Category: Current Semester

Or, Sakura’s Revenge: Danganronpan Mysteries and Truth Bullets

Recently I came across a good refresher on that song. Back in middle school, I distinctly remember a time that there was an assembly in the gym for us to hear about why we shouldn’t do drugs, and they blasted Third Eye Blind on the speakers. I would have done almost anything to escape… But this was my favorite track from the game.

Now that we’ve set the mood: be advised, more spoilers and nostalgic self-indulgence lie ahead.

The ending of Danganronpa reminds me sharply of Little Inferno, the little mobile game that launched us on our quixotic scholarly adventures here at Video Game Academy. I recollect, that is to say, the sun, which I take to be what is represented on the opening of the sealed main doors of Hope’s Peak Academy, and with it Plato’s whole allegory of the cave in the Republic comes flooding in. With that, in Platonic fashion, comes the idea of allegorical reading as such. Where are the limits of likeness and pattern, and how far should a sense of symbolic or thematic structures take us in interpreting their meaning? Where do they shade into free association and playful recurrence to unrelated hobby-horses? When is the sun just the sun, and we look into it too closely at our peril?

I basically agree with Eleanor Duckworth’s memorable turn of phrase, “the having of wonderful ideas is what I consider the essence of intellectual development.” I’m tempted to hear the capital I there on ideas, but either way, the Socratic approach of dialogue, questioning, myth-making and -unraveling together with friends seems entirely right for discussing games, books, or anything else we might want to learn. In Danganronpa, which aside from the standout trial scenes is hardly compelling as gameplay but rich in generating opportunities to wonder and cogitate, a big part of the intrigue of the game resides in theorizing and seeking community through that pursuit of the truth. It’s a game obsessed with the identities of spectacular individuals; naturally, it leads the player to reflect on their own. Know thyself, the ancient wisdom runs.

Then I think about Ben’s story of emailing the folks behind Extra Credits back in the day, and how they replied to his question about depictions of faith in games with a nod to EarthBound’s Pray mechanic. That, too, seems spot on. I believe, for all the baggage of Christian orthodoxy, the great stories behind the development of our allegorical and other habits of reading basically have it right when they say where two or three are gathered, the great I am is there. Chapter 3 I talked about with Steve, and 4 through the end with him and Ben, so we made a quorum. Of course, the Danganronpers are also very interested in status and popularity and, well, feeling some firsthand evidence of the sustaining love that moves the sun and other stars. That we can feel this so palpably and connect with them on it is a big part of their appeal and their convincingness as characters. Sayaka, in particular, is liable to totally take in the unwary player with sympathetic longing with her stories of working hard to become the sort of person she once looked up to on TV. Junko, for all her boredom, sets great store by the emotions of others, both those trapped with her in the school and those watching the broadcast live. The Junko we meet at the start of the game, too, radiates embarrassment in the moment and pathos in hindsight when Makoto mentions she doesn’t look like her picture on the magazine covers.

Much as I’d like to hope there are more friends we haven’t met yet listening in, thinking back on the twin founts of philosophy and the paradox of faith makes it all the more inconsequential to me whether we end up recording our conversations about these games and releasing them or not, so long as we get to have them and all the wonderful ideas that arise. I can well imagine plenty of other people are out there doing something similar with their friends, whether online or in person, about this game or some other resource of shared concern, and the thought gives me solace. While some of it is fresh in my mind, though, I wanted to make some notes about the remaining parts of the first game.

For myself, I don’t set much store by the canon/head-canon distinction the policing of which seems to occupy some people so fully. Good for them, but my interest doesn’t lie in persuading other people of my theories or arguing for or against a certain interpretation as being correct, whether that means in line with the author’s intentions or by some other measure of rightness. Particularly in the game’s more surreal moments, like the nightly Monokuma Theater micro-fictions, Danganronpa seems to take a wryly self-reflective tack against such attempts to pin down its narrative. Still, thinking and talking about it is fun and writing it down meanwhile seems worthwhile.

The final reveal, with Junko monologuing about her plans and motives in pure supervillain fashionista fashion, conspicuously includes her dismissal of any full disclosure of the how, so long as we can sort of wrap our heads around the what and why, of her erasure of the players’ memory before the killing game began. She resents the survivors’ hopeful interruptions and grows bored with straightforward questions about a few final subversions of tropes, such as secret twins, Cain-and-Abel-style fratricide, and amnesiac heroes coming together to overcome evil. The extent of that evil, whether it be godlike in fact or only in appearance, is left obscure. Once the manipulation of our minds on the level of the removal of two years of school memories is on the table, the idea of some sort of global “ideological” mischief, complete with the superposition of mascot heads on the representative monuments of culture and covering the faces of partakers in violent mobs in the streets alike, may as well be either simulation or actuality. The breakdown, whether social or psychological, is fait accompli, and the only question is whether there is some return or conversion possible for the players and the world.

