#sometimes simple dislikes in personal taste raise implications about other issues

[cerealandchoccymilk]

(through gritted teeth) dont make the play fight into a real argument dont make the play fight into a real argument dont make the play fight into a real argument

[murasaki-murasame]

Danganronpa V3 Liveblog Part 14 [Chapter 4 - Trial]

Huh.

Thoughts under the cut.

Well I can’t say this game doesn’t know how to surprise me!

I, uh . . . was not expecting it to be Gonta, at all. I really don’t know how to feel about it. This seems like the sort of case I’ll need to sit on for a while.

Anyway, just to get it out the way from the start, I’m honestly glad that my whole guess about Kokichi’s motives in all this were wrong, since, as I also said, I figured that if I was right, it’d probably be handled badly and just be a really uncomfortable experience. Although on the other hand, my main issue with this case is that I just . . . feel a little empty about what ACTUALLY happened, motive-wise.

I may as well just dive right into my issues with it all. The bottom line is that Gonta being the murderer just . . . came out of nowhere. I’m not saying that you couldn’t suspect him from the start, it’s just . . . he didn’t feel relevant to the case at all until the very last minute, and we had no real way of guessing his motive. I don’t really dislike the idea that he tried to kill everyone as an act of mercy, but it kinda came completely out of nowhere and there was no real way to predict it. And the whole detail of Gonta having lost his memories of even committing the crime made the whole thing just feel . . . weird. I don’t even know if I’d say it was depressing, it just . . . felt weird.

Like, I’ve talked before about how much I love and adore Gonta, and how much I wanted him to beat the odds and survive, but instead of feeling sad about him dying, I’m just left like ‘wait what’.

I also feel like, even though I technically didn’t guess the culprit right at all, the logic of the entire trial felt really . . . simple? I was actually almost disappointed at how simple it was. I expected something much more complicated.

Like, for example, near the start of the case I thought that maybe the avatar user error was about how Kokichi might have hacked into the program in advance to disable the paralyzing effect on his avatar, so that he could have killed Miu and then hid behind that rule as a cover to say that it was impossible for him to do it. But I guess we were meant to take that whole plot point at face value because there wasn’t any real twist to it beyond it being an explanation for why Kokichi wasn’t the culprit.

And on the note of the avatar user error, the whole thing with Gonta screwing up felt . . . lame? Like, you definitely could have guessed it in advance if you thought about his dialogue instead of just brushing it off, so I’m not calling it unpredictable or completely out of nowhere, it’s just that it felt like a disappointing answer to that little mystery. It pretty much didn’t even serve a real story purpose beyond making Gonta more sympathetic in the end, since him just lying to hide his guilt would have caused more or less the same end result. It also lead to the Alter Ego thing I guess, which in itself felt like a slightly weird repeat of, well, Alter Ego, and to a lesser extent Mini-Mechamaru, but I guess that got immediately taken out as a plot point in the execution. It was just weird all around.

I also spent the entire case suspecting Kaito because, well, even though I thought he didn’t intentionally do anything, I thought that maybe Kokichi had messed with something in the program that caused Kaito to unwittingly be responsible for Miu’s death. Maybe there was some weird body swapping/fake identity thing going on that confused the system and made the log-in/out data inaccurate. Who knows. Then I thought later on that the motive put into the game might have been something to motivate him to kill Miu, like info on a cure for his disease. I’m obviously glad that none of this happened, since it means that he gets to stick around for a bit longer, but still.

It’s also just a bit weird that the entire point of this trial was basically ‘Kokichi is pure human evil on every level, he’s a genuinely awful person who manipulated someone into murder, and then spent the entire trial being annoying and insulting people’. I wasn’t expecting much in the way of a redemption arc or whatever, but yikes. Doing all that pretty much just to make everyone else feel bad and make some sort of a moral point to prove his superiority is . . . eh.

I also don’t know how to feel about the idea that he might not have even been telling the truth about the outside world to Gonta, and that everything he did really was just deceitful manipulation to engineer a killing game for no real purpose other than messing with people. Which added a whole other layer of weirdness and, to a degree, pointlessness to everything that happened.

It does still raise the question of what he actually saw in the outside world, especially if the implication is that it’s not equally as bad as the academy or even worse. But it was delivered in a way where it didn’t do much to make me any more curious about the truth.

They also revealed the deal with the tile stone at the end of the chapter, and so I guess that was also just Kokichi being manipulative and wanting to make himself seem powerful and important. Huh. It doesn’t really . . . tell us anything new. So that’s a bit disappointing.

I mean, I’m still curious about what the hell is even going on in this story behind the scenes, but this chapter didn’t necessarily change things too much in that regard.

A big part of this is probably just that I’m still not a fan of Kokichi as a character, especially after this chapter. He’s just kinda awful. He isn’t even that interesting or nuanced in terms of him being an antagonist out to perpetuate the killing game. He mostly just comes across as a self-absorbed compulsive liar. I really hope he gets more interesting during the rest of the game.

