“Everything in this world has a writing credit. All our words and actions are just a bunch of lies.”

I already have a review written for Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony, but on reflection I don’t think I said anything worth reading in it. I haven’t even played the game again, but after watching a friend play through the whole thing and taking notes all the while, I really got the urge to write a whole bunch more about this thing. I’ve come to believe that it has one of the best (or at least most interesting) scripts in a video game and it deserves to be mentioned on any list of the greatest video games of all time. I know how ludicrous a thing that is to say about a weird anime murder game where a busty girl makes a robot analyze her poop, but try to bear with me on this. Danganronpa V3 functions great as a murder-mystery game in the vein of previous Danganronpa or Ace Attorney games, but where it excels is in being the Ultimate expression of the joys of the video game medium itself. It accomplishes this in several key ways: As a vicious takedown of low-effort fiction, as a celebration of the cathartic power of creativity, and as a meditation on grief and escapism. We’re gonna take it one at a time.

“If fiction has the power to touch people’s hearts, then that power can change the world!”

Danganronpa V3 respects the hell out of its audience, but it also knows them better than they know themselves. In the final trial of Danganronpa V3, the game drops one last bombshell plot twist on us: In the world of Danganronpa, Danganronpa is a fictional franchise. The first two games, spinoffs, animes, everything the player has come to know and believe and discuss with fellow fans, none of it was ‘real.’ It was all an in-universe franchise created to make money, one that took off and became bigger and more morally bankrupt with its success. Eventually the Danganronpa franchise stopped being games animes and novels and became ‘Ultimate Real Fiction’ - a reality show where people are mindwiped, have their personalities altered to become ‘more Danganronpa-like,’ and locked in a dome and forced to kill one another for the amusement of Danganronpa fans. This twist does any things: It’s hilarious, outrageous, and also very upsetting for any Danganronpa fan playing V3 who has come to love the franchise to the point of discussing it on Reddit or cosplaying characters. There’s a reason that the big bad is the Ultimate Cosplayer after all - she’s the character who most obviously represents the kind of person who would get super into an anime franchise to the point of it taking over a significant portion of their life. Danganronpa V3 becomes a direct message to these people about the very nature of media like Danganronpa: “This is not healthy.” Repeated exposure to the same tropes, to graphic violence and misery, to fanservicey sexual exploitation and droning repetitive character developments can have a very real impact on the kind of person who would thoughtlessly consume it without any critical thinking. Just look at Star Wars fans in 2024. In the modern age fandom has become a clique that is intensely dismissive of anything other than what The Thing They Like already is, including new entries in that Thing They Like that doesn’t shut up and play the hits. Danganronpa V3 flirts fleetingly with radical new ideas - a female protagonist, reviving a previously killed character, a double murder with two culprits only one of whom gets punished, but always finds a copout to keep things familiar. Wouldn’t want to risk upsetting our core audience by getting too out of the box, right? It’s easy to look at this as a copout in itself, but the game makes its stance here frightfully obvious. During that final trial, Danganronpa fans flood the screen with comments about what has transpired during the game, like reading a reddit livewatch thread. “This is why I wanted Kaede to live,” says one such comment. “Show me the despair ending,” says another. “If it’s not fun, it’s not Ronpa!” says another still. As the final hours play out and Shuichi’s plan of group suicide to permanently end the Danganronpa franchise begins to solidify, Tsumugi even voices the concerns of the Danganronpa fandom at large for all to hear: “Don’t just end Danganronpa! We supported you, you owe us!”

That feeling of ownership permeated every element of Danganronpa V3. From the deliberately out of place fanservice scenes that are all written as though the characters involved have become possessed and lost their sense of self, to the grotesque punishments that are largely a significant step up in brutality over the previous games, down the finer points of the game’s narrative progression and character arcs, everything plays out the way a Danganronpa fan experiencing this adventure would want. Until the end, where playing on the player’s empathy and affections towards this game’s cast is the central narrative device used to end the series. Shuichi speaks directly to the audience of Danganronpa fans - directly to the player - and his words land. He appeals for reason over fanaticism and for freedom over the capitalistic bloat of endless franchising. The player, despite being a huge fan of the series, supports him. We want to see Shuichi win, because Shuichi winning is Kaede winning, and didn’t we all want Kaede to stick around and achieve her goals? We are convinced by Danganronpa V3 that the Danganronpa franchise needs to end - that it deserves to end. Seven years later, it’s still dormant. I’m sure there are execs in suits chain smoking cigars trying to get another mainline Danganronpa entry out the door. Maybe it’ll be announced five minutes after I post this. But as of this writing, the finality of it all rings true. You truly believe that Danganronpa is over, and you truly believe that you wanted it to be.

