Hope you're ready for more despair
A trilogy of Japanese stage plays based on Danganronpa's Hope's Peak trilogy. Sponsored by Cornflakes.
The plays adapt the events of the first and second game, along with the third anime's Future and Hope Arcs.
The first playnote premiered in 2014, with another performance in 2016. Same goes for the second playnote , which premiered in 2015 and had another performance in 2017. The third playnote premiered in 2018.
Each play can be viewed on YouTube with English fansubs.
Spoilers are unmarked.
This play contains examples of:
- Adaptational Heroism: Due to the compressions altering the plot, Hifumi, Celeste, and Gundham never commit murder.
- Adapted Out:
- Alter Ego, Makoto, Kyoko, and the real Byakuya do not appear in the second stage play. All the exposition they provided in the game about the Neo World Program is instead given by Monomi and, to a lesser extent, Junko.
- Class 77 doesn't show up at all in the third stage play, with the excuse being that they're still recovering inside the Neo-World Program during the play's events.
- Breaking the Fourth Wall: Nagito in the second stage play often references the fact that everybody's a character in a play, even escaping at one point in Chapter 5 through the audience. It only serves to highlight his insanity.
- Compressed Adaptation: Given how long the games and anime are, each play cuts out a good chunk of the stories in order to fit them within three hour plays.
- The first stage play cuts out Chapter 3, shortens Chapter 4, and Chapters 5 and 6 have been combined.
- The second stage play cuts out Chapter 4, and shortens Chapter 6 considerably.
- The third stage play, however, is very accurate to the anime, though it helps that the Despair prequel arc was removed. Despite that, parts of it are referenced in flashbacks.
- Dead Person Impersonation: Junko claimed she was going to do this to the dead classmates in the game version of Danganronpa 2, taking over their bodies once they awoke from their comas, but in the second stage play she actually does it while still inside the simulation. At first the survivors are led to believe that their friends have been returned to life, but after Hajime claims that the real Nagito would never tell him to join despair, Junko drops the facade and just starts puppeting the characters around the stage while speaking through them. Occasionally she imitates the real person's personality, just to fuck with the survivors more. Notably, she has Fake Peko come on to Fuyuhiko, lifting her skirt and calling herself Peko Kuzuryu, to which he turns away and yells for Junko to stop, clearly affected."Nagito": It truly is a hopeless story! (dropping the act) Hey, how was that? I'm the perfect Komaeda, aren't I?
- Demoted to Extra: While already a minor character in the third anime, Yasuhiro only appears two times in the third stage play and doesn't get to do anything of note.
- Dies Differently in Adaptation: Several times due to the compressed nature of the plays.
- All executions are carried out the same way here: Impalement via multiple sharp objects, similar to Mukuro's execution in the first game. The second play does switch it up with personalized weapons, though: Teruteru gets the same type of skewer he killed the Ultimate Imposter with, and Mikan gets a giant syringe, with the spears from the first play only being brought back for Chiaki's execution. Notably, Peko's execution wasn't changed much compared to the others, though it still ends the same way, due to her execution in the game already being similar enough.
- The first play has Kiyotaka, Celeste, and Hifumi executed by Monokuma's spears due to choosing the wrong killer during the trials.
- The second play has Nekomaru and Gundham die during a battle with dozens of Monokuma robots, going out in a blaze of glory.
- The Fourth Wall Will Not Protect You: Nagito actually wanders off into the audience while delivering his Motive Rant, and unlike in the game, he makes it perfectly clear that he kept the gun from his Russian Roulette game.
- Lighter and Softer: While still dark, the plays aren't nearly as graphic or disturbing as the original trilogy. The executions themselves have been changed to just impaling the killers with spears, making them far less visceral, but still dramatic and climactic.
- Pragmatic Adaptation:
- The first play has a new rule where those who've incorrectly voted are executed alongside the Blackened. This allows for the play to move at a brisker pace as Kiyotaka, Hifumi, and Celeste's deaths are given a proper excuse with the removal of Chapter 3.
- The third play's climax has Asahina revive Kizakura, Bandai, and Izayoi to help Makoto take down Ryota, rather than the sudden appearance of Class 77 like in the original anime.
- Spared by the Adaptation: Junko at the end of the first play is forced to live by Makoto, viewing it as a worse punishment than allowing herself to die. Well, that is until...
- Sudden Sequel Death Syndrome: Despite surviving the events of the first two plays, Junko is said to have died offscreen at the beginning of the third play, only appearing in a flashback.