It’s kinda hard for the whole message he tried to send of ‘the truth is depressing and you all suck for wanting to discover it!’ to really land with me when it’s, again, not exactly a new point, and he went about it in a really contrived and forced kind of way. I know it was obviously intentional, but I related pretty hard to how everybody’s reaction in the end wasn’t ‘wow you’re right Kokichi, the truth IS depressing!’, but instead ‘what the fuck is wrong with you, Kokichi?’. I don’t exactly think that Shuichi of all people needs to be told that the truth is depressing and maybe isn’t worth pursuing. That’s literally his entire emotional hang-up.

I wonder how much of my perpetual annoyance at Kokichi is caused by how I really adored Komaeda as a character, and that Kokichi doesn’t really compare favourably to him. It feels wrong to compare them, but it’s impossible not to. I just feel like Kokichi feels way more shallow and one-note and unsympathetic than Komaeda ever did.

Also, just to continue this whole rant a bit more, now I’m left confused about the little stinger moment in the virtual world, and his apparent grudge against Kaito. I feel like none of that came up at all. This isn’t even entirely about the fact that my speculation about how that all connected and what Kokichi’s motives were was wrong. As I said, me being wrong about that part is almost a relief more than anything. I’m just confused that NOTHING seemed to happen with those details. Kokichi definitely pinned a lot of the blame on Kaito throughout the trial, but near the end it’s like he just shrugged his shoulders, went ‘actually Gonta’s the culprit’, and then the entire trial just veered off in a completely new direction. It was odd. I really thought that Kokichi had a grudge against Kaito specifically due to some sort of jealousy and bitterness, but . . . maybe not? Or maybe it just hasn’t come to the forefront yet? Both of them are still alive, so maybe it’s just being pushed off until later. The fact that the moment of Kokichi talking to himself about how he acts when he finds someone he likes didn’t really come up again was more confusing and weird, though. That seemed like such a big, ominous, mysterious little moment, but it kinda got forgotten about. I hope it’ll come up again later.

I feel like I’m more or less alone in being so annoyed at Kokichi since everyone seems to love him. Well, I see where people are coming from. I mean, I loved Komaeda as a character, so it’s not like I don’t get the appeal of manipulative and antagonistic characters. But something about Kokichi is just insufferable to me.

Then again, I’ve also seen lots of people hate Shuichi for being boring, and even though I get where people like that are coming from, I can’t help but side-eye everyone’s tastes. Shuichi is my wonderful boy and I will protect him.

Anyway, before I forget, I should comment on the Monokubs for a minute. For one thing, I was surprised to see them BOTH die during the execution. But most of all, I’m almost 100% certain now about them somehow being related to the survivors of whatever killing game Rantarou took place in. Or something like that. The way Monotaro kept talking about how he was on the verge of remembering stuff kinda spells out that he was involved in some stuff in the past. I’m not sure where that’s going to go, though.

Back to the case, as I said before, it just felt . . . simple. And the surprising parts didn’t really feel ‘difficult’, they just felt . . . surprising. I dunno how to put it. I feel like there were only a tiny handful of moments in the entire trial where I felt unsure about exactly what to do. The vast majority of the time I instantly knew what the answer was. Sometimes the exact wording of the answer threw me off a bit, but I basically always knew what the game expected from me. I think I mostly got a bit thrown off at a few of the ‘pick a truth bullet out of the entire list to answer a question’ moments. The Hangman’s Gambit sections were also a little iffy but I think all of them were ones where it just took a while for me to understand which exact phrasing of the answer the game expected from me.

Even in chapter three where I basically guessed the culprit immediately, the actual logic of most of the debates still threw me off big-time. I really doubt that it’s JUST because I decided to play this trial during the afternoon rather than at midnight like the earlier ones.

Thinking back at my last post, I think I guessed most of the main points of the trial in advance. There were definitely things I didn’t fully grasp, but most of them were things that I don’t really feel too bad about not being able to guess, in hindsight. I do feel kinda dumb about not considering that the toilet paper could have been used as a rope, though. I think it just threw me off that the roll seemed entirely ‘intact’, and not as if it had been unraveled out.

I wonder if the game genuinely expected me to be surprised by the details of how the virtual world worked, because I figured that out immediately.

I’m really happy that Kaito wasn’t the culprit, one way or another, even though it makes me feel even more bad about suspecting him yet again. I don’t think I can be blamed for that, though. And really, I didn’t think he intentionally did anything. I was just paranoid that Kokichi might have done something to somehow make Kaito unwittingly kill Miu.

It was definitely interesting seeing him be the Argument Armament person this time around. It’s not unprecedented to get cases like this, but still. It’s mostly intriguing because I still feel like the game is setting him up to be a culprit later, in the sense that his illness might eventually push him to murder someone in a desperate attempt to escape and get treatment. So in that case, I just wonder if they’d use him a second time for that section, or if they’d have a separate person step in to defend him like what happened in this chapter. The latter option seems more likely, but getting two cases like that in one game would seem a bit odd.