Certainly there can be no turning back for the mastermind(s) behind its apparent destruction. Evidently, despite all the hints to the contrary, dead characters stay dead, and only in bonus content beyond the base story can they all be saved by the opening of the sealed door before the killing begins. When Junko embraces her theatrical multiple-stage suicide reprising each of the executions doled out so far, it includes that rocket-intro movie that we slowly realize accounted for the bones of Kyoko’s father. Like Junko, his face is turned away from us in all other images but this final one. True to the ways of video game villains, Junko provides us everything we needed in order to beat the game, even when she does so more out of determination to lose than due to the actual complete resolution of all the school’s mysteries that she stipulated (after all, we are left with plenty of questions).

After the credits roll, the seemingly defunct Monokuma once more asserts in his tautological, self-referential way his continued existence as headmaster, and we are left awaiting further illumination/obfuscation of the identity of the Ultimate Despair or Team Rock- er, Fenrir in the sequel. It had already been promised, tongue-in-cheek, as a soulslike game featuring the noble Sakura dual-wielding polygonal lances of some sort against a giant-mech Monokuma during the final dream theater, but that imaginary game’s development was to be contingent on players buying lots of copies and getting everyone they knew to do the same. This whole-hearted if jokey embrace of the actual dominant ideology of neurotic complexes and quiet despair that is so-called late-stage capitalism is perhaps the funniest moment in a game that also regales players with Murakami-level short stories about UFOs and ersatz all-beef patties. The actual follow-ups in the series are appropriately on the same order as the first game: 2-D, just like Hifumi prefers, visual novel affairs that emphasize their superficiality and stylized appropriation of generic tropes.

To pick up with some highlights of the discussion prior to the end of the game, starting back in Chapter 3: Somehow, we come to care about the whole cast of cut-out cliches of characters, as surprising to us as the Ultimate Fanfic Artist’s rush of parasocial feelings for the AI program, Alter Ego, is to him. A friend is another self, as one old formulation has it; but Hifumi cannot hold onto the other saying, assuming its fair to appeal to it, that the things of friends are common. Makoto, at least, instantiates this latter idea in his process of gradually learning from others and gaining skills by getting to be closer friends with them. Meditating on what his status as the “ultimate lucky student” or indeed “ultimate hope” means, in this light, is surprisingly rich, while as gameplay enhancements or rewards these abilities are hardly significant.

But to return to Chapter 3 and Hifumi: his jealousy is what Celeste plays upon for her nonsensically elaborate double-or-nothing-homicide. She pits him against the powered-up Taka, who also confesses his love for Alter Ego for its portrayal of Mondo. Her betrayal of Hifumi is barely reciprocated in his final words, foreshadowing some recovery of memory before the end, along with the disclosure of a secret name. This is precisely one of the items on which Junko “fucking Enoshima” refuses to pontificate at the end of the game: why is her sister’s family name (Ikusaba, ie. “battlefield”) different from her own (lit. “bay island”)? So the mystery of the name and identity of the mastermind is hardly resolved, and that partial resolution points directly to another key theme haunting many of the game’s characters: their family relationships.

Celeste herself seems to represent an attempt to cast off her own cultural heritage and embrace that of another place. Changing her name, unlike the concealment and replacement tactics of Junko and Mukuro, seems to be purely aesthetic preference, in line with a certain self-construction. Her motive for the murder plot, such as it is, consists in her desire to bankroll her dream of buying a castle in Europe and staffing it with suitable servants. This vision of inhabiting an invented version of some distant land seems very clearly to play on the wishes and pretentions of so many fans of Japanese cultural products in the west. That she so despises Hifumi, in particular, is profoundly ironic. To the extent that either native Japanese audiences or foreign ones have reflected on this, they should be moved by curiosity about the history and language of the cultures they are fascinated with, and perhaps gain some new perspective on their own.

Makoto’s motivation to ensure the safety of his family, though we are apt to forget it, is pushed back in his face towards the end of the final trial. Byakuya’s fraught pride and perfectionism as the triumphant scion of a supposedly destroyed family of masters of the universe gives even this aloof figure a touch of humanity by the end. Comic relief clairvoyants and schizophrenic mass murderers drop mentions of watching antenna TV with their grandma and having two moms. Discourse around the game is focused mostly on the second trial, where Mondo’s jealousy of Chihiro’s strength and guilt over his brother’s death lead to his crime of passion, but the whole second half of the game, more or less, is driven by the search for a lost father (on Kyoko’s telling, in order to more formally disown him).

Sakura’s case, the turning point in the story, is almost as developed as Kyoko’s. Like Kyoko’s relationship to Makoto, Sakura’s protectiveness of Hina nearly leads to disaster, but the game suggests that friendships can ultimately prevail over the complex inherited strife of families. Sakura’s devotion to the dojo of her family is what leads her to initially agree to Monokuma’s proposal to get the killing moving, before Sayaka initiates it aided by Makoto’s misplaced tenderness, and Sakura later rebels. Her final act of sacrifice nearly backfires. Hina’s misprision of her motivation as loneliness and despair leads her to try to sink the whole surviving group, led astray as she is by the false suicide note. This is one of the clearest moments of the mastermind’s unreliability, and arguably should have given Kyoko more pause before she ventured to challenge Monokuma directly on the unfairness of the fifth trial, which framed her for a murder before she shifted the suspicion onto Makoto. However, the game does not dwell on either Hina’s or Kyoko’s treachery. This one moment of truly consequential choice in the game, should Makoto speak up and reveal Kyoko’s deception, produces a goofy group/family photo bad ending, but has little effect on their relationship as the true endgame plays itself out, as swiftly forgiven and forgotten as Hina’s jealous wrath.

