Just so people know before they leave a comment, V3 was never "scripted" by Team Danganronpa. They used the flashback lights to motivate the characters towards a predetermined outcome for the show. It's not like there was a script being beamed directly into their brains via the flashback lights
I'd argue that you're overselling Tsumugi I think she's just as brainwashed as everyone else here I will say nice catch on her stage I completely agree that she made those "confession" videos Having said that I believe the cutaways are legit and the people are watching this as a gameshow en mass You may have forgotten in Danganronpa 3 the Anime The world was Brainwashed "for hope" by Ryota Mitarai While it was ended early it very likely had a lasting effect on people psyche I believe this is a significant detail in understanding V3 as I believe the world is in a post Brainwashed state The point of V3 is not to induce Despair but to Manufacture a new "Ultimate Hope" But they realized to truly do that they had to re create Junko the ultimate despair in some way The reason they talk about all those people that died might be due to the fact that at the end of the Game Kibo self Destructs blowing everything up I believe it also terminated the live stream So after Shuichi and the other two escape I believe that the world assumed them dead with everyone else in the explosion I believe Rantaro is the Ultimate Survivor not because he made it to the end of the killing game but actually he won the killing game through killing which is why they decided to both recycle him and make him the first victim as one who gave into and caused despair cannot be the ultimate hope Heck the ultimate hunt itself might not mean hunting for Ultimates but to hunt for regular people who didn't get brainwashed because they weren't watching any screens during *that* time to make them into "ultimates"
@@Chaki21 It was cancelled late though The world was already brainwashed to some extent Exactly how much we don't really know but assuming V3 takes place in the same universe it makes quite a bit of sense
I think ‘cospox’ is just makeup effects. It would be child’s play for Tsumugi to do this, considering she can quickly change to look like Sakura who has an entire different body type, different skin tone, and large scars
100% it's a case of villain handicapping themselves. Of course she can cosplay as "her own characters." She just maintains that rule to make herself seem useless. No different than a certain Zero Escape villain pretending to be blind and deaf.
Yeah, if cospox wasn't a thing we'd end up suspecting her of a LOT of mysterious circumstances that occur, so she made up some bullshit so that wouldn't happen
Despite Tsumugi having a intended script, she doesn't have full control over how things play out since the V3 cast are still people. Flashback lights, motives, and how she wrote her characters personalities nudge them in the direction she wants things to go. Things can still go off script though, which is why Tsumugi must take part in the game, to rectify anything that that might not go with her intended narrative. Kaede's trap that should've killed Rantaro failed, so she needed to step in to fix that error as Kaede needs to be the blackened to build Shuichi's character. Angie getting carried away with becoming a leader to the point where she destroyed a flashback was not supposed to happen. Kokichi's whole plan to break the participants spirits to continue the killing game and then his unidentifiable murder with Kaito when Tsumugi sabotaged his original plan thanks to the Hopes Peak flashback light definitely wasn't supposed to happen. Hell, Tsumugi incorporating Hopes Peak into her Gofer Project storyline was a last minute addition to rectify Kokichi's actions and encourage the remaining participants to take a stand against Kokichi. What ultimately damned her in the end though was Kaito's execution breaking Keebo free from the outside world's influence, resulting in him making the choice to "Awaken" and destroy the academy. That lead to Shuichi finding the last remaining clues that exposed Tsumugi's involvement with Rantaro's death, Kaede's rigged execution and the creation of the flashback lights, all things that was never intended to be discovered in Tsumugi's intended narrative. From there, she had no choice to improvise and make herself the villian in her story, aka Junko Enoshima the 53rd, and when Shuichi eventually saw through that too, she played along and revealed the real truth that'd make the remaining participants fall into despair as they should in a final class trial.
Idk why people hate so much v3, tsumigi was much a more strategic and logical villain than junko and ai junko, like she did have to act being "the boring and plain character that nobody cares-" and she did it so well, i really like her and i think she is underrated as such as the ending, even tho it puts an "end" to the franchise, i think there still are much more plotlines to explore and theorize
@@Sam-tl4ho She did it so well that it DID make her a boring and forgettable character No wonder people don't like her, despite her plan being sound. She feels like her personality is to have no personality, a sharp contrast to Junko who is overflowing with personalities, but not one that makes her fun.
@@Chaki21 i guess tsumigi got brain wash into being a helper of danganronpa, some theories say that she survived a killing game but that only made her be linked forever to danganronpa and suffer even more
@@Chaki21 Looking back at the prologue, it's interesting seeing 3 characters openingly call out how plain and generic they are. Pregame Kaede questions out loud with Pregame Shuichi why someone would kidnap her at all because she's just a ordinary girl, and Shuichi shimes in with the same consensus that he's just a regular guy. Then later when the Pregame crew get surrounded by the exisals in the gym as they debate on how they plan on tormenting the students, Pregame Tenko flips out in fear, outright stating it wouldn't be fun to pick on "plain good-for-nothing commoners" Three characters calling out how generic and ordinary that are before the one character we know to call themselves that constantly; Tsumugi. Now parallel that with the Makoto Kid we're introduced to during chapter 6's intro. That Makoto Kid introduces himself as being a boring person, how normal he looks, and he doesn't stand out at all. Considering how Tsumugi explained the outside world, regular people who are bored, it puts Tsumugi's "plain" coverup in a whole new perspective if everyone from the outside world including the Pregame crew also sees themselves as generic or plain in some aspect. Tsumugi being plain is not just for her to remain unnoticed, that's genuinely how she is and how she sees herself outside of her hobby, her personality and memories were kept the same unlike everyone else, she's the only "real" person personality wise. Tsumugi is the type of person that hyperfixates on fictional media and her hobbies so much that she doesn't have much of an identity outside of that, she invest her whole life into fantasy and fiction. That's actually a real thing some people irl go through who struggle to differentiate fiction from reality. Some people remain in their little bubble to cope with their real lives as life gets too real for most, and that's exactly what Tsumugi does, that's why the outside world and people in it like the Makoto Kid love the killing games so much.
I love to imagine Tsumugi lied about having everything planned too Everything seems to go wrong constantly but she’s just like “This is a normal amount of fire! This is fine!”
Clearly she did. Kokichi was clearly smarter than everyone else and nearly broke the game apart on his own. There is absolutely no way she planned that. Her sloppy handling of Rantaro's death was also not planned. It was last second. Literally everything was last second. She is just a worse version of Junko.
I mean Kokichi only broke the game so much. In the end, it doesn't matter if Monokuma knows who the killer is because the only way to prove it is for Kokichi/Kaito pop out of the machine. And when that happens, Monokuma can just punish them regardless if he knew BEFORE the voting. He can just stay the verdict or just say since it's an either or scenario he'll just kill everyone because they're both right and wrong and call it a wrap. Even then, we don't know if Team DR planned for Kokichi's chaos and just had no idea how far he'd go. They just went "Make someone who will try to derail the game" and she did and left it at that. She probably scripted it enough to happen and knew there wasn't any need to be concerned. If things go wild, Monokuma could just declare Kaito the winner and kill everyone else so they can start the next game. Again, it doesn't matter if Monokuma knows or not because you can't prove it without making it obvious who it was and just roll with that as the verdict. Kokichi banked a lot that the audience would care and wouldn't just tell the studio to execute everyone whether they get it wrong or right since both options are true. Or just call the trial a mistrial and end it with no verdict. It's not like he didn't do it prior games as far the audience really cares.
There's no way to prove Monokuma is wrong unless Kaito reveals he's in the Exosuit. As long as Monokuma can safely say "Whoever is in the suit is clearly the killer," the verdict doesn't really mean anything. The whole argument being presented is Monokuma has to know the culprit BEFORE the verdict. However, that's not really true. All Monokuma has to do is punish them if the students are wrong. And the only way to prove they got it right or wrong is if Kaito exposes himself. Monokuma by the end of the trial knows pretty much 100% that the person in the Exosuit is the killer. It isn't hard for him to go "Eh it doesn't really matter. I'll just execute you all since you can't prove who the killer is" and be done with it. Kokichi's assumption is in a Shorginer's cat scenario the verdict matters more than the truth. However, the argument they got it right and wrong is equally valid. Monokuma can just kill everyone since they're both right and wrong UNLESS the cat pops out of the machine. The verdict can hinge on Kaito's bluff by pointing out that he can just kill everyone if their wrong regardless if he knows they're right. All of this assuming of course that Kokichi's plan wasn't apart of the original script and Team DR already knows it's Kaito in the suit. And again, there's no proof the audience would really care that Monokuma knew or not. They could just be bloodthirsty and agree Monokuma should just kill everyone for the funsies for trying to and failing to ruin their fun. Again, it's a meaningless bluff because the only way to 'invalidate' Monokuma's verdict is to reveal who is in the suit, and once they do, he can decide who dies afterward. Does it really matter if Monokuma knows or not? Not really. He'll know after the verdict 100% of the time. If the kids are right, he kills Kaito. They're wrong he kills everyone else. It still follows the rules of the Killing Game to a T. There's no loophole if the rules don't specific Monokuma NEEDS TO KNOW the culprit to execute someone. He can do whatever he wants in this situation since there is no rule in place in the first place. Literally, DR1 establishes this when Junko just goes and tries to kill Kirigiri or Naegi for funsies for her murder instead of killing everyone for being too stupid to catch her in Ch 5.
My theory is that Tsumugi is a player in the game. There would be no reason for her to play 'ordinary high schooler' in the opening if they were all going to get their minds re-wiped anyways since it's implied that them not having their Ultimate Abilities at that time was a mistake. I think Team Dangan implanted false memories that she is the show-runner so they could have an inside agent for the survivors to sniff out and go up against.
It would make sense for her to want to play 'ordinary high schooler' in the context of Tsumugi wanting to keep her identity as the mastermind hidden from the audience for shock value later on. I always viewed Tsumugi as a corporate ladder climber that mangaged to get the green light for total creative control over an entire season of danganronpa. There's practically no evidence for or against Tsumugi being the mastermind of any previous killing games, so in theory her reveal as the mastermind would come as a total shock to the viewers and deliver higher ratings. Keebo would be broadcasting during the opening scene, so she'd need to keep her plain jane persona about her during all that instead of just going full balls to the walls insane.
I agree I had a similar theory that I posted about under the pinned comment but I did not even notice that area in her research lab Absolutely Massive find
Gonta still does have a point in the first couple chapters tho. To have absolutely zero bugs in a large set like that is difficult. Most of the executions have at least one scene that takes place in a location clearly outside or at least exposed to the outside since no such places exist on set. I personally believe that V3 takes place in the Neo World program, idk why it would tho. There’s other reasons too. Tsumugi clearly lied about cospox and has borderline superpowers when it comes to changing voice and appearance. Monkuma and the cubs seem oddly biological at times (tongues, wings, hair, “rock hard ragers,” pregnancy, vomit, etc.). Last, the ending zoom out where you see the Team Danganronpa facade for the set is in a dark void-like room when inside the set it clearly glows bright white. Oh and it should be obvious why the neo world program in chapter 4 is in no way the one we see in SDR2. It’s another lie to call that the same program
I do think it's weird that people take Tsumugi's "cospox" statement at face value. If she can't cosplay as real people, then there shouldn't be any restriction on her cosplaying as Kaede since Kaede is a fictional character. I think the twist is that Tsumugi can't cosplay as fictional characters which would be very detrimental as someone who does cosplay. More importantly, Tsumugi actually wants to wear her costumes because she doesn't like how cosplayers use the outfit for clout. It would fit the overall theme for Danganronpa where a character's talent is often a source of despair. Plus, at the end of her events you can see that her feelings towards cosplay are very twisted and despite having the lab and all of her materials, she doesn't actually put together any costumes for herself.
So… I do believe most of what she said, yes. Because it actually just makes sense. V3 *really* has that “whatever number of sequel” feel, where the team just doesn’t care anymore. The sheer amount of marketable plushies, the over-the-top sadistic executions, all the references to the first games, tired, unoriginal, broken storyline… hell, they’re literally building the school right in the middle of the season! But the whole “participation in voluntary” is *definitely* bullshit. You don’t just kidnap your players. Even Rantaro was confused as to why they’re doing it that way! So it’s *way* more likely that they just stole a bunch of kids and immediately murdered them with a flashlight. Seeing the first half of the prologue is always so depressing… they are all effectively dead! And so unceremoniously, too… For this, I like to use another piece of meta evidence. Considering Team Danganronpa’s logo really *was* there even before we started playing, I feel like this one might also be intentional. Also because it’s the *only* DR game that ever does this. Anyway… right when you boot up the game, you first get a basic “graphic content warning, which is fair. But the second one is.. pretty weird. It says “This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to real people is coincidental.” Why would *WE* need a message like that? I think it’s also in-universe, which is just.. actually sick.
Good points here, but that fiction disclaimer is actually a pretty common legal disclaimer, at least here in the US. I'm not 100% on this, but I think it's from an old lawsuit involving a work about the death of Rasputin, where one or more of his alleged killers were in the US after the revolution, and they sued the guy who made it for libel, which they won, as there was no direct evidence of their crime. Supposedly, the judge told them afterwards that if they had just said that any resemblance to real people was coincidental, even if it obviously wasnt, they probably would've won. And thus the disclaimer was born, being stuck on nearly everything to avoid getting sued. It's still might be meant to have broader significance in V3, but it's not guaranteed.
Depending on how you look at it, I think the game implies their personality aren't erased entirely. Kaede's, and I believe Shuichi's, dialogue is the exact same after they wake up for the second time up to a certain point, suggesting that even if their backstories and some of their interests aren't the same, their core personalities, like how they react emotionally to stuff, are still intact, more or less. Though of course, at what point their memories being altered changing their personality makes them "effectively dead" is up to you
Tbf how real the original personalities were is also questionable. We can't be certain of anything as the rules of the flashback lights aren't specific enough to seal holes in the plot. Memories, emotions, everything are all linked to whatever is implanted by those lights. As such, the % of personality that is real is questionable at best. Tsumugi might have intentionally did that kidnapping fiasco at the start to build up the fake narrative in the ending so the audience wouldn't find any fault in the production. Having them believe they were kidnapped helps build the realism of the show vs. knowing these kids willing signed their lives away for live TV.
@@fridaylambda3494 Are you trying to imply that the audience was watching even the first half of prologue? ..no, that’s a bit ridiculous. Keebo wasn’t even a robot at that point (btw, why is nobody talking about that? That’s also super creepy). And that moment completely breaks any and all narrative. Tsumugi would never have said that they were all happy about it by the end if the audience literally watched the entire scene and saw that that’s not true. Danganronpa isn’t about that.
it's actually quite fitting for the ending of v3 (which theme is more truth v lie instead of the usual hope v despair) to have an ending that you can't fully trust as being the real truth. Think about it, you trust Tsumugi for the entire game (at least to some extent) and are then asked/expected to trust her at her word after she's been proven to be a liar who has been fooling you the entire game. No matter how elaborate a lie is, it is still a lie, even if it is framed as "coming clean" (also i'd like to mention how in contrast to how Junko looked happy in her final moments of despair, Tsumugi out of cosplay looks uncertain and almost dissociative in a way. She should be happy, after all she's facing the despair of death just like junko but she isn't. it almost makes be feel like she was lying to herself as well and in her final moments she couldn't bring herself to lie any longer)
@@TheFlinchyDinosaurGuys what if the V3 students are in a "Rip Van Winkle" situation? Let me explain: We saw in an episode of "Danganronpa 3: The End Of Hope's Peak Academy" that the students of the Reserve Course broke into Hope's Peak and started to murder the ultimate students, with the only survivors being Class 78 and Class 77. Now, what if, during the Tragedy, the Hope's Peak higher-ups started a back-up plan consisting in kidnapping normal people and then turn them into Ultimates with the same technology that helped create Izuru Kamakura? What if then they put them in a place isolated from everyone to keep them away from the disasters and then put them in a simulation in cryo-sleep where they will be fed with Flashback Lights containing exaggerated backstories that serve the purpose to ENHANCE their talents (This would explain Ryoma Hoshi killing mafia members with nothing but steel tennis balls) so that one day they could become the new symbols of hope to REPLACE all the fallen ultimates? Only for the Remnants of Despair to find the place and create Team Danganronpa for their various purposes? I'm picturing three kind of people who would be part of Team Danganronpa: - Hope's Peak Purists who want to see something that validates their outdated ideas of Hope = Talent. Since now that Makoto is on charge of the school he will start admitting even non-ultimate students - Remnants of Despair who just want to spread despair - Shady powerful people like mafia gangs, dictators, criminals of all kind, cultists and shady businessmen who use the fallen students like their slaves in a cruel example of human trafficking When Kaede talked about how the world was rotten, what if she was talking about the world at the beginning of the Tragedy? When everything was going to shit and Hope's Peak was exposed for their human experimentation projects?
I thought the Kaede funeral scene was meant to be something kind of like a opening or closing scene of an episode to entice the viewers of the in universe TV show, and the player to question what exactly is going on.
My own personal theory is that Danganronpa IS fictional in their world, but Team Danganronpa isn't actually an official distributor of the series, and more like a cult/illegal organization that hosts disturbing reality shows featuring unwilling teens via kidnapping them. It has happened for decades on end with no leads to find any of teens who went missing, which is why people have stopped caring and Kaede got kidnapped in broad daylight without anyone to help. I thought of this theory when Rantaro said something weird in the prologue in the Japanese translation (i saw this somewhere on a forum so I don't know if it's 100% true, so take it with a grain of salt.l Instead of telling the Monokubs: "What's up with the ridiculous theatrics?" Theatrics is said as mimics/mimicry, additionally to Tsumugi in the finale saying:"... my plan was such a flawless copy." implying that Team Danganronpa is just a cheap copy, and not the actual thing from the anime, or maybe the Danganronpa events were real and Rantaro was talking about how they were copying Junko. idk tbh but this is what im choosing to believe.
Guys what if the V3 students are in a "Rip Van Winkle" situation? Let me explain: We saw in an episode of "Danganronpa 3: The End Of Hope's Peak Academy" that the students of the Reserve Course broke into Hope's Peak and started to murder the ultimate students, with the only survivors being Class 78 and Class 77. Now, what if, during the Tragedy, the Hope's Peak higher-ups started a back-up plan consisting in kidnapping normal people and then turn them into Ultimates with the same technology that helped create Izuru Kamakura? What if then they put them in a place isolated from everyone to keep them away from the disasters and then put them in a simulation in cryo-sleep where they will be fed with Flashback Lights containing exaggerated backstories that serve the purpose to ENHANCE their talents (This would explain Ryoma Hoshi killing mafia members with nothing but steel tennis balls) so that one day they could become the new symbols of hope to REPLACE all the fallen ultimates? Only for the Remnants of Despair to find the place and create Team Danganronpa for their various purposes? I'm picturing three kind of people who would be part of Team Danganronpa: - Hope's Peak Purists who want to see something that validates their outdated ideas of Hope = Talent. Since now that Makoto is on charge of the school he will start admitting even non-ultimate students - Remnants of Despair who just want to spread despair - Shady powerful people like mafia gangs, dictators, criminals of all kind, cultists and shady businessmen who use the fallen students like their slaves in a cruel example of human trafficking When Kaede talked about how the world was rotten, what if she was talking about the world at the beginning of the Tragedy? When everything was going to shit and Hope's Peak was exposed for their human experimentation projects?
This is a good point, but I will note that normally when people refer to “theatrics,” they don’t mean it how the word is defined. If something is “theatrical,” it’s exaggerated and characteristic of theatre.
I personally headcanon Tsumugi to be just another victim of Danganronpa, likely one who survived the previous one alongside Rantaro, only to be made this season's "mastermind" via flashback light manipulation. I do like the idea of the "V3" standing for "Version 3", rather than "53". If I were to fit my headcanon into yours, I'd say that while there were enough "Remnants of Despair" to sustain the show for a while, it's only a matter of time before those people start dying off, including the people behind the Danganronpa show, meaning a whole new staff. And as would happen with any show that runs for too long, it would go through seasonal rot, which would lead to people losing interest and looking elsewhere for some "fresh" entertainment. This would in turn lead to Danganronpa trying to keep interest up by adding in new characters (the Monokubs) and new gimmicks (the audience participation). It would also explain why this season was so shaky, as there's a new staff (including higher-ups) trying to keep up interest, but not knowing how.
great video. I think one of the problems with V3's ending is that I don't buy what's there, but coming up with any other theory is essentially just educated guessing. and I think your guess is as good as any, and one I also tend to think was what happened!
Quoting a commenter who I agree with "Honestly it doesn't even matter if in universe danganronpa is real or not, cuz either way the emotions the characters and viewers feel are real and that's kinda the message V3 goes for, that fiction has an impact on reality."
@@ClubPuguin yeah I think that's absolutely the ultimate message you're supposed to come away with. but I think it also hurts itself by doing this whole "oooh is it true or not???" thing haha
@@mrp1234 my exact feelings. It's just so hard for me to take it seriously when the answer is _it doesn't matter because it feeelt real so it's impactful anyway! Isn't it soooo ironic!? Very fourth wall breaking! Much meta!_ and just... None of it not works for me *because* it doesn't matter. It doesn't help that, having seen Undertale's much more structured and purposeful (and earnest) approach before whatever it is v3 is trying to do... this type of meta feels sloppy and time wasting and uninteresting to the point the entire game fails to get me invested. Hell, even SDR2 looks better in comparison and that virtual reality plot was the usual amount Danganronpa half asses concepts it really does not do justice! That _can_ feel like a natural progression of ideas if I squint hard but this... doesn't, no matter how much I try.
