The truth - which has long since been erased thanks to a Men in Black-style memory scrambler - is that each participant willingly joined the game after witnessing past “seasons” of Danganronpa, a series created by (real life franchise developer) Team Danganronpa. This particular game has been orchestrated by one of the surviving students, who reveals that each character’s memories have been reprogrammed to turn them into stock characters in a fictional world. It’s us, the people playing Danganronpa V3. They confront that evil, and manage to find relief - in one form or another - preventing the whole assembly from being wiped out for good.ĭanganronpa V3 follows that same formula to the finale, where the true evil is once again uncovered. The first two core games in the series followed a similar formula, with the class of prisoners being whittled down by murders and executions until a small group of survivors manage to discover the true evil behind the killing game. However, if the class gets it wrong, everyone else is executed, and the culprit walks free. If they’re correct, the culprit is executed in a grisly manner befitting their “Ultimate” identity the Ultimate Pitcher is killed by a firing squad of batting cage pitching machines, for example. Once a student murders a classmate, the group has a short while to investigate the crime before taking part in a Class Trial, where they argue the facts and vote on the culprit.
If you have no plans to dig into this murder mystery visual novel franchise - and you probably should, because it’s a series with some really cool ideas - read on.ĭanganronpa is a series about groups of students who represent the best and brightest of their individual fields - the Ultimate Detective, Ultimate Pianist, Ultimate Astronaut and so on - who become trapped in a series of deadly “killing games” across the franchise. If you haven’t played the games and want to stay unspoiled, I suggest you go read some of our other year-end coverage. There’s a lot there to drill down into, but before we get started: I’m going to spoil the ending of Danganronpa V3 here, and by extension, the earlier games in the series. Put simply: How would you feel if a game’s ending told you that you were a bad person for viewing and enjoying the events that had transpired? The controversy may surprise outsiders: Players haven’t been torn over the quality of the game’s finale, but rather, over the contempt the game’s metanarrative seems to harbor against the franchise’s most fervent fans. Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony’s ending has been subject to an extremely divisive reception, and for good reason.