Ooc: Celestia Ludenberg has definitely lied about the nature of her talent--but which is the lie and which is the truth? State your reasoning below if you like!
What makes her The Ultimate Gambler?
She's lucky and lied about her skills to seem more competent
She's skilled and lied about having luck to seem supernaturally unique
Of course, he'd recognized the kid the instant he saw him on the screen. He recognized all the kids. They were his kids. His students.
He didn't know how, and he didn't know why, but it looked like this nightmare had returned one more time.
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After so many years of peace, the killing game resurfaces once again, and Makoto Naegi is determined to rescue his students before it’s too late.
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AKA, a V3 in-universe rewrite.
A nice treat before you start your workweek: a new chapter of my Danganronpa V3 rewrite fic! The creative juices were really flowing for me this weekend. So please check it out and enjoy!
The Game Grumps Danganronpa V3 playthrough is heating up this weekend, as they approach the end of Chapter 5. I'm on the edge of my seat, and tempted to look up spoilers. Which is kinda cool, since I hadn't expected to get so invested in the third game.
I think the fifth trial is making me realize why DRV3 is reeling me in like DR1, whereas DR2 didn't so much. TL;DR: The grumpy one is soft for the sunshine one.
[Above: omg the grumpy one is soft for the sunshine one]
What made Trigger Happy Havoc click for me in the first place was Kyoko Kirigiri. The Prisoner's Dilemma concept was intriguing, but the aesthetic was so bonkers and the characters were so dumb that I wouldn't have stuck around if not for this one serious girl getting down to business. The game made me care about her, even as it made sure I understood that no one is safe and anybody could die tomorrow. I didn't realize I was falling into a trap until Chapter 5 teased her as the murder victim. The thought of continuing the story without her--with dumb ol' Byakuya replacing her as the deuteragonist--was intolerable, but I had to keep going to see if she was actually dead. This made Makoto's feelings about the case--all the grief, confusion, and self-doubt--more palpable, which sucked me in further. By the time the story hinted at Kyoko's feelings about what she's put Makoto through, I was all in.
Goodbye Despair couldn't recapture that vibe with me, and I've finally decided that's because it just doesn't have an analogue to Kyoko. To be clear, it was sensible not to rehash the characters from the first game. But Kyoko as a character is optimized for Danganronpa as a ludonarrative, and vice-versa--doing a sequel with one but not the other was a tall order. Because DR2 isn't about rescuing a tsundere girl from her own cynicism, it had to be about something else, and I felt it struggled in that area.
Killing Harmony seems to find a balance, revisiting what worked with Kyoko without simply copying it. Maki is not Kyoko, and Kaito isn't Makoto. Setting them both up as deuteragonists for Shuichi, each with their own secrets withheld from the player, helps set them apart. But they have a similar story arc, where Kaito reaches out to Maki for no real reason except his stubborn optimism, and Maki can't easily express how much that means to her. And, just like DR1, Chapter 5 blows that up, making us watch as one of them apparently discovers the other has been murdered. Except in V3, it's the grumpy one who has to find a way to move forward without the sunshine one. I really like that change.
Maki's dialogue (and Erica Mendez's performance) is really firing on all cylinders for me in Chapter 5. There are times when I'm not sure she personally cares if she lives or dies, but then she'll make it clear that she's not going to lay down and give up. (I can't tell if that's just because of Kaito or something deeper in her character.) So the worst part about discovering Kaito's body is knowing she's devastated, even when she can't really express that. When Shuichi holds out hope Kaito isn't the victim, and Maki can't, it's so sad. When the kids finally conclude Kaito must be the victim, it's like losing him all over again, and you see the blue despair stuff over her face and it's just...ugh. The Exisal pretending to be Kaito calls her "Maki Roll" and she loses her cool about it, and I just wish she could get a hug, but she'd only take it from one person, and barring a miracle he's just gone, man. It's heavy.
I suspect if I was watching DRV3 cold, all of this wouldn't hit me so hard. But thinking about Kyoko for four years has me thinking about these scenes in terms of what Maki doesn't say, how she doesn't react, and what's going on in her head that she won't share. She's going through a lot more than she's letting on, except unlike Kyoko in DR1, the other kids can kinda tell, even if they don't understand. (Shout-out to Dorothy Elias-Fahn for the way she read "Th-There's now way she is [the culprit]! 'Cause...why would she kill Kaito!?")
The toughest part is that I never expected Maki and Kaito to have a happy ending in the first place. I knew, very early in the story, that it would be too easy to have them bond and then both of them live all the way to the end, because we got that with Makoto and Kyoko. I thought I was fine with that--I already got Naegiri, so doing a more doomed version, an anti-Naegiri, was cool. I figured one of them would kill the other, or one would make a noble sacrifice for the other, and it wouldn't bug me. But now that it's happening, I find myself wondering if Maki will live (because that's what Kaito would want) or die (because how can she go on without him?) and I'm really worried I won't like the answer to that. I just want somebody in this story to make sure she's okay, and I don't know if it'll happen. Just like the first game, they've lured me right into the trap...
