Hear Me Calling You Home.
Adventures in London today to mark my mum's birthday! We went in a speedboat along the Thames; we accidentally stumbled across a Kazakh Nauryz spring festival (there was a yurt full of colourful carpets and cushions! And an address from the Kazakh ambassador to the UK, of which my favourite part was 'The image we associate with Easter is the egg. But what is egg?' It seemed interesting and I was sorry we had places to be and couldn't investigate the festival for longer); we FOUND WALLY.
It was good fun! I love London. There's always something going on.
I've been thinking about Danganronpa V3. I enjoyed it, but the trouble with it is that I never really fell in love with any of the characters. Naegi, Hinata, Komaeda, Koizumi, Kuzuryuu: these are characters I adore. (Looking at that list, it's no wonder that the second game is my favourite. Hinata might be my all-time favourite Dangan Ronpa character, and he's up against extremely strong competition.) V3 has a handful of characters I like, but none that engaged me in an 'I love them and I want to write loads of fanfiction and talk about them at great length' way.
V3 does still have its moments. I love the bit where Miu goes 'let's make the masochist go and get the sign' and Shuichi asks 'wait, who's the masochist?' and everyone else goes 'Shuichi, you're the masochist.' And it definitely had a few deaths that made me go 'NO, NOT THAT CHARACTER, WHY,' which is a good sign on the engaging-with-characters front; it's just unfortunate that my two strongest 'NO, NOT THAT CHARACTER, WHY' reactions were both in chapter one.
I've been wondering whether I should replay V3, actually. It might be interesting to re-experience the entire story in the light of the ending. And I'd like to pay more attention to Shuichi in the first couple of chapters; in the first chapter I was going 'pfft, you're obviously going to die first, I don't need to invest myself in you, let me go off and get invested in RANTARO AND KAEDE INSTEAD, SURELY THAT'LL BE SAFE,' and in the second chapter I was still smarting too much from the protagonist switch to appreciate Shuichi as a character. I did come to like Shuichi a lot by the end; maybe I could love him if I gave this game another try?
(That said, there's a part of me going 'you should replay V3 because maybe this time Kaede will survive chapter one.' No, Riona. That's not how this works.)
As ridiculous as the ending revelations are, a lot does make more sense in the light of them. I really didn't like the motive for the first murder: kill someone, or everyone dies. Why would Monokuma force the players into killing like that, when in previous instalments he's been more interested in the despair of knowing how far you'll go in situations that don't have to be life or death? As it turns out, though, the motive makes perfect sense, because this Monokuma isn't driven by any sort of ideology. He's creating entertainment, and that means he doesn't care what he has to do to kick off the murders; if nobody gets murdered, it's not entertaining.
(Admittedly there's some precedent for 'kill or be killed' motives in the Funhouse case of the second game, where everyone was cut off from food. I didn't like that either.)
The ending of V3 also explains why everyone has such a weird, over-the-top backstory, even by Dangan Ronpa standards. And I'll grudgingly say that the presence of the Monokubs also makes perfect sense in the light of that revelation. Of course they'd introduce a stupid 'Monokuma has a load of kids now!' gimmick in the hope of shaking up series fifty-three. I still hate the Monokubs, but I can understand why they're there.
Of course, the chapter six revelations also explain a lot about Kaede's murder plan. It's sort of brilliant that the game anticipates all the 'wait a second...' thoughts players would have after chapter one and goes, 'Yep, you were right all along.' It's a terrible plan! It would never have worked! She couldn't have known that music would play to mask the sound of the shot put, and it would probably have missed anyway! Well, yes. It's a terrible plan. Kaede's not good at murdering. The producers played the music to give her the best chance possible, and it still failed.
I suppose my response to the ending of Danganronpa V3 is a lot like my response to the ending of Ghost Trick. 'WHAT, THAT'S RIDICULOUS, THEY JUST PULLED THAT OUT OF NOWHERE, THERE'S NO WAY THIS WAS PLANNED FROM... wait, but it would explain this, and that, and that...'
