DANGANRONPA: CIRCUIT OF DESPAIR!
DANGANRONPA: CIRCUIT OF DESPAIR
Series Description (MA18+)
Neo Hope's Peak Academy, Singapore Branch. Year 2062. Fifty years after Junko Enoshima's despair nearly destroyed civilization, humanity rebuilt. Hope's Peak expanded internationally, cultivating ultimate talent to prevent history's darkest chapter from repeating.
But despair is patient. And it runs in the blood.
Hakuri Enoshima—Ultimate Mediator, amnesiac, and the last person who should share that infamous surname—wakes up trapped with seventeen ultimate students in a killing game orchestrated by Usagi, a figure in a white rabbit mask. The rules are simple: murder a classmate without being caught in the trial, and you earn freedom. Get caught, and face execution. Refuse to play, and die of old age in a gilded cage.
Hakuri is everything a Danganronpa protagonist shouldn't be—hostile, foul-mouthed, violent. But as bodies drop and trials reveal impossible truths, he evolves. Learns empathy through investigating murders. Discovers humanity while surrounded by death. Becomes the heart of Class 87-BR37 even as evidence mounts that something is catastrophically wrong with his missing memories.
The trials grow increasingly disturbing. Victims were experimented on before arrival. Usagi knows Hakuri personally. The facility's technology predates the school by decades. And the mastermind isn't who anyone expects.
Because Hakuri isn't the protagonist. He's the villain who forgot he wrote the script.
In Episode 9's devastating reversal, Hakuri remembers: he IS Usagi. A descendant of Junko Enoshima who created an AI duplicate of himself, erased his own memories, and orchestrated this killing game as the ultimate experiment—can despair learn to feel hope, or does redemption only make it more dangerous?
The final episodes force an impossible question upon the survivors: execute the mastermind as justice demands, or save the person their friend became? When the architect of despair evolves into hope's greatest defender, where does punishment end and murder begin?
Danganronpa: Circuit of Despair deconstructs the franchise's core themes through technological horror, philosophical warfare, and the terrifying premise that some legacies are coded into DNA itself. Twelve episodes of brutal trials, visceral executions, and one amnesiac mastermind discovering he's simultaneously victim and villain of his own design.
The killing game ends. But does despair?