@@Depressed_Dandelion only sorta related but another thing that drives me nuts about V3 or at least the reaction to it is how people rightfully laugh at "hope vs despair" as a theme but act like "truth vs lies" is SOOOO DEEP and original I do actually think DR2 handled "hope vs despair" better than V3 and "truth vs lies"
another interesting thing is that Kaede once had a flash where she seemed to be wearing some sort of headset. just a shot in the dark, but Tsumugi's killing game might take place within a virtual world, it would certainly explain how humanity now has a bunch of sci fi stuff not long after they were driven to near extinction. also, we do know that at the beginning Keebo was a real person, you can see his fleshy self during the prolouge, which is kinda weird, cuz Tsumugi implies that Keebo was created solely for the killing game
I think the Ending of V3 makes as much sense as how much thought you're willing to put into it. I remember seeing plenty of people who get stuck on the whole "this is all fictional" stuff that they immediately check out and forget the details that contradict that. Personally I don't blame Tsumugi for what happens in V3 like others do, to me Tsumugi is as much of a victim of the killing game as everyone else. At the beginning of the game she clearly has no idea what is going on but after they brainwash the entire cast suddenly Tsumugi is given the role of Mastermind and just like that she became the perfect scapegoat for whoever is behind the killing game. But again I believe that the Ending's impact depends entirely on how you choose to think about it: if all of this is fictional and it doesn't matter then that's that, if you belive (like me) that the cast is actually a bunch of people who were kidnapped and brainwashed into taking new identities to fit into the killing game then that's that.
Not to mention, who other than the Ultimate Cosplayer could get so attached to the killing games and its ‘characters’, enough to want to replicate it? Is that not what cosplay is?
I want to believe cospox was just a lie to keep the game running smoothly. As the mastermind, it's in Tsumugi's best interest to keep the game as exciting for it's audience as possible, and it'd get pretty boring if every suspect on trial could say "That wasn't me! That was Tsumugi pretending to be me!" She wanted to eliminate that tedious possibility as soon as she could.
Kodaka said he kinda fought for the Epilogue as other team members thought it would clash with the game. He said the Epilogue would clear stuff up on the plot from what I remember Edit: Also Kodaka has stated the V stands for Victory
I believe V3 to be a separate continuity from the previous games and anime. The original Hopes Peak storyline concludes with the Danganronpa 3 anime, while V3 is its own separate story piggybacking on the original. As for what Danganronpa is in V3's continuity.. From how Danganronpa is explained in V3, the first few installments (Dr 1, 2, UDG, 3 anime) started off as literal video games and anime, just like how we have them in our world. As the franchise went on and got more popular, Team Danganronpa started making real life stage sets, and incorporated real people into their killing games for their reality TV show, as fans are free to participate. Kaede and the rest of V3's crew were once real people from the outside world. Normal people with no Ultimate Talents turned into fictional characters thanks to the flashback lights. Tsumugi can't cosplay as Kaede or any of the V3 cast because they used to be real people. Kaede and Co. are still real flesh and blood people, but their minds were altered with fictional backstories, talents and personalities to act like Danganronpa characters.The Dr 1 and 2 characters on the other hand were never real people to begin with in V3's continuity, since they originated from video games and anime before the reality TV show, so Tsumugi can cosplay as them. Tsumugi's cospox is a condition given to her as apart of her Ultimate Cosplayer talent thanks to the prologue flashback light, just like how Kaito was given a illness and Kiyo a spit personality as apart of their characters. Cospox is no different, so she literally can't cosplay as real people once the flashback light have her that talent. How she talks about cosplaying real people moreso sounds like a personal preference that she made real with a flashback light. The first few Dr installments being video games and anime is supported by the case files in Shuichi's research lab. If you count them, there are exactly 52 case files of murder plans. Shuichi and Maki reveal the first few case files have illustrations (Dr 1, 2, UDG, 3 anime) while the later files have real photos (The other killing games turned reality show before V3, the 53rd season) Shuichi wonders if the first few are just fictional, while the later ones are real. The one definitive lie Tsumugi made was the V3 cast were excited when they were selected for the killing game during the prologue. You can go back to watch the prologue to see that flashback of Shuichi, Kaito and Kaede being excited never happened. But if the audition tapes are real or did they really want to participate is still up in the air. There's some weird things Kaede says in the prologue that implies she might know of the killing games, and she talks about how rotten the world is, similar to her audition tape saying she has no faith in humanity. If you've seen the Truman Show, V3 is basically that. I feel like to truly understand V3's world and story, you must first understand Tsumugi because at the end of the day...she's just a regular girl with a huge devotion to her passion as she uses it to cope with her normal boring reality, but takes it too far. That is how the Makoto Kid watching on his phone is depicted, that is how everyone in the outside world is depicted. As crazy as them enjoying killing games are at face value, there are truths to this that parallel our own world. Reality can be exhausting, stuck in the status quo that can be too much for a lot of us at times, and we rely on fiction to immerse ourselves, fixate on something else as a means of escapism from our everyday lives. That's not a bad thing, but there are some who have their heads in fiction too much where some have trouble distinguishing the difference between fiction and reality, resulting in conflict that can hurt yourself and others around you, exactly what Tsumugi and the outside world struggled with. The epilogue concludes with Shuichi, Maki, and Himiko being able to leave the giant dome through the hole Keebo made, entering back into the outside world. A world the survivors have no memory of anymore since their original personalities and memories were overwriten with fabricated ones Tsumugi made. The world outside the giant stage set won't match at all with what they remember, so no Shuichi's uncle's detective service, no Maki's orphanage and assassin cult she was in, and no Himiko's master that started a career with her performing magic shows across the world.
I also believe in V3 taking place in a post-DR3 world, but it's an AU where Ryota Mitarai actually went through with brainwashing the entire world into hope zombies. So basically, everyone who was affected by the brainwashing became remnants of hope(just despair in the opposite direction) while everyone else who was normal or just unaffected had to deal with these consequences. So Makoto still goes through with rebuilding hope's peak, and overtime the legacy of the tragedy becomes stories shared as a means to provide entertainment and lessons. Unfortunately, due to being hope obsessed, people are intentionally creating problematic situations to then later fix to get their fix for overcoming despair. Despite all his attempts, Makoto and his fellow staff can't quell these feelings that these people have and soon enough talks of the tragedy rise up again as it's become this ultimate symbol of evil that must be defeated. However, times are peaceful and society is healing and there's no way someone as smart as Junk will rise up and repeat history...right? Talk about killing games and overcoming despair become popular, people needing to satisfy their desire for hope. Then a few people come together and suggest a small experiment. One thing leads to another and they have sixteen "participants " to experiment on. They broadcast it to the world under the guise of it being fiction and thus law enforcement is rather lax in investigating. Then another game happens, more spectacle this time. An audience forms, it's just fictional characters right, so it's okay to see them subjected to this twisted game. It's okay if you enjoy it a little, the contestants will choose hope and beat the mastermind. Hope will conquer despair and the audience will get their release. After all, it's better if we channel our inner despair through fiction and not real life. We wouldn't want a repeat of the tragedy, however long ago that was. Makoto, Hajime and everyone else who lived through the tragedy have long since moved on, their memories and stories serving as a reminder to new generations on how important hope is. As the killing games go on, the guise of them just being fiction drops, people know these people are suffering for real. It's better this way, right? For these people to channel our darkest thoughts in a contained environment so that we ourselves don't turn on each other? Time goes on, the games are becoming normalized past times, the budget has increased. A girl named Tsumugi walks into the Team DR headquarters and applies for the job.
As an other commenter states that I agree with "Honestly it doesn't even matter if in universe danganronpa is real or not, cuz either way the emotions the characters and viewers feel are real and that's kinda the message V3 goes for, that fiction has an impact on reality."
Damn that's a pretty interesting headcanon you have in mind on V3 being in a alternate timeline where Ryota Mitari successfully upload the hope video to the whole world
i do think SOME of what tsumugi said is, while not ALL of the truth, SOMEWHAT accurate in PLACES. I think she was telling the truth about the characters being in a twisted reality show, but whether the cast were willing participants (the prologue makes that doubtful) or if danganronpa REALLY IS super popular, or that the events of the first two games are fictional and Ultimate High School Students don't exist, these are what I think are the lies. The CGs of the mourners and the meteor strikes are shown among the deluge of false memories, and nothing suggest sthey are real memories, so I think they're jsut beign shown to us to help trick us into beleiving what was revealed about the fake backstory made for the show (hell, the monkubs even bring it up in the prologue, that the backstory was written ahead of time). I beleive its meant to be implied that the're playing for the characters as they sleep (I think shuichi even comments on them after they play but i may be misremembering). Kaede's mention of not being an Ultimate in the prologue suggests that's a THING someone can be, otherwise she'd say something like "that's not real" or something, and it also can't jsut be a result of the 'ultimate hunt' backstory (as there'd be no reason to fake it, and if they incororapted a real event into their game the Monokubs wouldn't refer to it outright aloud, which they do, as 'backstory'). Tsumugi's claims of a "perfect, non violent utopia" is an outright lie, proven by the prolgue again. KLaede claims noone came to help her when she was kidnapped and expressed no real surprise at either happening, saying the world is kidna shitty. Not exactly evidence of a 'perfect utopia', let alone one ruled by a reality tv show. My beleif is that Team Danganronpa are criminals running an illegal snuff show, or at least their show is VERY underground, explaining why kaede didn't recognise elements but DID recognise the name of the Monkubs (as she likely may have at least heard of Monokuma, the mascot of the death games). Tsumugi's cospox can easilly be faked, since Kaede closed her eyes and didn't look at Tsumugi prior to the reveal, giving Tsumugi a chance to apply makeup to her body to make it look like she had a bizarre allergy.
1. I'm pretty sure it's been hinted by the game that the first few danganronpa entires weren't life action, specifically in shuichi's lab there are 52 files containing murder cases and how they were made, but the first few are drawn, so i assume that's the difference for cospox 2. It's been heavily implied that the entirety of danganronpa V3 is somewhat scripted, like tsumugi literally admits she wrote the maki-kaito romance plot, i'd say we can assume that everything till 6th trial was planned, so there's no need for more than one person being in charge of things, cuz everything is scripted and the only thing that could mess up things was kaede missing rantaro, for which tsumugi was prepared Honestly it doesn't even matter if in universe danganronpa is real or not, cuz either way the emotions the characters and viewers feel are real and that's kinda the message V3 goes for, that fiction has an impact on reality
There is no way the entire thing was scripted. Kokichi almost broke the entire game to pieces. There is absolutely no way Tsumugi planned that. One wrong move or Shuichi catching onto what was happening a little bit sooner and she loses and Kokichi wins from the grave as a final f-you.
I mean it depends on how you view Kokichi's efforts. Even Tsumugi pointed out in the 6th trial along with Monokuma that an invalid verdict is meaningless to stopping the killing game. (You know despite Junko in the first game willing to play fair after throwing Kyoko and Makoto under the bus). All Monokuma had to do was either call the trial a mistrial or just execute everyone regardless if they're right or wrong. heck, he could just not have a ruling at all. He could only be proven wrong if he calls the verdict incorrectly and the culprit reveals themself. At that point, though, if the cast is wrong, Monokuma can just kill them or kill the culprit if they're right. Monokuma's verdict doesn't matter since Kaito will end up proving whether or not they got it right. And making an error with his verdict won't really matter. He can just say screw it and not kill anyone due to the unprecented aspect. It's not like he can't add a rule to fix this error. Also, Shuichi was made the ultimate detective by the flashback light. He rarely comes across as a good detective in the main game. He literally made a huge guess on the door that for all he knows was set dressing to sew discontent. He has no proof the door is real and just guesses. Plus, she could just blast him with a blackout light or flashback light if he ever caught on. He's really only trained to find what the game wants at any given time so it wouldn't be hard for him to never guess. If she didn't tell Monokuma the plan, it'd work out in her favor as no one would know Kokichi is just under her influence since he'd already have killed the mini cameras long enough for her to zap him.
Or just not care. Don't forget that Monokuma and by extension Junko cheated in DR1. The only difference is Junko's cheat kept everyone alive while Tsumugi dismisses the implications entirely. Monokuma already changed the rules in the original game which if the audience liked or enjoys they wouldn't care seeing it as a blatant reference to the original game. Plus, Monokuma had to put in a rule randomly in that game as well when the need arose to keep the cast in control anyway. He could just state that Kokichi forced his hand and add in a rule to fix the problem. And technically regardless of whether Monokuma is right or wrong doesn't matter in the end. The rule still applies. The participants must guess the culprit right. If they don't, he just kills them. If they do, he kills whoever is in the machine. Or just like in the fangames, he just adds in a motion to vote for whoever is in the machine and call it a day. Monokuma technically doesn't need to know the answer. His verdict can change after Kaito proves the vote is right or wrong cause again the only way to prove Monokuma is wrong is to expose yourself and once you do it allows Monokuma to proceed with the standard rules. Or just kill everyone because they didn't identify the correct culprit either way. This all of course assumes there really is an actual audience and they will care when you can just flashback the memories of a good ending into their brains and make DR54. Kokichi assumed he could end the killing game, but there's no proof how Monokuma would proceed once the students cast their votes. He's free to do what he wants as Tsumugi and him can just make a new rule and call it a wrap by saying "Even if Monokuma doesn't know the culprit before the verdict, if the students can't identify the culprit, the culprit will escape and everyone else dies as per the standard Blackened graduation rule." Bam problem solved. Just like when Monokuma in DR1 added the rule to keep the kids from breaking into the headmaster's office.
The only reason I think Tumigi is telling the truth is the clearly visible team danganronpa logo that you can see on the outside of the dome when it zooms out in the epilog.
And tsumugi never ACTUALLY TURNED INTO ANYONE FULLY. The irises the contacts she’s the ultimate cosplayer she wouldn’t mess that up- it’d take real detective work but it was a work around for her cospox
Great video! I adore V3s ending and V3 in general and I love seeing people discuss V3s ending(people not doing more that is my biggest disappointment with the danganronpa fandom but oh well), so I'd like to say what I personally disagree with and how I interpret the ending. I disagree with your point of the funeral and meteor scenes(if I understood what you were getting at) because I DO actually think they are faked. They heavily corroborate the stories in the flashback lights and seem to be telling the audience(both the fictional one and the real one aka us) what the in-universe lore of the killing game is. The reason why trusting omniescent scenes in chapter 6 isn't convoluted imo is because at that point the veil(or the fog if you will) of the killing game is lifting and we are starting to be fed a different narative. Now, I'd like to point out the big questions surrounding V3's ending that I personally think matter. Those are: What's going on with the participants/How willing and real are they? What's going on with Tsumugi and Rantaro? What is the state of the outside world? I think you covered everything that needs to be said about the tapes being fake, and that the start of the prologue shows how the characters actually behaved before being kidnapped, but I'd like to add something related to them being real or fictional. I think, with how devoted Tsumugi is to cosplay, that cospox works on very strict rules, be it real or not. This would tell us that the cast of the first two games are fictional, while the cast of V3 is real. While some of the cast's personalities are fabricated with the flashback lights, they are still very real people. And why is that? Because all the events that happened to them, all the death and loss and the bonds they grew and the emotions they felt, all of that was real and it made them into real people. Danganronpa, in Tsumugi's narrative, started as something completely fabricated and staged, the characters were fictional because they were acted out, the actors weren't personally trapped and they merely put on a different personality for the sake of playing a role. Notice how Tsumugi cosplayed the characters of the first two "killing games", but not any other of the non-V3 killing games, like Rantaro's game. That's because Rantaro's game, alongside V3s game, all featured real people going through real events in a controlled environment. I personally think the first flashback lights added some memories and accentuated parts of their personality and backgrounds to fit their talent and role in the killing game more(kokichi doesn't seem to have his villain persona on in the prologue both because he isn't aware of the threat of the killing game yet and because he is meant to be disruptive. kiyo seems to be similar in personality, but his serial killer background was likely added as a failsafe in case nobody kills). Kaede specifically says she has a hobby she is devoted to in the prologue and I think it's likely the piano. She probably just got more awards in the flashback lights to accentuate her hobby and make it into an ultimate talent. I think the other questions are left much more vague and I am satisfied with not having a definitive answer to them, but I'd like to point out a couple of things. We don't exactly know if Tsumugi was rewired like the others were, if she was mastermind by choice or if she was forced into it. I definitely think she was a cosplayer at some point and that team danganronpa essentially gave her seemingly unnatural talent for cosplaying which made her more devoted for that role, but it's unclear if said role was forced onto her. Either way, I think both answers have narrative value which I am a big fan of. If she was forced to be the mastermind it makes her not voting in chapter 6 and having some level of solidarity with the other participants very sad and tragic, but if she was a willing mastermind it gives more power to her desire to be the ultimate cosplay copycat(can you tell I love Tsumugi Shirogane?). For Rantaro, I definitely think his personality and memories were altered for V2 like with the others in V3, and that some of his memories were erased for V3, but I'm not sure as to what state of mind he was in at the start of the prologue. If the flashback lights hadn't been activated yet he either remembers all of V2, had his memories reset to the start of V2 or he remembers parts of V2(maybe everything except the final chapter and all of this being a reality TV show). I'm personally leaning towards the third option. I think the prologue hints to a few things about the outside world: killing games aren't something most people(or if parts of the world are into danganronpa then some communities could be isolated from the phenomenon but I doubt that) are familiar with, at least in depth enough that the number 16 doesn't sound an alarm and that "Mono" symbolism is something well-known about enough for at least 1 out of 16 students to know about, considering Kaede probably connected the Monokubs to Monokuma. I think the two options that could follow up on those two pieces of information are that either the tragedy happened at some point and Kaede connected the monokubs to the mascot of the apocalypse essentially, or that Kaede recognised monokuma as a video game character, but wasn't aware of the implications of the real life killing games. Maybe danganronpa isn't a global sensation, but more like a high budget underground snuff project/experiment? In any case I think there's room for hope to be found in the outside world and I hope shuichi, Himiko and Maki are happy wherever they are :p I'd love to continue this discussion and to see other takes on the matter!
I haven’t watched this video, I just saw the thumbnail and wanted to say that I just started my playthrough of V3 and this popped up in my feed…I really hope I didn’t get spoiled and that Tsumugi isn’t the mastermind.
Guys what if the V3 students are in a "Rip Van Winkle" situation? Let me explain: We saw in an episode of "Danganronpa 3: The End Of Hope's Peak Academy" that the students of the Reserve Course broke into Hope's Peak and started to murder the ultimate students, with the only survivors being Class 78 and Class 77. Now, what if, during the Tragedy, the Hope's Peak higher-ups started a back-up plan consisting in kidnapping normal people and then turn them into Ultimates with the same technology that helped create Izuru Kamakura? What if then they put them in a place isolated from everyone to keep them away from the disasters and then put them in a simulation in cryo-sleep where they will be fed with Flashback Lights containing exaggerated backstories that serve the purpose to ENHANCE their talents (This would explain Ryoma Hoshi killing mafia members with nothing but steel tennis balls) so that one day they could become the new symbols of hope to REPLACE all the fallen ultimates? Only for the Remnants of Despair to find the place and create Team Danganronpa for their various purposes? I'm picturing three kind of people who would be part of Team Danganronpa: - Hope's Peak Purists who want to see something that validates their outdated ideas of Hope = Talent. Since now that Makoto is on charge of the school he will start admitting even non-ultimate students - Remnants of Despair who just want to spread despair - Shady powerful people like mafia gangs, dictators, criminals of all kind, cultists and shady businessmen who use the fallen students like their slaves in a cruel example of human trafficking When Kaede talked about how the world was rotten, what if she was talking about the world at the beginning of the Tragedy? When everything was going to shit and Hope's Peak was exposed for their human experimentation projects?
omg great vid !! i've been thinking about this since the game came out ! we're probably never going to find out the truth, or get another dr related piece of media, but its really fun to make new theories about what happened ! i have a few explanations of my own, but at the end of the say the games ending is really up to interpretation with how you want to fill the plot holes :)
I just came to say that I love V3’s ending and Tsumigi is the best Mastermind and have my own theories but to tired to lay it all out. But this thumbnail is a full blown spoiler, I got spoiled that Tsumigi was the Mastermind in chapter four of V3 and I didn’t suspect her at all. I was watching a gameplay on YT at that time and it was an unfortunate event that I saw it. (I’ve seen a comment that they got spoiled by this thumbnail)
You gotta understand I walked into this fully accepting that it was all a TV show and then everything you pointed out, started me. Thank you. The closest game show I can think that would be like this big brother especially the American version. Now ask yourself this the goal of killing game is that one person kills somebody gets away with it and then everybody else dies. Ask yourself this would you watch a season consisting of two episodes? Sure, it’s unlikely that somebody would get away with it especially when facing see a full 16 person group doing investigations, but let’s just say they did that means that they invested a ton of money, and concepts. Only for that to be cut short. No company would ever do that. No TV show would ever do that. The idea that Danganronpa is just a TV show false flat when you consider the tech as well You have hidden rooms in the school you have a robot is essentially shooting a giant, either laser or energy blasts you you have Nanities and equipment that can brain wash. The brainwashing equipment alone would raise red flags the world over. I think you’re right, I don’t think it’s a show. These could all just be despair, infected people who were brainwashed and into thinking that they were normal people that being said I also love how this ends with the idea of hope despair it doesn’t matter all that matters embracing the world whatever it may be.
