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Danganronpa 3: The End of Hope's Peak High School: Future Arc
Episode 8

by Jacob Chapman,

How would you rate episode 8 of
Danganronpa 3: The End of Hope's Peak High School: Future Arc ?
Community score: 4.2

Well, I'm sorry to report that after seven great episodes of the Future Arc, I finally walked away from one mostly disappointed. That's not to say this episode was bad, or even that it harmed the story in ways that can't be mended, but after such a consistently captivating build-up, it hurts to see this story stumble even in minor ways. After spending so much time with Makoto, fans had been clamoring for an episode with Kyoko instead, turning this week into a warning to be careful what you wish for.

So long, Kizakura! We hardly knew ye. No, seriously, we hardly knew this guy. After spending so many weeks questioning his role in both the Despair and Future arcs, this episode deflates all our speculation with the most shrug-worthy reveal possible. He really was just an incredibly lazy teacher who got his job mostly as a proxy to protect Headmaster Kirigiri, his bestest friend, from any attempts on his life by the Hope's Peak administration he so often opposed. After The Tragedy, Kizakura was separated from Kirigiri and applied his skills to the battlefield before reluctantly joining the Future Foundation. Still, things were never the same after that, so he devotes what's left of his life to protecting Kirigiri's daughter Kyoko, eventually paying the ultimate price to keep her safe in this episode.

Unfortunately, when a character is played up as dubious and mysterious for a long time, basic-ass emotional investment plots don't work very well as a twist, especially one that ends in that character's death. Kizakura's forbidden action is "opening his left hand," which is so conveniently specific to the "Lion King" scenario he ends up in that it feels like a cheap and transparent bit of writing to give him a tragic sendoff. If his forbidden action had been foreshadowed earlier on, we could have felt the sting of this unpredictable tragedy alongside him, but now it just feels like something that was created so the writer could kill him, not the mastermind, who could never have seen this situation coming. To make matters worse, we can't feel much over Kizakura's loss because we've spent all this time suspecting him, assuming he had a greater role to play in this whole conspiracy. It's hard to go from "what complex role does this cipher have to play in all this?" to "none at all, he was just a normal sluggard who became numb to the world after losing his only friend, and now he's dead!" Sadly, episode 8 does not execute this transition well.

And that's far from the only place this episode stumbles. Kyoko's deduction that Ando actually killed Izayoi creates more problems than it solves, and I suspect that this little whodunit was conceived before Ando's arc with Kimura was written. Sure, the murder case as standalone is neat. All the clues were definitely in place to solve it ahead of time (plenty of viewers did, though I'll admit I was not one of them), and I hope all the clever devils who had it pegged a week ago are patting themselves on the back now. Unfortunately, on a character development level, Ando's murder of Izayoi doesn't really add anything to Danganronpa 3, it just takes away a little of what we already had.

Ando killing Izayoi to save herself is understandable, but Izayoi's reaction is the real question mark in this equation. If he loves Ando enough to risk his life for her repeatedly, why wouldn't he hold off on escaping to keep her alive? This paints Ando as not only cartoonishly evil and mistrusting, undoing all the work that her nuanced development in previous episodes had built up, but a thousand times more stupid as well. I get not trusting Izayoi enough to reveal your forbidden action even if you're in love, but killing him rather than revealing it? If we're meant to believe that she did reveal her forbidden action and he tried to escape anyway, that twist on expectations for his barely-developed character would have been way more interesting to actually see play out. It feels like a first-draft mini-mystery that should have been excised from the final version when the characters involved had changed enough that the motivations needed to execute the idea didn't ring true anymore.

To add insult to injury, Ando then tries to control Sakakura's rage by feeding him a totally random mind control candy of some kind. (Hey, there's another interesting excuse they could have used for the Izayoi murder plot. Maybe Ando was controlling Izayoi's feelings with mind control candy, and since she could no longer feed him in the Killing Game, he was beginning to break away from her control to the point that he began to despise her and attempt escape. But nope! They didn't bother to pick that low-hanging fruit, and if they try to do it next week, it'll be too late to have the intended emotional effect.) Anyway, this Turkish Delight twist is so wildly unnecessary that it doesn't even matter for longer than 30 seconds. Sakakura becomes Ando's mind slave for maybe two lines of dialogue before he's brought out of it by Kyoko's amazing deductive reasoning skills or something. What?! Once again, I smell first-draft leftovers. The only thing this plot device accomplished was forcing Sakakura to try and kill Kyoko before Ando, and there were oodles of simpler ways they could have accomplished that. Magical candies? I hate to say that this better come back later, because I think it's a dumb idea, but it better come back later or it's going to feel even more pointless than it did before.

Speaking of Sakakura, it turns out that his own forbidden action isn't punching people in the face, but punching anyone period! I ruled this out early on because I could have sworn he punched Mitarai in episode 2, but rolling the footage back, it appears he used his knee. My bad! Anyway, that's why he's been using knives to kill his victims—if he is indeed the game's designated killer. It's still entirely possible that it could be someone else, because now it feels like the show is selling us on the idea that Sakakura's the killer, making the whole thing smell like red herring.

Frankly, our entire perception of who's on first in this Final Killing Game may still be topsy-turvy. (I think Calculated Misdirection might be Kazutaka Kodaka's own Ultimate talent.) Right before Gekkōgahara-bot goes HAM on Munakata (in Future Foundation-exterminating autopilot mode, which might also be pretty stupid but gets overshadowed by the other more questionable choices of this episode), he grumbles out a hair-raising accusation. Unless he's just totally lost his marbles under the influence of Kimura's doping pills, Munakata seems to think that either Aoi or Makoto is an Ultimate Despair, as he sees them both reflected in the steel of his katana. Is the truth of this Final Killing Game far darker than we anticipated? Is Aoi herself Makoto's enemy? Or is Makoto himself not who he seems to be? I don't know what to think yet, but this doesn't look good.

The episode ends with an unexpected implosion at the lower levels of the Future Foundation's tower. Hiro and Byakuya's rescue team tripped a booby trap on their way to save the day, which makes me think they're just around for fanservice (or disservice in Hiro's case) and to reunite with the survivors when the game (and this Danganronpa trilogy) has reached its end. In any case, they won't be saving their companions from Monokuma's trap any time soon, and even though Danganronpa 3 took some ugly stumbles this week, I still have faith that its final curtain will come down with a flourish.

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.


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