It's impossible to properly discuss New Danganronpa V3 without massively spoiling it. Even that right there consitutes a minor spoiler, but it's one I can't not have. As such, I'll divide this review into two sections: A general overview of why the game is good, and deeper discussion of its intricacies. I'll do my best to keep the first section spoiler-free, but I implore you, if you have even the slighest interest in this game, go play it, even before reading the first section, as even there I'll have to spoil some bare minimum things. Even if you don't, even if you haven't played the first two Danganronpa games, go do it. This might be the finest series in all of gaming, and I can't recommend them enough. Now, without further ado:
Section 1 - General Overview
New Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony is, as the title would suggest, the third installment in the Danganronpa series. As with the previous two, it follows a group of sixteen students who are trapped together - this time in a school again, back to series origins after Danganronpa 2's tropical island setting - and forced to participate in a killing game. If you kill someone, you're allowed to leave. The catch is, if you're caught, you're killed too. If you're not caught, everyone else gets killed instead. The player controls one of the students, who is forced to investigate the murders and become a prominent figure in the so-called Class Trials - group discussions where everyone puts their head together to try and figure out who the murderer is. Like previously, the students are all the best at some particular (and usually pretty obscure and specific) field, being called the "Ultimate" at that field. Talents in this game range from Ultimate Pianist, through Ultimate Entomologist to Ultimate Robot.
The gameplay loop is largely unchanged from the previous two games. The game is divided into chapters, with each chapter having three distinct parts - "Daily Life", where the story unfolds in typical visual novel style and the group learns more about the mysteries of the school, then "Deadly Life", where the player must roam the school investigating the murder and collecting clues, and finally the Class Trial itself, which resemble the trial sequences from the Ace Attorney games with an added element of action as you must point out contradictions in other people's reasoning, all while dealing with the changing mood in the room and navigating the situation accordingly.
Both Daily Life and Deadly Life contain walking about sections, where you navigate the school in first person. Much like the previous two games, they're both pretty scripted. Whilst there's often additional dialogue to be found if you roam about a little, there's only ever one place to move the story forward, and it's pretty obvious where. Following the formula for the hybrid detective/lawyer game that Ace Attorney proved works bizarrely well, there's no possibility of missing clues during the investigation sections either, which drains some of the charm away.
Still, the real trick here - as Ace Attorney proved - is that the writing has to be strong enough to make you forget this. The murders need to be set up in such a way that you constantly feel like you're discovering something significant as you're investigating, but there still need to be enough bizarre small clues that seem insignifcant but make no sense at the moment to make the big moments of realization in the trials work well. Danganronpa V3 mostly suceeds at this, though a couple cases (3 and 5 for me) become a little too obvious a little too fast, and it takes the characters a while to catch up.
The meat of the game as a game comes in the Class Trials though, and these are also pretty much unchanged from the previous two games. Most of your time will be step in what the game calls Nonstop Debate, where the characters talk at each other, presenting what they think happened in the murder. You've got a few pieces of evidence out of the ones you collected to choose from, and you must match them with highlighted statements in order to either contradict them or agree with them. This section is basically a much easier version of the cross-investigation sections of Ace Attorney - it works basically the same way, but you're only allowed to present a small portion of your evidence, and only at a few of the statements. The catch is people talk fast, and you have to respond quickly at the right statement (Otherwise you must wait for the whole conversation to loop again) as opposed to having unlimited time in Ace Attorney. It's overall considerably easier than Ace Attorney, but it makes the Trials feel much more fast paced and fluid, and puts more emphasis on the unfolding story.
This is backed up by a suite of minigames, which represent different occurences in the Trial. Someone takes particular offense at your line of reasoning? You enter a small minigame where you have to cut down their arguments with the correct piece of evidence like it's a sword duel. Hysteria overtakes the room? You have to listen to several people talk at once, and figure out who to focus on to find the statement you must contradict in order to calm everyone down. The room is split in half over a particularly contentious point of the murder? There's a minigame where you have to figure out how to best organize your side of the room to convince the others by matching the key words of their arguments to those of the opposition. Someone's out of arguments and they're just trying to shout you down? You play a rhythm game where you shoot down all their yelling. You have to think particularly hard about something? You either play a game where you're mining for the answer in your mind, one where you're creating a key word from scrambled letters, or one where you're driving a taxi through Vegas and picking up hookers with the right answers floating over their heads. That last one may be a bit weird.
