First Reactions: Dangan Ronpa Episode 4

One of the big draws of this show is its varied character designs, and up till now it’s mainly been letting each personality tell its own story. This week, it kicked things up a notch and really gave us a lot more of the characters spending time with each other. The scene showcasing the rising tension was as solid as the early episodes were, but the comedy was vintage Kishi Seiji.* Between numerous scenes proving that Shoukiin Kagerou would have a field day with every one of them and the sauna scene proving that Ishimaru and Oowada were bad enough to be right at home being captains in Kaiser Reinhard’s fleet, pretty much every joke was a dead-on critical critical. What’s even better is that including all that didn’t disrupt the series’ appreciably fast pacing.

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First Reactions: Dangan Ronpa Episode 3

Dangan Ronpa is so damn campy. But I love campy. So I love it. In all seriousness, there was a choice to be made when this anime was adapted. The staff could take the source material and turn it into a serious work about a bunch of teenagers forced to kill each other in a sadistic game they’ve been trapped inside of. Not that that genre is at all saturated. Or they could just make an anime that celebrates the already zany source material and went wild with the game-adaptation portion. There were plenty of points this episode where I found myself thinking “oh yeah, this is a game adaptation”, but there were exactly zero where I found myself minding.

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