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I spoil Danganronpa V3 and Share My Opinion About It
7-25-2025 - By Haddie
Danganronpa V3 is a relatively popular visual novel and relatively obscure video game which shares a name with a few other games, an anime and some books and manga. Danganronpa V3 has a very contentious ending. I love this game’s ending. It’s a perfect cipher because everyone has a different way to interpret it and are relatively strongly defensive about their interpretation being correct (me included, the stone is cast at me just as much)
I’ve never played a Danganronpa game, though I’ve watched a full playthrough of each of the main visual novels, watched a number of other videos discussing the games and probably 6 different YouTube videos longer than one hour discussing the triumph and failures of this game’s ending in particular.
I want to, like so many others, discuss my personal interpretation of the game’s ending, and why I adore it. In order to ensure this post is not over 10k words of preamble, I’m not going to go through the game itself. The visual novel is what I might describe as a slow rollercoaster. The games’s got ups and, wow, it's got some downs, and, holy hells, it's a slow game. The game itself is not a masterpiece. It’s fine to great, depending on my inclinations on a given day. It just has a fantastically divisive ending and its so fun to learn about and enjoy.
After this point is where I am going into spoilers, so, like, if you didn’t see the title of the page and do not want Danganronpa V3’s ending spoiled, here’s where you can get off Mr. Bones Wild Ride.
——- Spoilers below———
If you don’t know anything about Danganronpa, that is perfect. In fact, for the purpose of this, pretend to forget everything you know about Danganronpa, the entire concept and series.
Let me paint the picture of a fictional world.
In a world just like ours, the movie Groundhog’s Day is released.
The world is enraptured. Obsessed, and in love with the movie.
A sequel is released, and people adore it. They release a book and there’s no question about it - Groundhog’s Day has become the core religion of the planet.
In “Groundhog’s Day 10: Rebirth”, they find someone who has never heard of Groundhog’s Day, then place them in a small town full of actors who *pretend* that there is a Groundhog’s Day event happening until they figure it out.
The world has united, and there are efforts to solve world hunger and share Groundhog’s Day with everyone who hasn’t seen it yet.
“Groundhog’s Day 13: Your Loop” is a rudimentary but very functional VR simulation game where you can play as the Loop runner against an AI town that plays along.
Nanotechnology has progressed to a point where having microscopic cameras is a breeze.
“Groundhog’s Day 19: Reality” is a bombshell. The producers have found a village’s worth of people around the world who have anterograde amnesia and can’t remember anything past the last 24 hours, and someone who’s been in a coma since Groundhog’s Day was released.
Localized isolated environments can now be created whole scale, making colonizing outside of earth more possible. A whole generation has now been raised on as the pillar of human achievement.
“Groundhog’s Day 25: Superreal” is the first game-show style release, where people volunteer to be placed in a virtual environment with hyperealistic AI to play out the scenario, in hopes of completing challenges and winning prizes.
Biotech’s whole driving motivation is not profit but Groundhog’s Day. Aging can now be halted, or even reversed.
“Groundhog’s Day 31: Eternity” is when they manage to catch the White Whale, they can download and upload memories. Cloning has been solved science, but now, they can create clones of the entire cast and set up a 100% genuine Groundhog’s Day environment even if people die in the last loop.
“Groundhog’s Day 45: Invasion” is when they show that not only can they upload but now they can delete and replace memories, Memories can be rewritten for anyone, not just clones and they can start getting contestants from the common population. Now the game is just about surviving as long as possible.
Humanity’s problems are solved, they still love Groundhog’s Day.
“Groundhog’s Day 53: Killing Time” has a recurring contestant from GHD52, and also has an android that the audience can vote to decide their actions, so everyone can now play! But then…
But then, everything in this game show feels like over-the-top reference to the original Groundhog’s Day because the director is a bit too much of a fanatic of the OG Movie.
But then, one of the victim contestants spends a whole week tearing down the set-dressing, showing the cracks in the set, the failures of the time loop setup.
But then, another of the victims of the loop demonstrates that the producers of the show are rigging the whole thing, breaking rules they set up for the game’s time loop.
But then, the director and ‘mastermind’ tells the victims to shut up, the audience is a slave to this shit, and they are going to eat it up.
But then, the victim turns to the camera and plaintivly tells audience that its actually super fucked up that they are watching *and* participating because “what the fuck is wrong with you, my horror and pain are real, even if my old self volunteered.”
After much guilt-tripping and annoyance at being treated like idiots by the show director, the audience, who adored this whole Groundhog’s Day series, kinda feels a little weirded out and decides that maybe its a good time to tune out from this show and go find something else to do, ending Groundhog’s Day. For good.
Now, replace Groundhog’s Day with a setup where its about 16 teens with uniquely special skills who are are forced to kill each other in a school by a mascot teddy bear and that’s Danganronpa V3.
——-
All the details above from “Groundhog’s Day 10” to “Groundhog’s Day 45”? I made the specifics up to better provide context as to what kind of world this is so you - as the Our-Universe Player - understand the world and how it affects the In-Universe Contestants and In-Universe Audience.
Internally, Danganronpa V3 is closer to The Running Man, but where Ben Richards (Arnold Schwarzenegger) turns to the gameshow camera and delivers an impassioned speech to scold everyone watching the TV show to end the game show. He’s not targeting the people in *our Earth’s* theaters.
Danganronpa V3 is The Truman Show , where Truman Burbank (Jim Carrey) finds out his life is a sham on a soundstage, then just protests by going on strike until he emaciates and dies, killing the content and making the in-universe audience feel a little bad about what they’ve participated in. It isn’t condemning our Earth’s audience for enjoying a bit of speculative fiction.
Danganronpa V3’s an extended version of The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas by Usula K Le Guinn.
