get in Side Despair is far lamer than what I'd envisioned, and just about every character is cheapened by the Persona 4-esque herd treatment. Just about the only character who escaped mostly unscathed was Komaeda, and even he, who was THE defining driving force of SDR2, ended up underutilised and mostly there to provide context for Side Future's events. This show not only fails on its own, but it serves to also make SDR2 a much weaker story once you know just how uninteresting its backstory is.
Side Despair is woefully written and dreadfully directed. The animation is also clearly low budget, with the excellent music and voice work, as usual for the franchise, being its only saving graces. You probably already watched this if you're a hardcore fan of the series, but I recommend everyone else give this a skip. Side Future is undoubtedly the stronger show of the two, though even then it'd hard to recommend that one either.
