(Twisted direction anon) I see, I was wondering if that had something to do with Danganronpa for some reason. DRV3 has some fucked up ideas and overall really weird... weird handling? It wouldn’t surprise me, if something like that sprung up tbh, an unreliable narrator already happened once. Though that's partly a cynic in me talking, it just worries me a lot. Idk if you were too
(For the uninitiated, this follows on from this Ask.)
Yeah, V3 went in some really bizarre directions, but I didn’t hate it. In fact, the fact that it at least had some serious consequences made me prefer that ending over 2, which basically had a “Get-out-of-tragedy FREE!” card handed to everybody (and if you figured out the twist early enough, you were probably wondering if this would be the case... and the mere possibility really does take the wind out of the sails when dark twists and deaths are piling up).
But uh, I’m going to go ahead and use this to talk about the V3 ending yet again. Sorry? Unless that’s something you were hoping for.
See.... forgive me if I’m repeating myself, but you never know who hasn’t heard me say some of this before, so I guess it sometimes needs to be repeated... but DRV3 would upset me more if I thought we had ample reason to take Tsumugi at face value. Yet for me, even going into the ending of the game, I already had seen Kodaka’s tweet advising people to go back and replay the Prologue after finishing the game to catch “disparities,” so I knew something was gonna be up about the ending that would make it not jive with the beginning. Aaaaand sure enough, there’s a lot of reason to believe Tsumugi is largely full of shit, as I posted about here at length a bit after the international release.
The end result of the vagueness and me going “Hey! That’s a fucking lie!” and then trying to sit there and figure out which parts were truths and which were lies ultimately meant that, for me, V3′s last chapter felt like a rollercoaster of increasingly comedic plot twists that I found to just constantly ramp up in fucking absurdity. Sadly, I don’t think “zany, slapstick-y fourth-wall-breaking comedy in the vein of Kung Pow: Enter the Fist” was what Kodaka was INTENDING to convey, but that’s sure how it felt for ME when I experienced it. It was just too bugnuts and ridiculous, and yet... well, the lies muddied the waters forever so that we will always have people who choose to believe Tsumugi’s story about “pregame” characters. Just look at AO3 for endless reams of evidence on THAT chestnut...
The biggest negative takeaway from V3′s ending, for my money? It’s not even the people who failed to recognize what Kodaka was talking about RE: the disparities. It’s the “leaving it so vague and open-ended that some sequel could later decide to make her explanation canon” problem. All of the games have had pretty open endings in different ways (some more than others - I felt like 2 was pretty cut-and-dry, whereas 1 leaves you on a pretty big cliffhanger and UDG just leaves TONS unresolved), but this had to be the worst offender in that regard.
Me finding the ending hilariously bugnuts is at least a positive reaction, in a sense. At least I was having a good time while I coudn’t stop laughing at what he was trying to sell me. Even if it wasn’t necessarily the kind of “good time” that I think was expected.
(Kodaka has since gone on to complain that, after release, he had a ton of people excitedly sharing their reactions to Chapter 5 with him, but he had to actually ask and prod and pull to get opinions on Chapter 6. And I mean, I think there’s a damn good reason people weren’t anxiou to tell him what they thought about it :P)
