Danganronpa Case Files: Goodbye Despair Chapter 3

 This post contains Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair spoilers.

Danganronpa has always struggled with the third cases, albeit not quite as much as Ace Attorney has. The third case of the second game tops some people's lists of least favorite cases, but I will examine whether it's as bad as people think it is.

The Basics

Danganronpa has several series-wide trends, and three of them specifically apply to the third trials. The first is that the third trial involves two victims. The second is that the killer tends to be the least sympathetic one in the entire game. The third is that one of the two victims tends to be on the cusp of character development. Both of these trends, especially the latter, get criticized among people who are tired of the series' formulaic nature, but I will offer a defense for why they can be good ideas, at least on paper.

First, the double murder. In terms of the story, it helps serve a vital function in thinning down the cast relatively early on, and enabling the story to focus on the remaining characters.

This also serves as a way of making the third trial more complex than the first two, especially since there are several different scenario for how the killings may have happened.

1. There was only one killer, who killed both victims. This is what happened here, and in the following game.
2. Victim 1 was killed by Victim 2, who then died at the true culprit's hands. This happened in the first game.
3. Both victims killed each other, with the one who died second succumbing to their wounds or committing suicide. This theory is proposed in this case, as well as the following game, but doesn't actually happen.
4. There were two killers, one for Victim 1 and one for Victim 2.

As you can see, there are a number of potential scenarios that have not been explored, so the double murder in the third chapter has unexplored potential.

The unsympathetic culprit is harder to defend, but it can make sense within the context. In the first two case, the first culprit is usually the one who cracks most easily under pressure (which applies to the first game's victim/would be killer, rather than the culprit), while the second one is the most deeply affected by the motive. Neither of those justifies murder, but it can be easy to see why the culprits snapped. Having a less sympathetic third killer can drive home that not all the students are good people, at least if it is a believable motive.

As for the victim who was about to undergo character development, in this case, it's worth noting that originally, Fuyuhiko would have died instead of Hiyoko, and both of them fit the bill. Hiyoko was a bully to most of the other students, especially Mikan, and was only nice to Mahiru. Mahiru's death deeply impacted her, as did the realization that Fuyuhiko regretted the role he played in it, so it was implied that she was starting to change for the better and trying to forgive him. Because of that, some people regard her being killed as a waste of her character.

Now consider Fuyuhiko. In the first two chapters, he was extremely abrasive, refused to cooperate with the group (he is completely unavailable for Free Time events in the first two chapters), openly contemplated the possibility of killing someone to graduate and badmouthed the first victim and killer. He was similarly affected by the second trial, in which his actions led to Peko killing Mahiru, and then being executed herself. After attempting seppuku to atone for his crime, he starts working with the others, even offering to sacrifice himself if need be. Killing him off would have been a waste of his character development, too, so perhaps killing off Hiyoko was the lesser evil.

The Murders

The third trial involves two killings. Ibuki, who's hanging by her neck in the venue, might have committed suicide, but Hiyoko, whose throat was slashed, was definitely murdered.

For much of the trial, the students aren't sure who could be a suspect. Hajime is initially brought up as a suspect who committed copycat murders based on "The Wizard of Monomi," but he proves that he didn't watch the movie before the crime. In fact, considering that Hiyoko's murder was a poor imitation of the lion's fate, the culprit couldn't have imitated the movie; they were just trying to make Ibuki's death look like a suicide. Sonia and Kazuichi are brought up as suspects, but Fuyuhiko was under an erroneous assumption that it was a locked room murder.

It also doesn't help that on the morning the bodies were discovered, only Hajime and Mikan had alibis with each other, or that the time of the crime is unclear. The cast narrows it down to some time during Night Time, but are unclear as to when it happened. Most of the discussion in the trial focuses on whether the venue is a locked room, whether Ibuki or Hiyoko died first and the murder video. In the latter, it turns out that the culprit filmed herself in the conference room, and made it look like Ibuki was about to commit suicide in the venue.

