Danganronpa 3: The End of Hope's Peak High School: Future Arc

Episode 3

It took me a little while to process that Aoi Asahina was really dead last week, and this week kicked off by mocking all my wasted time. Aoi is fine, just smothered in tomato sauce with a toy knife in her blouse to send a cruel message. Your friends are not safe, Makoto. Monokuma can take them from you at any time, and anyone who gets close to you is fair game. Getting a fakeout death doesn't make Aoi immune from assassination later. If anything, it just ramped up her chances. At least I have time to brace myself now if it happens for real.

But Monokuma still recognizes the importance of killing someone in close proximity to Makoto, so poor Great Gozu is actually the one to draw the short straw. We barely had time to know this bullheaded fellow, but I am concerned about the first casualty of the game being a man in a mask. Since we don't know what he looked like beforehand, and the gang respects him in death by leaving it on his head, there's no way to know what kind of wacky variables his death might have just thrown into who's still alive and who isn't. There aren't any solid clues to go on just yet because so little is known about everyone, but just keep it in the back of your head that one of our casualties was a man whose face we've never seen.

After Makoto, Aoi, and Gekkōgahara mourn Gozu, Usami pops up to inform them that she's recovered some of the data that Monokuma has been scrambling to eliminate. She's found a map for the building they're in, and it was apparently meant to be the overseas Hope's Peak Academy once upon a time, before The Tragedy cut that dream short and turned it into a defense base for the Future Foundation. As Makoto makes his way to the intercom to try and quell any panic before it starts, Gekkōgahara accidentally gives away her forbidden action, so Makoto and Aoi share their own in solidarity. (Makoto cannot run in the hallway, Aoi cannot be punched or kicked, and Gekkōgahara cannot turn her automated wheelchair to the right.) The way she communicates through Usami is cute as a button, but Gekkō's inability to emote is still super-suspicious to me. Makoto makes a point of putting his bracelet right up to her face so she can see it, as if she isn't able to turn her own head. So is she actually paralyzed rather than just shy? She can obviously move her fingers. There's a story here, and I can't get the specter of Monaca out of my head as the little red flags keep firing up.

The rest of our cast remains spread out across the tower:

• Kyoko, Tengan, and Mitarai, who can't bring themselves to trust one other like the other triad, but stick together for safety reasons while Kyoko makes her way to Great Gozu's body for a quick autopsy. Getting a better picture of Mitarai's personality is fun because of how much it mirrors the Ultimate Imposter's impression of him in the Despair Arc. Imposter-kun really is great at taking on the lives of other people, whether they're a big braggart (Byakuya) or a creeping coward (Mitarai).
• Munakata and Sakakura, who are brotherly bonding (or "bronding") while they brood about how much more badass they are than everyone else.
• The loving couple, Ruruka Ando and Sonosuke Izayoi. Neither of these two sweethearts seem very suspicious just yet, but chances are pretty darn good that they're not going to survive this season together, probably because one will screw the other over by accident or on purpose. Take your bets now on which one will eat it!
• Seiko Kimura, a creepy chemist with braces on both her teeth and her facemask, who nobody else likes. (Ruruka has a personal grudge against her, but Kimura may also have invented the sleeping drug and poison being used in the bracelets.) Beyond that, I'm much more interested in the superhuman drug Kimura takes that turns her eyes red and instantaneously grows out her hair. Hm. That reminds me of another very important character in this story.
• Koichi Kizakura, the former talent scout and lousy homeroom teacher of Hope's Peak, who seems to not like anybody else. (He's been behaving in such an untrustworthy way in every single scene that I'm tempted to say he can't be the traitor anymore. At this point, it would just be too obvious, right?)

Speaking of people nobody likes, Yasuhiro Hagakure was left out of the killing game when he stayed outside to keep watch while Makoto attended his tribunal. He has no idea what's going on right now (which is his default state of being anyway), but he may be able to provide a lifeline in the future! I kind of hope Hiro stays out of this story until the very end, to be honest. The poor guy is one of the weakest characters in the entire franchise, and I can't imagine him adding much to any scene he happens to plow into.

When Makoto gets to the intercom room, he rushes through an explanation of Danganronpa 2's plot, and I got a good giggle out of imagining him running down the entire story beat for beat instead. ("So Monokuma replaced Nekomaru's body with a robot version that could dispense soft drinks from his eyeballs!") Then as a gesture of peace, Makoto shares his forbidden action with everyone, just in time for Munakata to rush in with a burst of cold cynicism. It seems pretty bizarre for Munakata to argue that Makoto doesn't know what true despair feels like considering all the kid has been through, and it still doesn't come close to justifying his eagerness to decapitate the former protagonist, but somewhere in all that bluster, this white knight does actually have a point.

Munakata's specific issue with Makoto's definition of hope is that it was formed from winning a game with concrete rules. He was chosen and even somewhat sheltered by Junko for a specific purpose, and he defeated her by working within her own system. He has no idea what hope looks like in the face of true disaster, in a global conflict where everyone is suffering and shades of gray dominate everyone's struggles. This echoes the theme of Ultra Despair Girls, which concluded with Makoto's sister Komaru choosing neither hope nor despair, but simply "to endure" in accordance with her own beliefs, even if they might contradict the beliefs of other conflicted people caught somewhere between hope and despair themselves. The series has gotten more morally complex with each new installment, so who is right in this situation? On the one hand, Makoto's optimistic faith is laudable, and he is technically in yet another game with concrete rules that can be won, but on the other hand, Munakata is older and more experienced than him, he's seen The Tragedy from the outside, and Monokuma is almost certainly playing the game in a way that abuses Makoto's predictable way of thinking.

It doesn't really matter, because along with his dismissal of a hope based on black-and-white rules, Munakata isn't interested in settling things with Makoto through hearty debate. He may not be the traitor, and Makoto may not be the traitor, but he's still going to decapitate our hero for all the pain he's caused, so we cut to credits with a katana headed right for Makoto's face! If there's one thing I am enjoying more about an anime-original Danganronpa experience, it's the way the show embraces cliffhangers! For an episode where somebody dies (and I think we can expect a relative average of one body per episode going forward), this was mostly just setup for something much darker. All we can do is catalog the details as they blow past in the chaos, and with no class trial system in place to give Great Gozu's death context, we'll have to log his fate away as just another clue in a much longer game.

Rating: B

Danganronpa 3: The End of Hope's Peak High School: Future Arc is currently streaming on Funimation.

Jake has been an anime fan since childhood, and likes to chat about cartoons, pop culture, and visual novel dev on Twitter.