Meanwhile, Chisa Yukizome (the teacher of most of the characters), Kyosuke Munakata, and Juzo Sakukura are working on uncovering a conspiracy within the school, including the Kamukura Project. The story itself is about the characters of Danganronpa 2 and their time at Hope's Peak Academy, where they were all members of the 78th class. Most of what's going on will be lost to you without knowledge of virtually every other released part- that being, Danganronpa 1+2, Ultra Despair Girls, Danganronpa/Zero, and even Danganronpa 3 Future Arc.
#DANGANRONPA 3 HOPE ARC POSTER SERIES#
Please note that the series is VERY CLOSELY tied to the rest. However, I'm going to try to keep it as seperate from my interest in the series as possible. Now before I go into this, I'm a big fan of the Danganronpa series as a whole, so this review might be moderately biased. The lack of a killing game though is my only issue here, and from a brief investigation, it looks like that component makes up the 2nd Danganronpa Game. I am a Junko and despair supporter rather than the side of hope, so this catered very perfectly to that desire. The story really drew me in since I am very partial to an evil (despair) type of story, and it got better and better with each episode. Overall I thought this was quite well done minus the somewhat boring and different start. The original art style with its signature neon pink blood are kept in place here which is great.
Introduced are also the characters and their original roles that form up the foundation and plot of characters in the Future Arc. The cast of characters were all wacky and unique enough to live up to expectations based on the original season. It contains quite a few torture based scenes which are actually welcome as they capture that punishment time vibe from the original season. As the title "despair" indicates, this Arc is rather dark and brutal. Junko Enoshima plays a big part here and she gets a good amount of screen time which I found to make this very interesting since she is the original mastermind behind the despair viewpoint.
Basically the story goes back to how everything began and the despair concept put into play. The starting and realizing placed some doubts on this Arc, but the story component is really interesting which made it good overall. This is a story oriented Arc that doesn't involve a killing game. This Arc takes place at the beginning of it all, before the original season. Either watch this alternating between the Arcs like this Ep1-Future, Ep1-Despair, Ep2-Future, Ep2-Despair, etc (The same method as the intended airing pattern) or view this before the Future Arc.