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kindlyre · 3 months ago

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okay so like this is going to be EXTREMELY long but its not hostile at all (and i'm the guy who did those tags, that was my main blog and this is my dangan sideblog) im just saying Why i left those tags and What i think of v3

and im saying all this because i like v3, i really do! i just wish it was better!

im gonna touch on the localization stuff first: they changed some of kokichi's lines that sort of, removed his more "soft" moments (for lack of a better word) and gave him depth?

like, there was this one time in one of the trials where kaito calls him naive, and ouma just insults him back and laughs at him or whatever

but in the original, kaito called him iirc "pure?" and ouma says something along the lines of "no one's ever referred to me like that before..." with the implication being he's more stunned, possibly even touched, that someone referred to him with such an "innocent" term

but thats nothing compared to gonta. the localization and honestly the game itself did gonta so goddamn dirty. in the og, he doesnt have tarzan speak!! he spoke in the third person yeah, but so did a few other characters- it gives a sort of, childish connotation in japanese, but the tarzan speak thing in the eng localization completely undermines his character and makes him look way dumber than he actually is, making him seem like he has little to no agency in the story

did you know that gonta actually KNEW that ouma's plan was to get everyone to have a motive video viewing party? and that he was only mad at ouma for lying and saying that he liked bugs, and he was In On It wrt the motive video viewing party?

yeah you literally cant know this unless you go do gonta's free time event when they're in gonta's lab scheming together. why was this CRUCIAL bit of information for character motivations sequestered like this. why did they do that. why. there is so much goddamn discourse over wether or not ouma manipulated gonta and if this scene was like, a little easier to get to, i wouldnt have to get it beamed into my eyeballs so much that i put a fucking manifesto as my blog title and bio

it looks crazy but ive been driven crazy. ive been here since 2016, since before this blog existed. i predate v3. help me

anyway thats JUST the localization issues and that one scene being hard to access. but i'll get on with the rest of it

and i just want to say: in a vaccum, v3 is quite good! it's not a godawful game, the characters are entertaining, it definitely has a good skeleton

but like, to see exactly why i think this game is not up to par- play v3 and sdr2 in tandem. spend one night on v3, one night on sdr2, the next on v3, or switch every few hours, however it appeals to you. but play them side-by-side

You Will Notice. Some Things.

FOR ONE: the days in sdr2 are just... longer. there's more stuff in them, more story. there's a lot that's missing from v3 and as such it feels empty

no one mourns the dead. shuichi mourns kaede but that's it for the whole game, until chapter 6 where he says that it's been horrible watching his friends die every week

in sdr2, here's how it worked in a story structure sense: the investigation itself was for mourning the victim, the trial was the Fun Part where nobody is mourned, really, and the focus is on finding the blackened, and the post-trial epilogue and is when we mourned the blackened

in v3.... the victims..... aren't mourned.

at all.

the blackends are, at the end of the trials, but only at the end of the trials.

in sdr2, hiyoko makes a memorial for mahiru using her photos. soda and nakomaru tie komaeda up because he manipulated teruteru into killing. byakuya was like, the main character of chapter 1 and had a prominent role before he was killed, meaning we saw a lot of him and ergo got close to him and mourned him. hajime was disturbed seeing his body. fuyuhiko talks about peko and how much he misses her. hajime mourns, he talks about the dead....

all of that is missing in v3

they're dead, and then they're gone.

rantaro as the first dead was a character with a lot of potential (WE WILL GET TO RANTARO.) but he didn't really have a prominent role at all. he was just another face in the crowd, until he wasn't. the only reason you'd mourn his death is if he was your favorite- byakuya in sdr2 was not my favorite (fuyuhiko my beloved and komaeda my beloved) but i still felt something when he died simply because of how prominent he was!

kaede as the protagonist, yeah her death had weight

we didnt get to know ryoma at all, or kirumi. or tenko or angie. et cetera

SPEAKING OF THE CHARACTERS.

so, broadly, there are two categories a character can fall in: active and reactive characters

active characters act on their own, without outside stimuli. reactive characters will just do nothing but go about their daily lives until something spurs them into action

all of sdr2's characters are on some level active.

most of v3's characters are reactive. you do not want this in a mystery game.