These minigames have differing levels of effectiveness, but you'll rarely be playing any of them more than twice in the same trial, so even the worst ones (like the rhythm game) are pretty painless, whilst the best ones (like the newly introduced Debate Scrum, the one where the room is split in half) are really fun. In general, they help keep variety up in Trials, and do a good job of making you feel like you're using a big skillset in order to overcome more obstacles than just having to figure out who the murderer is. It really does lend a dynamic feel to the trial, and help give the other characters in the room personality as they feel their involvement in the trail is as important as yours. In a way, it's more of a lawyer game than Ace Attorney, as pure hard logic won't get you to the end of the trial - you've also got to be able to manage the people in the room with you. Like the two previous games, class trials are a joy to play, with the mysteries being cleverly written and full of twists, and fairly hard to guess before you get at least partially into the corresponding trial.
Also back is Free Time - the small choice you do have during Daily Life, where you're allowed to choose who to spend time with when the plot's not advancing, which has been slightly improved but is still as flawed as ever. The problems with it in previous games were twofold. First off, there were barely any instances of it, which cut players from seeing many of the various stories told by hanging out with a character several times. Also, certain characters wouldn't give you scenes for hanging out with them until a certain point in the story, but would let you try, which not only would waste a valuable Free Time chance with no warning, but would also be spoilerific, as not being able to hang out with a character yet was a sure indication that they were neither the victim nor the killer of that trial. The first of these two is alleviated - you now get five Free Times per chapter, up from the three from the previous games, which means you can exactly complete one characters' little story in a chapter by only spending time with them, without being interrupted by a massively long Trial and all the story that comes with that. The second is super not, and I managed to massively spoil one of the Trials for myself that way, as well as wasting several Free Time slots. I don't understand why that feature is still there, it seems like putting in added work just to make the game worse. Surely it'd be easier to just allow all Free Time to happen at once, unless there's a plot reason for it not to (like a character isn't talking to you, for instance). Still, Free Time is a welcome addition to the game, letting you learn a bit more about the characters you like the most, and helping mix in a bit of interacitivity to the largely uniteractive Daily Life sections, where all you do otherwise is walk to the next plot-relevant location.
Now for the part that those spoilers will force me to drastically cut down: The story is good. Once again, the sixteen students have wildly different personalities, full of cartoonish quirks, and there's plenty of goofing around to be done with them. Everyone gets a fully fleshed out and unique personality and look, even the people who die early on, which in addition to making the world feel more vibrant prevents one from metatextually figuring out who stays around for long. Danganronpa carries on its trademark combination of wacky humor with genuinely gruesome, disturbing and touching scenes, which only makes the mood feel that much more bizarre and unique. Once more, the game largely consists of a drip-feed of information about the larger plot which the characters slowly figure out whilst dealing with interpersonal drama and the constant string of murders, which are often tragically motivated.
This isn't the stuff that makes Danganronpa V3 truly precious (that I need to give myself the freedom of spoilers to discuss), but it is an integral part of making it a great experience. Everything works here. The gameplay, whilst simplistic, works fantastically in conjuction with the plot. Mysteries that you want to solve abound, both in the short scale in the form of the murders, and in the long scale in the form of what exactly is going on and why this death game is happening. Characters evolve and grow, jokes become crucial and sometimes legitimately disturbing plot points. Danganronpa V3, even without the stuff that truly makes it tick is an incredibly good game, with pretty fine-tuned gameplay and a hell of a fun story. I'd be recommending it even without the stuff that I'm going to explore in...
Section 2 - Spoilers
Last chance to leave! I mean it! Full on spoilers! You're robbing yourself of a great experience by reading this! If you want to play the game, go do it now. You should, by the way.
The original Danganronpa was, all in all, a fairly straightforward little story: A death game happened for mysterious reasons, you got information about why along the way, and at the very end it all clicked together in a satisfying way. On the way there it played with your expectations a little bit (especially in the victim of the first case, who was set up to be a major character), but it was largely exactly the type of thing you'd expect from a death game story. Then Super Danganronpa 2 came along, which was set up to be the same thing, except it played off your expectations from the first game, mysteriously mirroring certain parts of it to an uncanny extent, but pulling off curveballs at the last moment. The reveal at the end was all the more satisfying for it, because not only did it explain the mysterious events happening in Super Danganronpa 2, but it also worked on the level of a metatextual commentary on the first game. Super Danganronpa 2 had followed just enough of the plot beats from the first game to make you feel like you knew what was going on, only to pull the rug out from under you consistently.