And on the whole note of Kaito maybe being a killer later, I hope that it’s not intended to be a huge surprise if that’s where it goes, since we’ve spent the entire last chapter and a half setting up this whole plot point in the brightest neon coloured text possible. I guess we’ll see.

It’s also worth considering that we probably only have one case left in the game, MAYBE two if we do cut the cast down to just two people in the end, so if Kaito IS meant to be a killer soon, it’d be a bit lame to have what would potentially be the final killer be so predictable. Ignoring the obvious emotional weight it’d have, there’s just the simple fact that if there’s just one case left, then if there’s one specific character who’s being set up as a future culprit, there’s no real alternative option. Even if there’s two cases left it’d basically be a 50/50 possibility. But with how this chapter went, and how it ended, I feel like whatever’s going on with Kaito will come to a head in the next chapter. So we’ll see.

It’d definitely be depressing as hell to see Shuichi need to expose Kaito as a murderer and lead him to his death. Hypothetically. And it’d hurt to potentially see Kaito spend an entire trial lying to Shuichi. But we’ll see. Maybe I’m completely wrong about where this is going.

Come to think of it, I feel a little silly about devoting this entire chapter’s set of free time events to Kaito since he ended up not dying, but hey, it’s not a bad thing. Even if I definitely think that playing his events got me into an inaccurate head-space in terms of trying to guess at the direction of this chapter, it was still nice to see his events through to the end. It would have been worse if he’d died before I got to see them all. Especially since I really did love his free time events as a whole. I’m glad I did them.

And on the note of free time events, part of me wants to try and max out Kokichi next just to see if maybe there’s some redemptive core to his character to potentially shift my feelings toward him, but for one thing I have a feeling that for story reasons Shuichi will refuse to spend time with him now, and for another thing, I don’t even know if I care enough to keep talking to him. This late into the game I’d rather do what I can to max out Maki’s free time events. I hope I can get that done in time.

Oh, and before I forget, I feel a bit stupid for not realizing that the key card Kokichi had gave him access to the secret room in the library. I had to see someone else point that out for me to put two and two together. I genuinely forgot all about that plot point, since it never really came up again after chapter one. I suppose that if anyone wanted to call it bad writing, that Shuichi never seemed to figure out what it was for, I couldn’t really blame them, but I don’t feel too annoyed about it.

Anyway, that’s basically all of my main thoughts on this trial. It was . . . a weird one. From what little I’ve seen of people’s thoughts on the game, I think I’m probably in a minority for feeling so deflated and disappointed in response to it. That’s fine. Not every case is going to work for everyone. I just think it took some bizarre turns in it’s final act, and wasn’t anywhere near as complex and interesting as I expected.

After how intensely negative this entire post was, I should clarify that I didn’t outright hate this chapter, and I’m not gonna stop playing the game or anything. It just didn’t really work for me in the end.

On a positive note, I guess I should specify that I really appreciate Miu’s attempts to set up a scenario to kill Kokichi in. Her whole plan was great, even though it was pretty easy to guess in advance. But I mean, I can’t help but cheer for anyone who wanted to murder this dude. I ended up liking her character in general a lot more than I thought I would. Apparently she was designed to be as intentionally off-putting as possible, which I can see, but she was so over the top that I couldn’t help but like her. I think most people would agree with me on that.

Also, as a side note, I took a look at the extras menu for the first time. I figured it’d have spoilers in it so I kept putting it off, but in the end I just felt that if they gave me the option to look into it now, there probably won’t be any spoilers. And I don’t think there are, thankfully. I'll probably just flick through it all once the game’s over, so I just sorta skimmed through the list, but the ‘intimacy scenes’ option kinda caught me by surprise. I know that there’s gonna be a bonus post-game Dating Sim Mode, but I didn’t expect to see this sort of option in the extras. I imagine that, unless it’s a joke option of some kind, it’s probably equivalent to the rank ten social link events in Persona, or something. I’m not exactly expecting anything, y’know, explicit, even from an option called ‘intimacy scenes’. I think that was what it was called anyway. I’m kinda surprised that the option seems to already be available, and that it’s not part of Dating Sim Mode. But I didn’t check it so maybe I’m wrong about it. I’m basically just expecting romance-y date/confession scenes, and/or some fanservice-y CGs. Since the title image thing for it seemed to have both Kaede and Shuichi on it, I hope that the events in it aren’t confined to just one or another of their POVs. That’d be nice. I have the same sort of hope for Dating Sim Mode, as I think I said before.

Basically what I’m saying is that I want my Shuichi/Kaito romance route, even as a non-canon extra thing. That’s basically all I want, lol.

But yeah I think that’s it for today. Not sure if I’ll play any of this tomorrow or if I’ll take a break.