in sdr2, everyone was talking about escaping, all the time. in v3 they all give up after the first chapter

in sdr2, everyone tried to stay united no matter what happened because they all understood that this was an extreme circumstance, and that the real enemy was monokuma. fucking- fuyuhiko committed a proxy murder, basically, and he was still welcome in the group! because they understood that he was under extreme emotion and that not only his talent played a part in his reaction, but they were all trapped and cornered and being psychologically tormented and that thats why he did what he did! like, there was tension at first.... and fuyuhiko attempted seppuku.... but he was accepted and at least hajime did try, even if hiyoko was still angry at him

in v3 monokuma just straight up joins in the fifth trial and the characters just Let Him? he's supposed to be their enemy!

in sdr2, every character had a purpose. some of those purposes were pretty weak, yeah, but they were like... there. teruteru as the Funny Pervert got old fast, and that's probably why he died really early on, and they did manage to give him like, actual pathos. akane as the Funny Comic Relief Food One got oldddd but she's kind of the weakest out of the characters that survive. soda also, but at least he did stuff like make the transmitter in chapter 3 or fix the elevator in chapter 4, so he wasn't just the Funny Simp One, he did stuff

like, let me ask this: from a story perspective, i.e. their impact on how the plot moved forward, disregarding trials because everyone speaks in those....

what did himiko do. or tenko. tenko straight up didnt do ANYTHING for the greater plot. what did kirumi do? or ryoma? did we really feel the betrayal of tsumugi being the mastermind? we didn't know her!! what did angie do outside of chapter 3, and even then, the student council thing is over before it starts (because v3 days have less ssssssssstuff in them) korekiyo is just There until he reveals that he's fucking his sister and then dies.

none of these motherfuckers are active characters. no one is trying to escape, everyone is playing along. shuichi isn't even very active and he's our PROTAGONIST! he just kind of.... takes it

and that wouldve been interesting, to see someone who just takes it up the ass slowly blossom into being more confident, not letting monokuma railroad him in trials PERCHANCE. and i know shuichi did do that, he got more confident, but he still doesn't even TRY to escape, he's never suspicious of the flashback lights, always assumes ouma's malice is the real thing and everything else is the lie (when really, it was the other way goddamn round)

and like. he's the ULTIMATE DETECTIVE! HE SHOULD BE DOING THIS SHIT!!

the only truly active characters, that actually act on their own and Do Stuff that impacts the plot outside of dying and killing someone...

are kokichi and rantaro.

and rantaro dies in chapter one.

this is, in clinical terms, not good.

chapters 4 and 5 are REALLY good, because ouma does shit and actually impacts the plot and it makes the other characters also be active for once

but the whole rest of the game is like, ouma is doing everything to try and figure everything out, and everyone else is just kind of going thru the motions and treating him with komaeda level ostricization when, at that point in the game, he'd done nothing to warrant it

and at the end of chapter 4, when gonta says that he doesn't want anyone to be mad at kokichi and wants everyone to get along, the whole cast writes him off as a naive idiot and completely disregards his final wishes, which makes sense narratively, but not even shuichi, the ultimate. detective. stops and thinks that maybe something is a bit wrong here

rantaro is just a whole ball of wasted potential sorry. he was the second most interesting character in the game, puzzling things out on his own and doing his best to survive. he was cool and mysterious and smart and he's the first to die and i dont CARE if monokuma ~lampshaded~ it later and was mad at tsumugi for killing him so early, it just means that they KNEW it was a shit idea and then did it anyway!

like. i really like rantaro's secrets being unveiled posthumously. but he shouldve at least died in chapter two, so we got some more time with him. or at least was extremely prominent in chapter one, like byakuya was. but neither happened and what we ended up with was the one active character trying to escape getting fucking shot putted before he has the chance to do literally anything

and maybe it wouldve worked if everyone wasnt so egregiously reactive? the trick with kaede was cool but the game was so focused on that that they forgot to mourn rantaro or like give the audience enough time with him to care when he died. and maybe the "died first, important later" thing COULD have worked if he wasnt one of two active characters!!!!