“This is fiction. There is no greater meaning. No greater meaning to death. No greater meaning to life.”

So Danganronpa V3 spends a lot of time talking shit about Danganronpa, and about factory-line media in general. A lot of people who play the game come away thinking that it hates itself, it hates video game sequels in general, and it definitely hates the people who enjoy them. It certainly does feel antagonistic, but there’s a lot of optimism in there too. Hope to match the despair, if you will. If there’s any one thing V3 is absolutely certain of, it’s the power of lies to influence truth in both positive and negative ways. Kokichi Ouma is one of the game’s main characters, but even when he’s sacrificing himself to save the remaining cast from the killing game he never feels like a good guy. His character is one of chaos and obfuscation. He will lie about every single event in the game, lie about every single feeling he feels, for the sake of manipulating the characters for his own benefit. Often that benefit is just a troll-y “wouldn’t it be funny if I make these losers think I’m sad when I’m not” sort of thing, but not always. His desire to lie for the purpose of hiding a very real truth from people grows more and more as the game goes on, culminating in his sacrifice being clouded over such an absurd web of lies that it takes the surviving characters hours of discussion to even realize that he’s no longer alive, let alone decide whatever his objective may have been. Kokichi’s aims with his lies are convoluted and shifting, it’s impossible to determine what side he’s on and what he seeks to achieve with his actions, but Kokichi isn’t the only liar in this cast. New to Danganronpa V3 is the ability for the player to lie during the trials, presenting false evidence or faking testimonies in an effort to steer the conversation in the direction that they think will lead to the truth. It’s a really cool system, and I’ve gotta give props for taking one of the game’s core thematic ideas and gamifying it in such an interesting way - especially in a Visual Novel where ‘gameplay’ is barely a factor for the vast majority of the runtime. These lies are often necessary to reach the truth of the case, and it makes for a fascinating moment in every trial when you realize you’re going to need to start making shit up if you want to figure out what really happened.

It’s easy to think of this idea of “lies being just as valuable as the truth” with some real ideological concerns. We live in a world where only a few short years ago a lot of families across the US were torn apart by QAnon. Conspiracy theories run rampant and have real political impact nowadays in a way that seemed laughable only ten years ago. But I don’t think the game is arguing lies are great or that believing lies is good - just that they can be necessary. A good lie that sweetens the blow of a bitter truth isn’t all bad, and may even be a coping mechanism you use to process the loss of something important. Like telling a kid that their dog is sleeping instead of dead, so that they aren’t devastated before they understand the concept of death. A lie is a tool for affecting human beings, the morality lies in how you use it. This game celebrates the idea that good stories can be used to impress positive messages onto the audience, altering the way a person who interacts with the story sees and empathizes with other people or plights. It’s a nice thought, and one the game spends the bulk of its final hour ramming into your head. But it does so with such conviction that it’s impossible not to be convinced. “Sure,” you say to the crazy video game where the robot bear and caveman, “I believe that this story can positively impact my brain chemistry in a permanent way.” And you’d be right! I came away from V3 feeling, of all things, more confident in the stories that I was writing. Maybe that’s why it worked so well on me - maybe this theme is more impactful for the wannabe creatives than it is for the people who just want to play and love the video game. Who knows? But even with this ultimately positive message reinforced so strongly at the game’s finale, the journey there is riddled with sadness that feels very real, even if it is all a lie.

“Why do we have to feel that sadness over and over and over again? Even if this is fiction, the pain in my heart is real. The sadness that I feel when I lose the people I love is real.”

