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

Episode 11

Damn. This penultimate Future Arc episode was basically a series of fist-pumping highlights from start to finish. Of the many screencaps I wanted to use for this review, every single one was a horrible spoiler, which is usually a sign of great entertainment if you ask me. (Googly Despair-Eyes Makoto just barely lost out to my mighty need to memorialize Sakakura.) Despite all the insanity going down in the main story, however, my favorite little gesture of this episode was something simple I'd been hoping to see ever since they announced that this show would end the Danganronpa trilogy. I wanted to see the original cast of that very first game one last time somehow, and Danganronpa 3 unexpectedly delivered.

The "killer is the victim, brainwashed into manic suicide" theory had become obvious enough at this point that its confirmation this week acted more as a memorial to all the characters we've lost so far than a shocking twist. Of course, I don't just mean this series' new characters. When Makoto decides to verify the existence of a brainwashing video with his own eyes, he tumbles into a nightmare where all his original classmates, resurrected as shambling shadows at the moment of their own deaths, beg Makoto to join them, blaming him for leaving them all behind. Sayaka caresses the wound in her stomach, Celeste burns where she stands, and Mondo even melts into butter! It was a perfectly placed final farewell to the characters who first kicked off Danganronpa's insane adventure, and I barely had time to appreciate it before they all got upstaged by the surprise survival of Sakakura!

Just as the Ultimate Student Council President lost one overseeing eye to the Killing Game, the Ultimate Boxer ends up losing his hand. After being left for dead by his bestie/crush, Sakakura falls into a fouler mood than usual and decides to sacrifice his arm for one last opportunity to find the real culprit, before all the survivors can be lost to Despair. Now free of the bracelet, Sakakura is able to save Makoto by choking the suicidal stupor out of him and get caught up on the truly cruel secret behind the game. At a complete loss and overcome with regret, poor Sakakura snails his blood trail back to the fake "exit" so he can cut the power to the whole facility, force-quitting the killing game at the risk of leaving the survivors trapped underwater. Even if he couldn't stop Despair and he's never redeemed in the eyes of his friends, at least he can give them a slightly better chance at survival. It's about the saddest and lowest bar Sakakura could reach for considering the high hopes for revolution he started with alongside Chisa and Munakata, but at least he accomplishes this final mission with a peaceful smile on his face.

In the broken love triangle between Munakata, Sakakura, and Chisa, Danganronpa 3 hammers home that even the strongest talents can be shattered without the more valuable strength of mutual trust. Munakata "trusted" Chisa and Sakakura without question as his informants, but he treated them like his underlings rather than his equals, never cutting through to their deeper beliefs and feelings about the right approach to take or their romantic feelings for him. Now that he's lost them both (maybe), Munakata is forced to confront the importance of his own beliefs in light of the pain they've caused, choosing to trust in people he disagrees with on a much deeper level, Makoto and his friends, for the sake of the future that's left to them. I'm eager to see what impact all this will have on Munakata in the final episode and how it factors into the mastermind's plan.

So that begs the Big Question, for the very last time. Who is the mastermind? Well, at least this episode gave us two people it can't be: Junko or Tengan. When Makoto tries to talk to the brainwashing video, he realizes that it's just a recording, reinforcing that the Junko AI, which should have stayed trapped in the Neo World Program, probably isn't involved in this finale. In fact, there's no reason Monokuma couldn't have been communicating as a recording this entire time, since the only character who directly interacted with him was Usami, secretly controlled by a playful and completely untrustworthy Monaka. The Monokuma tapes were probably set up in advance by a human within the Future Foundation, but thanks to Munakata's big mouth, we know for sure that human can't be Tengan. First of all, unless he AI'd himself in advance somehow (and no AI has been involved in this current killing game), we saw Tengan die before our eyes. More importantly, since even death can be deceiving, Munakata's conviction that it must be Tengan and the telltale text from Tengan that Mitarai receives are more blatant confirmations that it's not that simple. That's such transparent misdirection that it might as well have come out of Hiro's mouth. (If Hiro had been part of this killing game, we probably would have guessed the whole plot in the first episode just by picking the opposite of whatever he said.)

