All spoilers will be unmarked ahead. You Have Been Warned!
Danganronpa has more than a few Recurring Elements in the franchise, so many of the flaws in later installments were usually present to some extent in the earlier ones.
Danganronpa 3: The End of Hope's Peak High School:
- A major criticism for the divisive Side:Hope ending is that it was more of a Happy Ending instead of a Bittersweet Ending that the past installments usually have, with many fans stating that they don't believe a happy ending like that fits in with the franchise. However, if one takes a look at the endings for the past two games, while they still have bittersweet tones to them to avoid a Broken Base in them like Side: Hope did, they have become happier and more optimistic compared to the original ending for the first game, as Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair went on to state that the "deceased" students in its cast were actually comatose subjects that could be woken up, and in Danganronpa Another Episode: Ultra Despair Girls, the only named characters to die were villains or minor ones. Additionally, Absolute Despair Girls itself had been criticized by some fans for revealing the deaths of the Warriors of Hope to be Disney Deaths.
- Since DR2, the franchise has had a habit of giving returning characters Plot Armor when it was revealed that the "Byakuya Togami" who died in that game was actually an imposter. While this wasn't divisive as a twist there (on top of it being so obvious at first sight that even if you did later buy into it, you'd still have suspicions in the back of your mind), it was considerably more controversial in this series, as Kyoko seemingly died only for it to be revealed she survived later. The main difference between those two reveals is timing; while the reveal of "Byakuya" being an imposter happens right before the game's trial with the biggest Player Punch (Chiaki's execution), the reveal of Kyoko's survival happens right after an infamous resurrection of most of the DR2 cast, and it came across more as Pandering to the Base because of that.
- Andou's character is usually criticized due to the fact that she crossed the Moral Event Horizon for her unreasonable murder of her boyfriend Izayoi. However, a recurring element of the franchise is having a female character commit an unsympathetic murder about halfway through the story, exactly like Andou. The first game had Celeste and the second game had Mikan. However, Celeste's motivation was suspected to be a lie, and the manga provided an Alternative Character Interpretation that shows her Dark and Troubled Past. Mikan's feelings towards her beloved (heavily implied to be Junko) were proven by the anime to be forced upon her via brainwashing, absolving her of guilt for the incident. Both did a lot more than Andou to establish themselves as sympathetic before their respective murders, and Andou's main aspect is her trust issues. However, that actually ended up making things worse, as it was executed in a way that made her come across as Unintentionally Unsympathetic.
- Having the Big Bad of a certain installment brainwash a group of people to be on their side is not unfamiliar to the series, as Danganronpa Another Episode: Ultra Despair Girls had Monaca brainwash the Monokuma Kids to serve her. This wasn't as divisive as Junko brainwashing the DR2 classroom into serving her, since Monaca did it to a large group of nameless, faceless people as opposed to the fleshed-out and very popular DR2 cast, who at the time were popularly thought to have become the Remnants of Despair through manipulation, not through brainwashing of the literal variety.
- Junko's role as the Big Bad has well worn out its welcome by this point in the franchise. Initially, Junko was a fairly popular antagonist for her absolutely batshit insane demeanor, as well as being a masterful Manipulative Bitch, which made people curious as to just how she managed to bring down the world with the ideology of despair. Further intrigue was created when DR2 introduced the Remnants of Despair, who were implied to have been students Junko personally broke, and people wondered just how she did it all or how she even came to be who she is today, which would have given her more justification behind her plans beyond "It Amused Me". Not only were most of her background elements still left unexplored in the anime, but the plot either bent over backwards to make Junko's plan work or relied on everyone else being utterly ignorant of her and her obvious scheming, which destroyed much of the mystique behind Junko's character, exhausting or frustrating fans and turning Junko into a massive Base-Breaking Character as a result.
Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony:
- Originally, Kodaka's trollish and deceiving nature was a welcome thing for fans, because it created great plot twists before the game was released. Between Danganronpa 3: The End of Hope's Peak High School turning nearly every single member of Class 77 into Advertised Extras, and Shuichi being the real protagonist of this game instead of the far more popular Kaede, these tendencies are getting way too close to outright false advertisement, and fans no longer feel surprised as much as they feel cheated and lied to.