I believe there's just one thing that, somewhat unrelated but that still is a bit, and goes unexplained in the game is Keebo. After all, in the flashbacks, there aren't markings on his face (which you could say we're covered up with paint/makeup) and his clothes resemble his in-game body too closely, in a way that I don't think it would be possible for him to hide that high collar of his body under that jacket's high collar in a feasible way. This doesn't have much to do with the ending theory that was presented in the video (disproving or agreeing), but it's something that wasn't mentioned, and it also isn't in the game, and I'm not sure what that means for the cast and the world outside that killing game. After all, the video does not specify the methods the remnants of despair would be using to create these copycat killing games, and so it might be a virtual world, since they changed Keebo's whole existence, but if it's in the real world, it's very weird and would need an explanation. (In a virtual world, we know it's possible because of Nekomaru, so there's precedent, but then this is a world of ultimates, so maybe they transferred his consciousness to a robot OR they just created a robot based on the 'real' Keebo we see at the start)
14:33 If we’re going off of the assumption that “Danganrompa” is a popular thing in the game’s world then maybe “they” was referring to all of the people that died during the past killing games
gah after so many years of my love/hate relationship w danganronpa, i still gotta say i think this is the most interesting game in the series! this was such a good analysis, the detail of the cosplay lab floor matching the interviews is insane, I've never seen anyone point that out b4! I think personally v3 was intentionally created as a mystery not meant to be solved, (really obviously contradictory cutscenes- also a neat way to encourage replayability lol) and also to b self-contained, much like the original trigger happy havoc. in thh the ending shot cuts off before we can see the outside world, because whether or not it had actually been destroyed or it was junko's lie was irrelevant, it was the choice of the characters to see it for themselves that mattered. The intention was similar in v3, whether or not the characters were "real" is or should be irrelevant to the impact of their stories and our attachment to them. It's basically the most convoluted way of saying "fiction affects reality." v3 is a love letter and goodbye to danganronpa, it subverts the formula as much as it adheres to it, and is the most "meta" game in the series, which basically says "danganronpa shouldn't go on forever" (it still will, in fangames which explore concepts that we never got in canon... no 3rd trial double murder? no 3rd trial double murder PLEASE), and also, "we want to make a killing game that doesn't *have* to take place in the same universe" (because it's extremely limiting). tbh this is why a lot of fans like me prefer to just see it as being in an equally canon but different continuity (getting to the last chapter and whoops gotchya ofc this has to be connected to the previous games almost made me wanna smack my head against a wall... danganronpa gonna danganronpa) but the lack of clarity is one of the reasons people still talk about it, it's the reason there's something to come back to. woah whatta tangent yap yap yap anyway yeah this is a good theory with nice supporting evidence that does feel like something they would do 👍 ive been on a fnaf theory binge lately so it's insane to me that i found this channel thru danganronpa of all things, your style and presentation are really engaging (´・ω・)っ由
I've been a fan of the Danganronpa series for roughly four years, and this video is the best coverage I've seen on the logical inconsistencies for V3's ending
So, my theory has been for a while now that Team Danganronpa was trying to end the Danganronpa series with this season. They tried to make it seem like an unexpected outcome, but really it was the plan from the start. I hadn't considered the fact that the participants are strangely confused for people that literally signed up to be part of the killing game, but I'm gonna try to explain that away because I like my theory, which I am admittedly biased towards, and I want it to still work. What if it's common knowledge that you get told that you were chosen before you get thrust into anything? Like, they've all seen social media posts of people celebrating that they've been chosen and saying their goodbyes knowing they might die in the killing game. So when they're suddenly kidnapped and chased by giant robots, they probably aren't thinking of Danganronpa, because those aren't things that happen in Danganronpa (I claim the Exisals are new to this season). I propose that Team Danganronpa did this because giving the audience a peek behind the scenes and seeing the participants actually become the characters properly sets the stage for the audience to see those characters pull back the curtain and try to destory the show from within. I also propose that Tsumugi has been convinced with the Flashback Light to believe that she is the mastermind. She doesn't lie to you at all, she's just been intentionally misinformed about her own role in the show. Team Danganronpa was probably looking for a way to not only have one of the characters believably be the mastermind, but to have there be clues that would lead the non-mastermind characters to that conclusion. Once they saw Kaede build a trap that she wasn't physically present to see work, and that Tsumugi had a small gap in her alibi, they built a tunnel and planted evidence in the mastermind's room so that Shuichi would be able to "figure out" that the mastermind was responsible and that that person must be Tsumugi. The main reason I think this is the case is that Monokuma and Tsumugi seem to forthcoming with information if they genuinely didn't want Shuichi and co. to flip the script. Like, Monokuma should know that Shuichi has all the information to figure out that Tsumugi's the mastermind, Team DR explicitly left a book in Kokichi's lab that shows that the memories contradict reality, they gave Keebo a laser cannon so he could easily get into all the locked rooms and find all these clues, and Tsumugi basically tells them everything about the outside world. You could say that not choosing between hope and despair was where things went against Team DR's plans, but then why wouldn't Keebo vote? I don't care how convincing Shuichi is, even if he convinced the majority of the audience to abstain from the audience survey to choose Keebo's vote, there would still be a few trolls that would vote something to ruin it... unless "abstain" was on option on the survey, which Team DR would never allow unless they wanted the game to end. Also, and this is the part that's least likely to be an intentional decision by the game's writers and should probably be called a headcanon moreso than a theory, I think that Miu was the one who was actually working with Team DR the whole time. Like, she was a volunteer like everyone else, I bet, but they probably gave her knowledge of the game and the desire to work with them. That's why she made the floor plans in chapter 1 (literally why would she even think this would be remotely helpful unless she knew that the path of books on top of the shelves were there?), that's why she made it super obvious to Kokichi that she was trying to kill him (she wanted to create a more interesting murder than just her killing Kokichi, and maybe wanted to swing it so she'd die in the virtual world where maybe Team DR could store a backup of her consciousness into an Alter Ego Miu just before she died so she could continue work from behind the scenes), and that's why she made literally no attempt to escape despite knowing full well that she could (supposedly) invent devices like the Electrohammers, Electrobombs, and Exisal remote that could completely disable every piece of machinery keeping them locked in (she probably built them in such a way that, if absolutely necessary, Team DR could take control back from anything diabled/hijacked).
The Prologue before the first Flashback Light essentially answers this question definitively. All of it was a Monokubs mistake that was erased, so nothing in that dry run was false. There's no question that the participants were abducted unwillingly, and that it is common knowledge to overlook these abductions as it seems people know what it's for.
@@NotAGoodUsername360 If the bystanders were able to immediately figure out that the kidnapping was for Danganronpa, then shouldn't the participants have pieced that together as well? Why was Rantaro the only one to figure it out? Also, I don't recall any definitive proof that the pre-Flashback Light prologue wasn't shown to the audience. Is there any reason to suggest that the kidnappings weren't a first time thing so that the scene of them not having their memories could be shown to the audience? The inaction of the bystanders could be explained by what Tsumugi said about the world being peaceful; they might just not know how to react to that kind of thing. Or they could've just been bad people not willing to help, or the kidnappers could've been too threatening for any bystanders to feel like they stood a chance. And the Monokubs making a mistake could've been an intentional decision by Team Danganronpa so that that scene would be shown to the audience.
My biggest problem with danganronpa 3 is that I actually think that the plot they we’re doing for what was going on WAS ACTUALLY GOOD UNTIL the whole sending them to space deal and the whole tsumugi deal. I think it would have been a great plot twist if it was just that “Danganronpa” is just a tv show in their universe but that some were forced to participate and some weren’t because they loved the show, and show that Kaede was one of the ones that wanted to willingly participate. But also, Tsumugi just SHOULDNT have been the mastermind, because she didn’t do JACK SHIT throughout the whole game, it was honestly such an upsetting twist to me just because it was like, “well this is the last character that has no development, make them the villain!” STRONG BELIEVE that it should have been that Tsumugi was found out to kill Rontaro and we keep Kaede, only for Kaede to be the only one left off as the one to willingly participate, so by the last chapter when she regains her memory she is in between saving her new friends or continuing the game
My delusional self likes to think that everything tsumugi said was a lie and when shuichi, maki, amd himiko get out they see makoto, kyoko and all the other survivors and they help them out😭😭😭
Yo great video man, I do think v3 is easily the best of the trilogy and it's mostly because of the ending, gorgeous visuals (besides some CGs though lmao), Soundtrack which the games all have excellents ones but V3 has by far my favourite and some characters such as kokichi I enjoyed. the ending really does tie into the truth vs lies theme perfectly with no one being able to figure out which of the things Tsumugi said are a lie or a truth. I would not doubt for a second Metal Gear Solid 2 had a huge influence with the protagonist switch and the end game being a mind fuck plus from what I've heard Kodaka being a huge fan of the franchise as well. also huge W for the Sonic Adventure 2 and Final Fantasy 7 ost in the video :D
Honestly the whole point of the end of the game is just the devs coded message "were running out of ideas for these games and we kinda dont wanna make any more"
I dont appreciate you putting this person in the thumbnail and revealing to me that they're potentially a liar. This video showed in my recommended, and I'm in the middle of a playthrough of it. I don't care if it's not even her that's the mastermind, but i think being a bit thoughtful with spoilers, even fake ones, can go a long way. Others like me will be seeing this thumbnail and feel bad about it.
@@dabillya6845 Agreed. To be fair though, UA-cam recommendations can get influenced by google searches. You can literally just look up what gifts a character likes and then end up seeing DR videos in your feed :/
I did notice a few errors, but otherwise really nice video. One error I noticed was when you were discussing how Kaede's name wasn't censored out in the prologue while it was in the interview tapes.... I think that all comes down to perspective. Kaede's POV vs a Camera's POV. I don't think Kaede could exactly censor her own now like that. But I can understand if it was censored in the interview tapes if Tsumugi was pre-planning to use them to drive a stake of despair into their hearts by the end game. But I will say this, I think the one driving factor the game being in it's own universe is that if Tsumugi is telling the truth... then it'd make perfect sense as to why she'd only cosplay as the characters of Dr1 and DR2... (My guess is that since the game was being made around the same time as the DR3 anime, DR3 characters were excluded from her list of cosplays). The fact she doesn't cosplay as anyone 4-52 gives me a good feeling she might be telling the truth. As for Tsumugi pre-game... that's actually hard for me to figure out. There could be the possiblity that maybe she was putting on a good act. It's all so confusing still...
I think the major issue with V3's ending is that the flashback lights are too OP (combined with the Blacklight introduced at the start). You literally can just flash one and warp one's complete understanding and memories. And since emotions are directly related to how you remember an event, it calls into question nearly the entire story. How much of it was the characters actually performing their actions of their own free will? Did they even have free will? Or was it all influenced by Tsumugi? And why should we even care? Team DR can just flashback the world and they all love the show again. Even worse, the game completely ignores that Tsumugi isn't the Mastermind. The Mastermind is Team DR and it isn't really the world's fault. Team DR could stop at any time and refused (we can see this IRL where series can end even though fan interest is still at an all time high). So shouldn't we be facing Team DR as the true culprits and point out fairly that the flashback lights are OP and can't be stopped. I just stopped caring since how much of the characters are real and not artificially induced is subjective and impossible to determine. Almost the entire game depends on this plot twist and all I can think is "So like couldn't everyone just be murdered by Tsumugi in a dress? All she has to do is implant the memories and the characters will believe they did it." It isn't exactly her writing a script but her just doing as she pleases and building the narrative approximately she wants. Again, I get that it isn't a strict script, but like, why should I care when what little of the characters exists is probably fake? They themselves according to the twist are not real in their own world anymore. It's entirely possible it's all a lie, but the game itself has nothing to suggest what is true beyond theories or speculation. There's no substance that any of the characters even the initial incarnations are when Tsumugi or Team DR could have just flashbacked them into believing that. In that regard, who is supposed to be the real person? What is the actual truth? For a game about lies and truth, they should do a good job of making lies and truth the same, but a terrible job making some players feel satisfied with that answer.
I think part of the problem is that we in the west didn't really experience all the trickery the first two games pulled since we didn't get the Japanese marketing and got both 1 and 2 nearly back to back. The first game's marketing all heavily featured Sayaka in a leading role, framing her as our main side girl. The demo showcased half of the 'first trial', with Hiro being murdered and the evidence leaning towards Hifumi. Plus a second trial sporadically shown in trailers depicting someone attacking Junko at night. All of that was a lie. Sayaka dies first and was also involved. Danganronpa 1 also does not have a clean ending with solid answers in a vacuum at all. We never see what's past the door. Was Junko telling the truth, or is the world fine and she was just psychotic and had photoshopped some stuff. Our only corroborating witness is an insane nutter who speaks in tongues and doesn't give much detail. What happened in that old classroom, how did Junko erase our memories if she even did, zero answers. Danganronpa 0 came out a year later and is effectively the foundation for the rest of the series(the amount of stuff in both 2 and the anime that originates here is astounding). DR2's marketing and character design was intentionally designed to cause as much confusion as possible. A ton of characters looked like other characters or had certain attributes. Some very blatant (Byakuya seemingly returning, Nagito's name is an anagram of It's Makoto Naegi!, Akane looks super close to Aoi) and some more subtle(most of the rest of the cast). Was this a sequel to the first game or a prequel? Is this the same Byakuya? Are some of this cast actually just the old cast? Is this a retelling or some sort of AU? Are these the last games characters kids? It's impossible to tell for the bulk of the game if this is a prequel, sequel, AU, or anything of the sort. It's even more confusing in context because remember, this is AFTER Danganronpa 0, and before the DR3 Class 77-B retcon. Alongside stuff like Izuru hanging in the back of peoples minds, we know of 2 students in Class 77 already, Ultimate Neurologist and Ultimate Spy. Neither of them are in DR2, so if it's a sequel they're both already dead and if it's a prequel something else happened, but either way, there are only 16 students to a class here which means two people in SDR2 don't belong. Someone playing the game in Japanese who's read DR0 knows about Matsuda and Yuto and is suspicious to start with, and will probably believe it's Byakuya and The Traitor, but nope, it's US and Chiaki. (This detail was ruined by an anime retcon splitting the class in two so they could make Chiaki real and then invent Mitarai to do the brainwashing stuff even though I'm pretty sure Matsuda could have done something like that being Junko's brainwashing guru was kind of his thing). And again, vague ending as to the exact fates of everyone. V3 again pulled the same tricks, cranked up hard again and sort of combining the previous games. Just like DR1, the marketing and start of the game is misleading. But rather than being about the sidekick, it's about the Protagonist, Kaede is the Chapter 1 killer and midway through the trial we switch to playing as the Ultimate Detective. There's also a demo, which both tricks us into thinking this will be intimately tied to the first games and makes us question the universe/timeline(just like DR2 did), but also kills Hiro basically as a joke/callback to DR1's demo. V3 is extremely vague about if this takes place in the mainline canon or not, just like DR2 was. In English they further crank this up by reusing old VAs for everyone to maximise confusion. Just like DR1 we have zero clue how much we can trust the ending, just like with Junko we can't be sure the pictures shown to us weren't tampered with, can't trust our memories since a way to mess with them is established, can't trust our witnesses who may not be right in the head. Is Tsumugi honest, partially lying, or completely full of crap? Sure, Junko ended up being utterly honest at the end of DR1, but along with her character being very different (harsh, horrific truths and half riddles. Tsugumi lies way more) Danganronpa loves to parallel itself, but rarely directly repeat itself. All 3 games have a dark secondary sidekick, but Byakuya is the only one to survive, Kokichi is the only one to actually be murdered by someone else. Nagito is the only one to off himself. All 3 games have a double murder chapter, but DR1 is the only one to have two killers(Hifumi killed Taka and Celeste killed Hifumi), in the other two it's the same person both times. All 3 games have a chapter where someone is accused of being a serial killer alongside the blackened and that is used as evidence to tie them in. In DR1 they were correct about Toko being Genocider Syo, but wrong about her being the Blackened, she was framed. In DR2 they were correct about Peko being the blackened, but wrong about her being KiraKira(she intentionally mislead them to pull her 'I was only following orders' trick). And in DRV3 they're correct on both counts, Korekiyo is both the Sister Killer and the Double Blackened.
My assumption was always the show was a cover to hunt out hidden ultimate students who went into hiding in fear of the remanence of despair and they brainwashed Tsmugi to be the killer to take the fall. The cospox is a sign that she’s brainwashed to believe the first class and second class were fictional and not the heroes they were irl, to further brainwash her into believing what she’s doing is right and she can’t cosplay her fellow students because they are in fact real ultimates. She may have even volunteered to be the killer. Rantaro even shows they’re doomed even if they win the game, they’ll just be thrown into another game. They just want to kill off all ultimates. As long as Monokuma is alive, so is Junko
@@throwwway9152 I am not a big UA-camr. Prior to this only one of my videos got this level of viewership. I'm working on changing the thumbnail, but seeing as I have a FULL TIME JOB and my channel is not monetized, it's not very high up on my priority list to update the thumbnail of a video on a 7 year old game because every once in a while there's someone who hasn't played it and jumps to wild conclusions based on my thumbnail. Spoilers happen, sorry, maybe go finish the game instead of clicking on V3 content because you realize UA-cam is just going to recommend you more V3 content now right? You're setting yourself up to get spoiled MORE by taking potshots in my comment section
I still think V3 is my favorite story in the series, and I feel like a big part of that is how much better they handled the theme of the game than in THH and Goodbye Despair. The games that came before suffered a lot from Word Desensitization, if that makes sense. The key words of the games, like Hope and Despair were thrown around so much and from so many different people with different views that the words kinda lost their meaning after a while. Which granted, I believe was the point, and as much as I dislike the DGR3 anime, I think it does a good job of cementing that belief in me. Hell, Munakata ALONE does a good job of that. Still though, the point remains that the words themselves lost meaning pretty fast. By contrast, V3 has Truth and Lies as the themes, which offers major advantages from a writing perspective, right? For one, much more concrete. Hope and Despair? Very vague and nebulous terms when you get down to it. Again, I believe that was intentional, but AGAIN again, it still causes problems in the moment. It made the first two games feel like they were twisting themselves into knots in order fit and communicate their ideas meaningfully, to varying degrees of success. V3's Truth and Lies doesn't have that problem. Much more concrete. Much more self evident. And most importantly, much more fitting for a murder mystery game. Hope and Despair? You can make it work, but it still feels so removed from the nature of the game. Very much so a narrative themeing that doesn't really interact with the gameplay itself. That's not a BAD thing, granted, but again. It made past games almost feel like they were twisting themselves into knots to to make everything fit together. Once more, due to how much more narratively and mechanically appropriate they are, Truth and Lies become much easier themes to work with. And personally I feel like, even with all the narrative perfection that Kokichi's character delivered, NOTHING embodies how perfect the theming is than the final case. As it should, right? Final case, culmination of everything, gotta make a big splash with it. And really, to be fair, it's nothing NEW when you get down into the nitty gritty, is it? The narrative ideas executed during the final trial of V3 is the same as every other final trial in the series. You get there, you unveil the mastermind, both along the way and afterwards discovering that more or less everything you thought you knew so certainly up to this point was a lie, including a large amount of information you know about yourselves. With THH that was learning about the amnesia and all that it implied, and Goodbye Despair had all the Remnants of Despair revelations on top of the Izuru Kamukura mind fuck. V3 quite literally goes "All of It" in regards to how much of everything is actually a lie, and both the players and the characters are forced to kinda just... DEAL with it. Even in the end there's no truly satisfying confirmation or debunking of that being the reality and I find that a genuinely wonderful thing, cuz it forces our characters to truly wrestle with that potential reality of everything they are being a lie, and find a way to move past that dilemma. Personally, I think the answer they arrive at is a beautiful piece of writing and would genuinely believe this game is a far lesser experience without it. It's genuinely one of the few things that got me really emotional while I was playing the game. I love the ending of this game, I really do. Even if it does suffer from the same Kryptonite as every other mainline entry. The shitty, way too god damn short epilogues.😂 I dunno why epilogues are Kodaka's Kryptonite, but they are. Even Rain Code suffered from it, though in a different way than DGR games. UDG was good. It had a perfectly fine epilogue. That proves he can do them right. I don't know why he doesn't. Personally, I'm resigned to thinking he does it just to fuck with people like me whose brains will keep us awake all night trying to rewrite the epilogues in our heads so that we can be satisfied. Yes, my excuse I give him is that he's attacking me personally. Why does that make me forgive him? I dunno, this dev/player relationship is more toxic than ActiBlizz at it's worst. HELP.😂
16:00 you forgot, where Kaede Akamatsu gets a "head-ache" when trying to remember & inreturn somewhat became herself again, without the first flashback light memory. Even in one of Tsumugi's free-time event with Kaede has Tsumugi call out Kaede spoke differently to what she was expected to say. Also "Why is Tsumugi the only staff on site?" Simple, IT'S A SIMULATION & there's evidencce to back this up, with what the Monokub's says to Kaede & Shuichi about the outside area of the school, matches how the NEO World Program also works, it also explains how Tsumugi also changes characters in the final trial, like how Miu changed the avatars in the NEO World Program... and the simulation matches what is seen in Kaede's Headache (Yes there is indeed a CGI that appers for a short moment), it also explains how Kiibo became a Robot when he was a human in the prologue.