For all its talk of truths and lies, I find V3 to be just as strongly about grief and how we cope with it. Its characters are shut down and cut apart, again and again. A friend is killed, a friend betrays them, their principles are shattered, their core beliefs are proven wrong. Every single chapter, significant losses are endured by our characters. And it all takes a toll - by the game’s end, our remaining characters are utterly destroyed. Our main protagonist spends multiple days unable to will himself to move, contemplating suicide. Another on several occasions lashes out with violence against those who have hurt her, fully aware that she will get herself killed in the process. The entire game is spent in a haze of grief and mourning, as soon as Rantaro is killed and Kaede processes what she’s done. But it doesn’t focus on the despair of our characters as much as you might think - it focuses a lot on the various coping mechanisms that they use to push on, coping mechanisms that are easily translatable to the real world. Shuichi deals with the loss of Kaede by beginning a routine with Kaito (and eventually Maki), forming new friendships along the way.. Hitting the gym is a pretty common coping mechanism when upsetting things happen, so seeing a parallel here makes sense. Hitting the gym is also a known booster of confidence, which ties in great with Shuichi taking Kaede’s last words to heart. He’s found a way to carry her wish forward - by enacting the changes in himself that she wanted to see, he’s found a way to process her loss and move forward. Elsewhere, around the game’s halfway point when several likable characters have passed, we see religious fervor overtake the cast. Approximately half of the remaining characters form a cult, worshiping an unseen God who they believe will free them of their suffering. It’s a fascinating turn for a game like this, nothing like it happens in the previous entries, and it makes a lot of sense. After being ripped from your lives and forced to watch friends kill and betray one another, turning to a deity who you believe can make all that go away and fighting against those who won’t is a pretty normal response. Further escapism comes in Chapter 4 when the characters, unable to cope any longer with the reality of their situation, attempt to transfer their consciousness into a video game where killing is impossible. But when even that last ditch effort to move on strikes out, we see them cling not to positives of the present or even the possibilities of the future, but the promises of the past. Once they’re made to remember being Hope’s Peak students, they feel a renewed vigor. They are now able to cope with where they are because of who they are, cope with what they’re going through because of what they’ve already been through. Even Korekiyo’s outrageous backstory winds up being an example of a character coping with loss. Every chapter we see coping mechanisms introduced and torn down, and the cycle repeats until the game’s final moments.

“There’s only one way to get through this awful feeling. If anyone’s gonna help you, it’ll be her… in your memories.”

Through the game’s first trial, its developers are able to subsume the player in its two primary emotions: Doubt and grief. The player feels betrayal, having been lied to by the game about its protagonist. They have grown to love Kaede, not just Kaede but what Kaede represents - for both the Danganronpa franchise and the medium of video games as a whole, where strong-willed playable women are still a sizable minority of protagonists. Along with that, the player feels grief, a strong sense of loss for Kaede and her aforementioned meaning. Nobody blames Kaede, instead, they turn that blame towards the creators of the fiction that would devise such a cruel loss. In feeling this way, we have fallen into Danganronpa V3’s trap. By investing the player in Shuichi’s character development, and replacing his blooming relationship with Kaede with a similar one between Maki and Kaito, the game deftly transplants some of the player’s’ feelings for Kaede elsewhere. It gives you something new to latch onto, to mitigate that feeling of loss.

The game has provided even the player with a coping mechanism.

All of our empathy and closeness with Kaede has seamlessly been transferred to Shuichi without our even realizing it. We are made to feel his feelings for completely different reasons. Where Shuichi grapples with believing in his abilities and in carrying forward Kaede’s wish, the player grapples with respecting Kaede’s wish for Shuichi to carry on. We want Shuichi to surprise us, to grow and to become a character that can make her loss feel worth something. The game tricks us into rooting for Shuichi the same way Kaede did, even though the player was conceptually betrayed by Shuichi’s very role in the plot. It’s a magic trick. Just as the game’s characters go through arcs where they figure out how to cope with their tragedies, the player is made to cope with the losses by grasping at what remains of Danganronpa V3 and placing their faith in its ability to make it all worthwhile. This all stands in stark contrast to Monokuma’s blase attitude towards the deaths of his own children. It separates him from the game’s characters and players, and when the curtain rises in that final trial and we see the operation behind it all, we know intuitively that there is an ideological wrongness to it that stands in stark opposition to everything we have spent 40 hours investing in.

