Keirik

(Spoilers for the Danganronpa games) As half of the Danganronpa 3 anime experience, Side Despair's purpose is to provide backstory for Side Future as well as fill in Super Danganronpa 2's blanks. Neither should should be watched without playing the first two games in the series, but with Despair's final episode over with I can in good conscience say that they shouldn't be watched at all. Side Despair's problem is that it's boring, safe, predictable, and pointless. As a companion piece to Side Future it does its job fairly well, but in every other regard it's an absolute failure. Danganronpa and Super Danganronpa 2 left severalquestions unanswered, mysteries left up to one's interpretation. DR3 Side Despair aims to solve these riddles and provide answers to what exactly happened to Class 77 before SDR2's events. This was a terrible idea. Class 77's backstory is largely shoved to the background in favour of crossovers with Side Future and an insider's view of series antagonist Junko Enoshima's infernal machinations. When the time finally comes for their big defining moment, none of them have had the development to warrant it. Instead, aside from outliers Nagito Komaeda, Chiaki Nanami, Ryota Mitarai and the Ultimate Impostor, all of them are mushed into one entity. Class 77 is no longer a cast of different characters, but one singular plot device the series has been chained to. Most of the Class 77 segments is spent building up to the demise of the one student missing in SDR2, and when it finally hits it's neither impactful nor entertaining. Junko Enoshima herself has also lost all of her charm. In the games, she appeared only at the very end of DR1 and SDR2. Now she's a main character in Side Despair, and it really hammers home the point that she's best used sparingly. In short, she's just not a very interesting character when you get down to it. She's evil because she's evil, and every single one of her evil plans always goes off without a hitch. What she ends up doing to plunge the world into despair is also incredibly stupid and hokey. The charismatic supervillain who capped off both games on their victory laps is now an omnipresent, transparently evil mwahahaer with little to do or say except ensure that all of SDR2's major backstory beats are hit. The one shining beacon of hope is one of the new anime-original guys, Juzo Sakakura, an excellently written character with a compelling and tragic arc. However, most of his big moments happen in Side Future, though vital setup occurs in Side Despair. Juzo is one of the best additions to the series yet, and his presence alone saves the show from being scored even lower. In the end, I liked SDR2 better when I didn't actually know what happened before it. Every answer we get in Side Despair is far lamer than what I'd envisioned, and just about every character is cheapened by the Persona 4-esque herd treatment. Just about the only character who escaped mostly unscathed was Komaeda, and even he, who was THE defining driving force of SDR2, ended up underutilised and mostly there to provide context for Side Future's events. This show not only fails on its own, but it serves to also make SDR2 a much weaker story once you know just how uninteresting its backstory is. Side Despair is woefully written and dreadfully directed. The animation is also clearly low budget, with the excellent music and voice work, as usual for the franchise, being its only saving graces. You probably already watched this if you're a hardcore fan of the series, but I recommend everyone else give this a skip. Side Future is undoubtedly the stronger show of the two, though even then it'd hard to recommend that one either.

relenita

As a major fan of this series, I was expecting this anime to conclude the story for the three games and this arc was a surprise to many as we got a prequel of the second game to explain many mysteries involving the characters and the entire plot for the rest of the games. Sadly, there's a huge problem when, instead of giving you answers or even more questions, this anime leaves you with contradictions about what you already experienced in the games. Danganronpa 3: The end of Hope's Peak Academy - Despair Side falls into this situation repeatedly. The selling point of this workis, as shown in their PV, the evolution of the 77th class into despair. They're barely present in the series. Barely. And they were the selling point. The development about the characters we all knew and love is null, there's nothing to add into what the games already showed us and at points it contradicts what you have done in the games. The pace of the writing is wonky at best, with jumps in time that aren't explained of make sense in the huge timeline of the franchise, there's fanservice just to cover up the huge plotholes this anime leaves and it doesn't feel like it's a gift for the fans who have played this game for more than 4 years. Just as an example: The final scene from this anime in the credits contradicts the very five minutes you play into SDR2. And that isn't supposed to happen if you're going for a ground-breaking project like this and expect to make people who are already more than familiar with the story be angry or nitpicky because of the poor attention to detail. The few things that save this anime is the music, which is very nice in both Op/End and their OST, the voice acting which is top notch and the appearance of the Despair Twins and their dynamics and also the dynamics between the Future Foundation main Trio. The protagonist and focus of this arc is weak, the introduction of a fan favourite to turn her into the mere shadow she was in the games for a plot device is simply insulting and her classmates are barely in there. Other than Impostor and Health Committee member, no one else gets development in a refreshing way or have any weight in the plot. As an advice I recommend to not be hype about this anime if you're a die hard fan of the series or do it as me: Play the three games in a row, then sit to watch this; because you'll notice all the plotholes and contradictions and you'll be more focused into that than the entire story they poorly presented.