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murasaki-murasame · 7 years

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Danganronpa V3 Liveblog Part 8 [Chapter 2 - Trial Success]

Not gonna lie, this chapter kinda kicked my ass, and it’s basically entirely my fault, lol.

Thoughts under the cut.

Just to get it out the way, I honestly came disturbingly close to failing the trial a second time. Mostly because it took me a weirdly long time to figure out which weak point to use the Alibis for Yesterday truth bullet on, and then to remember that the concentration feature exists after several failed attempts at shooting it. Oh and then the sword battle section happened and I started panicking all over again because I didn’t think we’d have anything else after that before the Argument Armament, and something about the logic of the argument made it take me a few attempts to figure out which truth bullet to use. I also kinda suck at the actual gameplay of the sword battle segments. And THEN I lost like over half my goddamn health on the Argument Armament itself because I continue to be awful at rhythm games. My next priority skill-wise will almost certainly be getting that other one that makes those parts a bit easier.

So yeah this trial was a complete goddamn nightmare, but I can only really blame myself for it. I feel kinda dumb in hindsight for having expected it to be easy and predictable.

I really do wonder if anyone else had as much trouble with this as I did. I can at least see how Kirumi makes sense as a culprit, and how if you had a correct idea of how the murder happened, she’d be very immediately suspicious. So I guess at least SOME people must have guessed it right away. But I still wound up getting stuck suspecting Kaito, and then frantically suspecting basically everyone aside from Kirumi.

I especially feel like a bit of an idiot for not thinking about the piece of black fabric. I guess I just assumed it was some random material used to tie the ropes together.

Before I talk about the motive and whatnot, I should talk a bit about the trial in general since I didn’t really do so last time.

One of the more immediately surprising things was that Angie started immediately suspecting and questioning Himiko. I knew already that she’s pretty callous in her own way, but I didn’t expect her to start openly questioning someone who she just befriended and recruited into her religion.

Tenko’s still growing on me more and more as a character. She’s pretty flawed and short-sighted, but it’s always interesting to see characters deal with stress and desperation. I hope she gets a chance to develop further as a character.

I still don’t really like Kokichi, but he undeniably works great as a Komaeda-esque character who stirs shit up. I don’t really know how to word my opinions on him. I think his personality just grates on me much more than someone like Komaeda. Also his expressions are somehow getting more creepy and off-putting as time goes on. I do like that he’s not a super-competent genius manipulator, though. The only person who doesn’t immediately ignore him is Gonta, really, and a lot of his schemes get torn down at some point or another.

Oh, and that reminds me, I’m surprised that Keebo’s audio recording feature never came up again in this chapter, but it makes sense, since nothing audio-related happened in the case. I can only imagine that it’ll be used at some point later in a case, though.

I’m also still really happy that Kaito was innocent. I feel pretty bad about suspecting him for so long. He’s still a really neat character. I like how straight-forward and honest he is about everything. He’s working really nicely as a foil to Shuichi, with how he knows how to be blunt and somewhat harsh if he needs to motivate Shuichi to overcome his emotional hang-ups and insecurities. And of course he’s still a bit of an idiot who’s not very good at actual detective work and mystery-solving, so he needs Shuichi to help him. And I feel like Shuichi’s one of the relatively few characters who responds to Kaito’s overall personality in a positive way, and who tries to stay on his side and work with him. It’s a nice dynamic.

As for the murder case as a whole, it’s almost insane how complicated it is compared to it’s relatively simple end result. It’s no wonder that it was the Ultimate Maid who was able to nearly perfectly pull it off. I knew in advance that I had no real clue exactly how the mechanism of getting Ryoma killed and through the gym window worked, but I guess I had most of the gist of it down. It was just specific details of it that I couldn’t work out.

Part of me was expecting my guess about Kokichi actually being the Ultimate Prisoner to play a part in the trial, but I guess it didn’t. It makes sense that they wouldn’t just get rid of his character this early. I’m not discarding that theory, though. It may not have played into the trial, but I still think that he is indeed the Ultimate Prisoner, and that Ryoma’s bathroom was actually Kokichi’s lab.

I’m slightly surprised that this chapter actually managed to give me even more trouble than the first one did, but I like it. It’s fun to play a murder mystery game that feels genuinely challenging.

Onto the topic of Kirumi’s motive, I actually quite like it. It’s pretty fitting for how over-the-top these cases can be in this series. I can see why other people might think it’s too much, but I really loved the idea that she had been enlisted to become the de facto prime minister to help improve the country. It raised a pretty interesting ethical conundrum, with how everyone began to feel guilty about sentencing her to death because it might mean dooming an entire country’s worth of people. I wonder if someone could actually volunteer to be executed in someone else’s place. I’m guessing not.

Like with the last chapter, I appreciate that Kirumi’s motives were completely understandable, and she still felt like the same person afterward. It was really hard not to feel bad for her. It would have been nice if she could have escaped, but obviously she was never going to be able to. That one CG of her screaming while running was really well done.

Her execution was also pretty difficult to watch. I mean, all of them are, but the ones that involve people being slowly injured, and having to actively move through a damaging environment, are always uncomfortable to watch. My only real issue was that it was kind of unfortunate that the signs that random shadow people were holding weren’t redrawn to be in English, so I can only guess at what they meant. I guess they were meant to represent protestors who were demanding stuff from Kirumi as the de facto prime minister.

