So, anyway, to its credit, Danganronpa 3 actually tries something very different from a straight-up game adaptation: it's an ambitious prequel-sequel combo intended to bookend all of the games in the Hope's Peak Academy Saga (including the bizarre near-kusoge spin-off
Ultra Despair Girls), and it has double the episodes to play around with. But then again, since the two story halves, Despair Arc and Future Arc, are so different from one another, the end result is just two one-cour shorties, now burdened with an even bigger crossover cast, and as you might have guessed, the bloat absolutely murders the end result. Ambition can be a good thing, but so is knowing your limits. Danganronpa 3 is a bad anime, but it's the sort of bad anime that gets my script-doctoring juices flowing, since its badness largely results from mismanagement of good raw material. So here's my idle brainstorming as to how Danganronpa 3 might have been made good:
Starting with the most essential thing, Future Arc is ditched altogether. Seriously, just amputate the whole thing and recycle the few good parts it has elsewhere, so that Despair Arc gets to have all 24 episodes to itself. Despair Arc is the saveable part; it is misguided but not rotten like Future Arc, which is just an unholy garbage patch. Just consider what Future Arc attempts to do:
- It attempts to be a sequel and a grand narrative conclusion to all of the DR properties so far, including Despair Arc.
- It has its own cast of anime-OG do-not-steal characters interacting with the established game characters, so it’s a case of a big cast meeting a giant cast.
- It features yet another killing game, although with a reduced "hardcore" XFL ruleset.
- It attempts to be action show.
This last item is especially bonkers, seeing how loaded the cart already is. I mean, the mainline games do have some action scenes in them, but nothing to this extent. Future Arc has so many fights, chases and explosions that in places it vaguely feels like what a shitty American Netflix-original movie version of Danganronpa might look like. What fuels these fights is the characters being rash, impulsive and stupid, even though these guys are supposed to be the top tier leaders of Future Foundation, and a majority of them are grown-ass adults. They’re made to be chumps and jobbers to a lore-deflating degree, and I'm pretty sure the people working on the anime realized this, when we consider the big finale.
Future Arc ends with what is basically the Danganronpa version of the Justice League popping in, saving the day, undoing all plot consequences to people the audience actually cares about, and then delivering a rousing message that going the anime route is bad and that you should abandon it and join all the cool kids at the game side of things. Seriously, that's the anime's equivalent to the metagaming weirdness in the mainline product, and it's a bold move, although certainly not enough reason to bother watching the show. I would be lying if I said this big ending team-up didn't give me some visceral "Oh, yes!" thrills, but even then, taken as a whole, it's not on a par with the tantalizing possibilities the preceding game was coyly hinting at, such as wild alternate character designs and cyborgs and whatnot. It feels to me like a triumphant fanservice finale like this would've worked better had it been saved up for the next mainline game, considering what an absolute fist-pumping moment DR2's smaller-scale version of the same event was. Now it seems like the franchise blew its load entirely in the wrong place.
Okay, so let's continue doctoring our hypothetical Danganronpa anime, that's just Despair Arc with double the episode count. The entire thing is now one big dark prequel, and in a perfect world it would be to Danganronpa what
Ga-Rei Zero was to
Ga-Rei. Our cast of characters is the cast of Danganronpa 2, the second mainline game. In terms of the total DR mythos, DR2 is kind of a side story; it tells the tale of Junko's apprehended miniboss squad and their trials and tribulations during the time when the despair near-apocalypse is winding down. Despair Arc is the tragic origin story of this goon squad, detailing how these genius teenagers were corrupted to the dark side, becoming vectors of social unrest that eventually culminated in a limited nuclear exchange. It is the darkest chapter in a bigger story, and I guess a more recent example would be
Avengers: Infinity War; Where Thanos traveled around the cosmos collecting Infinity Stones, Junko sneaked around the Hope's Peak campus mindbreaking hamster owners. There is a solid skeleton of a dramatic structure in the product we got. The first couple of episodes depict the everyday life of Class 77-B, the would-be goons. Then Junko arrives, and it's all villainy from there on, culminating in a sick, sad finale that heralds the despair near-apocalypse. A good story outline on paper.
But the thing is, people who are going to watch a Danganronpa 2 prequel want to see it for the game’s beloved characters (everybody's got their particular favorites), but the constrained one-cour thing we got is too busy setting up the plot dominos for story arcs to come, and thus the characterization has no room to breathe. Almost everyone is reduced to their respective talent-related gimmick, and the episodes are just checklists of things required to happen. Hugely important scenes pass by without leaving any emotional impact because there's nothing to hold on to. Junko's arrival gives the proceedings more zest but not much more focus, and the totality remains too scattershot for her to qualify as a proper (villain) protagonist.
