Saturday, 21 September 2013

Danganronpa - Episode 12

Danganronpa's series of cruel tests reaches its end-game this week, but the stakes are high with a requirement to not only unravel the mystery of the school's final murder, but also pinpoint and point the finger at the mastermind behind it all.

With the entire school now unlocked there's no time to lose, and Kirigiri and Naegi's first port of call is the principle's office - a location which initially seems to offer up little evidence bar the grisly confirmation of the principle's (and Kirigiri's father's) death.  However, look a little closer and there are some valuable items at hand, including the principle's personal organiser and a memory card which seems to hold evidence of each of the students agreeing that they'd spend the rest of their life at the Academy.  This in turn matches up with notebooks found by Naegi that seems to suggest that all of the group had already been students at the Academy despite their having no such memories - a suggestion backed up by further photographic evidence distributed by Monokuma.


As further investigation also sheds light on a disparity between the number of bodies within the establishement's morgue, the number of students and the number of supposed murders committed, things are seemingly falling into place within Naegi's head, which means shocking revelation follow shocking revelation in the final classroom trial as the mastermind behind this whole despicable debacle is unmasked.

Even if some of these revelations have to work a little too hard to justify themselves, the whole process of the layers of the show's mystery being peeled away was a lot of fun provided you brought the requisite suspension of disbelief with you.  The episode's relentless pace and determination to keep things moving swiftly were a real boon here, throwing out claims and counter-claims carefully enough for you to ingest them all but rapidly enough for you not to have too much time to think about them and pick holes in them.  I have no idea how the series is planning to close things off now the cat is out of the bag, but hopefully it can prove equally entertaining rather than limiting itself to massive later information dump to explain everything.

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