New Danganronpa V3 does a similar thing, with the direct one-to-one comparisons to the first game gone, and a whole new level of meta insanity pushed on top. In the very first case it blows your expectations coming in from the first two games straight out of the water: The Ultimate ???, a talent that always represented a major character up until this point, is the very first to be killed, and your bloody player character is the one who did it. The entire game is built around subverting your expectations this way: Characters trick you into thinking they're going to be important only to suddenly die, all whilst seemingly side gag-characters survive till late in the game. Murders seem incredibly simple and with obvious solutions, only to have been much more complex.
The entire game is just a constant, unending subversion of your expectations in every single regard. Seemingly important clues to the nature of the story turn out to mean nothing, whilst off-handed comments made an hour into the game unravel the plot over thirty hours later.
But, most of all , Danganronpa V3 is beautiful because of its ending, a metatextual clusterfuck where the characters appear to become aware that they're fictional only for you to realize that they're not fictional in our universe, they're fictional within a fictional universe in which the events of the first two Danganronpa games may or may not also be fictional. As such, all the mysteries of the school that have been carefully and precisely built up over the last thirty hours are thrown out of the window. There's no solution, the mastermind was sowing the clues as they went along in order to create an intriguing story. Really, none of the clues were actually real. It's all fiction. The last couple hours of the game are spent investigating why people enjoy Danganronpa the way we do. Is it out of some sadistic wish to see innocent characters die? Is it out of a desire to watch people overcome overwhelming odds? Maybe a combination of the two? What's true is that it's a massive mindfuck, and a joy to read through as more and more insane levels of meta get added on top of each other, creating a joyful and fascinating little tangle. There's a lot here, from the aforementioned self-reflection to an ode to the power of fiction and even a notice that the series is, at the very least, going to take an extended break.
There's also the cockblock aspect. The characters get actively angry at the audience and refuse to give them a satisfying ending, just choosing to allow themselves to be killed to spite us. Between this and the mysteries of the school not being satisfied, the entire ending is designed to feel unfullfilling, and it does its job fantastically. Fortunately, the metatextual mindfuck of the entire thing does make it incredibly satisfying, but not in the way the large majority of the game made you expect it to be. Once again, a fantastic reversal of expectations.
Danganronpa V3 is many things. It's a fantastic death game story. It's a commentary on its own series, and on the risk of a series running its course without ending. It's a meditation on the difference between art and artist. It's a critcism of people's taste in art, and an ode to the power of that exact same art to make the world a better place. Most of all, it's an absolutely phenomenal game that works near perfectly from beginning to end: Great murder mysteries to solve, a phenomenal plotline, and the best character work in the entire Danganronpa series, along with possibly the greatest ending in all of gaming. Fucking play this thing. Please.
10/10, among the greatest games of all time.
Section 1 - General Overview
New Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony is, as the title would suggest, the third installment in the Danganronpa series. As with the previous two, it follows a group of sixteen students who are trapped together - this time in a school again, back to series origins after Danganronpa 2's tropical island setting - and forced to participate in a killing game. If you kill someone, you're allowed to leave. The catch is, if you're caught, you're killed too. If you're not caught, everyone else gets killed instead. The player controls one of the students, who is forced to investigate the murders and become a prominent figure in the so-called Class Trials - group discussions where everyone puts their head together to try and figure out who the murderer is. Like previously, the students are all the best at some particular (and usually pretty obscure and specific) field, being called the "Ultimate" at that field. Talents in this game range from Ultimate Pianist, through Ultimate Entomologist to Ultimate Robot.
The gameplay loop is largely unchanged from the previous two games. The game is divided into chapters, with each chapter having three distinct parts - "Daily Life", where the story unfolds in typical visual novel style and the group learns more about the mysteries of the school, then "Deadly Life", where the player must roam the school investigating the murder and collecting clues, and finally the Class Trial itself, which resemble the trial sequences from the Ace Attorney games with an added element of action as you must point out contradictions in other people's reasoning, all while dealing with the changing mood in the room and navigating the situation accordingly.
Both Daily Life and Deadly Life contain walking about sections, where you navigate the school in first person. Much like the previous two games, they're both pretty scripted. Whilst there's often additional dialogue to be found if you roam about a little, there's only ever one place to move the story forward, and it's pretty obvious where. Following the formula for the hybrid detective/lawyer game that Ace Attorney proved works bizarrely well, there's no possibility of missing clues during the investigation sections either, which drains some of the charm away.
Still, the real trick here - as Ace Attorney proved - is that the writing has to be strong enough to make you forget this. The murders need to be set up in such a way that you constantly feel like you're discovering something significant as you're investigating, but there still need to be enough bizarre small clues that seem insignifcant but make no sense at the moment to make the big moments of realization in the trials work well. Danganronpa V3 mostly suceeds at this, though a couple cases (3 and 5 for me) become a little too obvious a little too fast, and it takes the characters a while to catch up.
