Danganronpa V3's Pink Lies

Danganronpa V3 spoilers below. I’m seriously spoiling like, everything. You’ve been warned.

Colour theming is fun, isn’t it? Pick a colour, any colour, and find clever ways to integrate it into a story, and boom. You’ve got some good theming and meaning behind the basic designs of anything you desire. Danganronpa V3 is absolutely no different. Pink is the colour of lies, deadly lies, in this game, and I wanna look into the clever ways this colour is used. Lies are slathered, no, bathed pink in this murder mystery.

You might be wondering, first and foremost; why pink? Out of all the colours that could be chosen? Pink isn’t really a real colour. Well I mean obviously we see pink, but there’s no such thing as a “pink” wavelength or anything of the sort, our brain just interprets a mix of other wavelengths as pink. Pink doesn’t technically exist, making it the perfect colour to theme lies off of. So with an appropriate colour choice, let’s dive right into the lies.

One of the primary ways lying is incorporated into the game is in the very gameplay. Lying is an option in your nonstop debates now, and whenever you change your truth bullet to a lie bullet, the bullet becomes pink. This is obviously the most direct representation of lies in the game, but we can go deeper.

So, flashback to the opening of the game for a sec. It’s pretty obvious as a glance that all the characters have silhouettes during the character cards. The key point here is that all their eyes are pink. Obviously, keeping with the colour theming, it implies some sort of deceit with the characters, and well, that’s a major plot point. All the characters are lies, fabrications for a long running reality series. The pink eyes are there to point out that none of this is actually real, and these characters are completely made up, in and out of universe.

You wanna get crazy? All the marketing material for the game showed Kaede as the game’s protagonist. As anyone who’s completed chapter 1 knows, that was all a bold faced lie, as Kaede is revealed to be the culprit and axed off soon after. If you’d been paying attention to the colour theming thus far, however, this reveal would have been seen a mile away, because Kaede’s main colour scheme is pink. Her status as the protagonist is a lie, and thus she is dressed accordingly. Her UI is even pink.

Basically, colour theming is hella cool, people. It shows a lot of thought and care going into the aesthetics. Rather than just looking cool, they use the visuals of the game to supplement the very themes and ideals. At the end of the day, the point of V3 is that fiction isn’t real, but it still matters. Shuichi, Maki, Himiko, they all make the decision that while they are technically “fake” characters, what they went through, and who they are now, is very real. It’s in the same way that while pink isn’t “real”, we still appreciate the colour for what it is. And I think that’s a very cool thing to do.