An additional bit of evidence to me has always been Mikan's strength and endurance. Flashy-thing her to believe she's an assassin all you want, memories does not equal years of training like that. Whether she was actually an assassin, difficult to say, but she was *something.*
Glad we get videos like this that touch on how the "plot hole" is a feature and not a bug. Everything about Tsumugi is completely suspect when one explores the implications of the ending at face value, to the point that one could reasonably make an argument for Tsumugi being a victim, the mastermind, one of several masterminds, or just someone who got "written in" to the role halfway through.
I'm mostly most of this makes sense though I would have included sealing industries as an explanation for the Exisals as high tech experiments still seem to need some sort of basis. Cool theory. Any thoughts on the transition of images from drawings to "real" people in that book in the ultimate detective lab?
Something that has always irked me about Tsumugi’s “cospox” is that she can cosplay Monokuma when Junko is holding him. Monokuma is just as real in this reality as Kaede, so if cospox was real, she should have turned pink.
I love the message tho. don't pressure people to continue an ip and also stop being hyperobsessed with fiction and seperate it from reality biiiiittchhhhh! *looks at actual irl cosplay killer*
It does feel heavily flawed, to the point of losing all its meaning. According to the prologue, only Rantaro, the previous Survivor of the last game, knew what was going on. Nobody else seemed to be aware, and this includes Tsumugi who's supposed to be the one running everything in the first place. Then even as the mastermind, she's too unreliable with her "Cospox" and unclear line of what's "real" and "lies"... It really begs the question of what the audience is supposed to believe, and for the most part the only "real" idea of the narrative is headcanon. There's no actual canon to be found, almost fittingly since the game's central gimmick is lying.
They made the entire stupid last episode to piss ppl off because they're forced to make v3 they didn't even want to make more danganronpa so the best thing to do is to ruin it so ppl don't ask for more
I think I just figured something out. The funeral scene is absolutely real. I’m almost certain that each character was kidnapped and presumed to be dead by the general population. My guess is that each character really did have an ultimate talent and in the beginning stages Tsumugi erased their memories and made them random students in order to make the fake interview videos which could be used for a variety of motives. Then she reverted them back to normal to start the game. Also another thing that points to her straight up lying about everything is the technology used in the game. All of it is reflective of the kind of tech found in the other games. Obviously Monkuma robots, but also the biggest one is memory erasing and brainwashing. Maybe they were developed specifically to make the show, but I doubt that. I might be wrong, but I’m absolutely certain that Tsumugi saw the first killing game and tried her best to cosplay/copycat or cosplaycat in her words Junko’s first killing game
I think the simplest explanation is that they’re real people with talents in a universe where danganronpa was a tv show/game. I don’t think we will ever get any additional context
With the question of whether they refer to Kaede or everyone in the killing game, it would be worth it to check out the original Japanese lines. Japanese isn’t gendered the same way as English, and if it’s a plural, it would be extremely easy to tell, since that would be indicated with 達 (tachi).
17:08 where the heck didn you pull that age from? No where is she said to be that young its far more likely shed be around 19 or so like the other cast
@@isauldron4337 This is true. But if Atlus can do it for Shin Megami Tensei 3 when nobody asked, NAS has the time and resources to fix V3 (Decadence was a perfect opportunity) if it was really that important to them.
I think Tsumugi calls DR the "Ultimate real fiction" one or multiple times, yes? Maybe that's where the destinction lies in the cospox situation, though it is weird regardless. If those audition tapes really are made by Tsumugi, why does she not break into cospox there? Does it imply their pre-ultimate forms are the fictional ones, or is it just a lie altogether? I don't think the audience is supposed to be fake either. Otherwise, why does Tsumugi seem genuinely surprised when they tune out at the end? Is that all just a performance by her too? It doesn't seem that way to me Though Tsumugi's position is also nebulous. Before the flashback light, she seems to act with the same surprise as everyone else. What would be the point keeping up that front if she knows things have gone awry and everyone will just get memwiped anyway? (Though, somewhat off topic, I think in universe, the Monokubs messing up is pretty clearly intentional, the motoves especially, with the goal of spicing up the show). Perhaps the writers want to distance themselves as much as possible to the point they inserted Tsumugi's character so they can closely control the show without putting themselves in danger Also, why does no one recognize Rantaro? If DR was truly such a big phenomenon, you'd think at least one other person would know who he was from the previous killing game. The game seems to imply the writers are kind of creatively bankrupt and milking the series at some points, e.g. the Monokubs, so it could be that the students were familiar with Danganronpa, but don't follow it closely due to its waning popularity and that's why they recognize the Monokubs but not Rantaro, but it's still strange There are a lot of small things in this game that make me wonder whether there is something going over my head. But maybe that's just the result of the lies vs truth theme purposefully setting up a lot of questions without the devs actually having an answer for them, or are omitting enough to the point that there it truly is open ended, which would be a bit disappointing
@@Expresso52 i think you hit the nail on the head when you said there are intentional questions the devs never thought of an answer for. I think it makes for a more open-ended ending, which fits the game's themes perfectly. I just wanted my video to start a conversation about that open-endedness
@@TheFlinchyDinosaur Oh yeah, definitely. It was a fun watch, even if I see some things differently. I'm also just trying to put my thoughts out there what some of these things could mean or how they can be interpreted.
There was really no need for such a spoiler thumbnail. If anyone is playing through the game rn and the algorythm somehow recommends your video, they're getting spoiled for free.
right on. there's a lot of pieces that just don't fit. the "flashback" tsumugi shows of the students getting welcomed into the killing game is totally different from the actual intro we get to see. it's clear she's lying about a lot of things, as you've pointed out. one of the things i've found especially weird is also one or two of the motives - particularly the one where they could bring someone back. that one is a major crack in the story for me. if kiyo had not killed angie, she would've completed the ritual successfully, in which case... what woulda happened? would they bring in a lookalike for rantaro and 'flashback light' everyone into believing it's him? or aren't the characters as dead as they seem? (look, im still on my "kaede alive pls" cope, im sorry.)
@@glmpimenta considering every time game staff gets asked about it, they deny it: I don't think it's their intention. Besides, this whole video is basically just me saying "Death of the Author" over and over again.
Unfortunately, I think the fact that the entire killing game was scripted more or less answers a lot of the points brought up in the video regarding the prologue. It explains why the prologue isn't consistent, why the kidnapping was "remembered" during said prologue and why real names were never used. Sure, I think there's a lot of room open for theories and the like, but I find it hard to believe anything other than V3 being an AU. Not because "I want the other games' characters to be real within their world", but because it was more or less implied by the game and I don't think there's been any compelling arguments against this. Danganronpa is fake in V3's universe but very real in the other games' universe. Not that I think this is anywhere near an original take lmao. I feel like it's the entire reason this game "isn't connected" to the others, as it was marketed originally not to have a connection to the other games. Mentioning the original killing games near the end of V3 was how they got us to believe they were actually connected, but the reveal that they're just entertainment in V3's universe is how it was separated from the past games again. This feels intentional to me. Also Tsumugi is totally a 45 year old corporate man cosplaying as a teenager. Change my mind.
14:20 Some of my thoughts Ive heard people refer to people who aremt nonbinary as they before The they pronoun couldve also been used to make the story more ambiguous? I have no clue.
There's a line in the game that many see as a throwaway. You find yearbooks and it's commented that the first two are cartoons, while the yearbooks from 3 on are photos. The Tsumugi says the first two were just a cartoon That with the yearbooks you find are supposed to confirm that the first 2 games are fiction, and thus Tsumugi doesn't get cospox. The games/cartoon was so popular that they decided to make the game in real life, which launched the reality killing game show with real people who volunteer to have their memories rewritten to be ultimates
Hate to say it but I had plenty of... my mind hurts from the amount of disbelieve I have to suspend in order to take some things seriously. So I'm gonna rant, possibly waste your time and definitely nitpick unnecessary things... but oh well. First thing that ticked me off is the funeral scene. You framed it as if there wasn't an explanation for it, but there is like pointed out in the edit, not only was it confirmed to be a funeral of everyone but it's also clearly stated later on to be fake, because it relates to the background fake V3 lore, aka ultimate hunt, Gofer project, worldwide epidemic, space travel... and all that other bullshit that Kokichi uses to play up his mastermind persona. The funeral tied into the plot by being about how the ultimates faked their death before erasing their memories to run from the Gofer project. I know it's stupid, but so is the entire fake narrative that plays as a distraction in between chapter plot. That means none of these scenes, especially since they were implanted by flashback lights can be taken as actual serious events. Second, about tsumugi cosplaying characters, your argument was that since she won't consplay V3 characters there is reason for doubt that her cospox is real and while I'm not trying to validate cospox as an element because it's stupid... there are two points I want to acknowledge. For one the series is not exactly a stranger to bullshit reality bending stuff... Junko's rapid personality switching, Nagito's luck in general, Nekomatu tanking a rocket to the face and living, the Imposter's ability to fool everyone without question, Seiko turning into a literal mutant and Ryota literally inventing brainwashing videos, but no a cosplayer getting sick from pretending to be a real person is breaking reality too much. And second if you wanna claim Tsumugi is weird for not cosplaying V3 characters... take a look at DR3 and UDG. Since they feature characters from the first two games that are fictional that should be proof that every character from those two should be as well... so why isn't Tsumugi consplaying them? I can excuse DR3 as they have no sprites, but UDG has and they still weren't used. So clearly Tsumugi is playing favorites which makes the argument feel less definitive to me. Next let's talk about that damn wooden floor in the background and the audition tapes. Question have you ever been to an audition? Like you go to a place to make a pitch for yourself? Because if you had in that case of course everyone would have the same background, because they were filmed on site. They get fans to come to them and introduce themselves as a pitch and it's filmed to look back and evaluate it or simply show it off to other people, in this case the games cast. And besides why does that floor in the background even matter? There are a lot of wooden floors that under the right lighting would look like that, hate to say it but a wooden floor can look very similar while being two different places. I can tell you did fnaf before because background overanalyzation is a part of that fandom, wanna know which series rarely if ever uses such visual hints... Danganronpa. It's very tell don't show if you couldn't tell, them randomly putting a floor in the background to hint that the audition tapes were filmed there is a stretch because if that was the intend they would've made the floor in that lab and on video have a unique detail that would give this theory some ground. I could point out more nitpicks and I'd likely find even more if I rewatched the video... but I'd like to not write too many of these, so instead let's talk about the one big issue that I have with this entire thing. These V3 theories that go deep into the what ifs and try to proof or at least explain a head canon always play too much into the gimmick of V3 being open ended and never look at the actual meta point of view which is would it make sense to be the answer and does it even fit the themes, message and intend behind V3 and 9 times out of 10 such theories don't. Think what is V3 about? In the simplest terms it's about a long running series getting stale and unimaginitive after a while. That's the commentary. Messages the game tries to push are "lies aren't always bad and are sometimes necessary for the truth or can even become the truth", "fictional media isn't meaningless just because it's fictional and can indeed have an impact on reality" and "a long running series would lose all of it's magic, so you should end it when it reaches that point". Now ask yourself with this as your meta plan... what do you think Kodaka thought the truth behind everything is and would your theory be in line with that vision. And the plain and simple answer is, it doesn't matter, whatever the truth is it doesn't matter because what we see has become the new truth and lies were necessary to get us here. What is truly behind the open ending of V3 is irrelevant because the story ended and any truth behind it revealing something new would invalidate the meaning behind the ending being the end to a series that if it were to continue would get worse. No explanation for V3's ending matters because the series is gone now, it's behind us and that ending parralels the other two because the three survivors get to enter a new world in which they choose their future away from being "characters" and they hope that after all this the reality of killing games becoming entertainment is gone and they can live a life that won't treat them as lesser for being part fiction. This fits the themes of V3, fiction mattered, lies became the truth to us and these characters and the franchise ended because it should end. Anything more would not support these themes, themes that clearly shaped everything we see on screen. So no matter how much evidence you do have for your theory and even if I couldn't try to poke holes into it, I can't in good faith believe it because it doesn't support anything the game tries to stand for. So while I believe the video to be of good production quality and I certainly see all the effort that went into it. While I can respect the work, I don't like the actual theory and I hope my criticism doesn't deter you from making new ones in the future.
I had a response typed up analyzing your comment in good faith and I'm actually going to store it in a google doc because I'm a little offended by your "I can tell you did fnaf before" jab. Not because it's disrespectful to me, but because its disrespectful to people I admire. Also, because its a little bit weird that because my first 2 videos were FNAF-related you've decided that I'm now "the FNAF guy". I actually like Danganronpa MORE than FNAF if you can believe it. Unlike FNAF, I can talk about Danganronpa without getting into arguments about what did and did not happen in the majority of its' story. I just want you to know I'm not trying to force my headcanon or whatever, I honestly don't care what "actually happened" because it's all open-ended like you said. I'm actually really ticked off that of all the messages my video could have sent, the one people came away with was "See, everyone is DUMB for not seeing what masterful Kodaka TRULY INTENDED". That's the opposite of what I wanted, if someone were to ask Kodaka what was true and what wasn't he would probably laugh and say he forgot. I just wanted my video to get people to look at V3's ending more creatively instead of treating it with such finality. Speculation is what makes open-ended works so fun.
@@TheFlinchyDinosaur I don't exactly take issue with how you look at it... I did say I was gonna waste your time with it. Really it's just mindless ramblings about things I think just bothered me a bit. Also I'm not saying I thought you pushed for your theory or anything, just that for personal reasons some based on observations that to me seem clear, I don't agree with it. And of course the fnaf jab is technically a self burn as well... seeing as I wouldn't have known what the general modus operandi of that fandom would be like if I wasn't at least a part of it for a time. And it's not like I said you're the fnaf guy now, I just thought it was a observation based on context clues that made sense since I see such outragous claimes rarely in the DR community and much more with fnaf. Ultimately I'm not a critic, I just like yourself, share a view with other people, in your case it was a perpective that was unorthodox to some, but I'd say same goes for me. I can't exactly prove you wrong definitively after all. We look at things differently and both of us try to show people our way to at least offer something else. Well whatever the case if you want to consider or ignore my points is at the end of the day not in my control, so do whatever you want, I'll just do the same in return. But I do have to say, seeing continous theories about a seven year old game with almost all of them making me question what the point of the entire game is... has really started to influence me, so if I sound confrontational in my way of approaching such theories, I apologize. I just want to see people agree on something for once, which I know I won't get, but still.
@@ProfessorNiloThe original ending or whatever you were fighting for or trying to show everyone what kodaka wanted is only true if you take everything in at face value. But even then a lot of questions arise because let’s be honest Kodaka is kind of a bad writer who more than often wastes character/ story potential and doesn’t have an answer for. He probably made the ending thinking it was deep and didn’t think much about if it really made sense or not. Theories like these are trying to make this game make sense because lord knows kodaka can’t do that.
@@JunPhantom I think you got my intend here backwards. I don't fight for the "canon" ending or whatever... my point is that I want to see a theory that aligns with the established themes of the story or in on other words makes sense from a narrative point of view. Call whoever you want a good or bad writer, but I can tell you for a fact a good one has a message behind their story and themes to support it. This is creative writing 101, it's one of the first things that gets drilled into you when learning how to write. If I see a theory that ignores all of these messages and themes I can not take it seriously, because it just feels like they didn't understand what the game was about. Sure an elaborate theory might be interesting, but if it doesn't support the narrative what's the point? I don't care what's the truth, because I don't think it really exists, but I do care about narrative consistency. And me not liking a theory because it's narratively inconsistent should not be anything crazy. I hope this puts my intend here into a better perspective, because I don't know how you read my comment, but I think you didn't get my point at the end at all.
The flashback lights could easily be used to broadcast memories of a good time but instead they use it to rewrite memories for a fucking killing game. It's an extremely stupid plot point. V3 is a stupid game. Like why bother going to the trouble of killing people when you could just beam entertainment directly into people's heads?
I think the 'standard' interpertation is that as stated when investigating shuichi's lab the first games and shows are 'drawn', meaning they are just game in universe(like they are for us). V3 is a reality show with real humans that have implanted memories, thier personas are fictonal with real bodies which ia why tsumugi calles them fictiinal. That is why tsumugi can cosplay as dr characters, in universe they are just video game characters. That is also why she cant cosplay kaede, kaede's body ia that of a real human. About how the show is poorly run: It is said that tsumugi wrote some of the plotlines like the kaito maki love plot and from this we can infer that it is at least somewhat scripted. We can also see how using the implanted personas of the drv3 cast dr team could have manipulated some of the main plotlines and murders. An example would be how in case 2. Kirumi's persona would always prioritise her helping the outside world over continuing the killing game. With this in mind the dr team could use the motive videos whenever they wanted her to kill(they could also make the motive less important to the rest of the cast so only she tries to kill). This shows the limited control they had on the game using the cast's personas and motives. While there are momemts that the show goes wrong like how there is no murder in case 1, the game shows how the dr team will just break the rules to fix the nerative in those cases. This is the most common interpertation and i disagree with some of it, but it does clarify some of the misuderstandings you had about the game
This entire video just feels like a COPE that tries to still cling to idea that Danganronpa series wasn't fictional in V3. I think Kodaka's message was pretty clear, It was fictional and "didn't matter" but that doesn't mean it didn't feel real to us. Kaito was fictional but his messages and character was real for Maki, Kaede was fictional but the love Shuichi felt for her was real, same with Tenko/Himiko etc. If you try to overanalyze it and try to imply Tsumugi is just a liar then you are removing the main message from Kodakas work. Just like Anime ressurecting DR2 characters for happy ending completely making their sacrifice and story arcs no longer impactfull.
@@MrConredsX If you think my silly video "removes" anything from V3 then there is a fundamental problem with how you consume media and engage with other's ideas.
Tsumugi doesnt the entire thing is clearly a show shes a real ultimate so theres an obvious lie also the game is very interesting to go through once you know the twist its kind of funny watching the show itself go into choas and catching moments where tsumigi says something odd or goofs arounds because shes lowkey working
Just so people know before they leave a comment, V3 was never "scripted" by Team Danganronpa. They used the flashback lights to motivate the characters towards a predetermined outcome for the show. It's not like there was a script being beamed directly into their brains via the flashback lights
I'd argue that you're overselling Tsumugi
I think she's just as brainwashed as everyone else here
I will say nice catch on her stage I completely agree that she made those "confession" videos
Having said that I believe the cutaways are legit and the people are watching this as a gameshow en mass
You may have forgotten in Danganronpa 3 the Anime The world was Brainwashed "for hope" by Ryota Mitarai
While it was ended early it very likely had a lasting effect on people psyche
I believe this is a significant detail in understanding V3 as I believe the world is in a post Brainwashed state
The point of V3 is not to induce Despair but to Manufacture a new "Ultimate Hope"
But they realized to truly do that they had to re create Junko the ultimate despair in some way
The reason they talk about all those people that died might be due to the fact that
at the end of the Game Kibo self Destructs blowing everything up
I believe it also terminated the live stream
So after Shuichi and the other two escape
I believe that the world assumed them dead with everyone else in the explosion
I believe Rantaro is the Ultimate Survivor not because he made it to the end of the killing game
but actually he won the killing game through killing which is why they decided to both recycle him
and make him the first victim as one who gave into and caused despair cannot be the ultimate hope
Heck the ultimate hunt itself might not mean hunting for Ultimates
but to hunt for regular people who didn't get brainwashed because they
weren't watching any screens during *that* time to make them into "ultimates"
@@sirrealgaming6913 Wasn't the hope video cancelled by Hajime though in the final episode ?
@@Chaki21 It was cancelled after it had already started brainwashing people leaving it kind of up in the air with how much people were effected by it
@@Chaki21 Yes, and it is clear in lore that Makoto continues on to make Hope's Peak grow, with the former Remnants being around if needed to help.
@@Chaki21 It was cancelled late though
The world was already brainwashed to some extent
Exactly how much we don't really know
but assuming V3 takes place in the same universe
it makes quite a bit of sense
I think ‘cospox’ is just makeup effects. It would be child’s play for Tsumugi to do this, considering she can quickly change to look like Sakura who has an entire different body type, different skin tone, and large scars
Cospox is just a mandatory rule Tsumugi needed to add to the game, so she shouldn't be suspected to be a body double for anyone at anytime.
