What's Danganronpa best known for? Wacky character designs? Sure, that's certainly been a massive aspect of its success, but I don't think it's what keeps so many people coming back. Flexible visual novel style? It's nice, but that's really only good for the many, many people that like to make fangames, and not very relevant to this anime adaptation anyway. Deep, intricate themes and complex character interaction? Lmao, no, it'll never aspire to those levels. Danganronpa's presentation is an important ingredient to the overall experience, but what exactly is it that hooks so many about Danganronpa from the get-go?
Murder. Raw, imaginative, hilarious, unreal and unpredictable murder. There's many a compilation on YouTube if you want to see for yourself. The series has class trials and suspects for a good reason - the games and overarching series are, by and large, murder mysteries with a high-school anime edge for marketing value. Even if all else fails (and Danganronpa certainly fails in many categories - its worldbuilding, characters, design philosophy, and narrative structure are about as solid as a pool full of lube), Danganronpa can always rely on good old-fashioned, stylish murder to keep people hooked - if it ain't making you horny, it's tapping into that edgy teen mindset you never fully grew out of and exploiting it for all it's worth. Murder keeps Danganronpa afloat.
Keep that in mind as we progress through the next few episodes.
So DR3 decided an entire class and two brand-new teachers weren't enough characters for a twelve-episode series, and decided to switch gears and focus on the Reserve Course, the class where all of the students that apply to Hope's Peak but aren't worth a damn get shafted to. We're introduced to Natsumi Kuzuryu, the younger sister of Fuyuhiko Kuzuryu, the straight-laced mafiosi kid from Class 1-B. She's a rude, arrogant slut that's waiting for her chance to slip into the Main Course, armed with a mega-hollow rivalry with some random green-haired skank named Sato (isn't even given a last name... unless that is her last name), who gets uppity with Natsumi for threatening to pull something against Mahiru, the collected and polite, redheaded photographer from Class 1-B.
The redhead herself steps in to break up the fight, which Hajime witnesses with the emotional variety of a fucking sack. Despite "Farewell" seemingly being an episode that focuses on the Reserve Course, the main focal point and lead insight into the Reserve Course himself remains awfully distant from the events that kick off this episode, which only further removes Hajime from the audience as a passable human being. All the drama in this episode happens between two girls that have been suddenly thrust upon us without warning and Mahiru, who hasn't done anything of note in the last two episodes... and this lack of intimacy makes it hard to give a damn about what they're fighting about. "You haven't changed," says Mahiru to Natsumi after the latter threatens to murder Sato. Like... sure? I guess I have no reason to disagree with you since I have no idea what she's like, and I'm not going to get another chance to after this episode's over.
Did I spoil that ahead of time? Natsumi is killed after having another fight with Sato that feels like a nerfed rehash of the first fight they already had not five minutes ago - once again, they fight over Mahiru. It begs the question - why does Mahiru matter so much to these girls? Why does Mahiru matter so much to the narrative all of a sudden? Mahiru barely appears again after this episode, so it just feels like a conflict for the sake of it - it comes out of nowhere and goes nowhere. But I'm getting ahead of myself - Natsumi is the first murder of DR3. She's murdered in the music room offscreen.
Yes, you heard me. Offscreen. DR3's first murder is offscreen. For a series that prides itself on stylish and inventive executions... doesn't that seem a bit disingenuous? We're not even treated to a shot of the corpses. Sato and Natsumi were lifeless, trite characters with nothing to their name, so their deaths were already bound to be disappointing... but fuck, man, they couldn't even bother to make them bombastic? To make them visually striking? To make them ANYTHING? Would you really watch a murder mystery series where the murders never happen and the mystery of "who did it" has already been solved? If you would, then... damn, have I got a show for you. It's got a funny bear in it.
And yes, you read that right. Sato winds up dead as well. We never see her death, and we never see her body. What the fuck is this shit? Even if this wasn't a Danganronpa series and didn't have a legacy of maniacal executions to live up to, this is pretty miserable for standard thriller BS. We're barely even told how Sato died (I had to go onto the Wikia to learn that Fuyuhiko apparently killed Sato out of vengeance for his sister), which gives this entire episode a weightless feeling of pure and utter pointlessness. Character deaths are important, man, especially the first major ones - they should be impactful, they should really hit you with that distinctive feeling of "the die has been cast, there's no turning back from this". But the universe pretty much completely shrugs the events of this episode off of its shoulders after the fact - we're barely treated to Fuyuhiko and Mahiru's reactions to losing his sister and her best friend respectively, and they both just kinda move on from the murders as if nothing happened at all. Episode 4 will pull this same trick again, no less!
I'll give Hajime some credit. Even though he starts this episode off as weak as always, he actually starts doing something and actually starts emoting afterwards - he tries to dissuade Natsumi from acting like a bitch, he talks to Chiaki some more, he confronts Sato about her obvious role in Natsumi's death, and he tries to storm the Main Course grounds in order to confront Mahiru about everything before getting into a fight with Juzo, a new character and a cynical, harsh security officer that kicks Hajime's ass before unveiling his quasi-Darwinist philosophy about the talented and the talentless. Hajime demonstrates the kind of initiative and fire I wanted him to have from the get-go... a pity this side of him never comes up again. It also kinda sucks that the exact moment Hajime works is during a conflict that ultimately means nothing in the larger narrative, but I'll let that slide - he's the only character in this entire episode that doesn't annoy me to some degree, minus Chiaki.
Hajime leaves to make the "decision" hinted to in Episode 2, officially ending his forward momentum as a character in the process... ironically enough. There's a scene between Juzo and Chisa where they talk about their findings from digging into Hope's Peak and express their distaste for the school covering up Sato and Natsumi... which is pretty retroactively ironic, because that's almost exactly what the show itself is going to do in no time at all. This episode might as well be filler compared to the others - and that's my biggest problem with DR3's beginning beyond its tonal instability. The first three episodes feel like they don't matter once you land in the middle of the show - I feel like the only thing you really need to take away from the first 3 episodes is that there's this kid named Hajime, and he decides to make a vague decision of unknown gravitas that will presumably change his life and make him "everyone's hope". Everything else is, comparatively, filler bullshit. It's hard to escape the feeling that an hour or so of your time was wasted watching these first three episodes.
"A Farewell to All Futures" feels like a completely different show compared to the first two episodes. Whereas the first two episodes of DR3 had a lot of cartoonish slapstick and broad, vibrant personalities on display, Episode 3 is grimmer - sometimes altogether humorless - and much slower-paced, trying and failing to tell a story about bullying, spite, murder, and conspiracy. The victims of this conspiracy are hard to care about, and the conspirators themselves are even harder to give a damn about, shadowy figures that do little more than gather in offices and talk about what other characters have done. Episode 3 commits many narrative sins, key among them being introducing two prominent characters only to have them murdered without fanfare... and if 'murdered without fanfare' isn't the biggest neon sign that this is not a good Danganronpa product whatsoever, then perhaps future events might be enough to sway you. It's all downhill from here.
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