When it became clear that it would be a struggle to include the format of the killing game in the world of Hope’s Peak Academy a third time, Spike Chunsoft looked for other ways to continue and complete the story, even if it went against what people may have expected or wanted from Danganronpa. The switch in medium allowed Danganronpa to create a story not restricted by mechanics as well as wrap up loose ends outside the format of the murder mystery that brought it prestige in the first place.įrom 2012 to 2016, Spike Chunsoft went to great lengths to maintain the integrity of Danganronpa’s story.
Ultimately, the story of Hope’s Peak Academy was concluded in Danganronpa 3: The End of Hope’s Peak High School, an animated series that forgoes gameplay entirely. The premise felt more honest to the grander story of the series, even if it didn’t draw the same praise the murder mystery entries did.
The following game, Danganronpa Another Episode: Ultra Despair Girls, dismissed the notion of the killing game, opting instead to focus on the outside world in a third-person shooter.
It worked, but it bent the story just beyond its breaking point to create what the fans expected. Among the many mysteries Trigger Happy Havoc provided, its reveal that the world outside Hope’s Peak Academy had been decimated by a cult of Monokuma’s followers set the series on a difficult path to maintaining its integrity while also giving fans what they wanted out of it.ĭanganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair recreates this killing game on an island, but doing so within the realm of the series’ current fiction proved elaborate, as it had to use a virtual reality simulation and escape the truth of its world to make it fit. This murder mystery was framed as a philosophical battle between hope and despair, and this theme was a throughline from the first game to its eventual conclusion in Danganronpa 3: The End of Hope’s Peak High School. In order to escape the confines of Hope’s Peak, a student must murder a classmate without being caught by the survivors in a mock trial.
This prestigious school was a prison for a group of elite students who were forced into a killing game by Monokuma, a devious teddy bear with a fetish for despair. The first game in the series, 2010’s Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc, focused on students of Hope’s Peak Academy. This ending, coupled with developer Spike Chunsoft’s treatment of the series in its seven years and creator Kazutaka Kodaka’s own statements, seems indicative of Danganronpa attempting to, for better or worse, die just as it lived: on its own terms. Using an elaborate meta-commentary Danganronpa V3 gets the final word on whether or not the franchise should continue. Technically Danganronpa V3 is a new story, but it doesn’t seem to exist as a way to start the series anew, but rather a thinly veiled look at the series, consumerism, and how market demand can push something beyond its original intent. While the latest game in the series, Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony, was positioned as a new beginning for the series, one that dropped the original game’s setting in favour of something brand new, I ended up coming away from the game feeling that it was actually more of an extended goodbye. When the murder mystery series’ story expanded beyond the confines of its format, its creators looked to other genres and mediums to spin its tale, ending its original story in anime form with Danganronpa 3: The End of Hope’s Peak High School. Danganronpa is a series that has largely existed on its own terms.