100% it's a case of villain handicapping themselves. Of course she can cosplay as "her own characters." She just maintains that rule to make herself seem useless. No different than a certain Zero Escape villain pretending to be blind and deaf.
For real! I figured “cospox” was just her using body paint. Of course, whatever the reason, the cospox thing was just to give her an out
she doesn't even need make up if the game is happening in a simulation she could just set her skin color to be whatever she wants.
Yeah, if cospox wasn't a thing we'd end up suspecting her of a LOT of mysterious circumstances that occur, so she made up some bullshit so that wouldn't happen
Despite Tsumugi having a intended script, she doesn't have full control over how things play out since the V3 cast are still people. Flashback lights, motives, and how she wrote her characters personalities nudge them in the direction she wants things to go. Things can still go off script though, which is why Tsumugi must take part in the game, to rectify anything that that might not go with her intended narrative.
Kaede's trap that should've killed Rantaro failed, so she needed to step in to fix that error as Kaede needs to be the blackened to build Shuichi's character. Angie getting carried away with becoming a leader to the point where she destroyed a flashback was not supposed to happen. Kokichi's whole plan to break the participants spirits to continue the killing game and then his unidentifiable murder with Kaito when Tsumugi sabotaged his original plan thanks to the Hopes Peak flashback light definitely wasn't supposed to happen. Hell, Tsumugi incorporating Hopes Peak into her Gofer Project storyline was a last minute addition to rectify Kokichi's actions and encourage the remaining participants to take a stand against Kokichi.
What ultimately damned her in the end though was Kaito's execution breaking Keebo free from the outside world's influence, resulting in him making the choice to "Awaken" and destroy the academy. That lead to Shuichi finding the last remaining clues that exposed Tsumugi's involvement with Rantaro's death, Kaede's rigged execution and the creation of the flashback lights, all things that was never intended to be discovered in Tsumugi's intended narrative. From there, she had no choice to improvise and make herself the villian in her story, aka Junko Enoshima the 53rd, and when Shuichi eventually saw through that too, she played along and revealed the real truth that'd make the remaining participants fall into despair as they should in a final class trial.
Idk why people hate so much v3, tsumigi was much a more strategic and logical villain than junko and ai junko, like she did have to act being "the boring and plain character that nobody cares-" and she did it so well, i really like her and i think she is underrated as such as the ending, even tho it puts an "end" to the franchise, i think there still are much more plotlines to explore and theorize
@@Sam-tl4ho
Hooray, I found an awesome person! :D
Yes, Tsumugi is my spirit animal and I love her.
@@Sam-tl4ho She did it so well that it DID make her a boring and forgettable character
No wonder people don't like her, despite her plan being sound. She feels like her personality is to have no personality, a sharp contrast to Junko who is overflowing with personalities, but not one that makes her fun.
@@Chaki21 i guess tsumigi got brain wash into being a helper of danganronpa, some theories say that she survived a killing game but that only made her be linked forever to danganronpa and suffer even more
@@Chaki21 Looking back at the prologue, it's interesting seeing 3 characters openingly call out how plain and generic they are. Pregame Kaede questions out loud with Pregame Shuichi why someone would kidnap her at all because she's just a ordinary girl, and Shuichi shimes in with the same consensus that he's just a regular guy. Then later when the Pregame crew get surrounded by the exisals in the gym as they debate on how they plan on tormenting the students, Pregame Tenko flips out in fear, outright stating it wouldn't be fun to pick on "plain good-for-nothing commoners" Three characters calling out how generic and ordinary that are before the one character we know to call themselves that constantly; Tsumugi.
Now parallel that with the Makoto Kid we're introduced to during chapter 6's intro. That Makoto Kid introduces himself as being a boring person, how normal he looks, and he doesn't stand out at all. Considering how Tsumugi explained the outside world, regular people who are bored, it puts Tsumugi's "plain" coverup in a whole new perspective if everyone from the outside world including the Pregame crew also sees themselves as generic or plain in some aspect. Tsumugi being plain is not just for her to remain unnoticed, that's genuinely how she is and how she sees herself outside of her hobby, her personality and memories were kept the same unlike everyone else, she's the only "real" person personality wise. Tsumugi is the type of person that hyperfixates on fictional media and her hobbies so much that she doesn't have much of an identity outside of that, she invest her whole life into fantasy and fiction. That's actually a real thing some people irl go through who struggle to differentiate fiction from reality. Some people remain in their little bubble to cope with their real lives as life gets too real for most, and that's exactly what Tsumugi does, that's why the outside world and people in it like the Makoto Kid love the killing games so much.
I love to imagine Tsumugi lied about having everything planned too
Everything seems to go wrong constantly but she’s just like
“This is a normal amount of fire! This is fine!”
Clearly she did. Kokichi was clearly smarter than everyone else and nearly broke the game apart on his own. There is absolutely no way she planned that. Her sloppy handling of Rantaro's death was also not planned. It was last second. Literally everything was last second. She is just a worse version of Junko.
@@orga7777ie, she's a fangirl who plays herself off as smarter than she is. So, her "flaws" are... deeply accurate.
I mean Kokichi only broke the game so much. In the end, it doesn't matter if Monokuma knows who the killer is because the only way to prove it is for Kokichi/Kaito pop out of the machine. And when that happens, Monokuma can just punish them regardless if he knew BEFORE the voting. He can just stay the verdict or just say since it's an either or scenario he'll just kill everyone because they're both right and wrong and call it a wrap. Even then, we don't know if Team DR planned for Kokichi's chaos and just had no idea how far he'd go. They just went "Make someone who will try to derail the game" and she did and left it at that. She probably scripted it enough to happen and knew there wasn't any need to be concerned. If things go wild, Monokuma could just declare Kaito the winner and kill everyone else so they can start the next game. Again, it doesn't matter if Monokuma knows or not because you can't prove it without making it obvious who it was and just roll with that as the verdict. Kokichi banked a lot that the audience would care and wouldn't just tell the studio to execute everyone whether they get it wrong or right since both options are true. Or just call the trial a mistrial and end it with no verdict. It's not like he didn't do it prior games as far the audience really cares.
@@fridaylambda3494
Explain better
There's no way to prove Monokuma is wrong unless Kaito reveals he's in the Exosuit. As long as Monokuma can safely say "Whoever is in the suit is clearly the killer," the verdict doesn't really mean anything. The whole argument being presented is Monokuma has to know the culprit BEFORE the verdict. However, that's not really true. All Monokuma has to do is punish them if the students are wrong. And the only way to prove they got it right or wrong is if Kaito exposes himself. Monokuma by the end of the trial knows pretty much 100% that the person in the Exosuit is the killer. It isn't hard for him to go "Eh it doesn't really matter. I'll just execute you all since you can't prove who the killer is" and be done with it. Kokichi's assumption is in a Shorginer's cat scenario the verdict matters more than the truth. However, the argument they got it right and wrong is equally valid. Monokuma can just kill everyone since they're both right and wrong UNLESS the cat pops out of the machine. The verdict can hinge on Kaito's bluff by pointing out that he can just kill everyone if their wrong regardless if he knows they're right. All of this assuming of course that Kokichi's plan wasn't apart of the original script and Team DR already knows it's Kaito in the suit. And again, there's no proof the audience would really care that Monokuma knew or not. They could just be bloodthirsty and agree Monokuma should just kill everyone for the funsies for trying to and failing to ruin their fun. Again, it's a meaningless bluff because the only way to 'invalidate' Monokuma's verdict is to reveal who is in the suit, and once they do, he can decide who dies afterward. Does it really matter if Monokuma knows or not? Not really. He'll know after the verdict 100% of the time. If the kids are right, he kills Kaito. They're wrong he kills everyone else. It still follows the rules of the Killing Game to a T. There's no loophole if the rules don't specific Monokuma NEEDS TO KNOW the culprit to execute someone. He can do whatever he wants in this situation since there is no rule in place in the first place. Literally, DR1 establishes this when Junko just goes and tries to kill Kirigiri or Naegi for funsies for her murder instead of killing everyone for being too stupid to catch her in Ch 5.
My theory is that Tsumugi is a player in the game. There would be no reason for her to play 'ordinary high schooler' in the opening if they were all going to get their minds re-wiped anyways since it's implied that them not having their Ultimate Abilities at that time was a mistake. I think Team Dangan implanted false memories that she is the show-runner so they could have an inside agent for the survivors to sniff out and go up against.
It would make sense for her to want to play 'ordinary high schooler' in the context of Tsumugi wanting to keep her identity as the mastermind hidden from the audience for shock value later on. I always viewed Tsumugi as a corporate ladder climber that mangaged to get the green light for total creative control over an entire season of danganronpa.
There's practically no evidence for or against Tsumugi being the mastermind of any previous killing games, so in theory her reveal as the mastermind would come as a total shock to the viewers and deliver higher ratings. Keebo would be broadcasting during the opening scene, so she'd need to keep her plain jane persona about her during all that instead of just going full balls to the walls insane.
Unironically a very well done video. Got a genuine “WHAT” when you revealed the videos could have been made in tsumugis lab. Great work
I agree I had a similar theory that I posted about under the pinned comment
but I did not even notice that area in her research lab
Absolutely Massive find
@@sirrealgaming6913 He didn't find it. The comparison picture has been around for quite some time
@@S.omeone618 doesn't matter *who* found it the fact that it was found is massive
Gonta still does have a point in the first couple chapters tho. To have absolutely zero bugs in a large set like that is difficult. Most of the executions have at least one scene that takes place in a location clearly outside or at least exposed to the outside since no such places exist on set. I personally believe that V3 takes place in the Neo World program, idk why it would tho. There’s other reasons too. Tsumugi clearly lied about cospox and has borderline superpowers when it comes to changing voice and appearance. Monkuma and the cubs seem oddly biological at times (tongues, wings, hair, “rock hard ragers,” pregnancy, vomit, etc.). Last, the ending zoom out where you see the Team Danganronpa facade for the set is in a dark void-like room when inside the set it clearly glows bright white.
Oh and it should be obvious why the neo world program in chapter 4 is in no way the one we see in SDR2. It’s another lie to call that the same program
I do think it's weird that people take Tsumugi's "cospox" statement at face value. If she can't cosplay as real people, then there shouldn't be any restriction on her cosplaying as Kaede since Kaede is a fictional character. I think the twist is that Tsumugi can't cosplay as fictional characters which would be very detrimental as someone who does cosplay. More importantly, Tsumugi actually wants to wear her costumes because she doesn't like how cosplayers use the outfit for clout. It would fit the overall theme for Danganronpa where a character's talent is often a source of despair. Plus, at the end of her events you can see that her feelings towards cosplay are very twisted and despite having the lab and all of her materials, she doesn't actually put together any costumes for herself.
So… I do believe most of what she said, yes. Because it actually just makes sense. V3 *really* has that “whatever number of sequel” feel, where the team just doesn’t care anymore. The sheer amount of marketable plushies, the over-the-top sadistic executions, all the references to the first games, tired, unoriginal, broken storyline… hell, they’re literally building the school right in the middle of the season!
But the whole “participation in voluntary” is *definitely* bullshit. You don’t just kidnap your players. Even Rantaro was confused as to why they’re doing it that way! So it’s *way* more likely that they just stole a bunch of kids and immediately murdered them with a flashlight. Seeing the first half of the prologue is always so depressing… they are all effectively dead! And so unceremoniously, too…
For this, I like to use another piece of meta evidence. Considering Team Danganronpa’s logo really *was* there even before we started playing, I feel like this one might also be intentional. Also because it’s the *only* DR game that ever does this. Anyway… right when you boot up the game, you first get a basic “graphic content warning, which is fair. But the second one is.. pretty weird. It says “This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to real people is coincidental.” Why would *WE* need a message like that? I think it’s also in-universe, which is just.. actually sick.
Good points here, but that fiction disclaimer is actually a pretty common legal disclaimer, at least here in the US. I'm not 100% on this, but I think it's from an old lawsuit involving a work about the death of Rasputin, where one or more of his alleged killers were in the US after the revolution, and they sued the guy who made it for libel, which they won, as there was no direct evidence of their crime. Supposedly, the judge told them afterwards that if they had just said that any resemblance to real people was coincidental, even if it obviously wasnt, they probably would've won. And thus the disclaimer was born, being stuck on nearly everything to avoid getting sued. It's still might be meant to have broader significance in V3, but it's not guaranteed.
For real though people forget how disturbing the first half of the prologue is. Their personalities literally get erased, they basically die
Depending on how you look at it, I think the game implies their personality aren't erased entirely. Kaede's, and I believe Shuichi's, dialogue is the exact same after they wake up for the second time up to a certain point, suggesting that even if their backstories and some of their interests aren't the same, their core personalities, like how they react emotionally to stuff, are still intact, more or less. Though of course, at what point their memories being altered changing their personality makes them "effectively dead" is up to you
Tbf how real the original personalities were is also questionable. We can't be certain of anything as the rules of the flashback lights aren't specific enough to seal holes in the plot. Memories, emotions, everything are all linked to whatever is implanted by those lights. As such, the % of personality that is real is questionable at best. Tsumugi might have intentionally did that kidnapping fiasco at the start to build up the fake narrative in the ending so the audience wouldn't find any fault in the production. Having them believe they were kidnapped helps build the realism of the show vs. knowing these kids willing signed their lives away for live TV.
@@fridaylambda3494
Are you trying to imply that the audience was watching even the first half of prologue? ..no, that’s a bit ridiculous. Keebo wasn’t even a robot at that point (btw, why is nobody talking about that? That’s also super creepy). And that moment completely breaks any and all narrative. Tsumugi would never have said that they were all happy about it by the end if the audience literally watched the entire scene and saw that that’s not true. Danganronpa isn’t about that.
it's actually quite fitting for the ending of v3 (which theme is more truth v lie instead of the usual hope v despair) to have an ending that you can't fully trust as being the real truth. Think about it, you trust Tsumugi for the entire game (at least to some extent) and are then asked/expected to trust her at her word after she's been proven to be a liar who has been fooling you the entire game. No matter how elaborate a lie is, it is still a lie, even if it is framed as "coming clean"
(also i'd like to mention how in contrast to how Junko looked happy in her final moments of despair, Tsumugi out of cosplay looks uncertain and almost dissociative in a way. She should be happy, after all she's facing the despair of death just like junko but she isn't. it almost makes be feel like she was lying to herself as well and in her final moments she couldn't bring herself to lie any longer)
This is my favorite comment.
@@TheFlinchyDinosaurGuys what if the V3 students are in a "Rip Van Winkle" situation?
Let me explain: We saw in an episode of "Danganronpa 3: The End Of Hope's Peak Academy" that the students of the Reserve Course broke into Hope's Peak and started to murder the ultimate students, with the only survivors being Class 78 and Class 77.
Now, what if, during the Tragedy, the Hope's Peak higher-ups started a back-up plan consisting in kidnapping normal people and then turn them into Ultimates with the same technology that helped create Izuru Kamakura?
What if then they put them in a place isolated from everyone to keep them away from the disasters and then put them in a simulation in cryo-sleep where they will be fed with Flashback Lights containing exaggerated backstories that serve the purpose to ENHANCE their talents (This would explain Ryoma Hoshi killing mafia members with nothing but steel tennis balls) so that one day they could become the new symbols of hope to REPLACE all the fallen ultimates?
Only for the Remnants of Despair to find the place and create Team Danganronpa for their various purposes? I'm picturing three kind of people who would be part of Team Danganronpa:
- Hope's Peak Purists who want to see something that validates their outdated ideas of Hope = Talent. Since now that Makoto is on charge of the school he will start admitting even non-ultimate students
- Remnants of Despair who just want to spread despair
- Shady powerful people like mafia gangs, dictators, criminals of all kind, cultists and shady businessmen who use the fallen students like their slaves in a cruel example of human trafficking
When Kaede talked about how the world was rotten, what if she was talking about the world at the beginning of the Tragedy? When everything was going to shit and Hope's Peak was exposed for their human experimentation projects?
I thought the Kaede funeral scene was meant to be something kind of like a opening or closing scene of an episode to entice the viewers of the in universe TV show, and the player to question what exactly is going on.
My own personal theory is that Danganronpa IS fictional in their world, but Team Danganronpa isn't actually an official distributor of the series, and more like a cult/illegal organization that hosts disturbing reality shows featuring unwilling teens via kidnapping them. It has happened for decades on end with no leads to find any of teens who went missing, which is why people have stopped caring and Kaede got kidnapped in broad daylight without anyone to help. I thought of this theory when Rantaro said something weird in the prologue in the Japanese translation (i saw this somewhere on a forum so I don't know if it's 100% true, so take it with a grain of salt.l Instead of telling the Monokubs: "What's up with the ridiculous theatrics?" Theatrics is said as mimics/mimicry, additionally to Tsumugi in the finale saying:"... my plan was such a flawless copy." implying that Team Danganronpa is just a cheap copy, and not the actual thing from the anime, or maybe the Danganronpa events were real and Rantaro was talking about how they were copying Junko. idk tbh but this is what im choosing to believe.
literally my theory as well!!!!!!! this!!! ^^^^^^^
Guys what if the V3 students are in a "Rip Van Winkle" situation?
Let me explain: We saw in an episode of "Danganronpa 3: The End Of Hope's Peak Academy" that the students of the Reserve Course broke into Hope's Peak and started to murder the ultimate students, with the only survivors being Class 78 and Class 77.
Now, what if, during the Tragedy, the Hope's Peak higher-ups started a back-up plan consisting in kidnapping normal people and then turn them into Ultimates with the same technology that helped create Izuru Kamakura?
What if then they put them in a place isolated from everyone to keep them away from the disasters and then put them in a simulation in cryo-sleep where they will be fed with Flashback Lights containing exaggerated backstories that serve the purpose to ENHANCE their talents (This would explain Ryoma Hoshi killing mafia members with nothing but steel tennis balls) so that one day they could become the new symbols of hope to REPLACE all the fallen ultimates?
Only for the Remnants of Despair to find the place and create Team Danganronpa for their various purposes? I'm picturing three kind of people who would be part of Team Danganronpa:
- Hope's Peak Purists who want to see something that validates their outdated ideas of Hope = Talent. Since now that Makoto is on charge of the school he will start admitting even non-ultimate students
- Remnants of Despair who just want to spread despair
- Shady powerful people like mafia gangs, dictators, criminals of all kind, cultists and shady businessmen who use the fallen students like their slaves in a cruel example of human trafficking
When Kaede talked about how the world was rotten, what if she was talking about the world at the beginning of the Tragedy? When everything was going to shit and Hope's Peak was exposed for their human experimentation projects?
This is a good point, but I will note that normally when people refer to “theatrics,” they don’t mean it how the word is defined. If something is “theatrical,” it’s exaggerated and characteristic of theatre.
I personally headcanon Tsumugi to be just another victim of Danganronpa, likely one who survived the previous one alongside Rantaro, only to be made this season's "mastermind" via flashback light manipulation.
I do like the idea of the "V3" standing for "Version 3", rather than "53". If I were to fit my headcanon into yours, I'd say that while there were enough "Remnants of Despair" to sustain the show for a while, it's only a matter of time before those people start dying off, including the people behind the Danganronpa show, meaning a whole new staff. And as would happen with any show that runs for too long, it would go through seasonal rot, which would lead to people losing interest and looking elsewhere for some "fresh" entertainment. This would in turn lead to Danganronpa trying to keep interest up by adding in new characters (the Monokubs) and new gimmicks (the audience participation). It would also explain why this season was so shaky, as there's a new staff (including higher-ups) trying to keep up interest, but not knowing how.
THATS WHAT I THOUGHT V3 STOOD FOR. Version 3😭😭😭
great video. I think one of the problems with V3's ending is that I don't buy what's there, but coming up with any other theory is essentially just educated guessing. and I think your guess is as good as any, and one I also tend to think was what happened!
Yeah which is probably what the game wants which works for and against it.
Quoting a commenter who I agree with "Honestly it doesn't even matter if in universe danganronpa is real or not, cuz either way the emotions the characters and viewers feel are real and that's kinda the message V3 goes for, that fiction has an impact on reality."
@@ClubPuguin yeah I think that's absolutely the ultimate message you're supposed to come away with. but I think it also hurts itself by doing this whole "oooh is it true or not???" thing haha
@@mrp1234 my exact feelings. It's just so hard for me to take it seriously when the answer is _it doesn't matter because it feeelt real so it's impactful anyway! Isn't it soooo ironic!? Very fourth wall breaking! Much meta!_ and just... None of it not works for me *because* it doesn't matter.
It doesn't help that, having seen Undertale's much more structured and purposeful (and earnest) approach before whatever it is v3 is trying to do... this type of meta feels sloppy and time wasting and uninteresting to the point the entire game fails to get me invested. Hell, even SDR2 looks better in comparison and that virtual reality plot was the usual amount Danganronpa half asses concepts it really does not do justice! That _can_ feel like a natural progression of ideas if I squint hard but this... doesn't, no matter how much I try.