For anyone who knows the short story, you probably get it already. The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas is a short story written by arguably the best speculative fiction writer in the 20th century. It is about a city named Omelas, a True Utopia where everything *is Perfect*. But once people are of a certain age, they are told why the Utopia continues to exist. Every person in the city is confronted by the fact that everything is perfect in Omelas but only as long as the city continues to keep a single child locked away, in perpetual filth, darkness and misery forever in a basement of the city. People just continue about, trying not to think about that one, singular, immense evil that fuels their happiness. But there are people who walk away, and can’t stand to be part of it.
It is an excellent *short story* and an earnest indictment of utilitarianism applied to the human condition. Super important to this: the entire narrative is not buried 35 hours after and 85% of the way into a story of a half million words to convey the wacky antics by teens murdering one another and conducting a debate club to see whodunit.
Inside the game, the story is conveying the experience of the In-Universe Contestants forced to be part of an actually physical killing game.
In our world, ‘Our-Universe Players’ are playing video game and looking at digital art, not watching a real killing game.
The In-Universe Audience already understands - from a dramatic irony sense - that they are watching a real-live killing game and they absolutely love it.
In my opinion - there is no fourth wall breaking in the game of Danganronpa V3. When the In-Universe Contestants are horrified and trying to explain that enjoying a killing game is wrong they are not talking to the Our-Universe Players! There is no metatextual horror happening here. The existential horror is internal to the In-Universe Contestants who are struggling with the concept that their entire lives may be just as much fake memories and programming as the android the audience is controlling!
The In-Universe Contestants are protesting that what is happening and what’s been done to them is wrong because these characters, brainwashed or otherwise, are expressed as real people with agency and are being tortured, to entertain and inspire sadists watching from the outside!
One of the biggest sins of Danganronpa V3 is that it spends most of the time hinting at the In-Universe Contestants about a bunch of false narratives and lies - only to confuse us as the Our-Universe Players. Remember: the In-Universe Audience knows all the worldbuilding is a lie. For them, the tension is not “What is going on?” And more “What new false narratives is the Killing Game Mastermind going to come up with and how are these characters going to react and keep Hope alive?”
All of this is conveyed very poorly, subtly, but explicitly, The game even attempts to define the extreme difference in perspective between the In-Universe Audience and Our-Universe Player. The concept of defining a distinct difference between the In-Universe Contestants, the In-Universe Audience, and the Our-Universe Players is fascinating! And Hard! And the game does so very confusingly!
All the game ending is summed up as - in my opinion - “Wouldn’t it be fucked up if there was a world where they actually made a killing game and enjoyed it?”
I also think this interpretation solves a lot of the remaining frustrations about the game. If we take the above as canon:
- How much of the memory altering and history the characters remember is real?
- None of it. Their memories have been completely wiped and their personalities are more or less derived completely from the backstory written by the mastermind.
- Why is the mastermind constantly lying about the history of reality?
- Because they’re an egotistical superfan who thinks their fan-service worldbuilding is more important than telling a convincing lie, which also explains all the inconsistencies and alternative memory options the players discover.
- Did the mastermind actually write all the In-Universe Contestants’ personalities?
- Probably. I imagine they wrote these personalities including things like “X person is inclined to trust Y and Z” or “Person A will be intentionally disruptive to the game and sow distrust”. But once the pieces were put on the board, the mastermind can’t actually decide how the contestants end up, otherwise why would they write the In-Universe Contestants to destroy their beloved franchise?
- Doesn’t all this invalidate the characters and their agency, and make everything we just watched fake?
- No matter what these people may have volunteered their body for in a different lifetime, these personalities are real, and all the tragedy is horrifically real to them. You can’t sign away your consent in perpetuity. In practice, these volunteers signed away someone else’s consent, because the volunteers’ minds and memories are gone for good. BUT! No judgement from me if that makes it feel less real! But either Real or Fiction, Truth or Lies, those In-Universe Contestants felt every second of their pain, factually, which is the heart of the tragedy unfolding.
Convincing someone their family hates them, then yelling “Psyche, actually they’re all dead!” doesn’t invalidate the pain from the first part.
Everyone else’s additional or different interpretations are valid, of course, because art is always interpretable, but the point above is the most often unemphasized or missed point I’ve seen in videos about Danganronpa V3. (The most consistent point I’ve seen is that Danganronpa V3 is poorly executed, to be fair, so its not like folks don’t understand the symptoms.)
As much as there are lots of individual things I really like about the game, what I love more than anything is that this story is truly going totally gonzo weird in a way that art so rarely can afford. I’ll cop to being a fan of The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya’s Endless Eight anime arc (that’s for a different article. Much like that arc, Danganronpa V3 steps up to the bat, points to the outfield, readies itself, swings! and hits the ball so hard into the popular mascot’s head it explodes and then no one watches baseball again.
My sincere love and appreciation for the fact humans are willing to spread and share their opinions, ideas and fan theories about the game and I wanted to contribute just a little. I’ve found some great theories, and learned so much about how to identify and avoid confusing messaging in writing.
One of the main playthroughs I watched was Game Grumps’s playthrough.
I was finally pushed to write this bit after watching the very recent and enjoyable Viveros’s The Defense of V3 video, but special mention goes to KazumiVA’s Danganronpa V3 breakdown video here if you want someone to go through the entire game in specific detail but not watch/play the game.
Some other videos I recall having enjoyed are here:
And that’s Danganronpa V3’s ending in about 2400 words. Now go enjoy other people’s impassioned, earnest, and also correct perspectives on the story! (Or don’t! The game series as a whole is a very mixed bag and tries really hard to be Edgy in a 00’s and 10’s way, so you would have to deal with that).
You aren’t a bad person for enjoying fiction that would be horrible if it really happened! Have a good day!
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