Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony is the third mainline game in the series released for the PlayStation 4 and PlayStation Vita. It is not a direct sequel storywise to the previous three games but has the similar premise of a killing game at a school. It is more of a reboot taking place in a different world. The game opens up with a student waking up in a locker and finds out that she, along with 15 other students, were kidnapped and placed in this abandoned school. Instead of the iconic Monokuma, it is instead hosted by the five Monokubs, each of a different wacky design.
The 16 students, who are all known as Ultimates, have unique talents. These talents aren't as strange as some previous characters; we get the Ultimate Pianist and Ultimate Tennis Pro, but there are also ones like Ultimate Robot and Ultimate Supreme Leader. The over-the-top scenes return in full force. Dialogue is highly exaggerated and the series has given up all pretense of at least being plausible with giant robots, metal bars surrounding the school like a birdcage and high tech gadgets. Swearing and heavy sexual innuendo are rampant. In the writer's bid to make everything bigger and more over-the-top than previous games, it ends up making the characters unlikable.
Monokuma constantly breaks the fourth wall and while all these can be funny, you feel that the writers has tried too hard at times and finally crossed the line of it being like this for the sake of it and thus becoming pointless. The game is broken up into various sections. You'll start off each chapter where the characters are still recovering from the effects of what they have learned. Some relatively normal events happen like trying to find the escape, hanging out with each other and exploration of each section that is opened up. You get "Free Time" where you speak to various characters and learn their backstories and individual quirks.
Exploration around the school is done in first-person, and rooms are rendered in 2.5D which has a very unique look as furniture and character portraits are like cardboard cutoffs. A murder will inevitably happen and you spend the next section finding clues and ammunition for the Class Trial. You cannot progress the story nor can you exit the room until you have found all clues, which is helpful to make sure you don't aimlessly wander around trying to find what you have missed.
When investigating rooms, you use the reticule to select points of interest. Unfortunately, the bad part is that while it doesn't allow you to leave without investigating everything that the game wants you to, there are many small items that are easy to miss and it can get frustrating when you know that there is more but the game doesn't give you a hint on what you have missed.
Finally, there is the Class Trial where debates happen as you try to find out the culprit and how they committed the murder. There are more than a few red herrings and false accusations from various characters. A variety of minigames are present, the main one being that you use "Truth Bullets", various facts that you've gathered from your investigation, to either agree or counter statements from the characters. It can be a bit tough at first and you will definitely need to open up the in-game database to refresh your memory of what each clue meant. It doesn't help that you have a time limit in each section and a health bar to boot.
The debates are made harder now with the introduction of multiple characters talking at once and you have to try and sift through three trees of dialogue. It gets confusing the first time around. There is definitely a lot more to the Class Trial compared to the first game, to the point where it now feels overly gimmicky. It is overwhelming during the first trial where there are numerous tutorials and feels too convoluted, detracting from the ingeniousness of the some of the murders.
Class Trials end with a comic section in which you have to piece together the missing panels. When completed, it tells the whole story in how the murder was completed. The story is always the draw of the Danganronpa games and V3 steps it up even more. Coming from the past three games, players would be wary of what the game would throw at them and will be ready for it. However, V3 plays into that aspect and still manages to throw a huge twist in the first Class Trial alone. It makes sense and feels more ingenious considering that it is always the likable ones that die first. Conversely, it's a shame that some of the more annoying characters didn't get offed first.
No matter how much V3 tries to keep it interesting and different from previous games, it never seems to suck you in like the first two games did. The murders can be clever, but it doesn't seem to click once you learn how it works. As the characters are so meh overall, it isn't as shocking to find out who the murderer is. It gets a little bit better by Chapter 4, where there was a genuine sad moment as the harsh truth comes out.
There are vague directions in how to progress the story such as finding the mysterious objects lying around to open up areas. You'll end up scouring around the school trying to find them, which seems like a huge pointless waste of time and grinds the pacing to a halt. It is quite annoying actually in an already overlong and bloated game. Even with all the twists it throws into the plot, the biggest one is left for the ending. It will be something you do not expect at all and the writer went completely rogue in terms of the direction. It's hard to know what to feel after the revelation since while it is a shocker; it also feels lame and lazy.
The game never reaches the height of the first two games in terms of emotional depth or the significance of hope and despair. It ends with a hard version of one of the minigames which is a massive pain to play through and the whole thing just feels hollow at the end. It felt like this game undid so many of the significant plot points of the whole franchise, the anime and spin-offs included. Thus once the epilogue is over, more than 30 hours in, Danganronpa V3 simple falls flat and cheap with none of the same depth of character investment you should have had. While the core concept wasn't bad, the execution was not done well.
The quality of some of the cutscenes and artworks are poor since there is an obvious fuzziness to the outlines. It feels as if it was heavily compressed and lost too much quality in the process. It is distracting, especially compared to the crisp gameplay. The familiar music of Danganronpa returns and it gives a slight nostalgic feeling. The same aesthetic as previous games are used and it looks great here.
There is a lot of postgame content. Love Across the Universe is just a mode for you to get the rest of the character backstories (each character has five scenes). While efficient in that you can smash out scene after scene, it is also tedious and boring as there is nothing else to do apart from being forced to go to the in-game Casino every so often.
The Ultimate Talent Development Plan is a board game where you play through the three years of attending Hope's Peak. You get to choose any character from all three mainline Danganronpa games. Each year is comprised of 12 months, each month you roll a dice and depending on which square you land will determine what happens. You might get stat increases, friendship events or items. The aim is to level up your characters such that when final exams come, which take on the form of a battle, you can win. It is very luck based but the other major draw of this mode is that you get to see events between characters of different Danganronpa games (which would never have been possible within canon). It's not just a shoehorned side mode as there are a lot of original scenes here and each playthrough only takes around 20 to 40 minutes.
Despair Dungeon: Monokuma's Test is a dungeon crawling RPG that ties into The Ultimate Talent Development Plan. Through the Development Plan mode, you level up your characters and gain skills in order to be used in Despair Dungeon. In Despair Dungeon, you form a party of four and traverse through 100 levels, fighting bosses every ten floors and random encounters every few steps using a basic turn-based battle system. It's quite bland and boring, and the kicker is that defeating enemies here only gives money (for obtaining new characters) and items (for crafting). You get no experience points in Despair Dungeon, thus you can only ever level up from the Development Plan mode.
Overall, Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony tries to outdo its predecessors in every way. Unfortunately, in its efforts to try and do just that, it goes too far and ends up crossing the line. The story never quite sucks you in and its revelations while great in concept, just feels lacking in execution. The ending is especially divisive and while there's a lot of postgame content, they're quite boring and grindy.
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