It was also interesting how the execution used the concept of that one story I’ve heard before about a sinner in Hell being given a string leading up to Heaven to climb, that snaps before they get to the top. It makes a lot of sense that it’d reference a story all about Heaven and Hell, given that this chapter’s title is literally A Thin Line Divides Heaven and Hell, and we also had a few different vague references to the idea of the school being a sort of Hell. Which is getting me even more curious about the idea that maybe it literally is a form of Hell.

I should also probably say that even though I get why some people might find the idea of the motive videos to be a bit forced, especially the idea that Kirumi was the only one to get her own video, but the basic concept has been around since the very beginning of the series, and I think this chapter did a good job of twisting the formula a bit. It was also pretty obvious that Monokuma and the Monokubs probably designed it specifically so that Kirumi would get her own video and be driven to murder. So I think it’s totally fine.

Though on the note of Monokuma and the Monokubs, I’m intrigued by the way that they don’t all seem to be on the same page, and might be messing with the game in their own ways. I’m not sure what to make of it.

Obviously the whole ‘unprecedented crisis’ is foreshadowing for later plot reveals. I’m curious to see what’s up with all that. It’s reminding me a little of the whole scenario of Junko overtaking the world with despair. I guess we’ll learn about it later. It makes me kinda curious about why Kirumi would have elected to lose her memories like Shuichi seemingly did, if she was so devoted to her country.

I stopped playing immediately into chapter three, but I still saw a brief flash of some sort of news report showing meteors raining down, so . . . maybe that’s part of it. I have no real clue.

Anyway, on the topic of Ryoma, I probably should have expected that he was complicit in the murder and allowed himself to die. I think I kinda idly suspected it, but I never thought about it deeply since it wasn’t important to figuring out who the culprit was. But it makes sense. It’s both depressing and kinda admirable that he allowed himself to die in order to potentially save the entire country. And I like how it showed that Kirumi didn’t simply take him by surprise, but instead she explained her motive to him and gave him time to agree to it before attacking him. Not that she would have backed down even if she needed to fight him over it, though. There’s also the detail of how even in spite of all the emphasis placed on Ryoma’s apathy about life, he still resisted death in his final moments, as shown by the struggle he put up in the bathroom. I don’t think Kirumi was lying or anything about him genuinely exposing himself to her attack, I just think that instincts took over for him when he was actually facing imminent death. It adds an interesting element to this chapter’s whole discussion of the idea of ‘having a reason to live’.

I also like that Ryoma was actually hoping he could find a reason to live by looking at his motive video. It’s interesting that he wasn’t so apathetic that he wouldn’t seek a chance to live if he could discover one. Which isn’t that much of a surprise, I guess, since he said before that he was jealous of how everyone else had reasons to live. It’s also really depressing to think that he must have been genuinely curious to see who Monokuma would say is his most important person. Though we now know that there was literally nobody. I think that Monokuma went out of his way to give him a ‘blank motive’ in order to set him up as a victim, though. Ryoma probably technically had SOMETHING that could have been put there. We even saw in this chapter earlier that Kaito has a lot of respect for him from his old tennis club days, and that he was annoyed at him because he wanted him to regain his will to live. So there’s at least one person who cared for Ryoma in his own way.

Then there’s the implication of him having blackmailed Maki about potentially exposing her identity as the Ultimate Assassin. That was neat. Even though Ryoma’s more or less a good person, he’s still someone with an experience in crime, and he’s not above things like this. I was gonna say that I’m not sure how Ryoma or Kokichi knew her real identity, but come to think of it, Ryoma had her motive video, and Kokichi had also presumably seen them all. He was probably lying about having ‘just checked who had which motive video without having watched them’. So her motive video probably just made it clear that she was the Ultimate Assassin, and since they’re the only people other than her who would have watched her video, it makes sense that they both knew about it. Now I’m wondering exactly what her motive video showed. I wonder if we’ll ever see it. I’m kinda surprised, but also happy, that the motive videos actually played a pretty huge part in this overall case, in multiple ways.

I was wondering why Maki was being so defensive about her room, and why she was so tight-lipped during the trial, but now it makes sense. I kinda hope we can see her lab now that the truth’s been exposed.

It’s also pretty interesting that this already opens up the idea of someone outright lying about their talent, which makes me even more confident in thinking that Kokichi’s probably also lying about his talent. I guess she was probably setting up a false identity for herself in order to remain as unknown and unsuspected as possible. I wonder how she’ll act now that everyone knows her big secret.

Come to think of it, I remember people thinking that she looked more like a ninja or an assassin when we first learned about her, so I guess this twist makes sense. I’d forgotten about it though, so I didn’t see this coming.

I’m very curious to see how the story continues now. It feels like it’d be pretty difficult to motivate anyone to kill after how these two chapters went.

In a metagame-y sense, I’m kinda expecting to get a female victim and a male killer soon, after two cases of a male victim and a female killer. That’s about the extent of my prediction, though. I’m not sure who exactly I’m expecting to see die.

Before I forget, I’m aware that I apparently missed one or two ‘backdoor’ options in the trial, but I can’t really imagine where they could have been. I’d have to basically retry the entire trial, which I have no real intention of doing anytime soon. I feel like, in general, it’d be much easier to find those options in hindsight, when you know who the killer is.

Overall, I thought this was a really good chapter, even if I feel a bit ashamed about having lost right near the end of it the first time around. I really wasn’t expecting it to feel equally as difficult, if not MORE difficult, than case one, but it really did.

#murasaki rambles #danganronpa #danganronpa v3 #danganronpa v3 spoilers

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