Danganronpa 3: The End of Hope's Peak High School: Future and Hope Arc

Episode 12

Phew! After 24 episodes in just 12 weeks, the original Danganronpa timeline has reached its finish line, as we close this chapter for the franchise and prepare to open another with the "New Danganronpa V3" game next year. As the Future Arc turned into the Hope Arc for Makoto, Hajime, and all their friends, I left Danganronpa 3 behind with very conflicted feelings. On the one hand, I'm glad my crackpot theory turned out to be false. While I still think Chisa would have made for a more potent antagonist than what we got, the thought of losing Aoi to such an outlandish trick (one Kodaka has already played before) was disheartening, and it's usually better to be surprised when it comes to puzzlebox mystery stories. On the other hand, the actual identity of the mastermind and his complex evil scheme was thematically sound but logistically ludicrous. That's true of every Danganronpa story of course, which has always been one of my favorite things about the franchise, but there's a huge difference between acknowledging that the details don't matter in light of the big picture (like Junko often did) and relying on those details to pan out in a way that wrecks all suspension of disbelief. Kazuo Tengan is no Junko Enoshima, and the same "nuclear option" plan that works for Little Miss Despair just seems like a senile gamble in Tengan's hands, distracting too much from the heartening message Danganronpa 3 wanted to end on.

Replacing Junko Enoshima, who is more Despair Incarnate than a human with any reasonable aspirations, with a human being like Tengan, who has a very specific outcome he needs to achieve with this plan, changes absolutely everything about the battle royale setup. By its very nature, an indefinite killing game with over a dozen people involved has too many variables for any one person to account for, so in order for the plan to seem wise, your end goal has to be very broad in scope. For Junko 1.0, it didn't matter who died and who survived the Hope's Peak killing games or how long any of it took, the end goal was always to crush the few survivors (and the global viewing public) with the hopeless truth at the end. For Junko 2.0, the goal was simply to goad the group into killing off a specific number of people within an allotted time period that also wasn't technically essential for the plan's success, just useful for luring in her true enemies and keeping them from interfering with her true "Junko-fy All Mankind" gambit. Both plans were more foolproof for their adaptability, defeatable only by a true "fool's hope" denial of the impossible odds Junko controlled, and even failure was always an option in both plans, since Junko considered the whole endeavor worthwhile as an exercise in True Despair even if (perhaps especially if) she were defeated. Removing Junko from the equation and replacing her with a more focused human mastermind happened to work for the climax of the spinoff game, Ultra Despair Girls, because Komaru decided that the only winning move in Monaka's twisted master scheme was not to play. Her decision not to act completely wrecked Monaka's plan, and the same thing could very well have happened to Tengan, who wanted an even more specific outcome from his enormous undertaking, like trying to perfectly toast a marshmallow with the energy from a dynamite explosion—but against all odds, he succeeded? Everything worked out perfectly in his favor when there were a million ways it should have gone wrong.

I'll just come right out and say it: Why why why would Tengan come up with such a dangerous and convoluted method just to persuade Mitarai, easily the weakest-willed member of the Future Foundation, to broadcast his Hope video to the world? There were dozens, nay hundreds, of easier options he could have gone with in pursuit of this simple goal. He certainly didn't need to kill all the other Future Foundation members to give Mitarai an opening, considering that the plan is to brainwash everyone anyway! Even assuming Tengan has no regard for his own life anymore and wanted to exterminate his fellow Foundation members out of bitterness, he still should have aborted the plan as soon as Mitarai entered the game. (They were all moved to an underwater facility after being knocked out, so why didn't he leave Mitarai behind and come up with an excuse!? That was his golden opportunity to get the guy out! Wait, if Tengan reportedly had no accomplices, how did he move everybody to begin with?!) Even if he was determined to follow through despite the one person he needed to survive the game being caught in the line of fire, why would he give himself and Mitarai the worst possible Forbidden Actions for his needed endgame? (The game's success 100% relies on Tengan being able to lie about his involvement and Mitarai being able to use his talent. If Tengan had been interrogated at length or the power hadn't been cut by Sakakura, Tengan's own deadly bracelet rules would have wrecked his whole plan! Hell, if Mitarai was never meant to be part of the game, why did he even have a Forbidden Action prepared for him?!) Questions upon questions! How were these forbidden actions being monitored and administered if the entire killing game setup was pre-recorded? There's no A.I. monitoring everyone's behavior, so there's no reason the Forbidden Actions should have still been deadly after Tengan's death. I mean, Kyoko's could have been pre-programmed, but how did a deceased Tengan activate Izayoi's or Kizakura's bracelets?! If you want to stretch and say there were sensors attached to Izayoi's tongue or Kizakura's hand, that still doesn't explain the lunacy that would have been trying to enforce Kimura's forbidden action on autopilot. Tengan's plan only worked on the Anthropic Principle, and while "if it didn't happen this way, we would have no story" can pardon many sins in a complicated plot, I don't think Jesus and Buddha combined have enough room in their hearts to forgive this much narrative genocide.

