You can talk all day if you want, if we're on such boards is for this purpose. I don't think anybody minds.
Anyway, I'm not claiming that Kodaka was such a bonafide scenario writer nor director... but he has what it takes to make games such as Danganronpa. I believe you must have a certain mindset to make something so vile and brutal - especially considering that Danganronpa is ultimately a censored version of the original, wicked and gruesome never-published DISTRUST.
There's a reason if games like Danganronpa (or even the Zero Escape series by Uchikoshi) are so rare. It's not only because they target a certain niche audience and thus are not endorsed by publishers and developers, it's also because it's no easy task even just thinking about something like it, let alone develop it for real.
I mean, I'm looking forward to play a new Danganronpa (hoping it'll be a reboot of sort, I'm kind of tired of the Hope's Peak Arc), but I'm going to have very low expectations regardless.
Very well, if I'm going to indulge, then I shall.
Basically, his biggest issue is that Kodaka often writes to a twist and then
really wants that twist to land.
DR1 doesn't really have it because it was made iterative, so the writing has been changed to fit what works and what hasn't. I've actually gone and looked up interviews of the development cycle of these games, and what is sorta uh... notable? Is that out of all the casts, DR1s cast is the only one that really underwent changes. DR2 and DRV3s casts both were designed first, and the plot was later written around them.
This... means that DR2 and DRV3 both end up cribbing a lot of the same plot points from Trigger Happy Havoc, while screwing up on the meat of those points. DR2s cast is way too "buddy buddy" for them to really fit a killing game, which leads to literal writing ass-pulls to force murders on the cast.
DRV3 on the other hand has a cast that is just... well, not functioning as human beings. DR1 and DR2 (to a lesser extent) both had characters that felt believable to some extent. Yeah, there's a disbelief element to Byakuya being the son of what is the illumnati, but all in all, he is a believable character that could work in his own game (which was a part of the way the DR1 cast was explicitly designed, they all were made to also work
as the protagonists of their own games). I could do this for the other characters as well, but I'll stick to this one.
In DRV3? There's a character that hates men because they were
so literal minded that they assumed that a "don't play with boys" meant that, and it's not just treated as a goof or a joke, no it's the entire character. There's a character that is practically having an orgasm half the trial. There's fucking Kamina from Gurren Lagann with the serial numbers filed off. These characters just don't feel even remotely believable, they feel like they walked out of a cartoon. That isn't to say that I hate them, DRV3 does have a
few good characters, but for the most part the V3 cast killing each other just doesn't make me feel anything, because
I don't feel anything for the characters.
I didn't mean to slag off V3 in this post, but because it's really Kodaka's final work on the series, it's the one with the most flaws. The ending is often used to justify the bad writing as being "intentional". The thing is... this is just not a good twist. And here I will detail why.
Big fucking spoilers from here on out.
A good twist has three key parts to it. 1. The buildup, 2. The twist itself, 3. The aftermath. A bad twist fumbles at least two out of those three.
To pick an example from the same series, I will look at both DR1 and DR2s twists. DR1s is easily the strongest, with the twist being the state of the outside world. The buildup to the twist is repeatedly alluded to. Early on there's a scene where people are trying to break into the school, the bolts on the windows are there for a reason that makes sense, there's constantly a reminder that Hope's Peak is kinda... unusual. Then, when it hits you, the twist is sorta out of the left field. It's a genuine suprise, and it essentially becomes the darkest hour for the characters. Then, you get the aftermath of the twist. It's a heroic one, the protagonist sticks up and beats the villain. But there's also a good metatextual aftermath, in that it reframes those earlier story segments to fit and gives the introduction and really the entirety of the game it's meaning.
Now, let's go to DR2. DR2s is essentially a redo of DR1. The world isn't what it seems, except well, the scale is higher. This twist works... less well because it's only somewhat alluded in the prologue and there's an implication it's the reason that Monokuma has really just been beating people around for the entire game. There's less buildup. Then we get to the twist itself. Now, retroactively this twist sorta fails to land due to the fact that DR3 just made the full cast survive (bar Chiaki). The aftermath is also fairly similar to DR1s, but its again lessened since it's only really a choice for Hajime to make, since the rest of the cast is already pretty much on the side of the good guys (there's a lot of concrete issues that make 2-6 fail, but I won't deal with that right now).