The meat of the game as a game comes in the Class Trials though, and these are also pretty much unchanged from the previous two games. Most of your time will be step in what the game calls Nonstop Debate, where the characters talk at each other, presenting what they think happened in the murder. You've got a few pieces of evidence out of the ones you collected to choose from, and you must match them with highlighted statements in order to either contradict them or agree with them. This section is basically a much easier version of the cross-investigation sections of Ace Attorney - it works basically the same way, but you're only allowed to present a small portion of your evidence, and only at a few of the statements. The catch is people talk fast, and you have to respond quickly at the right statement (Otherwise you must wait for the whole conversation to loop again) as opposed to having unlimited time in Ace Attorney. It's overall considerably easier than Ace Attorney, but it makes the Trials feel much more fast paced and fluid, and puts more emphasis on the unfolding story.
This is backed up by a suite of minigames, which represent different occurences in the Trial. Someone takes particular offense at your line of reasoning? You enter a small minigame where you have to cut down their arguments with the correct piece of evidence like it's a sword duel. Hysteria overtakes the room? You have to listen to several people talk at once, and figure out who to focus on to find the statement you must contradict in order to calm everyone down. The room is split in half over a particularly contentious point of the murder? There's a minigame where you have to figure out how to best organize your side of the room to convince the others by matching the key words of their arguments to those of the opposition. Someone's out of arguments and they're just trying to shout you down? You play a rhythm game where you shoot down all their yelling. You have to think particularly hard about something? You either play a game where you're mining for the answer in your mind, one where you're creating a key word from scrambled letters, or one where you're driving a taxi through Vegas and picking up hookers with the right answers floating over their heads. That last one may be a bit weird.
These minigames have differing levels of effectiveness, but you'll rarely be playing any of them more than twice in the same trial, so even the worst ones (like the rhythm game) are pretty painless, whilst the best ones (like the newly introduced Debate Scrum, the one where the room is split in half) are really fun. In general, they help keep variety up in Trials, and do a good job of making you feel like you're using a big skillset in order to overcome more obstacles than just having to figure out who the murderer is. It really does lend a dynamic feel to the trial, and help give the other characters in the room personality as they feel their involvement in the trail is as important as yours. In a way, it's more of a lawyer game than Ace Attorney, as pure hard logic won't get you to the end of the trial - you've also got to be able to manage the people in the room with you. Like the two previous games, class trials are a joy to play, with the mysteries being cleverly written and full of twists, and fairly hard to guess before you get at least partially into the corresponding trial.
Also back is Free Time - the small choice you do have during Daily Life, where you're allowed to choose who to spend time with when the plot's not advancing, which has been slightly improved but is still as flawed as ever. The problems with it in previous games were twofold. First off, there were barely any instances of it, which cut players from seeing many of the various stories told by hanging out with a character several times. Also, certain characters wouldn't give you scenes for hanging out with them until a certain point in the story, but would let you try, which not only would waste a valuable Free Time chance with no warning, but would also be spoilerific, as not being able to hang out with a character yet was a sure indication that they were neither the victim nor the killer of that trial. The first of these two is alleviated - you now get five Free Times per chapter, up from the three from the previous games, which means you can exactly complete one characters' little story in a chapter by only spending time with them, without being interrupted by a massively long Trial and all the story that comes with that. The second is super not, and I managed to massively spoil one of the Trials for myself that way, as well as wasting several Free Time slots. I don't understand why that feature is still there, it seems like putting in added work just to make the game worse. Surely it'd be easier to just allow all Free Time to happen at once, unless there's a plot reason for it not to (like a character isn't talking to you, for instance). Still, Free Time is a welcome addition to the game, letting you learn a bit more about the characters you like the most, and helping mix in a bit of interacitivity to the largely uniteractive Daily Life sections, where all you do otherwise is walk to the next plot-relevant location.
Now for the part that those spoilers will force me to drastically cut down: The story is good. Once again, the sixteen students have wildly different personalities, full of cartoonish quirks, and there's plenty of goofing around to be done with them. Everyone gets a fully fleshed out and unique personality and look, even the people who die early on, which in addition to making the world feel more vibrant prevents one from metatextually figuring out who stays around for long. Danganronpa carries on its trademark combination of wacky humor with genuinely gruesome, disturbing and touching scenes, which only makes the mood feel that much more bizarre and unique. Once more, the game largely consists of a drip-feed of information about the larger plot which the characters slowly figure out whilst dealing with interpersonal drama and the constant string of murders, which are often tragically motivated.