Danganronpa V3's great advantage over the other games in the series is that it has the Hotel Kumasutra, the finest innovation in videogame history. 'The protagonist bangs everyone' is secretly what I want from every piece of media I consume. (Not that secretly, perhaps.) I haven't been able to write for a couple of months, and it's making me restless. Maybe I should just write Hotel Kumasutra AUs for everything.
It was good fun! I love London. There's always something going on.
I've been thinking about Danganronpa V3. I enjoyed it, but the trouble with it is that I never really fell in love with any of the characters. Naegi, Hinata, Komaeda, Koizumi, Kuzuryuu: these are characters I adore. (Looking at that list, it's no wonder that the second game is my favourite. Hinata might be my all-time favourite Dangan Ronpa character, and he's up against extremely strong competition.) V3 has a handful of characters I like, but none that engaged me in an 'I love them and I want to write loads of fanfiction and talk about them at great length' way.
V3 does still have its moments. I love the bit where Miu goes 'let's make the masochist go and get the sign' and Shuichi asks 'wait, who's the masochist?' and everyone else goes 'Shuichi, you're the masochist.' And it definitely had a few deaths that made me go 'NO, NOT THAT CHARACTER, WHY,' which is a good sign on the engaging-with-characters front; it's just unfortunate that my two strongest 'NO, NOT THAT CHARACTER, WHY' reactions were both in chapter one.
I've been wondering whether I should replay V3, actually. It might be interesting to re-experience the entire story in the light of the ending. And I'd like to pay more attention to Shuichi in the first couple of chapters; in the first chapter I was going 'pfft, you're obviously going to die first, I don't need to invest myself in you, let me go off and get invested in RANTARO AND KAEDE INSTEAD, SURELY THAT'LL BE SAFE,' and in the second chapter I was still smarting too much from the protagonist switch to appreciate Shuichi as a character. I did come to like Shuichi a lot by the end; maybe I could love him if I gave this game another try?
(That said, there's a part of me going 'you should replay V3 because maybe this time Kaede will survive chapter one.' No, Riona. That's not how this works.)
As ridiculous as the ending revelations are, a lot does make more sense in the light of them. I really didn't like the motive for the first murder: kill someone, or everyone dies. Why would Monokuma force the players into killing like that, when in previous instalments he's been more interested in the despair of knowing how far you'll go in situations that don't have to be life or death? As it turns out, though, the motive makes perfect sense, because this Monokuma isn't driven by any sort of ideology. He's creating entertainment, and that means he doesn't care what he has to do to kick off the murders; if nobody gets murdered, it's not entertaining.
(Admittedly there's some precedent for 'kill or be killed' motives in the Funhouse case of the second game, where everyone was cut off from food. I didn't like that either.)
The ending of V3 also explains why everyone has such a weird, over-the-top backstory, even by Dangan Ronpa standards. And I'll grudgingly say that the presence of the Monokubs also makes perfect sense in the light of that revelation. Of course they'd introduce a stupid 'Monokuma has a load of kids now!' gimmick in the hope of shaking up series fifty-three. I still hate the Monokubs, but I can understand why they're there.
Of course, the chapter six revelations also explain a lot about Kaede's murder plan. It's sort of brilliant that the game anticipates all the 'wait a second...' thoughts players would have after chapter one and goes, 'Yep, you were right all along.' It's a terrible plan! It would never have worked! She couldn't have known that music would play to mask the sound of the shot put, and it would probably have missed anyway! Well, yes. It's a terrible plan. Kaede's not good at murdering. The producers played the music to give her the best chance possible, and it still failed.
I suppose my response to the ending of Danganronpa V3 is a lot like my response to the ending of Ghost Trick. 'WHAT, THAT'S RIDICULOUS, THEY JUST PULLED THAT OUT OF NOWHERE, THERE'S NO WAY THIS WAS PLANNED FROM... wait, but it would explain this, and that, and that...'
Danganronpa V3's great advantage over the other games in the series is that it has the Hotel Kumasutra, the finest innovation in videogame history. 'The protagonist bangs everyone' is secretly what I want from every piece of media I consume. (Not that secretly, perhaps.) I haven't been able to write for a couple of months, and it's making me restless. Maybe I should just write Hotel Kumasutra AUs for everything.