Danganronpa is a trashy series. It’s loud, abrasive, crass, bleak, gory, and oftentimes just downright dumb in its sensibilities. It’s also got a killer aesthetic, a killer soundtrack, and some of the sharpest, funniest writing in modern games, features which—to me at least—are strangely enhanced by the trashiness on display. It’s not a series I’d recommend to everyone, but its bold visual style and unique gameplay are worth experiencing if you’re intrigued by the premise.

When I do recommend the series—caveats aside—I recommend it largely with the strength of its ending in mind. Danganronpa V3 is my favorite video game, and while it is definitely the best of the three mainline Danganronpa games, it cannot be engaged with meaningfully on its own. As with all great sequels and series capstones, it builds on what came before it. Series creator Kazutaka Kodaka is a master of playing with consumer expectations. From the very first chapter of Danganronpa, where the shy, soft-spoken childhood friend mercilessly frames the milquetoast main character for murder, I knew I was dealing with something different, something that operated on a more self-aware level than I had initially expected. Each game plays with your expectations in this way, building on what you know about the mystery genre and the series’ own tropes and tendencies to surprise you at every turn.

With Danganronpa V3, Kodaka upped the ante. Instead of merely turning the detective genre on its head like the fist two games did, it used its trashy appeal to comment on the state of popular media as a whole. Danganronpa V3 is structured much as the other mainline DR games are: there are six chapters with six different murders, and six trials wherein characters present evidence and debate who the murderer is. Stakes are high, since the rules stipulate that getting the culprit wrong will result in the execution of everyone but the real killer. Lurking in the shadows is the game’s mastermind, the main villain pulling the cast’s strings for their own nefarious ends. And once again in V3, as in the second game and the first, it’s Junko behind the helm! But not in the way you might expect.

It’s revealed late in the final trial that Shuichi et al. are not actually characters in a video game, per se, but rather normal people who have been brainwashed into believing that the fictional world of Danganronpa is real. In the fiction of the game, Danganronpa is a worldwide pop culture phenomenon, and Danganronpa V3 (actually Danganronpa 53, with the Roman numeral “V” representing the number “5”) is the 53rd(!) season of the property, which began as a game series, then branched into anime, and finally became a reality show where real people (assumed to be largely fans) audition to be part of the production. It is subsequently revealed that the cast of V3 are the newest batch of hardcore Danganronpa fans to audition and land roles on their beloved show. The mastermind of V3 is Tsumugi Shirogane, a member of Team Danganronpa, the franchise’s production company. Tsumugi herself is a professional cosplayer, and switches between identities at the drop of a hat, quickly taking on the appearance and personalities of different Danganronpa characters and mocking the cast as she does so. She first appears as Junko, and then reveals her true identity as a corporate suit… who just so happens to be a Danganronpa superfan.

There’s a lot going on here. With V3, Kazutaka Kodaka created a world where Danganronpa was a megahit, as culturally homogenous as the MCU—but he envisioned it as a worst-case scenario, a pop culture apocalypse. The most popular media franchise in the world is a creatively bankrupt hellscape, run by a cabal of superfans who let their equally fannish cast members pitch backstory ideas for the characters they will eventually become in the killing game. Kirumi’s identity as the true leader of Japan, Korekiyo’s ridiculous incest subplot, Kokichi’s desire to be the true mastermind–it is important that all of these reveals are believable enough due to Danganronpa’s peculiar brand of trash, but they’re kind of tired despite everything, aren’t they? There’s a feeling we’ve seen all of this before, with Kokichi being a somewhat weaker Nagito, and Shuichi following in the footsteps of the first game’s Kyoko. When the ideas driving Danganronpa V3 are revealed to be the creation of diehard fans who eat, sleep, and drink nothing but the Danganronpa franchise, it all clicks into place. Notably, Team Danganronpa acknowledges no singular creator for the original series. Nor does it care to, most likely. By the time of DRV3, all Danganronpa content is created by an amorphous blob of fans-turned-corporate suits, with no meaningful mark of individuality on any of their output. You see the same thing happening right this very moment with megacorporations like Disney and Marvel as they do their damndest to make you forget that the properties their movies are based on were once the creation of small teams of talented individuals. In this sense V3 is a game about franchise fatigue taken to its extreme—yet logical—conclusion.

Danganronpa V3 generated no small amount of ire when it released, with many fans disappointed in the metatextual nature of the ending, and many more feeling that Kodaka was giving them the proverbial middle finger for caring about the series at all. I have no interest in contesting anyone’s emotional response to the game’s conclusion, but to this last perspective I say: recall the last few scenes of the game. Tsumugi—representing Team Danganronpa, the shadowy overlords who have iterated upon the franchise to the point of meaninglessness—is executed by K1-BO, while Shuichi, Maki, and Himiko are spared by the global fanbase refusing to vote. There’s an interplay between consumer desires and corporate decision-making, to be sure, and DRV3 acknowledges that fan entitlement and market demand play an important part in prolonging the lives of tired franchises. But it couldn’t be more clear who the true bad guys are at the end of the day. The game—and by extension, Kodaka—trusts the fans to know when enough is enough. In the fiction of the game, Shuichi survives and the fans are vindicated, and the corporate overlords are the ones who are punished—unredeemed and unrepentant.

The ending of Danganronpa V3 shocked me. Never before had I seen a video game argue so strongly against its own existence, against even the possibility of its continuing in a franchise capacity. On the face of it, this is certainly Kazutaka Kodaka saying he has reached creative capacity on Danganronpa. V3 paints a fictional picture of the Danganronpa series, but it echoes the progression of the real-world property, which started as a game, then became an anime. For a mercy, Danganronpa has not yet become a murderous reality show in the real world, but V3’s hypothetical future is not simply a literal “what-if.” It is a metaphor for Kodaka’s fears, an examination of the limits of creative ability when forced by capital to produce content beyond all reasonable expectations. There’s a sense, then, that V3 is Kodaka’s swan song, a vital course correction for a project he may have felt was slipping away from him, and a definitive effort to end it all on his own terms. At the same time, it’s impossible not to see the game more generally as commentary on the current state of bloated franchises and tired reboots and remakes. In this sense, V3 is much more a reflection than it is a warning. The Danganronpa “universe” as imagined in V3 is an ouroboros of recycled ideas and haphazardly workshopped plotting that could fall apart at any second, with no clear sense of where wistful fannish spitballing ends and organic creative intent begins. I think it’s one of the most searing critiques of modern franchise culture to date, as well as a piercing look at the synthesis between fan expectations and cynical corporate cash-grabs. I expected Kodaka to wow with this third and hopefully final entry in the main Danganronpa series, but I never expected him to knock it out of the park like this. In the end, I am delighted that one of my favorite creators could conclude his trademark series exactly as he wanted, all while convincing me that letting it go is in and of itself a good thing. This is a mic drop I will be thinking about for years to come.