The Gofer Project

The Gofer Project (ゴフェール計画 Gofēru keikaku lit. The Gopher Plan) is a major event featured in Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony, which was actually fabricated by Team Danganronpa as part of the 53rd season of the Danganronpa reality show.

Overview


The story began when countless meteorites kept crashing into Earth. With so many unavoidable collisions, the leaders of every nation decided that even if the Earth's destruction was unavoidable, they could at least try to prevent the destruction of mankind. So they decided to implement a project called as the Gofer Project.



The project was to select a number of excellent human beings, put them on a spaceship, and have them escape from Earth before it was destroyed. Then they would seek out some planet where life was sustainable and from there, work to "preserve the species of mankind". In other words, the Gofer Project was never a project to save all of humanity, it was a project to preserve the last vestiges of the human race to the very end. And the ones selected for that Gofer Project were sixteen young, talented, upstanding high school students.



Those sixteen high school students, who were called the Ultimates, were selected as the Adams and Eves of the new world. But the sixteen of them tried to decline the offer altogether for an obvious reason; They refused to go on living by themselves, even though all of their families, friends, and everyone they ever knew were all dead, On the contrary, that just sounds like hell.

So then, the sixteen of them decided to try and escape from the project. By erasing their own memories, they decided to abandon their “Ultimate” talents, and tried to live their lives as ordinary high school students. However, it was just around that time that an extremist cult began to come into power.



Obsessed with the idea of the End of Days, they believed that the meteor crashes were a punishment humanity had brought upon itself, and thought that mankind should receive that punishment. And they, who knew about the Gofer Project, decided to try to put a stop to it.



As a result, the Ultimate Hunt began. That Ultimate Hunt began to encompass the entire world, and the sixteen students who had tried to run away were gradually cornered. And so the organization that had tried to implement the Gofer Project in the first place tried to counter that situation.



They began spreading false information, saying that “all sixteen students had died.” That is what that funeral the students remembered was all about. By doing so, they managed to calm down the Ultimate Hunt while providing protection to those sixteen students. And finally, they were able to put the Gofer Project into action.



And so, the Ark succeeded in launching with all sixteen students aboard, as the meteorites continued to rain down incessantly on Earth and the sixteen students set off into space, as the last survivors of mankind. That Ark itself is the true identity of the Ultimate Academy for Gifted Juveniles.



The truth is, this Ultimate Academy for Gifted Juveniles is actually a gigantic spaceship colony.

Killing Game
Even though the Ark was supposed to set out bearing the hope of all humanity, a Killing Game involving the sixteen students occurred. It turned out that the organization that carried out the Gofer Project overlooked someone among those sixteen students. He is the person who leads the cult organizaiton that was trying to crush the Gofer Project, the Ultimate Supreme Leader, Kokichi Oma. Originally, the sixteen crew members selected for the project were supposed to be put into a state of cold sleep and when the spaceship found a suitable planet, they were supposed to be woken up from that cold sleep,



However, Monokuma began piloting the Ark on his own, and returned it to “the Earth after its destruction” after hundreds of years the sixteen students were put into a cold sleep. The Earth current state is completely demolished by meteorites, devoid of oxygen, devoid of all living things. Its people could no longer exist anywhere at all.

This is the truth of the outside world.

Outcome
The story was slowly revealed by the Flashback Light through the chapters, until it was completely revealed in Chapter 5.

However it is revealed in Chapter 6 that the Gofer Project is a fake story created by Team Danganronpa and used by the ringleader of the Killing School Semester, Tsumugi Shirogane, to deceive the students' memories of the past.

Trivia

 * The cover of the file found in Kaito Momota's Research Lab in the Japanese version mistranslates the name as "The Gophel Plan."
 * As Maki Harukawa points out after finding the file, the word "gofer" is a reference to the story of Noah's Ark, in which God instructs Noah to build an ark made of "gopher wood". This word (unrelated to the name of the North American animal) is only referenced once in the Bible, and the identity of gopher wood is still debated.
 * This draws some comparisons between Noah's Ark and the Gofer Project. Both events involve a world-threatening catastrophe; a flood and meteorites damaging the Earth respectively. Both events also include a vessel where the necessities to continue civilization after aforementioned event inhabit.