I didn't even sit down and catalogue plotholes beforehand, that was all just written off the top of my head. I'm sure if you dig even a little deeper, Tengan's whole plan will continue to cave in until there's absolutely nothing left. Well okay, not nothing. As a thematic endpoint, Tengan's motivations do make complete sense, and Mitarai's dilemma puts a nice ribbon around the ideas about Hope that Danganronpa 3 has been playing with. For Tengan, the kind of holier-than-thou authoritarian who would endorse the Izuru Kamukura project, Hope means an end to all conflict and imperfection everywhere. He doesn't see any problem with rewriting human brains into automatons of flawless talent and static emotion, which not only puts him at odds with Munakata's extremely individualistic ideal of Hope, but also illustrates the grim endpoint of demanding that everyone else's morality line up with your own: the inevitable devaluation of free will and diversity. As the clock ticked down to the broadcast of a video that would rewrite all human psychology as we knew it, I took some small comfort in the feeling that this conclusion was right for Danganronpa, even if I didn't like the path we took to get there.

And then the Hope Arc episode happened. After watching Munakata and Makoto race toward the light to stop Mitarai, ready to go out in a blaze of glory to fight for their own definitions of hope, we got abruptly interrupted by a whiplash cavalry charge from the Remnants of Despair, here to save the day so incredibly hard that Makoto and Munakata could have sat on their hands for the entire finale and nothing would have changed. Ugh.

Don't get me wrong, it was great to see the Danganronpa 2 cast back in action again. I'm a sucker for more nostalgic fanservice before the end, and it's nice to have it confirmed that the most lovable characters in the franchise all survived their ordeal. (Even if it looks like they survived it too well, with only directly-canonized-amputee Nagito sporting an artificial limb, despite Danganronpa 2's assertion that the entire cast had been Frankenstein'd with Junko parts. I'd be more disappointed if we hadn't been braced for this since Danganronpa 3 first started by showing us their remarkably healthy Despair versions. Oh well.) But after all that buildup about Munakata and Makoto learning to compromise their values, we're only rewarded with another imbalance; Munakata has lost both of the people he loved, and Makoto hasn't lost anything (because I was at least right about Kyoko pulling a Juliet). For the purposes of this finale, they might as well have not learned anything, because they don't actually use what they learned to do anything after Sakakura force-quits the game. If I had to guess, I'd say this whole conclusion was written long before the middle of the series was fleshed out, which might explain why the finale felt so much like a neighboring island to the continent we spent most of Danganronpa 3 living on.

Even the tearjerking stuff with the Remnants of Despair gets somewhat compromised by the poor decision made in the Despair Arc to take everyone's agency away from them. While Makoto and Munakata had to learn that their definitions of Hope were not absolute (even if they didn't do anything with that knowledge in the end), Mitarai had to learn that Hope by any definition is not an absolute state. He may have fallen into Despair long ago, but it was never too late for him to start over, and even though his class was never there for him when it mattered before, they can start by being here for him now. This is nice on the surface, and the shot of Mitarai weeping into Imposter-kun's arms is definitely heartwarming, but it's heavily undercut by the fact that none of these characters actually committed any sins to be ashamed of. When they talk about atonement and never giving up hope, they're talking about atoning for circumstances that were completely beyond their control. The only character among them who did something "wrong" without being coerced or tricked into it was Hajime, and even then he wasn't really aware of the consequences to becoming Izuru Kamukura. Everyone else from Mitarai to Mikan was just sucker-punched, bullied, and brainwashed into being evil or having their creation used for evil, which isn't remotely the same as making a conscious choice that you regret and seek redemption for. Danganronpa 3 tried so hard to keep Mitarai and the Remnants of Despair sympathetic that it went too far in making them powerless victims, weakening its ultimate message.

In the end, it's hard to imagine anyone being deeply disappointed by Danganronpa 3, but it's also hard to imagine anyone being completely satisfied by it. Even if 80-90% of the content was entertaining, tense, and thoughtful, the other 10-20% was ill-advised, unconvincing, or just plain lazy. Kazutaka Kodaka has always ridden right along the line of biting off more than he can chew, but this half-baked final entry in the original Danganronpa timeline marks the first time I think he actually choked. Regardless, I enjoyed the journey more than enough to forgive it falling down on the landing. Even when the plot couldn't hold together, the emotions it stirred in me were valid, and I can appreciate the message he was shooting for, even if he dampened it with some questionable plot points. If nothing else, we can all be impressed that he delivered completely on structure; that insane prequel/finale blend must have been murder to plot out, but it turned out beautifully. Kudos to you for shooting for the moon, Kodaka-sensei! Even if you missed, you still landed—well, this is Danganronpa, so he landed in a pile of bones underneath Hope's Peak Academy. Upupupu~

Rating: B-

Danganronpa 3: The End of Hope's Peak High School: Future Arc is currently streaming on Funimation.

Jake has been an anime fan since childhood, and likes to chat about cartoons, pop culture, and visual novel dev on Twitter.