This isn't the stuff that makes Danganronpa V3 truly precious (that I need to give myself the freedom of spoilers to discuss), but it is an integral part of making it a great experience. Everything works here. The gameplay, whilst simplistic, works fantastically in conjuction with the plot. Mysteries that you want to solve abound, both in the short scale in the form of the murders, and in the long scale in the form of what exactly is going on and why this death game is happening. Characters evolve and grow, jokes become crucial and sometimes legitimately disturbing plot points. Danganronpa V3, even without the stuff that truly makes it tick is an incredibly good game, with pretty fine-tuned gameplay and a hell of a fun story. I'd be recommending it even without the stuff that I'm going to explore in...
Section 2 - Spoilers
Last chance to leave! I mean it! Full on spoilers! You're robbing yourself of a great experience by reading this! If you want to play the game, go do it now. You should, by the way.
The original Danganronpa was, all in all, a fairly straightforward little story: A death game happened for mysterious reasons, you got information about why along the way, and at the very end it all clicked together in a satisfying way. On the way there it played with your expectations a little bit (especially in the victim of the first case, who was set up to be a major character), but it was largely exactly the type of thing you'd expect from a death game story. Then Super Danganronpa 2 came along, which was set up to be the same thing, except it played off your expectations from the first game, mysteriously mirroring certain parts of it to an uncanny extent, but pulling off curveballs at the last moment. The reveal at the end was all the more satisfying for it, because not only did it explain the mysterious events happening in Super Danganronpa 2, but it also worked on the level of a metatextual commentary on the first game. Super Danganronpa 2 had followed just enough of the plot beats from the first game to make you feel like you knew what was going on, only to pull the rug out from under you consistently.
New Danganronpa V3 does a similar thing, with the direct one-to-one comparisons to the first game gone, and a whole new level of meta insanity pushed on top. In the very first case it blows your expectations coming in from the first two games straight out of the water: The Ultimate ???, a talent that always represented a major character up until this point, is the very first to be killed, and your bloody player character is the one who did it. The entire game is built around subverting your expectations this way: Characters trick you into thinking they're going to be important only to suddenly die, all whilst seemingly side gag-characters survive till late in the game. Murders seem incredibly simple and with obvious solutions, only to have been much more complex.
The entire game is just a constant, unending subversion of your expectations in every single regard. Seemingly important clues to the nature of the story turn out to mean nothing, whilst off-handed comments made an hour into the game unravel the plot over thirty hours later.
But, most of all , Danganronpa V3 is beautiful because of its ending, a metatextual clusterfuck where the characters appear to become aware that they're fictional only for you to realize that they're not fictional in our universe, they're fictional within a fictional universe in which the events of the first two Danganronpa games may or may not also be fictional. As such, all the mysteries of the school that have been carefully and precisely built up over the last thirty hours are thrown out of the window. There's no solution, the mastermind was sowing the clues as they went along in order to create an intriguing story. Really, none of the clues were actually real. It's all fiction. The last couple hours of the game are spent investigating why people enjoy Danganronpa the way we do. Is it out of some sadistic wish to see innocent characters die? Is it out of a desire to watch people overcome overwhelming odds? Maybe a combination of the two? What's true is that it's a massive mindfuck, and a joy to read through as more and more insane levels of meta get added on top of each other, creating a joyful and fascinating little tangle. There's a lot here, from the aforementioned self-reflection to an ode to the power of fiction and even a notice that the series is, at the very least, going to take an extended break.
There's also the cockblock aspect. The characters get actively angry at the audience and refuse to give them a satisfying ending, just choosing to allow themselves to be killed to spite us. Between this and the mysteries of the school not being satisfied, the entire ending is designed to feel unfullfilling, and it does its job fantastically. Fortunately, the metatextual mindfuck of the entire thing does make it incredibly satisfying, but not in the way the large majority of the game made you expect it to be. Once again, a fantastic reversal of expectations.
Danganronpa V3 is many things. It's a fantastic death game story. It's a commentary on its own series, and on the risk of a series running its course without ending. It's a meditation on the difference between art and artist. It's a critcism of people's taste in art, and an ode to the power of that exact same art to make the world a better place. Most of all, it's an absolutely phenomenal game that works near perfectly from beginning to end: Great murder mysteries to solve, a phenomenal plotline, and the best character work in the entire Danganronpa series, along with possibly the greatest ending in all of gaming. Fucking play this thing. Please.
10/10, among the greatest games of all time.