@@Depressed_Dandelion only sorta related but another thing that drives me nuts about V3 or at least the reaction to it is how people rightfully laugh at "hope vs despair" as a theme but act like "truth vs lies" is SOOOO DEEP and original
I do actually think DR2 handled "hope vs despair" better than V3 and "truth vs lies"
another interesting thing is that Kaede once had a flash where she seemed to be wearing some sort of headset. just a shot in the dark, but Tsumugi's killing game might take place within a virtual world, it would certainly explain how humanity now has a bunch of sci fi stuff not long after they were driven to near extinction.
also, we do know that at the beginning Keebo was a real person, you can see his fleshy self during the prolouge, which is kinda weird, cuz Tsumugi implies that Keebo was created solely for the killing game
I think the Ending of V3 makes as much sense as how much thought you're willing to put into it. I remember seeing plenty of people who get stuck on the whole "this is all fictional" stuff that they immediately check out and forget the details that contradict that. Personally I don't blame Tsumugi for what happens in V3 like others do, to me Tsumugi is as much of a victim of the killing game as everyone else. At the beginning of the game she clearly has no idea what is going on but after they brainwash the entire cast suddenly Tsumugi is given the role of Mastermind and just like that she became the perfect scapegoat for whoever is behind the killing game.
But again I believe that the Ending's impact depends entirely on how you choose to think about it: if all of this is fictional and it doesn't matter then that's that, if you belive (like me) that the cast is actually a bunch of people who were kidnapped and brainwashed into taking new identities to fit into the killing game then that's that.
Not to mention, who other than the Ultimate Cosplayer could get so attached to the killing games and its ‘characters’, enough to want to replicate it? Is that not what cosplay is?
I want to believe cospox was just a lie to keep the game running smoothly. As the mastermind, it's in Tsumugi's best interest to keep the game as exciting for it's audience as possible, and it'd get pretty boring if every suspect on trial could say "That wasn't me! That was Tsumugi pretending to be me!" She wanted to eliminate that tedious possibility as soon as she could.
Kodaka said he kinda fought for the Epilogue as other team members thought it would clash with the game. He said the Epilogue would clear stuff up on the plot from what I remember
Edit: Also Kodaka has stated the V stands for Victory
I believe V3 to be a separate continuity from the previous games and anime. The original Hopes Peak storyline concludes with the Danganronpa 3 anime, while V3 is its own separate story piggybacking on the original. As for what Danganronpa is in V3's continuity..
From how Danganronpa is explained in V3, the first few installments (Dr 1, 2, UDG, 3 anime) started off as literal video games and anime, just like how we have them in our world. As the franchise went on and got more popular, Team Danganronpa started making real life stage sets, and incorporated real people into their killing games for their reality TV show, as fans are free to participate.
Kaede and the rest of V3's crew were once real people from the outside world. Normal people with no Ultimate Talents turned into fictional characters thanks to the flashback lights. Tsumugi can't cosplay as Kaede or any of the V3 cast because they used to be real people. Kaede and Co. are still real flesh and blood people, but their minds were altered with fictional backstories, talents and personalities to act like Danganronpa characters.The Dr 1 and 2 characters on the other hand were never real people to begin with in V3's continuity, since they originated from video games and anime before the reality TV show, so Tsumugi can cosplay as them. Tsumugi's cospox is a condition given to her as apart of her Ultimate Cosplayer talent thanks to the prologue flashback light, just like how Kaito was given a illness and Kiyo a spit personality as apart of their characters. Cospox is no different, so she literally can't cosplay as real people once the flashback light have her that talent. How she talks about cosplaying real people moreso sounds like a personal preference that she made real with a flashback light.
The first few Dr installments being video games and anime is supported by the case files in Shuichi's research lab. If you count them, there are exactly 52 case files of murder plans. Shuichi and Maki reveal the first few case files have illustrations (Dr 1, 2, UDG, 3 anime) while the later files have real photos (The other killing games turned reality show before V3, the 53rd season)
Shuichi wonders if the first few are just fictional, while the later ones are real.
The one definitive lie Tsumugi made was the V3 cast were excited when they were selected for the killing game during the prologue. You can go back to watch the prologue to see that flashback of Shuichi, Kaito and Kaede being excited never happened. But if the audition tapes are real or did they really want to participate is still up in the air. There's some weird things Kaede says in the prologue that implies she might know of the killing games, and she talks about how rotten the world is, similar to her audition tape saying she has no faith in humanity.
If you've seen the Truman Show, V3 is basically that.
I feel like to truly understand V3's world and story, you must first understand Tsumugi because at the end of the day...she's just a regular girl with a huge devotion to her passion as she uses it to cope with her normal boring reality, but takes it too far. That is how the Makoto Kid watching on his phone is depicted, that is how everyone in the outside world is depicted. As crazy as them enjoying killing games are at face value, there are truths to this that parallel our own world. Reality can be exhausting, stuck in the status quo that can be too much for a lot of us at times, and we rely on fiction to immerse ourselves, fixate on something else as a means of escapism from our everyday lives. That's not a bad thing, but there are some who have their heads in fiction too much where some have trouble distinguishing the difference between fiction and reality, resulting in conflict that can hurt yourself and others around you, exactly what Tsumugi and the outside world struggled with.
The epilogue concludes with Shuichi, Maki, and Himiko being able to leave the giant dome through the hole Keebo made, entering back into the outside world. A world the survivors have no memory of anymore since their original personalities and memories were overwriten with fabricated ones Tsumugi made. The world outside the giant stage set won't match at all with what they remember, so no Shuichi's uncle's detective service, no Maki's orphanage and assassin cult she was in, and no Himiko's master that started a career with her performing magic shows across the world.
Those flashback lights have pretty much unlimited potential for entertainment and these morons use it for killing games.
I also believe in V3 taking place in a post-DR3 world, but it's an AU where Ryota Mitarai actually went through with brainwashing the entire world into hope zombies.
So basically, everyone who was affected by the brainwashing became remnants of hope(just despair in the opposite direction) while everyone else who was normal or just unaffected had to deal with these consequences.
So Makoto still goes through with rebuilding hope's peak, and overtime the legacy of the tragedy becomes stories shared as a means to provide entertainment and lessons.
Unfortunately, due to being hope obsessed, people are intentionally creating problematic situations to then later fix to get their fix for overcoming despair.
Despite all his attempts, Makoto and his fellow staff can't quell these feelings that these people have and soon enough talks of the tragedy rise up again as it's become this ultimate symbol of evil that must be defeated. However, times are peaceful and society is healing and there's no way someone as smart as Junk will rise up and repeat history...right?
Talk about killing games and overcoming despair become popular, people needing to satisfy their desire for hope. Then a few people come together and suggest a small experiment. One thing leads to another and they have sixteen "participants " to experiment on. They broadcast it to the world under the guise of it being fiction and thus law enforcement is rather lax in investigating.
Then another game happens, more spectacle this time. An audience forms, it's just fictional characters right, so it's okay to see them subjected to this twisted game. It's okay if you enjoy it a little, the contestants will choose hope and beat the mastermind. Hope will conquer despair and the audience will get their release.
After all, it's better if we channel our inner despair through fiction and not real life. We wouldn't want a repeat of the tragedy, however long ago that was. Makoto, Hajime and everyone else who lived through the tragedy have long since moved on, their memories and stories serving as a reminder to new generations on how important hope is.
As the killing games go on, the guise of them just being fiction drops, people know these people are suffering for real. It's better this way, right? For these people to channel our darkest thoughts in a contained environment so that we ourselves don't turn on each other?
Time goes on, the games are becoming normalized past times, the budget has increased. A girl named Tsumugi walks into the Team DR headquarters and applies for the job.
As an other commenter states that I agree with "Honestly it doesn't even matter if in universe danganronpa is real or not, cuz either way the emotions the characters and viewers feel are real and that's kinda the message V3 goes for, that fiction has an impact on reality."
Damn that's a pretty interesting headcanon you have in mind on V3 being in a alternate timeline where Ryota Mitari successfully upload the hope video to the whole world
i do think SOME of what tsumugi said is, while not ALL of the truth, SOMEWHAT accurate in PLACES. I think she was telling the truth about the characters being in a twisted reality show, but whether the cast were willing participants (the prologue makes that doubtful) or if danganronpa REALLY IS super popular, or that the events of the first two games are fictional and Ultimate High School Students don't exist, these are what I think are the lies.
The CGs of the mourners and the meteor strikes are shown among the deluge of false memories, and nothing suggest sthey are real memories, so I think they're jsut beign shown to us to help trick us into beleiving what was revealed about the fake backstory made for the show (hell, the monkubs even bring it up in the prologue, that the backstory was written ahead of time). I beleive its meant to be implied that the're playing for the characters as they sleep (I think shuichi even comments on them after they play but i may be misremembering).
Kaede's mention of not being an Ultimate in the prologue suggests that's a THING someone can be, otherwise she'd say something like "that's not real" or something, and it also can't jsut be a result of the 'ultimate hunt' backstory (as there'd be no reason to fake it, and if they incororapted a real event into their game the Monokubs wouldn't refer to it outright aloud, which they do, as 'backstory').
Tsumugi's claims of a "perfect, non violent utopia" is an outright lie, proven by the prolgue again. KLaede claims noone came to help her when she was kidnapped and expressed no real surprise at either happening, saying the world is kidna shitty. Not exactly evidence of a 'perfect utopia', let alone one ruled by a reality tv show.
My beleif is that Team Danganronpa are criminals running an illegal snuff show, or at least their show is VERY underground, explaining why kaede didn't recognise elements but DID recognise the name of the Monkubs (as she likely may have at least heard of Monokuma, the mascot of the death games).
Tsumugi's cospox can easilly be faked, since Kaede closed her eyes and didn't look at Tsumugi prior to the reveal, giving Tsumugi a chance to apply makeup to her body to make it look like she had a bizarre allergy.
1. I'm pretty sure it's been hinted by the game that the first few danganronpa entires weren't life action, specifically in shuichi's lab there are 52 files containing murder cases and how they were made, but the first few are drawn, so i assume that's the difference for cospox
2. It's been heavily implied that the entirety of danganronpa V3 is somewhat scripted, like tsumugi literally admits she wrote the maki-kaito romance plot, i'd say we can assume that everything till 6th trial was planned, so there's no need for more than one person being in charge of things, cuz everything is scripted and the only thing that could mess up things was kaede missing rantaro, for which tsumugi was prepared
Honestly it doesn't even matter if in universe danganronpa is real or not, cuz either way the emotions the characters and viewers feel are real and that's kinda the message V3 goes for, that fiction has an impact on reality
It wasn't even implied, it was flat out stated that it was scripted.
There is no way the entire thing was scripted. Kokichi almost broke the entire game to pieces. There is absolutely no way Tsumugi planned that. One wrong move or Shuichi catching onto what was happening a little bit sooner and she loses and Kokichi wins from the grave as a final f-you.
I mean it depends on how you view Kokichi's efforts. Even Tsumugi pointed out in the 6th trial along with Monokuma that an invalid verdict is meaningless to stopping the killing game. (You know despite Junko in the first game willing to play fair after throwing Kyoko and Makoto under the bus). All Monokuma had to do was either call the trial a mistrial or just execute everyone regardless if they're right or wrong. heck, he could just not have a ruling at all. He could only be proven wrong if he calls the verdict incorrectly and the culprit reveals themself. At that point, though, if the cast is wrong, Monokuma can just kill them or kill the culprit if they're right. Monokuma's verdict doesn't matter since Kaito will end up proving whether or not they got it right. And making an error with his verdict won't really matter. He can just say screw it and not kill anyone due to the unprecented aspect. It's not like he can't add a rule to fix this error.
Also, Shuichi was made the ultimate detective by the flashback light. He rarely comes across as a good detective in the main game. He literally made a huge guess on the door that for all he knows was set dressing to sew discontent. He has no proof the door is real and just guesses. Plus, she could just blast him with a blackout light or flashback light if he ever caught on. He's really only trained to find what the game wants at any given time so it wouldn't be hard for him to never guess. If she didn't tell Monokuma the plan, it'd work out in her favor as no one would know Kokichi is just under her influence since he'd already have killed the mini cameras long enough for her to zap him.
@@fridaylambda3494 Problem is that if Monokuma did that, the people watching would not be satisfied and would probably be angry.
Or just not care. Don't forget that Monokuma and by extension Junko cheated in DR1. The only difference is Junko's cheat kept everyone alive while Tsumugi dismisses the implications entirely. Monokuma already changed the rules in the original game which if the audience liked or enjoys they wouldn't care seeing it as a blatant reference to the original game. Plus, Monokuma had to put in a rule randomly in that game as well when the need arose to keep the cast in control anyway. He could just state that Kokichi forced his hand and add in a rule to fix the problem. And technically regardless of whether Monokuma is right or wrong doesn't matter in the end. The rule still applies. The participants must guess the culprit right. If they don't, he just kills them. If they do, he kills whoever is in the machine. Or just like in the fangames, he just adds in a motion to vote for whoever is in the machine and call it a day. Monokuma technically doesn't need to know the answer. His verdict can change after Kaito proves the vote is right or wrong cause again the only way to prove Monokuma is wrong is to expose yourself and once you do it allows Monokuma to proceed with the standard rules. Or just kill everyone because they didn't identify the correct culprit either way. This all of course assumes there really is an actual audience and they will care when you can just flashback the memories of a good ending into their brains and make DR54. Kokichi assumed he could end the killing game, but there's no proof how Monokuma would proceed once the students cast their votes. He's free to do what he wants as Tsumugi and him can just make a new rule and call it a wrap by saying "Even if Monokuma doesn't know the culprit before the verdict, if the students can't identify the culprit, the culprit will escape and everyone else dies as per the standard Blackened graduation rule." Bam problem solved. Just like when Monokuma in DR1 added the rule to keep the kids from breaking into the headmaster's office.
The only reason I think Tumigi is telling the truth is the clearly visible team danganronpa logo that you can see on the outside of the dome when it zooms out in the epilog.
I honestly believe there was no mastermind, The brain washing flashlights
And tsumugi never ACTUALLY TURNED INTO ANYONE FULLY. The irises the contacts she’s the ultimate cosplayer she wouldn’t mess that up- it’d take real detective work but it was a work around for her cospox
Great video! I adore V3s ending and V3 in general and I love seeing people discuss V3s ending(people not doing more that is my biggest disappointment with the danganronpa fandom but oh well), so I'd like to say what I personally disagree with and how I interpret the ending.
I disagree with your point of the funeral and meteor scenes(if I understood what you were getting at) because I DO actually think they are faked. They heavily corroborate the stories in the flashback lights and seem to be telling the audience(both the fictional one and the real one aka us) what the in-universe lore of the killing game is. The reason why trusting omniescent scenes in chapter 6 isn't convoluted imo is because at that point the veil(or the fog if you will) of the killing game is lifting and we are starting to be fed a different narative.
Now, I'd like to point out the big questions surrounding V3's ending that I personally think matter. Those are:
What's going on with the participants/How willing and real are they?
What's going on with Tsumugi and Rantaro?
What is the state of the outside world?
I think you covered everything that needs to be said about the tapes being fake, and that the start of the prologue shows how the characters actually behaved before being kidnapped, but I'd like to add something related to them being real or fictional. I think, with how devoted Tsumugi is to cosplay, that cospox works on very strict rules, be it real or not. This would tell us that the cast of the first two games are fictional, while the cast of V3 is real. While some of the cast's personalities are fabricated with the flashback lights, they are still very real people. And why is that? Because all the events that happened to them, all the death and loss and the bonds they grew and the emotions they felt, all of that was real and it made them into real people. Danganronpa, in Tsumugi's narrative, started as something completely fabricated and staged, the characters were fictional because they were acted out, the actors weren't personally trapped and they merely put on a different personality for the sake of playing a role. Notice how Tsumugi cosplayed the characters of the first two "killing games", but not any other of the non-V3 killing games, like Rantaro's game. That's because Rantaro's game, alongside V3s game, all featured real people going through real events in a controlled environment. I personally think the first flashback lights added some memories and accentuated parts of their personality and backgrounds to fit their talent and role in the killing game more(kokichi doesn't seem to have his villain persona on in the prologue both because he isn't aware of the threat of the killing game yet and because he is meant to be disruptive. kiyo seems to be similar in personality, but his serial killer background was likely added as a failsafe in case nobody kills). Kaede specifically says she has a hobby she is devoted to in the prologue and I think it's likely the piano. She probably just got more awards in the flashback lights to accentuate her hobby and make it into an ultimate talent.
I think the other questions are left much more vague and I am satisfied with not having a definitive answer to them, but I'd like to point out a couple of things. We don't exactly know if Tsumugi was rewired like the others were, if she was mastermind by choice or if she was forced into it. I definitely think she was a cosplayer at some point and that team danganronpa essentially gave her seemingly unnatural talent for cosplaying which made her more devoted for that role, but it's unclear if said role was forced onto her. Either way, I think both answers have narrative value which I am a big fan of. If she was forced to be the mastermind it makes her not voting in chapter 6 and having some level of solidarity with the other participants very sad and tragic, but if she was a willing mastermind it gives more power to her desire to be the ultimate cosplay copycat(can you tell I love Tsumugi Shirogane?). For Rantaro, I definitely think his personality and memories were altered for V2 like with the others in V3, and that some of his memories were erased for V3, but I'm not sure as to what state of mind he was in at the start of the prologue. If the flashback lights hadn't been activated yet he either remembers all of V2, had his memories reset to the start of V2 or he remembers parts of V2(maybe everything except the final chapter and all of this being a reality TV show). I'm personally leaning towards the third option.
I think the prologue hints to a few things about the outside world: killing games aren't something most people(or if parts of the world are into danganronpa then some communities could be isolated from the phenomenon but I doubt that) are familiar with, at least in depth enough that the number 16 doesn't sound an alarm and that "Mono" symbolism is something well-known about enough for at least 1 out of 16 students to know about, considering Kaede probably connected the Monokubs to Monokuma. I think the two options that could follow up on those two pieces of information are that either the tragedy happened at some point and Kaede connected the monokubs to the mascot of the apocalypse essentially, or that Kaede recognised monokuma as a video game character, but wasn't aware of the implications of the real life killing games. Maybe danganronpa isn't a global sensation, but more like a high budget underground snuff project/experiment? In any case I think there's room for hope to be found in the outside world and I hope shuichi, Himiko and Maki are happy wherever they are :p
I'd love to continue this discussion and to see other takes on the matter!
Woah. I haven't thought about it that way. This makes a surprising lot of sense.
Really ironic you mention chat gpt run big brother when the current season is AI themed
I find it crazy that the V3 ending controversy still goes on to this day😭
I haven’t watched this video, I just saw the thumbnail and wanted to say that I just started my playthrough of V3 and this popped up in my feed…I really hope I didn’t get spoiled and that Tsumugi isn’t the mastermind.
Guys what if the V3 students are in a "Rip Van Winkle" situation?
Let me explain: We saw in an episode of "Danganronpa 3: The End Of Hope's Peak Academy" that the students of the Reserve Course broke into Hope's Peak and started to murder the ultimate students, with the only survivors being Class 78 and Class 77.
Now, what if, during the Tragedy, the Hope's Peak higher-ups started a back-up plan consisting in kidnapping normal people and then turn them into Ultimates with the same technology that helped create Izuru Kamakura?
What if then they put them in a place isolated from everyone to keep them away from the disasters and then put them in a simulation in cryo-sleep where they will be fed with Flashback Lights containing exaggerated backstories that serve the purpose to ENHANCE their talents (This would explain Ryoma Hoshi killing mafia members with nothing but steel tennis balls) so that one day they could become the new symbols of hope to REPLACE all the fallen ultimates?
Only for the Remnants of Despair to find the place and create Team Danganronpa for their various purposes? I'm picturing three kind of people who would be part of Team Danganronpa:
- Hope's Peak Purists who want to see something that validates their outdated ideas of Hope = Talent. Since now that Makoto is on charge of the school he will start admitting even non-ultimate students
- Remnants of Despair who just want to spread despair
- Shady powerful people like mafia gangs, dictators, criminals of all kind, cultists and shady businessmen who use the fallen students like their slaves in a cruel example of human trafficking
When Kaede talked about how the world was rotten, what if she was talking about the world at the beginning of the Tragedy? When everything was going to shit and Hope's Peak was exposed for their human experimentation projects?
omg great vid !! i've been thinking about this since the game came out ! we're probably never going to find out the truth, or get another dr related piece of media, but its really fun to make new theories about what happened ! i have a few explanations of my own, but at the end of the say the games ending is really up to interpretation with how you want to fill the plot holes :)
I just came to say that I love V3’s ending and Tsumigi is the best Mastermind and have my own theories but to tired to lay it all out.
But this thumbnail is a full blown spoiler, I got spoiled that Tsumigi was the Mastermind in chapter four of V3 and I didn’t suspect her at all.
I was watching a gameplay on YT at that time and it was an unfortunate event that I saw it.
(I’ve seen a comment that they got spoiled by this thumbnail)
You gotta understand I walked into this fully accepting that it was all a TV show and then everything you pointed out, started me. Thank you.
The closest game show I can think that would be like this big brother especially the American version. Now ask yourself this the goal of killing game is that one person kills somebody gets away with it and then everybody else dies. Ask yourself this would you watch a season consisting of two episodes?
