I feel a bit weird with this opinion because I think about it a lot. It's odd, because I do love Danganronpa a lot and it's my favorite of the things Kazutaka Kodaka's hand print is on. I love love love the series to bits, but I also have to admit that it is highly up in the air for the first two games and the anime whether or not the status quo has really shifted.
I don't want to say that it hasn't because Makoto and Hajime both fight to keep living and to continue to pursue Hope for their respective futures. HOWEVER, Hope's Peak Academy is still rebuilt and that feels like a big blunder on the story. It makes me think that perhaps we were better off without the anime and leaving things up in the air after SDR2 and the revelations of UDG.
It's a bummer... but that's why Rain Code honestly makes me so happy as a game. Whereas DR may have fallen off a little bit with its theme and messaging, Rain Code actually has its characters push past the status quo of an abusive system.
Yuma, the main character, instead of seeing no choice but to kill his Homonculus, Makoto Kagutsuchi or vice versa, instead talks to him about telling the entire population of Kanai Ward the truth about their circumstances and to let them decide what to make of it. They decide to believe in the people of the city that Makoto loves and fought to protect and let them choose what to do next as the World around them has isolated and cut them off (and probably would want them killed).
By the end of the story, everything has changed. Yomi and his abusive structure is defeated, his former partner asserts that criminals must have the rights of human beings, Kanai Ward chooses to keep Makoto watching over them and to essentially become something of a democracy. And the first Homonculus, Kurumi Wendy, with precautions from Makoto looking out for her, leaves Kanai Ward on her own to search for Yuma.
In DR, you have to search and pick apart the things that have changed in characters and the world, and some of that is quite clumsy or forgotten.
But with Rain Code, so much has changed. From characters to Kanai Ward to beliefs and trust in others as a whole. The world was proven to be capable of change because there was a person (Number One) who wanted people to be happy and for it to be so.
That's good storytelling. The quality of Kodaka's work is really, steadily improving.