One thing that strikes me as strange about this trial is that it never reveals Hiyoko's murder weapon. In most cases, the murder weapon is a key clue as to the culprit's identity, or it's at least accounted for in the investigation, so it's strange that there aren't any bladed weapons at the scene.

Incidentally, the trial has two mechanically unusual Rebuttal Showdowns. In most cases, you spend the first phase striking down your opponent's words, then look for the correct weak spot in the second. However, in Gundham's first Rebuttal Showdown, you find the weak spot in the first round, so if you go on to the second, you'll have to start over (a bit like Maki's second Rebuttal Showdown in the third game). Akane's Rebuttal Showdown requires you to clear two rounds before you get to the right weak spot. In terms of gameplay, this is an interesting twist.

Cornering Mikan

After Hajime realizes that Ibuki's hanging video was staged, and filmed within the conference room, he realizes that there's only one person who could have filmed it. That person is the one person who supposedly had an alibi- Mikan.

As it turns out, Mikan's murder plan was riddled with mistakes, although some of them only become obvious after she's officially named a suspect.

• Hiyoko walking in on the murder plot was merely bad luck. The fact that it was a mere coincidence comes off as odd when you consider that Hiyoko was the cruelest to Mikan, and thus the person she'd most want to kill, but then this leads into how...
• After Mikan killed Hiyoko, she got blood all over Ibuki's shoes and the ladder, thereby ruining her attempt to stage a suicide. Not only did the ladder in the conference room not have any blood on it, but the ladder in the venue didn't have any bloody footprints on it (despite Ibuki somehow having stepped in Hiyoko's blood).
• Mikan blatantly sabotages the investigation of the bodies by turning up the temperature in the venue (thereby throwing off the time of death) and lying about Ibuki having died by hanging rather than strangulation. In fact, Nagito noticed this in advance.
• The black curtain on the venue stage is blatantly out of place, making it obvious that it was put there prior to the crime.
• When Mikan ripped off the wallpaper around Hiyoko's corpse, she left behind a small scrap. Then again, this seems to be an obligatory small piece of evidence to indicate tampering with a crime scene, and can be excused by her being in a bit of a hurry.

As you can see, there are several points that could have been used to accuse Mikan, rather than waiting until it was proven that the suicide video was staged.

As Mikan becomes even more desperate, she rants about how nothing in the video would prove that she impersonated Ibuki, not even the camera angle. Since the camera angle was the one thing the group didn't discuss, Mikan talking about this is proof that she filmed the video. In theory, it proves that she knows something no one besides Hajime (the one who watched the video) does, but in practice, she doesn't say anything specific enough to incriminate her, such as when the third culprit of the first game mentioned that multiple people had died. Another problem is that Hajime was the only one to watch the video, whereas Byakuya picked up on the previous game's third culprit's slip-up.

Even stranger, it's followed by Mikan actually making a blatant mistake when she talks about the hemp bag on the culprit's head, and how it couldn't be in two places at once. She even gets called out on that, but simply brushes it off.

Another odd part about the trial is the Closing Argument, in which Hajime doesn't even bother to hazard a guess how the murders took place; he only describes how Mikan manipulated him into discovering the bodies and staged Ibuki's suicide video.

While most of the third killers have rather weak motives, and Mikan seems like she was simply killing for the sake of her beloved her motive makes sense in hindsight. Since she remembers who she was before she entered the Neo World Program, it's natural that the "memory disease" she contracted would have reverted her to her Ultimate Despair self. It also makes sense that since the Neo World Program removed all of her memories since coming to Hope's Peak Academy, she'd started the game as the person she was at the time of her enrollment. The "Despair Disease" is rather strange and not utilized as well as it could have been (particularly how Akane and Nagito's symptoms end up being entirely irrelevant), but the trial does help foreshadow later events.

Conclusion

The third case of the second game is deeply flawed, like the other third cases, and doesn't quite live up to its potential. Despite that, I still think that cases with two murders can potentially be very interesting, so if there is a fourth Danganronpa game, I'd like to see one that utilizes that idea to its fullest potential.