Sure, it’s unlikely that somebody would get away with it especially when facing see a full 16 person group doing investigations, but let’s just say they did that means that they invested a ton of money, and concepts. Only for that to be cut short.
No company would ever do that. No TV show would ever do that.
The idea that Danganronpa is just a TV show false flat when you consider the tech as well
You have hidden rooms in the school you have a robot is essentially shooting a giant, either laser or energy blasts you you have Nanities and equipment that can brain wash.
The brainwashing equipment alone would raise red flags the world over.
I think you’re right, I don’t think it’s a show. These could all just be despair, infected people who were brainwashed and into thinking that they were normal people that being said I also love how this ends with the idea of hope despair it doesn’t matter all that matters embracing the world whatever it may be.
I believe there's just one thing that, somewhat unrelated but that still is a bit, and goes unexplained in the game is Keebo. After all, in the flashbacks, there aren't markings on his face (which you could say we're covered up with paint/makeup) and his clothes resemble his in-game body too closely, in a way that I don't think it would be possible for him to hide that high collar of his body under that jacket's high collar in a feasible way.
This doesn't have much to do with the ending theory that was presented in the video (disproving or agreeing), but it's something that wasn't mentioned, and it also isn't in the game, and I'm not sure what that means for the cast and the world outside that killing game. After all, the video does not specify the methods the remnants of despair would be using to create these copycat killing games, and so it might be a virtual world, since they changed Keebo's whole existence, but if it's in the real world, it's very weird and would need an explanation.
(In a virtual world, we know it's possible because of Nekomaru, so there's precedent, but then this is a world of ultimates, so maybe they transferred his consciousness to a robot OR they just created a robot based on the 'real' Keebo we see at the start)
14:33
If we’re going off of the assumption that “Danganrompa” is a popular thing in the game’s world then maybe “they” was referring to all of the people that died during the past killing games
gah after so many years of my love/hate relationship w danganronpa, i still gotta say i think this is the most interesting game in the series! this was such a good analysis, the detail of the cosplay lab floor matching the interviews is insane, I've never seen anyone point that out b4!
I think personally v3 was intentionally created as a mystery not meant to be solved, (really obviously contradictory cutscenes- also a neat way to encourage replayability lol) and also to b self-contained, much like the original trigger happy havoc. in thh the ending shot cuts off before we can see the outside world, because whether or not it had actually been destroyed or it was junko's lie was irrelevant, it was the choice of the characters to see it for themselves that mattered. The intention was similar in v3, whether or not the characters were "real" is or should be irrelevant to the impact of their stories and our attachment to them. It's basically the most convoluted way of saying "fiction affects reality."
v3 is a love letter and goodbye to danganronpa, it subverts the formula as much as it adheres to it, and is the most "meta" game in the series, which basically says "danganronpa shouldn't go on forever" (it still will, in fangames which explore concepts that we never got in canon... no 3rd trial double murder? no 3rd trial double murder PLEASE), and also, "we want to make a killing game that doesn't *have* to take place in the same universe" (because it's extremely limiting). tbh this is why a lot of fans like me prefer to just see it as being in an equally canon but different continuity (getting to the last chapter and whoops gotchya ofc this has to be connected to the previous games almost made me wanna smack my head against a wall... danganronpa gonna danganronpa) but the lack of clarity is one of the reasons people still talk about it, it's the reason there's something to come back to.
woah whatta tangent yap yap yap anyway yeah this is a good theory with nice supporting evidence that does feel like something they would do 👍 ive been on a fnaf theory binge lately so it's insane to me that i found this channel thru danganronpa of all things, your style and presentation are really engaging (´・ω・)っ由
I've been a fan of the Danganronpa series for roughly four years, and this video is the best coverage I've seen on the logical inconsistencies for V3's ending
So, my theory has been for a while now that Team Danganronpa was trying to end the Danganronpa series with this season. They tried to make it seem like an unexpected outcome, but really it was the plan from the start. I hadn't considered the fact that the participants are strangely confused for people that literally signed up to be part of the killing game, but I'm gonna try to explain that away because I like my theory, which I am admittedly biased towards, and I want it to still work.
What if it's common knowledge that you get told that you were chosen before you get thrust into anything? Like, they've all seen social media posts of people celebrating that they've been chosen and saying their goodbyes knowing they might die in the killing game. So when they're suddenly kidnapped and chased by giant robots, they probably aren't thinking of Danganronpa, because those aren't things that happen in Danganronpa (I claim the Exisals are new to this season). I propose that Team Danganronpa did this because giving the audience a peek behind the scenes and seeing the participants actually become the characters properly sets the stage for the audience to see those characters pull back the curtain and try to destory the show from within.
I also propose that Tsumugi has been convinced with the Flashback Light to believe that she is the mastermind. She doesn't lie to you at all, she's just been intentionally misinformed about her own role in the show. Team Danganronpa was probably looking for a way to not only have one of the characters believably be the mastermind, but to have there be clues that would lead the non-mastermind characters to that conclusion. Once they saw Kaede build a trap that she wasn't physically present to see work, and that Tsumugi had a small gap in her alibi, they built a tunnel and planted evidence in the mastermind's room so that Shuichi would be able to "figure out" that the mastermind was responsible and that that person must be Tsumugi.
The main reason I think this is the case is that Monokuma and Tsumugi seem to forthcoming with information if they genuinely didn't want Shuichi and co. to flip the script. Like, Monokuma should know that Shuichi has all the information to figure out that Tsumugi's the mastermind, Team DR explicitly left a book in Kokichi's lab that shows that the memories contradict reality, they gave Keebo a laser cannon so he could easily get into all the locked rooms and find all these clues, and Tsumugi basically tells them everything about the outside world. You could say that not choosing between hope and despair was where things went against Team DR's plans, but then why wouldn't Keebo vote? I don't care how convincing Shuichi is, even if he convinced the majority of the audience to abstain from the audience survey to choose Keebo's vote, there would still be a few trolls that would vote something to ruin it... unless "abstain" was on option on the survey, which Team DR would never allow unless they wanted the game to end.
Also, and this is the part that's least likely to be an intentional decision by the game's writers and should probably be called a headcanon moreso than a theory, I think that Miu was the one who was actually working with Team DR the whole time. Like, she was a volunteer like everyone else, I bet, but they probably gave her knowledge of the game and the desire to work with them. That's why she made the floor plans in chapter 1 (literally why would she even think this would be remotely helpful unless she knew that the path of books on top of the shelves were there?), that's why she made it super obvious to Kokichi that she was trying to kill him (she wanted to create a more interesting murder than just her killing Kokichi, and maybe wanted to swing it so she'd die in the virtual world where maybe Team DR could store a backup of her consciousness into an Alter Ego Miu just before she died so she could continue work from behind the scenes), and that's why she made literally no attempt to escape despite knowing full well that she could (supposedly) invent devices like the Electrohammers, Electrobombs, and Exisal remote that could completely disable every piece of machinery keeping them locked in (she probably built them in such a way that, if absolutely necessary, Team DR could take control back from anything diabled/hijacked).
The Prologue before the first Flashback Light essentially answers this question definitively. All of it was a Monokubs mistake that was erased, so nothing in that dry run was false. There's no question that the participants were abducted unwillingly, and that it is common knowledge to overlook these abductions as it seems people know what it's for.
@@NotAGoodUsername360 If the bystanders were able to immediately figure out that the kidnapping was for Danganronpa, then shouldn't the participants have pieced that together as well? Why was Rantaro the only one to figure it out? Also, I don't recall any definitive proof that the pre-Flashback Light prologue wasn't shown to the audience. Is there any reason to suggest that the kidnappings weren't a first time thing so that the scene of them not having their memories could be shown to the audience? The inaction of the bystanders could be explained by what Tsumugi said about the world being peaceful; they might just not know how to react to that kind of thing. Or they could've just been bad people not willing to help, or the kidnappers could've been too threatening for any bystanders to feel like they stood a chance. And the Monokubs making a mistake could've been an intentional decision by Team Danganronpa so that that scene would be shown to the audience.
My biggest problem with danganronpa 3 is that I actually think that the plot they we’re doing for what was going on WAS ACTUALLY GOOD UNTIL the whole sending them to space deal and the whole tsumugi deal. I think it would have been a great plot twist if it was just that “Danganronpa” is just a tv show in their universe but that some were forced to participate and some weren’t because they loved the show, and show that Kaede was one of the ones that wanted to willingly participate.
But also, Tsumugi just SHOULDNT have been the mastermind, because she didn’t do JACK SHIT throughout the whole game, it was honestly such an upsetting twist to me just because it was like, “well this is the last character that has no development, make them the villain!”
STRONG BELIEVE that it should have been that Tsumugi was found out to kill Rontaro and we keep Kaede, only for Kaede to be the only one left off as the one to willingly participate, so by the last chapter when she regains her memory she is in between saving her new friends or continuing the game
My delusional self likes to think that everything tsumugi said was a lie and when shuichi, maki, amd himiko get out they see makoto, kyoko and all the other survivors and they help them out😭😭😭
Yo great video man, I do think v3 is easily the best of the trilogy and it's mostly because of the ending, gorgeous visuals (besides some CGs though lmao), Soundtrack which the games all have excellents ones but V3 has by far my favourite and some characters such as kokichi I enjoyed. the ending really does tie into the truth vs lies theme perfectly with no one being able to figure out which of the things Tsumugi said are a lie or a truth. I would not doubt for a second Metal Gear Solid 2 had a huge influence with the protagonist switch and the end game being a mind fuck plus from what I've heard Kodaka being a huge fan of the franchise as well. also huge W for the Sonic Adventure 2 and Final Fantasy 7 ost in the video :D
Honestly the whole point of the end of the game is just the devs coded message "were running out of ideas for these games and we kinda dont wanna make any more"
I dont appreciate you putting this person in the thumbnail and revealing to me that they're potentially a liar. This video showed in my recommended, and I'm in the middle of a playthrough of it. I don't care if it's not even her that's the mastermind, but i think being a bit thoughtful with spoilers, even fake ones, can go a long way. Others like me will be seeing this thumbnail and feel bad about it.
dont look up any danganronpa stuff before playing the entire series then.
Yeah don't worry. Bimbo blimbo is actually the Mastermind
@@dabillya6845 Agreed. To be fair though, UA-cam recommendations can get influenced by google searches. You can literally just look up what gifts a character likes and then end up seeing DR videos in your feed :/
I did notice a few errors, but otherwise really nice video.
One error I noticed was when you were discussing how Kaede's name wasn't censored out in the prologue while it was in the interview tapes.... I think that all comes down to perspective. Kaede's POV vs a Camera's POV. I don't think Kaede could exactly censor her own now like that. But I can understand if it was censored in the interview tapes if Tsumugi was pre-planning to use them to drive a stake of despair into their hearts by the end game.
But I will say this, I think the one driving factor the game being in it's own universe is that if Tsumugi is telling the truth... then it'd make perfect sense as to why she'd only cosplay as the characters of Dr1 and DR2... (My guess is that since the game was being made around the same time as the DR3 anime, DR3 characters were excluded from her list of cosplays). The fact she doesn't cosplay as anyone 4-52 gives me a good feeling she might be telling the truth.
As for Tsumugi pre-game... that's actually hard for me to figure out. There could be the possiblity that maybe she was putting on a good act. It's all so confusing still...
I always liked V3 more for the cast itself than the actual situations they found themselves in.
I think the major issue with V3's ending is that the flashback lights are too OP (combined with the Blacklight introduced at the start). You literally can just flash one and warp one's complete understanding and memories. And since emotions are directly related to how you remember an event, it calls into question nearly the entire story. How much of it was the characters actually performing their actions of their own free will? Did they even have free will? Or was it all influenced by Tsumugi? And why should we even care? Team DR can just flashback the world and they all love the show again. Even worse, the game completely ignores that Tsumugi isn't the Mastermind. The Mastermind is Team DR and it isn't really the world's fault. Team DR could stop at any time and refused (we can see this IRL where series can end even though fan interest is still at an all time high). So shouldn't we be facing Team DR as the true culprits and point out fairly that the flashback lights are OP and can't be stopped. I just stopped caring since how much of the characters are real and not artificially induced is subjective and impossible to determine. Almost the entire game depends on this plot twist and all I can think is "So like couldn't everyone just be murdered by Tsumugi in a dress? All she has to do is implant the memories and the characters will believe they did it." It isn't exactly her writing a script but her just doing as she pleases and building the narrative approximately she wants. Again, I get that it isn't a strict script, but like, why should I care when what little of the characters exists is probably fake? They themselves according to the twist are not real in their own world anymore. It's entirely possible it's all a lie, but the game itself has nothing to suggest what is true beyond theories or speculation. There's no substance that any of the characters even the initial incarnations are when Tsumugi or Team DR could have just flashbacked them into believing that. In that regard, who is supposed to be the real person? What is the actual truth? For a game about lies and truth, they should do a good job of making lies and truth the same, but a terrible job making some players feel satisfied with that answer.
The "oh no, things are falling apart" vibes is an interesting idea to contemplate, I'll keep it in mind when I get around to playing v3!
I think part of the problem is that we in the west didn't really experience all the trickery the first two games pulled since we didn't get the Japanese marketing and got both 1 and 2 nearly back to back.
The first game's marketing all heavily featured Sayaka in a leading role, framing her as our main side girl. The demo showcased half of the 'first trial', with Hiro being murdered and the evidence leaning towards Hifumi. Plus a second trial sporadically shown in trailers depicting someone attacking Junko at night. All of that was a lie. Sayaka dies first and was also involved.
Danganronpa 1 also does not have a clean ending with solid answers in a vacuum at all. We never see what's past the door. Was Junko telling the truth, or is the world fine and she was just psychotic and had photoshopped some stuff. Our only corroborating witness is an insane nutter who speaks in tongues and doesn't give much detail. What happened in that old classroom, how did Junko erase our memories if she even did, zero answers. Danganronpa 0 came out a year later and is effectively the foundation for the rest of the series(the amount of stuff in both 2 and the anime that originates here is astounding).
DR2's marketing and character design was intentionally designed to cause as much confusion as possible. A ton of characters looked like other characters or had certain attributes. Some very blatant (Byakuya seemingly returning, Nagito's name is an anagram of It's Makoto Naegi!, Akane looks super close to Aoi) and some more subtle(most of the rest of the cast). Was this a sequel to the first game or a prequel? Is this the same Byakuya? Are some of this cast actually just the old cast? Is this a retelling or some sort of AU? Are these the last games characters kids? It's impossible to tell for the bulk of the game if this is a prequel, sequel, AU, or anything of the sort.
It's even more confusing in context because remember, this is AFTER Danganronpa 0, and before the DR3 Class 77-B retcon. Alongside stuff like Izuru hanging in the back of peoples minds, we know of 2 students in Class 77 already, Ultimate Neurologist and Ultimate Spy. Neither of them are in DR2, so if it's a sequel they're both already dead and if it's a prequel something else happened, but either way, there are only 16 students to a class here which means two people in SDR2 don't belong. Someone playing the game in Japanese who's read DR0 knows about Matsuda and Yuto and is suspicious to start with, and will probably believe it's Byakuya and The Traitor, but nope, it's US and Chiaki. (This detail was ruined by an anime retcon splitting the class in two so they could make Chiaki real and then invent Mitarai to do the brainwashing stuff even though I'm pretty sure Matsuda could have done something like that being Junko's brainwashing guru was kind of his thing). And again, vague ending as to the exact fates of everyone.
V3 again pulled the same tricks, cranked up hard again and sort of combining the previous games. Just like DR1, the marketing and start of the game is misleading. But rather than being about the sidekick, it's about the Protagonist, Kaede is the Chapter 1 killer and midway through the trial we switch to playing as the Ultimate Detective. There's also a demo, which both tricks us into thinking this will be intimately tied to the first games and makes us question the universe/timeline(just like DR2 did), but also kills Hiro basically as a joke/callback to DR1's demo.
V3 is extremely vague about if this takes place in the mainline canon or not, just like DR2 was. In English they further crank this up by reusing old VAs for everyone to maximise confusion. Just like DR1 we have zero clue how much we can trust the ending, just like with Junko we can't be sure the pictures shown to us weren't tampered with, can't trust our memories since a way to mess with them is established, can't trust our witnesses who may not be right in the head. Is Tsumugi honest, partially lying, or completely full of crap?
Sure, Junko ended up being utterly honest at the end of DR1, but along with her character being very different (harsh, horrific truths and half riddles. Tsugumi lies way more) Danganronpa loves to parallel itself, but rarely directly repeat itself.
All 3 games have a dark secondary sidekick, but Byakuya is the only one to survive, Kokichi is the only one to actually be murdered by someone else. Nagito is the only one to off himself.
All 3 games have a double murder chapter, but DR1 is the only one to have two killers(Hifumi killed Taka and Celeste killed Hifumi), in the other two it's the same person both times.
All 3 games have a chapter where someone is accused of being a serial killer alongside the blackened and that is used as evidence to tie them in. In DR1 they were correct about Toko being Genocider Syo, but wrong about her being the Blackened, she was framed. In DR2 they were correct about Peko being the blackened, but wrong about her being KiraKira(she intentionally mislead them to pull her 'I was only following orders' trick). And in DRV3 they're correct on both counts, Korekiyo is both the Sister Killer and the Double Blackened.
My assumption was always the show was a cover to hunt out hidden ultimate students who went into hiding in fear of the remanence of despair and they brainwashed Tsmugi to be the killer to take the fall. The cospox is a sign that she’s brainwashed to believe the first class and second class were fictional and not the heroes they were irl, to further brainwash her into believing what she’s doing is right and she can’t cosplay her fellow students because they are in fact real ultimates. She may have even volunteered to be the killer. Rantaro even shows they’re doomed even if they win the game, they’ll just be thrown into another game. They just want to kill off all ultimates. As long as Monokuma is alive, so is Junko
Thanks for the spoiler thumbnail man very cool of you
@@throwwway9152 I am not a big UA-camr. Prior to this only one of my videos got this level of viewership. I'm working on changing the thumbnail, but seeing as I have a FULL TIME JOB and my channel is not monetized, it's not very high up on my priority list to update the thumbnail of a video on a 7 year old game because every once in a while there's someone who hasn't played it and jumps to wild conclusions based on my thumbnail. Spoilers happen, sorry, maybe go finish the game instead of clicking on V3 content because you realize UA-cam is just going to recommend you more V3 content now right? You're setting yourself up to get spoiled MORE by taking potshots in my comment section
I always interpreted all the scuff as just how every single TV show just deteriorates in quality as it goes on.
Consider changing the thumbnail for spoiler reasons
God the ending made everything so needlessly conplicated
IM PROUD OF YOU!
I still think V3 is my favorite story in the series, and I feel like a big part of that is how much better they handled the theme of the game than in THH and Goodbye Despair.
The games that came before suffered a lot from Word Desensitization, if that makes sense. The key words of the games, like Hope and Despair were thrown around so much and from so many different people with different views that the words kinda lost their meaning after a while. Which granted, I believe was the point, and as much as I dislike the DGR3 anime, I think it does a good job of cementing that belief in me. Hell, Munakata ALONE does a good job of that. Still though, the point remains that the words themselves lost meaning pretty fast.
By contrast, V3 has Truth and Lies as the themes, which offers major advantages from a writing perspective, right? For one, much more concrete. Hope and Despair? Very vague and nebulous terms when you get down to it. Again, I believe that was intentional, but AGAIN again, it still causes problems in the moment. It made the first two games feel like they were twisting themselves into knots in order fit and communicate their ideas meaningfully, to varying degrees of success.
V3's Truth and Lies doesn't have that problem. Much more concrete. Much more self evident. And most importantly, much more fitting for a murder mystery game. Hope and Despair? You can make it work, but it still feels so removed from the nature of the game. Very much so a narrative themeing that doesn't really interact with the gameplay itself. That's not a BAD thing, granted, but again. It made past games almost feel like they were twisting themselves into knots to to make everything fit together. Once more, due to how much more narratively and mechanically appropriate they are, Truth and Lies become much easier themes to work with.
And personally I feel like, even with all the narrative perfection that Kokichi's character delivered, NOTHING embodies how perfect the theming is than the final case. As it should, right? Final case, culmination of everything, gotta make a big splash with it.
And really, to be fair, it's nothing NEW when you get down into the nitty gritty, is it? The narrative ideas executed during the final trial of V3 is the same as every other final trial in the series. You get there, you unveil the mastermind, both along the way and afterwards discovering that more or less everything you thought you knew so certainly up to this point was a lie, including a large amount of information you know about yourselves. With THH that was learning about the amnesia and all that it implied, and Goodbye Despair had all the Remnants of Despair revelations on top of the Izuru Kamukura mind fuck.
V3 quite literally goes "All of It" in regards to how much of everything is actually a lie, and both the players and the characters are forced to kinda just... DEAL with it. Even in the end there's no truly satisfying confirmation or debunking of that being the reality and I find that a genuinely wonderful thing, cuz it forces our characters to truly wrestle with that potential reality of everything they are being a lie, and find a way to move past that dilemma. Personally, I think the answer they arrive at is a beautiful piece of writing and would genuinely believe this game is a far lesser experience without it. It's genuinely one of the few things that got me really emotional while I was playing the game.