Make no mistake, Tengan was involved, but only in the limited capacity that he spelled out very clearly during Munakata's interrogation. He's not a Remnant of Despair, but he cooperated with the Despair faction in this Killing Game to ensure the survival of his life's work: Izuru Kamukura. The mastermind promised Tengan that Kamukura would not be destroyed by Munakata's guerillas if his plan succeeded, and that promise combined with a general dislike of Munakata's revolutionary ideas about Hope's Peak was all it took for the old man to gamble his life on the results. With a knowledge of the game's secrets and all the player's forbidden actions, he had a pretty good chance of surviving to the end if it wasn't for Munakata's wild rampage, but the risks Tengan took also made it clear that his life was no longer as important to him as Izuru's survival. Anyway, that text sent to Mitarai's phone isn't coming from Tengan himself, just some twisted trickster who got their mitts on his stuff.

The mastermind's true identity will remain a mystery until the very last episode, so after scrubbing through Danganronpa 3's earliest episodes, I'm going to fall back on my earlier theory that Chisa is the mastermind. Now that we know an AI isn't involved in running the game, the only option remaining is that she switched places with Aoi somehow. Unfortunately, this theory makes me intensely sad because if it is true, Aoi's fakeout death that raised so much ire in episode two was anything but a fakeout after all. Here's what I noticed when I went back in time to look at how all this nonsense first started...

1. Chisa's "death flashback" in episode 11 shows her climbing up to the chandelier and tinkering with it, while holding a knife in her mouth. It's an oddly ambiguous image, considering that the other three death flashbacks show the characters more directly killing themselves.
2. Almost no one touches Chisa's body after it falls from the ceiling. Sakakura drags her from the table but does not appear to check her vitals. (And even if he did, could we really trust him?) Gozu puts a coat over her. Then fights start breaking out, and everyone leaves the room in spurts.
3. We now know that Kyoko was deliberately hiding her deductions from the others, perhaps to avoid premature elimination by an interfering mastermind. (I'm convinced she's pulling a Juliet, and you can't persuade me otherwise! It's the greatest gamble on trust in Makoto she could possibly play, and trust has been the central theme of this finale.) Assuming that she may be harboring even the grimmest secret of them all, it's interesting that Kyoko hustles off to do Chisa's autopsy only after reuniting with Aoi for the first time since the first goodnight round. Perhaps she saw something that made her want to check the old body for suspicious details. Whatever she learned, she does tell Kizakura that it was "a lot."
4. Aoi's had a habit of clasping both hands to her chest a lot throughout this series. I don't remember Aoi doing that before, maybe she did, maybe she didn't, but it's definitely something Chisa does constantly throughout the Despair Arc.
5. Finally, and for some strange reason this felt like the most damning piece of evidence to me, when Aoi carries Makoto through the halls before the first goodnight round, she lugs him around on piggyback. After the first goodnight round? Aoi carries him over her shoulder like a sack of potatoes. Now how did Chisa round up all her students in the first episode of the Despair Arc again...?

Sad as it is to say, maybe that ketchup prank Monaka pulled really was more than a fakeout. It might have been a warning, a tease to the mastermind themselves that Gekkogahara was not who she appeared to be. When the mastermind didn't take the bait, Monaka got bored with the whole adventure pretty quickly (although they did verbally spar a little while they were both escorting Makoto). I still don't know how the hell Chisa managed to pull off such a convincing disguise, but we still don't know who the 13th Division Head is, so maybe that will be the nail in the coffin of this whole tortured mystery. Even if I'm completely out in space with my theories on this one, I hope we get justice for Kyoko and Sakakura before this apocalypse is over.

Rating: A

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.