There, they have their sense of humanity and morality tested, and are forced into making difficult decisions in order to affirm what it is about life that is important to them. No Exit, Saw, and Danganronpa, all share similar setups individuals are locked within hostile environments with no immediate avenue to escape. The play itself is an enactment of Sartre's philosophy behind the Look - the idea that the presence of another person can cause an individual to look at him or herself as an object, and see his or her world as it appears to the other in other words, it's a philosophy that recognises that there is subjectivity in how people view the world, but the only way we can understand our place in it is to understand how other people see us. You might have heard of the quote "Hell is other people". Sartre was not just a philosopher, he was a playwright, and one of his most famous works is No Exit, a 1944 work that depicted three deceased characters being punished for eternity by being locked into a room together without escape.
It's quickly evident from the quality of the plot and the wealth of ideas at work in Danganronpa that the game takes after the earlier Saw films, before they became an excuse to try and set new records for gore on screen. These are films that are often derided as being B-grade horror films, and for the later films in the series, this is certainly true, but the original Saw film was itself a genius work of moral complexity that borrowed heavily from the Jean-Paul Sartre school of existentialist thinking. Danganronpa's producer, Yoshinori Terasawa, was openly inspired by the Saw films. The developers quite cleverly resisted the temptation to spell out the reason Monokuma was designed that way - in fact his design is never even mentioned in the plot - but it's a clear marker to look for further meaning within the character.Ī second clue is the inspiration from the developers themselves. This visual motif clearly suggests a duality in Monokuma's narrative role. The first is the visual design of Monokuma himself - half pure, white bear, and the other half the kind of psychopathic monster that you'd expect to find in a child's closet. So why did I feel sympathy for Monokuma (and, of course, the villain herself)? There's a couple of immediate hints that I'd draw attention to that Monokuma is perhaps not the real enemy in Danganronpa. And for 90 per cent of the game before the real villain made herself known, Monokuma was a source of both fear and loathing for the characters, and every time he popped up we as players knew that something bad was about to happen. He most certainly did not play fair within the elaborate Game Theory scenario that his master had concocted ( hah, you all knew eventually I'd work the actual Game Theory into a column called Game Theory, right?).
When one character committed suicide, Monokuma was blamed for being responsible, and he actively provided endless temptations to other characters to kill one another. Yes, I felt sympathy for Monokuma, the diminutive mechanical monster that had, for 90 per cent of the game, been terrorising the protagonists and forcing them to tortures and murder one another.