DRV3? There's no buildup throughout the game itself. The twist serves little narrative purpose for the game, which so far has build itself on "truth vs lies" as it's core theme. Reality vs. fiction, which the ending deals with more than it deals in truth and lies has little to do with that ending. It also doesn't make a lot of sense as a twist. The previous games always had their twists out of the left field, but they worked since we were given a look into what the twist entailed on the world and how it impacted the story. DRV3 on the other hand just... doesn't. We're shown a few deranged fanboys, but it doesn't really tell us much about the world of V3. We're just expected to swallow that the world is okay with a "killing game". While Junko uprooting society in THH was out there, it was illustrated with CGs, and given how Junko herself acted in THH, it also felt feasible that someone like her could do it. V3 on the other hand just... fails. The game throws Tsumugi up as a mastermind, but she's just a complete non-entity as a mastermind. She doesn't work on a meta level since she's just a show character. Similarly, Monokuma, who previous was the decoy for the actual villain, is just Monokuma here. There's some suggestion that Team Danganronpa might control him, but even then it does very little to impact the plot, nor does it enhance his effectivity as a villain. I've heard him being considered one of the weakest characters, and going by DRV3 alone, it's really not suprising. Monokuma always only worked as a villain because someone else controlled him. In THH and even in 2, Monokuma is by all accounts the idea of what Junko thinks a bear is like and his personality is just as much Junko as it is the act she puts on to play him. Take away the person behind Monokuma, and you're left with a quintessential mascot character: Disliked by the fans, loved by the developers.
So the twist fails because it feels non-solid to the rest of the game or to the rest of the series. Then we get to the aftermath. Makoto Naegi often gets accused of being a Mary Sue in 1-6 because he cheers up the rest of the cast in a single line. However, there's an important element here. Makoto's cheering up is really just providing scraps of hope for them to cling onto, for them to believe in. 2-6 has a somewhat weaker version of this (2-6 just is more about Hajime as a person than it is about the cast), but it's still there. The aftermath is always them still pulling through, even though the going is bleak. The ideals of the protagonist don't get compromised, and that's the clear point.
V3 compromises those ideals. Shuichi, who until this point was the Truth in the Truth vs. Lies theme suddenly gets shuffled into the Reality vs. Fiction theme. And well... it just doesn't work. His character, personal dislike aside, is just build very much on finding the truth no matter what. A character that would be
more fit in the theme would be Kaede Akamatsu, who is um... not available. The result is that Shuichi just gets pushed into depression, and the game has to shift you around to
other characters to prove that there's still an ideal to cling to, something to make towards. The result is that the game both leaves Shuichi's arc unfinished in proving that even if the truth isn't always a good thing, it's still to strive towards, by dropping it off and has to actually pull things out of it's ass to give a "happy ending" . It's all so very clear in that final speech Shuichi ends up giving Tsumugi: We may be fiction, but even then we are still us, and we're still changing. It's a powerful line to be sure, but it's just so
detached from the rest of the game. Shuichi just doesn't fit that mold, he just isn't the Reality in the Reality vs. Fiction theme and the game took away his agency as a protagonist to try to provide a reason for him to make that claim. It's just bad writing on a bad twist.
And even metatextually, it also is just a cheap copout. V3 is when the Danganronpa pattern becomes annoyingly noticable (sympathethic early murderers, third case is a duo case, someone rules lawyers, the fifth case isn't what it seems, you get the idea), and the game tries to pave over it by pretending that it was all "intentional". 2 did it as well, but there it still felt intentional. In V3, it feels like an overelaborate excuse to go over bad writing.
And this is without digging in to the absolutely horrid way that Kodaka has handled
anything to do with fanservice.
Ultimately, you can boil it down to a very simple thing to hold on to: Intentionally doing something badly still requires you to have the skill to do it well. If you don't have that skill, it just isn't enjoyable. Bad writing is still bad writing, even if there's an elaborate reason as to why it's bad.
--------------------- MERGED ---------------------------
Basically, the beta version of Danganronpa.
What's known about it is in the earlier linked wiki page, but it's mostly just "early designs". The main things that are interesting to know about it is that Celeste obtained Byakuya's last name iirc, Kirigiri was originally meant to be the first victim and there was a goal of branching paths that they removed (making the game closer to Zero Escape).
The main things left of it in the final product is that one destroyed classroom on the last floor and a tune on the OST.
Source