In several key moments, the game plays an excerpt from the unfortunately named Claude Debussy’s piano movement ‘Clair de Lune.’ Kaede mentions the piece by name, calling it a calming piece. Its deployment in the game is anything but - clearly meant to emphasize feelings of sadness and heartbreak whenever it arises. I think of Clair de Lune as sort of a codex to view the game’s themes through. Clair de Lune starts with that immediately iconic and sober melody, a slow start and stop that evokes that feeling you get when you meditate on a certain sadness. As the piece progresses, it becomes violent, a tidal wave ripping across a calm sea. It’s fierce, unpleasant, downright annoying to listen to. Eventually it calms, and the third and final part of the piece begins: A reprise of the introduction, but in a different register. I think that’s an audio version of what Danganronpa V3 is saying about grief and how we process it. Our default state is interrupted by horror, throwing everything awry. Loss of income, the death of a loved one, the betrayal of a lover, there are many forms that horror can take and they all result in chaos and doubt and pain. In the end, it settles down, and we adjust to the new way things are. We return to our default state, but we are changed. We look at things a little differently. We think and act a little differently. We’ll always be ourselves, but we’ll never be the same person we once were. We’ve been revised.

In the end, we have no choice but to pick ourselves up and dust ourselves off. All the shit we endure. All the pain and strife, the self-doubt and self-hate. The pain caused by others and by ourselves. The hopelessness of facing another day in the bodies we inhabit. It’s all too much. It’s a weight that stamps us out, pressing defeat upon us like we are cattle being branded. But there is one saving grace. One power that pain does not have over us: Choice. Misery cannot kill us alone. It is us as individuals who have the ability to choose whether or not to give into it, or to live a life open to joy. Our lives are our own.

“Why… am I here? Why did I even survive?”

Danganronpa V3 exists as a singular expression of feeling in the medium of video games. Using the concepts of video game franchises and the fandoms they cultivate, Danganronpa V3 is able to use uniquely immersive storytelling tricks to put the player in the shoes of both the game’s protagonists and antagonists at the same time. It runs the player through emotions of grief and persistence, developing and broadening those concepts until ultimately the player is mourning the Danganronpa IP itself, while celebrating that they saw it through to the end. If there’s any one reverberating thought that the player takes away from V3, it’s on the power of words. Danganronpa V3 has made us fight against it and against ourselves using the nature of its franchise, genre, medium, and the player’s own desires as weapons. There can never be a creative work like this again, because no creative work is as uniquely positioned as Danganronpa V3 is to tell a story like this. If it came from a franchise without the celebrated twisty absurdity as Danganronpa, all of the goofy plot reveals would feel out of place. If it came at any other point in the Danganronpa franchise, none of its self-effacing ribbing would feel apt. V3 makes no sense as a second game in a franchise, hell it barely makes sense as a third. But it makes perfect sense as a third mainline entry after a series of loudly disliked spinoffs. Without radical change, the Danganronpa IP was destined for a slow suicide, and we know how echo chamber fandoms feel about radical change.

Still, the very very end of Danganronpa V3 is not one of desecration. The fourth wall breaks and our trio of survivors are left to explore the world outside of Danganronpa. They ponder the impact the ending of Danganronpa will have on its fans, hoping that the world will positively receive what they’ve just done. Hoping that their fiction will inspire real people in some way, to better themselves and to better the lives of others. It’s a shockingly saccharine final message for a game so drenched in innocent blood, but it’s the only one that makes sense. The first time I played V3 I thought this epilogue was unnecessary and maybe even took away from the game’s message about destroying the Danganronpa IP. Over several revisits, I’ve found that this epilogue is the whole point, and I was misreading the message. It isn’t about destroying the Danganronpa IP. It’s about creating an ending to it that recontextualizes its existence as something more than schlock. I’m not sure if this franchise deserves it, but I do think it gets there in the end. No, I know it does.

“Was this lie able to change something? Was this lie able to change someone? If it was able to change even the smallest thing… Then the story isn’t over.”

"We had no choice." "Always, we had no choice. Those were our magic words. We repeat them to ourselves again and again. But the magic never worked. The only thing we have left is regret."

Final Fantasy X-2 is a weird, cool, messy as hell little game. As a followup to the absolute masterpiece of Final Fantasy X it is undeniably a tremendous disappointment, but I don't really think that's the right way to look at it. I sort of look at it more like the Majora's Mask to Final Fantasy X's Ocarina of Time. In that sense, it's also a tremendous disappointment, but what can you do.