(most of them are active in chapter 5 ill give them that. but like.... just 5)

and after all this.... the ending. the idea of the ending is kind of good. but the same people that made the ending made the rest of the fucking game and that does not bode well

the ending is.... how do i put this..... imagine a 26 year old that still proudly identifies as an "antishipper." imagine the extremely myopic view this person would have on the relationship between fiction and reality

now imagine this person was in charge of writing a game.

that's what the ending is like.

in the game, the narrative is that "danganronpa" was a video game that got so popular that it turned into an irl reality show, which is the exact kind of myopic "WELL, YOU LIKE THE BAD THING IN FICTION, SO YOU'D CHEER FOR IT IRL, RIGHT? RIGHT??? ITS TOTALLY THE SAME THING!!!" view your bog standard antishipper would have. it's just not very good, imo

in sdr2, they pulled off the "its all fake~!" thing a LOT better, the two endings are strikingly similar and yeah just play them in tandem and you might see what im talking about, because i loved v3 (still do!) but when i played it and sdr2 in tandem i realized ah..... sdr2 is way better in quality....

i like the ambiguous ending in v3, it ties to the "truth and lies" thing nicely, but its like.... again, the same people that wrote that wrote the rest of the game

and there are some hints that it's televised in some way (the characters refer to the blood as "red," monokuma refers to it as "pink," i.e. the pink blood is a tv censor and the characters are seeing the true red) but not really anything else

and it feels less like a "keeping things ambiguous" thing and more like a "they forgot to put details in their game" thing

which i wouldnt think if it were not for the fact that sdr2 is extremely detailed (they remember mealtimes and remember to write in hajime's narration that everyone is eating, which pays off WELL in chapter 4 with the funhouse) and v3 forgot that their characters have to do stuff

also the Things in the v3 chapters just dont have as much weight to them like in sdr2? everyone was talking abt twilight syndrome murder case, the despair disease split everyone up (and soda got to use his talent by making that transmitter) (THATS ANOTHER THING no one in v3 uses their talents for the most part or acknowledges others' talents), the funhouse was a multi-day ordeal, and everyone was involved in chapter 5's Stopping The Rival and the leadup to the now-standard Chapter Five Extremely Cruel And Unusual Rival Death

the magic show in v3's second chapter was kind of being prepped in the background and shuichi had nothing to do with it, and its only purpose was a distraction. the motive videos were kind of there and only useful for the insect meet and greet and then the trial itself. the student council in chapter 3 wasn't around for long and didn't do anything, we only spent a day in chapter 4's virtural world as opposed to the three in sdr2, chapter 5 was good tho chapter 5 can stay. kaito being missing and shuichi being despondent over the secret of the outside world was good and had weight bc we spent a good chunk of chapter 4 hanging out w kaito and seeing him be cute and stuff. we were invested and now he's gone!

and also smaller details like blackends in sdr2 being suspicious before/during the trials, there were actual clues that something was wrong (teruteru lying about the meat skewers, peko being wet, mikan being hot when laying on hajime (i.e. feverish,) we SAW gundham in the room with the alarm clock; there were enough clues to put it together before it was revealed in the trial

i love v3 and i'm so upset about it because i love v3 and i love danganronpa- i sunk a lot of time into this game and the ending seemed spiteful that i even like the game. it was seemingly a critique on fan culture but written by someone with the most condescending, myopic lens on what fan culture actually is

v3's commentary on fan culture was written by the same person who wrote hifumi yamada as the ultimate fanfic writer and it shows

anyway u h . i am very sorry for leaving a fucking THESIS on your innocent question about my tags. but that's why i think that

I have come to realize that, to me, one of the worst crimes a piece of fiction can commit is being mean-spirited. Just about anything else can be good in certain circumstances. But a mean-spirited work diminishes anyone who encounters it.

#SORRY AGAIN 4 THE DISSERTATION ;A;#lyrelies #im rewriting v3 as like a fun little project for Me #im not saying its gonna be 'better' than v3 itself #im just doing it for funsies #taking a spin on it #the premise is that rantaro and kaede both survive and forn a duo #kaede and shuichi represent trust and truth respectively #while rantaro and kokichi represent distrust and lies respectively #i thought itd be fun bc the rival never has like A Buddy #give em a little buddy for enrichment #rantaro is gonna KIND OF be The Komaeda #but if komaeda was like. just as weird but way better at masking #which i think makes him more unsettling #because you can never be sure that he's got Something Up With Him #but you always kind of wonder....#anyway im going off topic #but yeagh

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