- As mentioned before, Shuichi being the real protagonist instead of Kaede. Much to the consternation of a number of fans, he is, in many regards, cut from the same cloth as pretty much every previous player character, being yet another regular-looking student with the now-expected case of Idiot Hair, whose main flaw is a sense of self-doubt about having a talent they personally perceive as unremarkable. Needless to say, after months of being teased with the possibility of playing as a character with a completely different characterization, appearance and talent than your usual Danganronpa protagonist, a lot of fans have gone on to express their displeasure at being flat-out lied to about who they were really going to be playing as. To make matters worse, while Makoto, Hajime, and Komaru all had self-esteem issues and doubts about themselves, they were still capable of fighting and leading the rest of the group; Shuichi, on the other hand, has to rely on Keebo, Maki and Kaito in order to get most things done, with his indecisiveness even being lampshaded by Kokichi as a hindrance to their survival.
- Adding another layer to this controversy is the fact that Makoto, Hajime and Komaru being largely regular people among their considerably crazier and more colorful peers were actually plot points, since they were all related to one of the main Aesops behind the Hope's Peak Academy Saga: Having a talent doesn't mean you are a better person than others, and not having one doesn't really make you worse than those who do. Makoto's ordinary upbringing and apparent lack of talent were some of the reasons he was so humble, understanding and emotionally reliable, which allowed him to be The Heart that kept his friends together, Hajime let himself become Izuru because of his fear of staying as someone simple and talentless, and Komaru's averageness and talentlessness were related to her fear of becoming a hero (or a new Junko). Shuichi's simplicity and lack of any particular remarkable trait serves no purpose aside from just being another recurring element.
- Fans have also complained that, for the third time in a row, the game is relying on the series' strictly formulaic habits, such as a seemingly important character being murdered in the first chapter, the Nonstandard Character Design character dying in the first half of the game, a double murder in the third chapter involving Shoo Out the Clowns and a somewhat unsympathetic murderer, The Big Guy and a robotic characternote dying in some way in the fourth chapter (which features a heavily Sympathetic Murderer), and a built-up antagonistic character being the fifth chapter's victim while the cause of death wasn't the most immediately clear wound on their body. Fans were fine with it in the first two games, since they were establishing all of these recurring elements, and the parallels between the killing games were even a plot point, but now the formula is beginning to get stale and some fans are clamoring for it to be shaken up a bit.
- By the same token, Korekiyo turning out to be a Serial Killer with a huge body count, motivated by Villainous Incest with his dead sister and a desire to help her "make friends" in the afterlife by murdering people has been decried as not only a lame and unsatisfying motive for murder, but simply being too over-the-top and edgy for good taste. Korekiyo is hardly the first character in the franchise to go too far with the gross-out factor for many people's liking, and it escalated with each title; as early as the first game it was suggested that Hifumi might need supervision while during the students' laundry. In the second game, Akane suggests she was sexually harassed throughout her life and just too ignorant to understand what was happening to her, and Teruteru actually roofies the player character at the end of his Free Time events. The omnipresence of horrifying (and frequently sexual) child abuse in the spin-off was a factor in many people not playing it at all. But in all of these other cases, the games did go out of their way to at least try to flesh out these people, make them into multifaceted human beings whose fates, and in the case of the villainous characters, motivations, a player could latch onto and potentially mourn. How good a job they did might be debatable, but not whether or not you think they succeeded, at least the attempt was made. Korekiyo is just a one-dimensional caricature, potentially even In-Universe where his persona may have been a product of implanted memories and personality traits.
- Heck, Korekiyo's not even the first student to turn out to be a serial killer; hello Genocide Jill, also straight from the first game! But the first game was smart enough not to also have the serial killer be one of the actual murderers, and in the sequel someone claiming to be a serial killer was actually a Red Herring. Korekiyo falls straight into a pitfall his predecessors deftly dodged.