Final Fantasy X-2 is weird, man. Structurally the game thrusts Yuna and Rikku (along with newcomer Paine, who rocks but has pretty much nothing to do) into a Cowboy Bebop-esque scenario, roving Bounty Hunters with a cool motorcycle airship who fly around and take on odd jobs and do cool shit and shoot people with guns. It's certainly not what I would have come up with for an FFX sequel, but that's why it's rad. The tone is wacky and irreverent, the vibes are kooky, it's playful and sexy in the campiest and most sincere ways. You pick which locals to visit, find a quest to do, do the quest. This all builds up your % Completion, and at the end if you get 100% you get a big cool secret ending. That's all cool!

Also weird is the completely reworked battle system. FFX has a pretty simple but extremely enjoyable turn based system. FFX-2 has scrapped that entirely in favor of bringing back ATB and introducing Garment Grids and DressSpheres. It's a whole huge thing and I won't get into the nitty gritty, but safe to say that combat here is extremely customizable and you have nearly infinite options to tweak your party to your liking. Battles themselves are typically fast and frenetic, but very satisfying and fun to play. Once you figure out how you want to approach fights, it feels fantastic to tear through enemies and get to that awesome looking Rewards screen with that slick glimmering game logo in the corner of the screen. It's the little things that stand out! There are a lot of optional superbosses and bizarre endgame challenges that require careful play and management of abilities and DressSpheres, but the main game is shockingly easy - I killed each of the 5 final bosses in under 2 minutes each. Still, the depth is here if you want it, and the challenge can be found if you know where to look.

Knowing where to look is one of the big problems though. Final Fantasy X-2 points you in the direction of progression, but doesn't give you too many indicators for how to approach uncovering its TREMENDOUS amount of side content. Herein lies another comparison to Majoras Mask: Finding out where to go and who to talk to start and progress these sidequests, which often span multiple chapters across the game and are easy to miss or mess up. Some of these involve extremely frustrating and tedious minigames, so I stopped bothering with trying to get 100% pretty early on. I appreciate a game that has content meant for Freaks and Freaks only, but FFX-2 kind of feels like a whole game built around that. It's a little much for me, and so much stuff is either easily missable or tremendously lame to access that even I, a person who usually feels inclined to see and do it all, decided that I would skip a good chunk of content within only the first 5 or so hours of the game. I finished with 78% story completion, not too bad if I do say so myself. But the rest either required rigorously following a guide or dealing with some abhorrent minigames, so forget it.

The story is... boy, it sure is in there. I think the game tackles some interesting topics - the power of art to communicate feelings and the way artists can use their talents and life experiences to spread empathy is a very interesting theme for a Final Fantasy game. I just wish they were better explored. While the game does succeed at giving us the flavor of a lesbian road trip, and this does rule, everything else comes up short. It's either unclear, unsatisfying, or just plain lame. I lost interest extremely quickly in whatever was going on with the lead villain (whose name I forget even though I just beat him in a boss fight 30 minutes ago) and while the climactic scene of him embracing Lenne does somewhat work as a cathartic moment, it doesn't hit nearly as hard as it would if the game had been at all successful in establishing or expounding on these characters and what they represented. The similarities with Yuna and Tidus are so clearly intended thematically and narratively but the game barely ever mentions it and the whole thing winds up feeling half-baked. Pretty much a total miss for me, even if it was nice to see FFX's characters and settings repurposed for some interesting new themes.

"So cherish me. And I will cherish you."

For all its flaws, I'm glad I played FFX-2. The goofy sci-fi gay roadtrip vibes alone made this worth experiencing, there's a real heart and soul here that shines through under all the cruft and tedium. The UI is flashy and stylish, the character designs are audacious spectacles, the music is... well, it's there. There's plenty to like about Final Fantasy X-2. Even playing is usually pretty fun thanks to a great combat system, even if you can sleep through even boss fights by the end. But all that glitters ain't gold, even if the glitter got stuck to you during a dope-ass rave. The structure is overly harsh and unpleasant despite being cool on paper, and the writing and story feel downright unfinished. Still, games like this don't get made anymore. If Final Fantasy X-2 got made today and came out like this it would be lambasted by gamers and critics alike and be such a massive bomb that we'd be reading thinkpieces for years about what a woeful misstep this was for Square Enix's fortunes. So we should celebrate that a game like this got made at all, even if it came out kind of fucked up. FFX-2 represents a better time for its medium, and I can't help but be charmed by it.