Monokuma, for all his misdirection, does eventually reveal the true last words of Sakura so as to let the game continue. In this way, her suicide comes into line with a prototypically noble sacrifice, for all the problematic resonance it has with the real world of youthful despair. He also acquiesces to Kyoko’s bluff, again seemingly more on the strength of Junko’s commitment to her popular image and to delivering an entertaining show than on her fairytalesque legalism and observance of the rules she herself has arbitrarily laid down.

Sakura’s suicide is another of those key instances, like Chihiro’s gender identity or Celeste’s cultural one, of Danganronpa putting not just young bodies but young minds and souls under the gaze of the player. It flirts with voyeurism in scenes like the bathhouse “man’s fantasy” and the overt surveillance cameras in the rest of the school, and its treatment of gender nonconformity, school violence, and suicide are at least as problematic on reflection. The developers’ understanding of their audience’s being here for this edgy content presumably accounts for the otherwise inexplicable shots of Hina in bed–a piece of narration our POV character Makoto couldn’t have provided since he wasn’t there, and one that gets repeated as she recounts the events later anyway, and is thus doubly gratuitous–and the up-skirt views of Junko stomping Monokuma and Kyoko climbing the ladder up from the garbage heap. For all the emphasis on bodies, their surfaces and undergarments, Danganronpa is also addressing, albeit more obliquely, some of the psychological and even spiritual aspects of characters and identities. Bodies living and dead, uncomfortably sexualized and then disposed of, become the point of departure for reflections about trust, depression, habits of exercise, eating, and hygiene, discipline, and, most of all, talent. Whatever is ineffable, inexplicable, maybe only imaginary about what makes someone who they are and makes human connection possible, the game celebrates it in its own deranged way.

Sakura’s break-in of the headmaster’s room allows Kyoko access to the entire extant school, including the conspicuous lock on the door of the refuse room, using the key with a Monokuma face on it, though the building sure looks much bigger than five stories in the opening cutscenes. The secret room between the bathrooms and the library archive proves to be an open secret: once Makoto accesses it, he gets bonked on the head by a masked assailant, though never more severely punished, and the AI linked to the network there is part of Junko’s plan all along, just another one of the hints she gives to feed despair with glimmers of hope. Still, somehow Alter Ego manages to save his life, just as Kyoko heard the footsteps of the god of death and fought off a masked Junko before putting him in that predicament of facing execution in her place. She atones, perhaps, by diving into the garbage with him, cup noodles and all, to bring him back into the light, and to help solve the mysteries of their school life together. Perhaps.

Most of all, the player is left wishing for a better understanding or a more convincing portrayal of the inciting Tragedy, the true nature of which remains locked in those stolen memories, however it was they were stolen. It seems to include the presence of at least a handful of killers among the elite students at the nation’s most prestigious school, where a classroom on the fifth floor has been turned into a crime scene. If this was the focus of the Tragedy whose repercussions became truly society-ending in scope, it requires a huge escalation of our suspension of disbelief. Willing as we are to suppose the mastermind has an endless supply of technology for killing and gift-giving at their disposal, along with a degree of mind control and a knack for the spectacular, the possibility of a school-based tragedy spawning a global breakdown stretches all credulity. It would almost be nice to imagine it were possible, that the world’s attention and compassion could be so concentrated on the loss of life and hope in one classroom. But it makes no sense, given the otherwise surprisingly realistic portrayal of human nature in the main characters of the game. For all the absurdity of their circumstances, they do feel understandable, in a way the Monokuma-headed monuments and mobs do not.

What matters to me is not whether the world outside the school gates is irrevocably shattered, or whether we’ve literally travelled on our spaceship ark of a school to the point of opening an airlock on the surface of the sun. The first game by itself doesn’t provide enough evidence, in my view, to prove or disprove that possibility, absurd though it seems. As for the subsequent games in the series, the jury is still out. We’ll be discussing them soon, if all goes according to plan. Metaphorically, though, the ending of Danganronpa, like so many other great games, is certainly about returning us to the world a little wiser and more hopeful. In this regard, it chimes with Tolkien’s notion of escape as much as Plato’s. The one cordially disliked allegory, the other denigrated poetry in favor of philosophy, and yet both reverberate with the same perennial themes, illumined all the more and anew by an encounter with this bizarre visual novel. See for yourself and try reading the Symposium or the Silmarillion in the light of Danganronpa’s vicarious youthful mayhem, jealous love, and joyous truthfinding. That’s what I hope, anyhow.