I finally got to play the third entry of the Danganronpa series and we find ourselves in a situation similar to the first game. You’re trapped in a place that looks like an academy and as always you play a character with an ultimate talent who is forced to compete against 15 other individuals with their own ultimate talent in a killing game hosted by the half black, half white bear Monokuma. The rules are simple you have to kill someone and not get caught in order to get out but after the murder and some investigation there is a class trial to see who did it. If the murderer is caught only they will be executed; however, if the murderer is not caught then everyone else is executed.

So overall the story is for the most part the game. It’s the same game with the same rules as the previous games the main difference is that events have transpired that are unique to this new group of contestants and other major events have happened since the events of the second game. With that being said the story once again manages to leave seemingly random disconnected breadcrumbs that really hook you in and try to piece them together but what you get is vague enough there’s not much of a way to do so which in my case made me further invested in the story. With that being said I went into this wondering what kind of spectacular twist was coming and could it amount to what we got to see from the first two games. I was really thrown for a loop with several surprise twists at the end that I would have never guessed no matter how much time you gave me. Obviously I won’t actually discuss them in detail for spoiler reasons but it was a twist that really wraps up the series as a whole but also fundamentally changes the way we think of not just this game but the entire series and I love it when a twist is capable of doing that. I actually had to process the twist for a second it was that out of left field compared to even the other two games.

The investigations are the same as the other two games where you go to various rooms and look for clues by highlighting and pressing the A button to look at things further, but one thing I loved about this game is you have this new kind of vision mode where if you press it everything you can interact with is highlighted making them easier to find. While it wasn’t an issue with the previous two games I did notice I spent a lot of time trying to find an item to interact with that was harder to notice so this really helped to fix that a lot.

The class trials are pretty much the same as the other two games. You listen to everyone make their statements and use your evidence that you gathered in your investigations to either agree or disagree with key statements to advance the trial.  The mini games have some of their aspects tweaked to make them unique but for the most part they all play with the same basic rules and controls. Now I didn’t mind that at all as I felt like if you added too much more to the games games it would have made things a bit too much because you already had quite a lot of them. 

The trials do add three things in this game and while they are different they operate very similar to how the trials normally go so it felt more like a twist on the same games rather than something new entirely. One is where you don’t just listen to people one at a time to figure out what to agree or disagree with but as many as three people which is a lot of information to process and made things a lot harder but it also felt more like what you would see in an actual mass debate since rarely do people talk one at a time, another is the where if the room is split you actually make arguments with the people who agree with you in order to counter arguments made from the opposing side. This I liked a lot because it really puts into play differing and similar opinions in the characters a lot more than the previous games did. The third thing I honestly didn’t care for is that you can actually lie to progress the trial. I am a terrible liar in real life so parts of the story where you had to lie really threw me off and I often was spent frustrated trying to figure out what to do. Thankfully sometimes the game will outright tell you it’s time to lie which made some of it easier.

The outcome of the trials are both similar and different than the previous games. While the rules are the same the way the murders play out it actually has a way of leaving you a bit sympathetic to the characters, even the ones who did it. Now by no means do I condone their actions but the story is spun in a way where you can’t help but at least understand for most of them why it happened and it’s hard to not feel some sort of empathy for them. A spin that I didn’t see coming which fundamentally changed the emotional tone to the outcome of the trials in a way that had me very much invested.

The characters are all interesting but I’ll admit I wasn’t as invested in them as I was in the previous two games. While they all had new Ultimate talents most of them felt more like new versions of already existing characters rather than characters that could stand alone. Now this wasn’t the case for all of them but enough that I did notice a difference in how I felt about them. That’s not inherently a bad thing but where this game has a lot of text you do wind up noticing the sheer amount of conversations that take place prior to gameplay a lot more here than previous games.

So overall the end of the series ends on a very twisted note. The story takes an entirely new spin that is unpredictable and incredible. The gameplay is for the most part the same but it works really well because it really didn’t need to change as this is a game you play for the story which was done masterfully. The characters I will admit weren’t quite as interesting this time around but at the same time the stories behind their actions in the game were ones that can easily make the player empathetic and therefore more invested in their individual motivations. Overall the game ends on a note that is hard to see coming but makes for a spectacular end to the series.