[MeoTwister5]

Well here's what I think about each chapter individually.

Spoiler for Chapter 1:

You'd have to commend Kodaka for doing this. False protagonists aren't exactly common and TBH not a lot of people would be used to the bait and switch when it does happen, but I do think Kodaka handled it really well.
You have an elaborate trap set by the "perpetrator" who already dropped hints since the trial began that it was them, subtly pushing the true protagonist to the truth while urging them not to be afraid. She had already resigned to her fate. The true protagonist already knew the truth early on but refused to admit it. All in all a ballsy feels case that would have been very easy to screw up and easily sour the game for everybody. As it stands not a lot of people were turned off by the switch, so I guess Kodaka succeeded on that part.

And then the revisit in chapter 6.

Spoiler for Chapter 2:

While the emotional high and low of the first chapter gave some bias when judging this, I have to say that the reason this felt weak to me was it felt like this case was too early in the game to work. Kirumi and the overall motive would have hit home harder with more emotional impact if we had some more backstory on their erased memories and the true status of each individual.
The chapter made more sense in retrospect when we had more... uh... flashback lights to work with giving deeper histories for the characters and their motivations,
even if they eventually proved to be fake.

Spoiler for Chapter 3:

The scheme was elaborate, the mystery well thought out.
The problem again was that Kiyo's motivation and dissociative identity disorder came completely out of left field. It would have been better if we had hints that he had a backstory of multiple personalities, but he only started dissociating when he was cornered in the trial, and everything just went haywire from there. Not to say the chapter ultimately sucks, but the sudden disconnect felt jarring, making it difficult to emotionally connect to the case of obviously the motive.

Spoiler for Chapter 4:

We start going up again after the lull of the previous 2.
I have to say that the idea of two murder scenes for the same person who was supposed to be the culprit who made one hell of an elaborate setup only to fail in the end was enthralling, though it plodded some during the exposition bits of the virtual world. This is made more endearing since chapter 4 of the games is supposed to be based on the theme of self-sacrificing nobility, and the trend continues. In the end even if real world Gonta ultimately died for a fictitious memory, you can't deny he had some sort of noble gesture in mind despite the intention of mercy killing everybody to save them from despair.

Spoiler for Chapter 5:

Ah yes. Chapter 5. Generally chapter 5 of the series
become some of the favorite chapter of fans due to the writing and the clusterfuck plans needed to get the death to work. You have the locked room mystery of Sakura's suicide and of course Nagito's Ultimate Luck based pseudo-suicide.
Now you have Kokichi forcing Kaito to kill him, all to entrap Monokuma and find out who the mastermind was. It eventually failed in the end, but you can't deny how many times I had to clench my butthole and retract my balls as the mystery unfolded,
just like its predecessors.

And then we have chapter 6...

Spoiler for Chapter 6:

Chapter 6 always hinged on its big reveal for its emotional payoff to the end. You had Junko being alive while the world burned in the first game. You had the truth about the Remnants of despair and the NWP in the second.
Hell you could add trying to turn Komaru into the successor with a near impossible personal choice in UDG. Here we have the meta-reveal of the real world vs the fictional world of Danganronpa. I'll discuss that later in this post. All I can say that it worked for me, but I completely understand why this is extremely controversial.

Originally Posted by dniv

In response to this post and your last post, I pretty much agree with everything you've said. I think I just ended up liking it more. I also agree about which characters were likable and which ones weren't. The thing is:

Spoiler for for those who have finished the game:

I'm not totally sure I agree with you though about Rantaro not being likable. If he had lived longer, he would have probably gotten some good character development. Considering how he literally had no time to get character development, we only saw one aspect of him, the douchebag aspect. I think I would have also wished that they'd not teased us with the bringing characters back to life, and then didn't follow through on it. That would have been quite interesting if they'd actually gone the length on that.

Spoiler for Rantaro:

I would say that Rantaro and whatever V2 was about is prequel bait, much like how Mukuro Ikusaba eventually got her own side stories about her time before she got skewered as the first death. We're likely going to get supplementary material about him later on, if not a game of V2. That would be actually interesting...

Originally Posted by Klashikari

That aspect was never an issue to me as I said several times. It is just that Kodaka could go even deeper with that subject considering case 6. But at the very least, it was something that still makes a lot of sense with Danganronpa franchise.

But then again, its execution wasn't really flawless, which explains why so many people hated that ending.

Well the reason that was the game that came to mind was that the endings were thematically the same...

Spoiler for Spoilers for two games.:

In the end both writers declined to give a straight path to the "truth" because both games relied on the idea of pitting "truth against lies" and which one the viewer ultimately believed in. That being said, the problem with what Ryukishi did is that he never gave any semblance of an answer, whether truth or lies, and asked the reader to make one themselves. That is to say, IMHO, he never really pointed in a direction and told us to navigate from there, especially since that cast pretty much went on to kill the metaworld representation of the viewers who tried to search for this truth. The notebook was ultimately never opened, and the mystery remains unknown to all but Ryukishi to this day.

OTOH, Kodaka at least attempted to point to a certain truth despite the rebellion of his characters refusing to die in this twisted game of hope vs despair. This becomes even more apparent that Kodaka did have a distinct truth in mind, something that perhaps a good part of the fanbase failed to see, when he insisted back during the Japanese release that one should play/remember the prologue after finishing the game. I did and I have to agree with the sentiment of you and other people who took the prologue seriously because it is likely to be absolutely true: that the mastermind lied on a large chunk of things.

I am now inclined to believe that this entire Truman Show setting is false.