After watching the Danganronpa 3 anime earlier this year, I was all set to play Danganronpa V3, and the winner of this year’s Celebrating All Things Spooky contest chose the game review prize and picked it.

Like the other two mainline Danganronpa games, Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony begins with a group of teenagers learning that they’ve been imprisoned and forced into a death game. Kill someone, and a trial will be held. If the killer is found, they’ll be executed, but if they get away with their crime, they’ll be allowed to leave while everyone else is killed instead.

The setting is back to a school this time, although much more grandiose than a normal school.

That applies to the cast, too. My first thought after meeting the main characters of Danganronpa V3 was that these people were eccentric even by Danganronpa standards. However, that didn’t stop me from liking them.

In fact, I’d say this is actually my favorite Danganronpa cast. There were several characters I wanted to learn more about from the start, and despite being so exaggerated and eccentric, they developed in a way that felt believable to me. Maybe that’s why this is also the only Danganronpa game to make me cry, with a particularly hard-hitting case.

V3 follows the same structure as its predecessors. While storytelling is largely presented as a visual novel, it also has point-and-click gameplay elements, as well as some areas with 3D exploration. During the Free Time sections, you can choose a character to hang out with to learn more about them, until the story reaches a new death. Once someone dies, you switch over to investigative gameplay and inspect relevant areas to gather evidence. A trial then begins, in which you must contradict statements and present evidence, all in the form of various mini-games.

In my previous Danganronpa reviews, I’ve made it clear that I’m not the biggest fan of the trial mini-games… but in V3, they’re not actually so bad.

I still don’t like having to aim and shoot evidence at contradictions instead of simply presenting it like in Ace Attorney, and I disliked the new “lie” mechanic that lets you reverse a piece of evidence’s meaning to lie during a testimony (on the other hand, it replaced the “grab a key phrase someone else said and use it as evidence against a different phrase” mechanic from 2 that I hated, so I’ll accept that trade-off), but it has much better versions of Hangman’s Gambit, Rebuttal Showdown, and the rhythm game, I prefer the new Psyche Taxi over 2’s Logic Dive, and the newly-added mini-games are… actually kind of fun.

There’s a place where you can play certain mini-games outside of trials to earn tokens, and I actually did so voluntarily, which is a big change from how much I hated the mini-games in Danganronpa 2.

So in short, V3 has my favorite set of trial mini-games, which made trials feel infinitely better to play.

Now, as far as the story goes, it’s not my favorite. The character interactions are top-notch and really helped elevate the story, but it lacked the tight storytelling of 1 and the thrilling climax of 2. It also added five new mascot characters in the form of the Monokubs, and they’re far more annoying than Monokuma ever was.

However, by the time I reached the final chapter, I was still enjoying it enough to consider it my favorite in the series… and knowing how divisive it is had me worried about just what would happen in the ending.

Then I played the final chapter and understood.

After having a little time to reflect on it, though, I… liked the ending. Some parts of it are brilliant, and the whole concept certainly had me thinking. It seems to me that there are multiple ways to interpret the ending, and the interpretations that get people the most upset aren’t how I took it at all.

Overall, I came out of Danganronpa V3 thoroughly enjoying my time with it. To me, 1 has the best standalone plot, and 2 has the most exciting endgame, but V3 has my favorite cast, my most appreciated version of the mini-games, and a story that certainly kept me guessing.