Okay, seeing the Nonary Games thread by a different poster made me think I want to write this one.
I played Danganronpa - Trigger Happy Havoc on a whim once because I really like games that have big mysteries and conspiracies to solve. It was quite a thrill.
The second game felt a little forced in some aspects but everything does make sense after a given point, as it reaches internal consistency.
If you are familiar with the series, you know what comes next, the elephant in the room, Danganronpa V3 - Killing Harmony. I went in completely blind (as I did with the other two) and honestly loved everything about it, it was setting up to me my favorite of the classic trilogy...
Spoiler and rant incoming!
But then, in the final chapter...
Thank you for your kindness if you take the time to read my massive rant, and please don't forget those spoiler tags.
I played Danganronpa - Trigger Happy Havoc on a whim once because I really like games that have big mysteries and conspiracies to solve. It was quite a thrill.
The second game felt a little forced in some aspects but everything does make sense after a given point, as it reaches internal consistency.
If you are familiar with the series, you know what comes next, the elephant in the room, Danganronpa V3 - Killing Harmony. I went in completely blind (as I did with the other two) and honestly loved everything about it, it was setting up to me my favorite of the classic trilogy...
Spoiler and rant incoming!
But then, in the final chapter...
We get that absolutely ridiculous reveal that none of it is real and the characters don't exist, that it is all just a fabrication of Team Danganronpa.
I get it, of course it is true, you know it, I know it, it's fiction, of course. What killed the wind off my sails is Tsumugi, a character within the fictional universe, having awareness of this, and being the willing host of any number of Killing Games while working for Team Danganronpa themselves.
I realize one possible angle of this is just Spike Chunsoft being tongue-in-cheek about the corpus of the work and the whole last segment of the game served as meta commentary, in a sense.
Tsumugi herself seems to be a sort of stand-in for the fan of the franchise on one side and Shuichi and the other future survivors kind of go out of their way to seemingly berate the player (that is essentially part of the greater audience of the killing game, more than an agent in the story) for liking what amounts to entertaining, somewhat violent but ultimately harmless fiction.
I'm probably misreading the authors' intents with all this but it felt disingenuous and even somewhat offensive to me as a fan, and left me with a bad aftertaste, despite really liking V3 as a whole.
Also, it could be that they did this just to leave it to the player's interpretation whether to believe Tsumugi or not, as well as create some room for a possible sequel, though I don't personally believe that since the main series' writer left Chunsoft and all we had since V3 was the somewhat dubious Danganronpa S. A nice bit of fanservice, perhaps a covert apology to fans, but hardly a true Danganronpa game.
My personal interpretation is that part of what Tsumugi says is true: she did try to replicate past killing games in a controlled environment and did broadcast it to an audience, as it had been done before, but to an audience in universe, not out of it (us).
I see what she says as the characters not being real as an allusion to the fact she wiped the memories of the participants and fed them unreliable information to get her plan along, but, for me, at least, the V3 killing game is absolutely real within the fiction and Tsumugi has nothing to do with Team Danganronpa, nor does she truly bridge the fictional and real universes, despite her apparent awareness.
She is the Ultimate Cosplayer and could fabricate lies, clothing and other articles wholesale, and she defines herself as a copycat criminal as well, which means she is imitating Junko, by and large, same M.O.
Of course, the fact she can't cosplay as the characters involved in the V3 killing game itself is something of a flaw in my logic - it would be to her advantage if she could impersonate other participants and complicate things even further, but since Tsumugi is an unreliable narrator and as much of a liar as Kokichi, if not more so, she might be lying about the whole Cospox excuse.
I get it, of course it is true, you know it, I know it, it's fiction, of course. What killed the wind off my sails is Tsumugi, a character within the fictional universe, having awareness of this, and being the willing host of any number of Killing Games while working for Team Danganronpa themselves.
I realize one possible angle of this is just Spike Chunsoft being tongue-in-cheek about the corpus of the work and the whole last segment of the game served as meta commentary, in a sense.
Tsumugi herself seems to be a sort of stand-in for the fan of the franchise on one side and Shuichi and the other future survivors kind of go out of their way to seemingly berate the player (that is essentially part of the greater audience of the killing game, more than an agent in the story) for liking what amounts to entertaining, somewhat violent but ultimately harmless fiction.
I'm probably misreading the authors' intents with all this but it felt disingenuous and even somewhat offensive to me as a fan, and left me with a bad aftertaste, despite really liking V3 as a whole.
Also, it could be that they did this just to leave it to the player's interpretation whether to believe Tsumugi or not, as well as create some room for a possible sequel, though I don't personally believe that since the main series' writer left Chunsoft and all we had since V3 was the somewhat dubious Danganronpa S. A nice bit of fanservice, perhaps a covert apology to fans, but hardly a true Danganronpa game.
My personal interpretation is that part of what Tsumugi says is true: she did try to replicate past killing games in a controlled environment and did broadcast it to an audience, as it had been done before, but to an audience in universe, not out of it (us).
I see what she says as the characters not being real as an allusion to the fact she wiped the memories of the participants and fed them unreliable information to get her plan along, but, for me, at least, the V3 killing game is absolutely real within the fiction and Tsumugi has nothing to do with Team Danganronpa, nor does she truly bridge the fictional and real universes, despite her apparent awareness.
She is the Ultimate Cosplayer and could fabricate lies, clothing and other articles wholesale, and she defines herself as a copycat criminal as well, which means she is imitating Junko, by and large, same M.O.
Of course, the fact she can't cosplay as the characters involved in the V3 killing game itself is something of a flaw in my logic - it would be to her advantage if she could impersonate other participants and complicate things even further, but since Tsumugi is an unreliable narrator and as much of a liar as Kokichi, if not more so, she might be lying about the whole Cospox excuse.
Thank you for your kindness if you take the time to read my massive rant, and please don't forget those spoiler tags.
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