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Danganronpa is a great game. Dangaronpa 2 is also a great game. But Danganronpa 3 wants to prove to me that I'm wrong and that they actually awful games about brainwash, fake deaths and plainly stupidity. There is nothing great about a series of games in which the main villain just uses a brainwash video to make everything and everyone act the way she want, making them free of all charges and essentially destroying any dramatic effect this would have. That said, let's speak about Junko.
Junko is great. In the midst of a lot of colorful and excentric characters, she stands out as the most charismatic and also the most charming one. She was purposely made that way so we could believe that she was capable of manipulating and corrupting all the Ultimates and making them cooperate with her grandiose plan of tainting the world with despair. And so she used every weakness to manipulate them, as informed to the player in a piece of information in the game. But then comes lazy writing and everything now is brainwash. Kinda takes out the whole point of her character, huh? And so everything in the series. The Ultimate Despairs now are just brainwashed people without any responsabilites for their actions. The whole dilemna of "hope versus despair" is entirely meaningless if there is no clear logic behind their actions as Ultimate Despairs.
And really, I don't know what is more stupid: Kirigiri's death or she being revived. What was the point? I can't see any logic if not the writers purposely doing something completely stupid because they knew the game would never do it. Because that's the point of the game. All the death and dark twists mattered. They are important for the thematic construction of the games and its main message to the player. Everything was made that way so its message would be conveyed with a strong impact.
I could go on and babble about the other problems with Danganronpa 3, but those are enough. They destroy everything that was build in the game just for a cheap fanservice with a forced happy ending. A lot of people are crediting this to Kodaka Kazutaka, the creator of the series, but he's just the supervisor, while the writers are actually Higashide Yuichiro and Kodachi Ukyou, the duo behind Gakkou Gurashi. It's difficult to say how much involvment Kodaka has, but being busy with V3, I doubt there is much to credit him for. And now I understand why he made V3 so it wouldn't have any connection with the previous games. No freaking way he could consider this piece of garbage as part of the game series.