I love the ending of this game, I really do. Even if it does suffer from the same Kryptonite as every other mainline entry. The shitty, way too god damn short epilogues.😂
I dunno why epilogues are Kodaka's Kryptonite, but they are. Even Rain Code suffered from it, though in a different way than DGR games.
UDG was good. It had a perfectly fine epilogue. That proves he can do them right. I don't know why he doesn't. Personally, I'm resigned to thinking he does it just to fuck with people like me whose brains will keep us awake all night trying to rewrite the epilogues in our heads so that we can be satisfied.
Yes, my excuse I give him is that he's attacking me personally. Why does that make me forgive him? I dunno, this dev/player relationship is more toxic than ActiBlizz at it's worst. HELP.😂
16:00 you forgot, where Kaede Akamatsu gets a "head-ache" when trying to remember & inreturn somewhat became herself again, without the first flashback light memory.
Even in one of Tsumugi's free-time event with Kaede has Tsumugi call out Kaede spoke differently to what she was expected to say.
Also "Why is Tsumugi the only staff on site?"
Simple, IT'S A SIMULATION & there's evidencce to back this up, with what the Monokub's says to Kaede & Shuichi about the outside area of the school, matches how the NEO World Program also works, it also explains how Tsumugi also changes characters in the final trial, like how Miu changed the avatars in the NEO World Program...
and the simulation matches what is seen in Kaede's Headache (Yes there is indeed a CGI that appers for a short moment), it also explains how Kiibo became a Robot when he was a human in the prologue.
An additional bit of evidence to me has always been Mikan's strength and endurance. Flashy-thing her to believe she's an assassin all you want, memories does not equal years of training like that. Whether she was actually an assassin, difficult to say, but she was *something.*
Nice use of "Under the Rotting Pizza" from FF7 towards the end there.
This analysis is crazy thorough, I loved it!
Amazing video
Glad to be the 700th sub
Glad we get videos like this that touch on how the "plot hole" is a feature and not a bug. Everything about Tsumugi is completely suspect when one explores the implications of the ending at face value, to the point that one could reasonably make an argument for Tsumugi being a victim, the mastermind, one of several masterminds, or just someone who got "written in" to the role halfway through.
The funeral and meteor scenes could’ve been filmed by team danganronpa for the fans to get more context?
Wai no but I actually love that theory at the end omg???
recognize the factory theme, nice
off-topic but I love the fact that you used music from Code Lyoko’s OST
i hear that code lyoko bg theme lmao
"Thats like letting chatgpt host the next seaspn of big brother" Ainsley: am i a joke to you?
I'm mostly most of this makes sense though I would have included sealing industries as an explanation for the Exisals as high tech experiments still seem to need some sort of basis. Cool theory. Any thoughts on the transition of images from drawings to "real" people in that book in the ultimate detective lab?
Something that has always irked me about Tsumugi’s “cospox” is that she can cosplay Monokuma when Junko is holding him. Monokuma is just as real in this reality as Kaede, so if cospox was real, she should have turned pink.
I love the message tho. don't pressure people to continue an ip and also stop being hyperobsessed with fiction and seperate it from reality biiiiittchhhhh! *looks at actual irl cosplay killer*
There's a lot about 'Danganronpa V3' that doesn't add up unless you factor in the flashback light.
It does feel heavily flawed, to the point of losing all its meaning. According to the prologue, only Rantaro, the previous Survivor of the last game, knew what was going on. Nobody else seemed to be aware, and this includes Tsumugi who's supposed to be the one running everything in the first place. Then even as the mastermind, she's too unreliable with her "Cospox" and unclear line of what's "real" and "lies"... It really begs the question of what the audience is supposed to believe, and for the most part the only "real" idea of the narrative is headcanon. There's no actual canon to be found, almost fittingly since the game's central gimmick is lying.
They made the entire stupid last episode to piss ppl off because they're forced to make v3 they didn't even want to make more danganronpa so the best thing to do is to ruin it so ppl don't ask for more
I think I just figured something out. The funeral scene is absolutely real. I’m almost certain that each character was kidnapped and presumed to be dead by the general population. My guess is that each character really did have an ultimate talent and in the beginning stages Tsumugi erased their memories and made them random students in order to make the fake interview videos which could be used for a variety of motives. Then she reverted them back to normal to start the game. Also another thing that points to her straight up lying about everything is the technology used in the game. All of it is reflective of the kind of tech found in the other games. Obviously Monkuma robots, but also the biggest one is memory erasing and brainwashing. Maybe they were developed specifically to make the show, but I doubt that. I might be wrong, but I’m absolutely certain that Tsumugi saw the first killing game and tried her best to cosplay/copycat or cosplaycat in her words Junko’s first killing game
I think the simplest explanation is that they’re real people with talents in a universe where danganronpa was a tv show/game. I don’t think we will ever get any additional context
With the question of whether they refer to Kaede or everyone in the killing game, it would be worth it to check out the original Japanese lines. Japanese isn’t gendered the same way as English, and if it’s a plural, it would be extremely easy to tell, since that would be indicated with 達 (tachi).
I think the game developer were just so fed up with the series😂😂 I think they were just trying to kill the series
This is exactly it.
They didn’t. In fact, Kodaka says the series didn’t finish and he might even direct a new game in the future.
Is that Code Lyoko music I hear???
17:08 where the heck didn you pull that age from? No where is she said to be that young its far more likely shed be around 19 or so like the other cast
To be fair game Translations are rarely fixed
@@isauldron4337 This is true. But if Atlus can do it for Shin Megami Tensei 3 when nobody asked, NAS has the time and resources to fix V3 (Decadence was a perfect opportunity) if it was really that important to them.
@@TheFlinchyDinosaur true also
I think Tsumugi calls DR the "Ultimate real fiction" one or multiple times, yes? Maybe that's where the destinction lies in the cospox situation, though it is weird regardless. If those audition tapes really are made by Tsumugi, why does she not break into cospox there? Does it imply their pre-ultimate forms are the fictional ones, or is it just a lie altogether?
I don't think the audience is supposed to be fake either. Otherwise, why does Tsumugi seem genuinely surprised when they tune out at the end? Is that all just a performance by her too? It doesn't seem that way to me
Though Tsumugi's position is also nebulous. Before the flashback light, she seems to act with the same surprise as everyone else. What would be the point keeping up that front if she knows things have gone awry and everyone will just get memwiped anyway? (Though, somewhat off topic, I think in universe, the Monokubs messing up is pretty clearly intentional, the motoves especially, with the goal of spicing up the show). Perhaps the writers want to distance themselves as much as possible to the point they inserted Tsumugi's character so they can closely control the show without putting themselves in danger
Also, why does no one recognize Rantaro? If DR was truly such a big phenomenon, you'd think at least one other person would know who he was from the previous killing game. The game seems to imply the writers are kind of creatively bankrupt and milking the series at some points, e.g. the Monokubs, so it could be that the students were familiar with Danganronpa, but don't follow it closely due to its waning popularity and that's why they recognize the Monokubs but not Rantaro, but it's still strange
There are a lot of small things in this game that make me wonder whether there is something going over my head. But maybe that's just the result of the lies vs truth theme purposefully setting up a lot of questions without the devs actually having an answer for them, or are omitting enough to the point that there it truly is open ended, which would be a bit disappointing
@@Expresso52 i think you hit the nail on the head when you said there are intentional questions the devs never thought of an answer for. I think it makes for a more open-ended ending, which fits the game's themes perfectly. I just wanted my video to start a conversation about that open-endedness
@@TheFlinchyDinosaur Oh yeah, definitely. It was a fun watch, even if I see some things differently. I'm also just trying to put my thoughts out there what some of these things could mean or how they can be interpreted.
There was really no need for such a spoiler thumbnail. If anyone is playing through the game rn and the algorythm somehow recommends your video, they're getting spoiled for free.
That was Kayedes lie
right on. there's a lot of pieces that just don't fit. the "flashback" tsumugi shows of the students getting welcomed into the killing game is totally different from the actual intro we get to see. it's clear she's lying about a lot of things, as you've pointed out.
one of the things i've found especially weird is also one or two of the motives - particularly the one where they could bring someone back. that one is a major crack in the story for me. if kiyo had not killed angie, she would've completed the ritual successfully, in which case... what woulda happened? would they bring in a lookalike for rantaro and 'flashback light' everyone into believing it's him? or aren't the characters as dead as they seem? (look, im still on my "kaede alive pls" cope, im sorry.)
What is the ost on minute 16:00?
So we're going to keep pretending that V3 didn't exist as a call out to the unhinged fanbase the series has. Ok then
@@glmpimenta considering every time game staff gets asked about it, they deny it: I don't think it's their intention. Besides, this whole video is basically just me saying "Death of the Author" over and over again.
it's because kodaka is a hack, it really is time to admit it, folks...
Unfortunately, I think the fact that the entire killing game was scripted more or less answers a lot of the points brought up in the video regarding the prologue. It explains why the prologue isn't consistent, why the kidnapping was "remembered" during said prologue and why real names were never used.
Sure, I think there's a lot of room open for theories and the like, but I find it hard to believe anything other than V3 being an AU. Not because "I want the other games' characters to be real within their world", but because it was more or less implied by the game and I don't think there's been any compelling arguments against this. Danganronpa is fake in V3's universe but very real in the other games' universe. Not that I think this is anywhere near an original take lmao. I feel like it's the entire reason this game "isn't connected" to the others, as it was marketed originally not to have a connection to the other games. Mentioning the original killing games near the end of V3 was how they got us to believe they were actually connected, but the reveal that they're just entertainment in V3's universe is how it was separated from the past games again. This feels intentional to me.
Also Tsumugi is totally a 45 year old corporate man cosplaying as a teenager. Change my mind.
14:20
Some of my thoughts
Ive heard people refer to people who aremt nonbinary as they before
The they pronoun couldve also been used to make the story more ambiguous? I have no clue.
There's a line in the game that many see as a throwaway. You find yearbooks and it's commented that the first two are cartoons, while the yearbooks from 3 on are photos.
The Tsumugi says the first two were just a cartoon
That with the yearbooks you find are supposed to confirm that the first 2 games are fiction, and thus Tsumugi doesn't get cospox. The games/cartoon was so popular that they decided to make the game in real life, which launched the reality killing game show with real people who volunteer to have their memories rewritten to be ultimates
Hate to say it but I had plenty of... my mind hurts from the amount of disbelieve I have to suspend in order to take some things seriously.
So I'm gonna rant, possibly waste your time and definitely nitpick unnecessary things... but oh well.
First thing that ticked me off is the funeral scene. You framed it as if there wasn't an explanation for it, but there is like pointed out in the edit, not only was it confirmed to be a funeral of everyone but it's also clearly stated later on to be fake, because it relates to the background fake V3 lore, aka ultimate hunt, Gofer project, worldwide epidemic, space travel... and all that other bullshit that Kokichi uses to play up his mastermind persona.
The funeral tied into the plot by being about how the ultimates faked their death before erasing their memories to run from the Gofer project. I know it's stupid, but so is the entire fake narrative that plays as a distraction in between chapter plot.
That means none of these scenes, especially since they were implanted by flashback lights can be taken as actual serious events.
Second, about tsumugi cosplaying characters, your argument was that since she won't consplay V3 characters there is reason for doubt that her cospox is real and while I'm not trying to validate cospox as an element because it's stupid... there are two points I want to acknowledge. For one the series is not exactly a stranger to bullshit reality bending stuff... Junko's rapid personality switching, Nagito's luck in general, Nekomatu tanking a rocket to the face and living, the Imposter's ability to fool everyone without question, Seiko turning into a literal mutant and Ryota literally inventing brainwashing videos, but no a cosplayer getting sick from pretending to be a real person is breaking reality too much. And second if you wanna claim Tsumugi is weird for not cosplaying V3 characters... take a look at DR3 and UDG. Since they feature characters from the first two games that are fictional that should be proof that every character from those two should be as well... so why isn't Tsumugi consplaying them? I can excuse DR3 as they have no sprites, but UDG has and they still weren't used. So clearly Tsumugi is playing favorites which makes the argument feel less definitive to me.
Next let's talk about that damn wooden floor in the background and the audition tapes. Question have you ever been to an audition? Like you go to a place to make a pitch for yourself?
Because if you had in that case of course everyone would have the same background, because they were filmed on site. They get fans to come to them and introduce themselves as a pitch and it's filmed to look back and evaluate it or simply show it off to other people, in this case the games cast.
And besides why does that floor in the background even matter? There are a lot of wooden floors that under the right lighting would look like that, hate to say it but a wooden floor can look very similar while being two different places.
I can tell you did fnaf before because background overanalyzation is a part of that fandom, wanna know which series rarely if ever uses such visual hints... Danganronpa.
It's very tell don't show if you couldn't tell, them randomly putting a floor in the background to hint that the audition tapes were filmed there is a stretch because if that was the intend they would've made the floor in that lab and on video have a unique detail that would give this theory some ground.
I could point out more nitpicks and I'd likely find even more if I rewatched the video... but I'd like to not write too many of these, so instead let's talk about the one big issue that I have with this entire thing.
These V3 theories that go deep into the what ifs and try to proof or at least explain a head canon always play too much into the gimmick of V3 being open ended and never look at the actual meta point of view which is would it make sense to be the answer and does it even fit the themes, message and intend behind V3 and 9 times out of 10 such theories don't.
Think what is V3 about? In the simplest terms it's about a long running series getting stale and unimaginitive after a while. That's the commentary.
Messages the game tries to push are "lies aren't always bad and are sometimes necessary for the truth or can even become the truth", "fictional media isn't meaningless just because it's fictional and can indeed have an impact on reality" and "a long running series would lose all of it's magic, so you should end it when it reaches that point".
Now ask yourself with this as your meta plan... what do you think Kodaka thought the truth behind everything is and would your theory be in line with that vision.
And the plain and simple answer is, it doesn't matter, whatever the truth is it doesn't matter because what we see has become the new truth and lies were necessary to get us here. What is truly behind the open ending of V3 is irrelevant because the story ended and any truth behind it revealing something new would invalidate the meaning behind the ending being the end to a series that if it were to continue would get worse.
No explanation for V3's ending matters because the series is gone now, it's behind us and that ending parralels the other two because the three survivors get to enter a new world in which they choose their future away from being "characters" and they hope that after all this the reality of killing games becoming entertainment is gone and they can live a life that won't treat them as lesser for being part fiction.
This fits the themes of V3, fiction mattered, lies became the truth to us and these characters and the franchise ended because it should end.
Anything more would not support these themes, themes that clearly shaped everything we see on screen.
So no matter how much evidence you do have for your theory and even if I couldn't try to poke holes into it, I can't in good faith believe it because it doesn't support anything the game tries to stand for.
So while I believe the video to be of good production quality and I certainly see all the effort that went into it.
While I can respect the work, I don't like the actual theory and I hope my criticism doesn't deter you from making new ones in the future.
I had a response typed up analyzing your comment in good faith and I'm actually going to store it in a google doc because I'm a little offended by your "I can tell you did fnaf before" jab. Not because it's disrespectful to me, but because its disrespectful to people I admire. Also, because its a little bit weird that because my first 2 videos were FNAF-related you've decided that I'm now "the FNAF guy". I actually like Danganronpa MORE than FNAF if you can believe it. Unlike FNAF, I can talk about Danganronpa without getting into arguments about what did and did not happen in the majority of its' story.
I just want you to know I'm not trying to force my headcanon or whatever, I honestly don't care what "actually happened" because it's all open-ended like you said. I'm actually really ticked off that of all the messages my video could have sent, the one people came away with was "See, everyone is DUMB for not seeing what masterful Kodaka TRULY INTENDED". That's the opposite of what I wanted, if someone were to ask Kodaka what was true and what wasn't he would probably laugh and say he forgot. I just wanted my video to get people to look at V3's ending more creatively instead of treating it with such finality. Speculation is what makes open-ended works so fun.
@@TheFlinchyDinosaur I don't exactly take issue with how you look at it... I did say I was gonna waste your time with it.
Really it's just mindless ramblings about things I think just bothered me a bit.
Also I'm not saying I thought you pushed for your theory or anything, just that for personal reasons some based on observations that to me seem clear, I don't agree with it.
And of course the fnaf jab is technically a self burn as well... seeing as I wouldn't have known what the general modus operandi of that fandom would be like if I wasn't at least a part of it for a time.
And it's not like I said you're the fnaf guy now, I just thought it was a observation based on context clues that made sense since I see such outragous claimes rarely in the DR community and much more with fnaf.
Ultimately I'm not a critic, I just like yourself, share a view with other people, in your case it was a perpective that was unorthodox to some, but I'd say same goes for me. I can't exactly prove you wrong definitively after all.
We look at things differently and both of us try to show people our way to at least offer something else.
Well whatever the case if you want to consider or ignore my points is at the end of the day not in my control, so do whatever you want, I'll just do the same in return.
But I do have to say, seeing continous theories about a seven year old game with almost all of them making me question what the point of the entire game is... has really started to influence me, so if I sound confrontational in my way of approaching such theories, I apologize.
I just want to see people agree on something for once, which I know I won't get, but still.
@@ProfessorNiloThe original ending or whatever you were fighting for or trying to show everyone what kodaka wanted is only true if you take everything in at face value. But even then a lot of questions arise because let’s be honest Kodaka is kind of a bad writer who more than often wastes character/ story potential and doesn’t have an answer for. He probably made the ending thinking it was deep and didn’t think much about if it really made sense or not. Theories like these are trying to make this game make sense because lord knows kodaka can’t do that.
@@JunPhantom I think you got my intend here backwards. I don't fight for the "canon" ending or whatever... my point is that I want to see a theory that aligns with the established themes of the story or in on other words makes sense from a narrative point of view.
Call whoever you want a good or bad writer, but I can tell you for a fact a good one has a message behind their story and themes to support it. This is creative writing 101, it's one of the first things that gets drilled into you when learning how to write. If I see a theory that ignores all of these messages and themes I can not take it seriously, because it just feels like they didn't understand what the game was about. Sure an elaborate theory might be interesting, but if it doesn't support the narrative what's the point?
I don't care what's the truth, because I don't think it really exists, but I do care about narrative consistency. And me not liking a theory because it's narratively inconsistent should not be anything crazy.
I hope this puts my intend here into a better perspective, because I don't know how you read my comment, but I think you didn't get my point at the end at all.
@@TheFlinchyDinosauri always wondered who is the CEO of Team Danganronpa, i feel like that is a MAJOR help to discover the truth
POV : you're full of sh*t
No, no this is just as dumb as I remember. As long as the whole game being dumb
The flashback lights could easily be used to broadcast memories of a good time but instead they use it to rewrite memories for a fucking killing game. It's an extremely stupid plot point. V3 is a stupid game. Like why bother going to the trouble of killing people when you could just beam entertainment directly into people's heads?
Please change the thumbnail. spoilers, my guy
I think the 'standard' interpertation is that as stated when investigating shuichi's lab the first games and shows are 'drawn', meaning they are just game in universe(like they are for us).
V3 is a reality show with real humans that have implanted memories, thier personas are fictonal with real bodies which ia why tsumugi calles them fictiinal.
That is why tsumugi can cosplay as dr characters, in universe they are just video game characters. That is also why she cant cosplay kaede, kaede's body ia that of a real human.
About how the show is poorly run:
It is said that tsumugi wrote some of the plotlines like the kaito maki love plot and from this we can infer that it is at least somewhat scripted.
We can also see how using the implanted personas of the drv3 cast dr team could have manipulated some of the main plotlines and murders.
An example would be how in case 2.
Kirumi's persona would always prioritise her helping the outside world over continuing the killing game. With this in mind the dr team could use the motive videos whenever they wanted her to kill(they could also make the motive less important to the rest of the cast so only she tries to kill).
This shows the limited control they had on the game using the cast's personas and motives.
While there are momemts that the show goes wrong like how there is no murder in case 1, the game shows how the dr team will just break the rules to fix the nerative in those cases.
This is the most common interpertation and i disagree with some of it, but it does clarify some of the misuderstandings you had about the game
This entire video just feels like a COPE that tries to still cling to idea that Danganronpa series wasn't fictional in V3. I think Kodaka's message was pretty clear, It was fictional and "didn't matter" but that doesn't mean it didn't feel real to us. Kaito was fictional but his messages and character was real for Maki, Kaede was fictional but the love Shuichi felt for her was real, same with Tenko/Himiko etc. If you try to overanalyze it and try to imply Tsumugi is just a liar then you are removing the main message from Kodakas work. Just like Anime ressurecting DR2 characters for happy ending completely making their sacrifice and story arcs no longer impactfull.
@@MrConredsX If you think my silly video "removes" anything from V3 then there is a fundamental problem with how you consume media and engage with other's ideas.
I stopped watching when you bragged about the translation of Danganronpa for 2 minutes instead of getting to the point.
Tsumugi doesnt the entire thing is clearly a show shes a real ultimate so theres an obvious lie also the game is very interesting to go through once you know the twist its kind of funny watching the show itself go into choas and catching moments where tsumigi says something odd or goofs arounds because shes lowkey working