- In regards to the infamous ending of this game, some people may recall that Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair had its share of fourth wall breaking and meta commentary. The reason why most people didn't take issue with it back then was because it was nowhere near as in-your-face and plot-relevant as it is here, where it becomes the focal point of the final trial, and more or less hijacks the plot in the views of some.
- One of the most hated bits of the game was Chapter 3's arc of Angie's "Student Council", whose job was to uphold strict curfews and rules to ensure no murders could take place. The preceding games already had this sort of thing happen, with Kiyotaka also being a stickler for the rules, and the remaining students in Goodbye Despair all taking turns to watch over each other especially when some of them got infected by Despair Fever. What made Angie's plan more hated than the these two, however, was the execution: in Trigger Happy Havoc, most students treated Taka's enforcing of the rules with amused indifference while those who did follow didn't make a big deal out of them, while in Goodbye Despair everyone who was stable enough agreed it was the best course of action especially when Fuyuhiko was still badly injured and nobody knew what the virus was capable of. In contrast, the Student Council turned normally rational characters like Kiibo and Himiko into borderline cult members who made themselves feel above the rules that they set, while Angie, despite her best intentions, only made morale worse as everyone not associated with the Council was annoyed at best, not helped by Angie herself constantly saying Atua absolves her of any wrongdoing. Compare this to Taka, who had very comical reactions to the rules being broken and at least abode by them himself. By the end, her plan was All for Nothing anyway, as not only was there a murder, but the killer was someone who wasn't a council member, meaning they likely would have killed with or without Angie's rules and everybody who was a member went back to normal once Angie was offed.
- The much-criticized incredibly bleak and depressing setting painted by the endgame has its roots as early as the very first title revealing that the world outside the Gilded Cage of the Hope's Peak Academy was a post-apocalyptic warzone, ruined by a cataclysmic event that originated within the school itself. Later titles would only escalate this, with the second title revealing the school itself prior to the catastrophe was, rather than the idealized and fun school life the original painted, as much an horrifically corrupt grift as an academic institution, preying on the fruitless hopes of students with no real talents to stay afloat financially and riddled with bullying and abuse even among the Ultimate students. The spin-off had Hope's Peak complicit in both sex-trafficking of and abusive experimentation on underage children, so long as it got to study their Ultimate talents. But in each of these cases, at least some forces fighting the good fight to stem or push against these demoralizing tides of corruption existed, and siding with them against despair rather than throwing up one's hands and saying Then Let Me Be Evil was one of the core themes of the series. Furthermore, the killing games were arranged by a single deranged maniac, and multiple characters aware of what was happening on the outside attempted to stop them both on and off screen. In V3, seemingly everyone on Earth is complicit in the unbelievably toxic abuse that the Danganronpa game show represents, because their lives are so empty and meaningless they simply have nothing better to do than watch children get psychologically tortured into killing each other, while dreaming of engaging in the abuse themselves as contestants, with entire production teams working together on an extremely long running television program to serve their desires. The only exceptions are some of the protagonists... and the revelation that this in turn is only a result of Amnesiac Dissonance; that they're only victims because their original selves, who volunteered, were erased via Heel–Face Brainwashing means even that statement comes with a laundry list of caveats. Finally, they ultimately push against the corruption not through somehow bringing a message of hope to a despairing and complacent world, but simply by leaving the irredeemable outside world so bored and miserable that they just give up and can the whole thing; hardly the uplifting message about the good in the world still being worth fighting for earlier games still tried to cling to. Even setting aside the various meta-commentary elements many fans found questionable, it's hardly an ending to the story worth investing in, and with a world so devoid of hope or positive qualities, who would want to?
- The game being nothing more than a long-running reality show had its basis back in game one as well, as one of the major twists was that Monokuma was broadcasting the events around the world. In this instance, it was because the despair was the goal unto itself, so showing the events of the Killing Game to ensure the world was filled with even more despair fit perfectly with the overall evil plan. Having it broadcast was just harder to buy both when it's considered genuine entertainment in-universe and having run for fifty-three seasons.