A particular and very serious mid-series misstep is the anime's treatment of The Tragedy of Hope's Peak Academy, which is just unbearably hacky directing and so very un-Danganronpa. In the games, violence and death are always sad, terrifying things. Sure, the executions are infamous for their goofiness, but the underpinning emotion is always horror and sadness because the violence is being visited upon people the player has gotten to know and probably like, too. Obviously, there's no same horror response if they’re being viewed by some rando watching anime death compilations on Youtube, and it is this crowd the anime seemingly wants to cater to with its depiction of this turning-point moment. Whereas the murders in DR games traditionally happen off-screen and we only see the grisly aftermath (and a somewhat abstract comic strip recreation of the crime during the trial's conclusion), Despair Arc goes all slasher with the student council. If you remember
Another's pie fights, you know what you're in for, but with more gross-out upmanship. It really feels like The Tragedy of Hope's Peak Academy and some later torture scenes are bones thrown to the edgelord sub-fandom of the franchise, since the very final scene of super-horror actually goes for more somber shock and hopelessness.
Zeroing in on what I, as the god-emperor of Despair Arc, would do to fix things, well, go more episodic with the characters. Another particular misstep of the anime was the way Junko corrupts her victims. Because there's no room for anything else, she just uses batch brainwashing to turn the whole posse at once. Not much devilish tempting there. If she got to pick out the students one by one, breaking them by poking at their psychological weak points, the structure of the show would then actually resemble the Danganronpa formula, where people die one by one, usually after some egging on by Monokuma. The last few un-turned ones could then be hit with the same despair bomb; the show could also be playful with this, populating the usual end-game survivor spots with more surprising choices like perhaps Peko, the Impostor, Mahiru…
Another important narrative fix would be to go easy on the lore. The Danganronpa big picture deeplore is both complex and hugely silly, and I doubt any amount of Christopher Nolan-ing would make things like the political status of the Hope's Peak Academy or the Parade protest movement make much sense. Since we don't need to follow the administration and the teaching staff as much in order to build up for an underwhelming Future Arc, just keep the camera close to the 77-B characters and watch as the corrupting influence of Junko seems to warp the very reality around them. Of course, after she recruits (for lack of a better word) Izuru, Junko is momentarily SUPERHAX, so to give the doomed people of the class some illusion of a fighting chance, perhaps a two-cour Despair Arc could actually integrate elements of
Danganronpa Zero into itself, ie. not the lore minutiae but the basic idea of Junko being incapacitated, but it still being part of her keikaku because she spews out new villain gambits like a firehose and she's planned ahead. Sure, the actual anime is crammed to hell and back, but there's oddly little acknowledgement towards DR:Zero, even though even Ultra Despair Girls basically got an entire episode for itself in Future Arc.
So, tl;dr, how to make Despair Arc good: two cours, No Future Arc, Junko is Thanos, turns people one by one; focus on established characters people want to see, no pie fights. Had to get that out of my system.
Interestingly enough, there's one kinda genuinely good piece of Danganronpa anime that offers a glimpse of what might have been possible: The Nagito bonus OVA. It's just this singular 25-minute thing, but since it features no anime-only idiot characters and is a sequel that needs to arrange no dominos, it actually gets to be itself, a workmanlike snippet of DR2 post-game content with, you know, proper character scenes where they talk with one another like actual people. Well, ridiculous anime people, but still. It even has dramatic stakes and some rewarding minor twists. So, if you were in a desperate need to know what happened to your DR2 favorites after the somewhat open-ended but hopeful ending of the game, spoilers, they're all alive and well, except for Kana Hanazawa, who died twice, but might still return as an AI robot at some later date.
And another genuinely good thing about Danganronpa 3, besides the unreal SS rank voice cast slumming in this otherwise hacky, low-rent production (video game adaptations, man), is the Despair Arc's opening animation that looks like it's plucked from some alternate reality where this thing was actually amazing.
Here's a recommendation-spoiler safe Polsy link.
Mr. Tines wrote:Uruhara -- cute girls fighting cute alien invasions in a somewhat psychedelic version of Tokyo's Harajuku district, with a side of the usual crippling social anxiety about (not) having friends. Entirely fluff, but harmless;.
On another topic based on this episode, I didn't notice that during the flashing of past lives in which Ange and Salamandinay were friends, one in particular of them in bed makes me wonder why they never went that route in terms of establishing their bond in later episodes since Ange already has a harem with both genders covered. 
