Spoiler warning: due to the nature of the manga, some characters can be seen as Walking Spoilers. Read at your own risk.
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Group C
Yuuichi Katagiri
- Voiced by: Chiaki Kobayashi (Japanese), David Matranga (English)
The protagonist of this story and orphaned at a young age. Though he is just a teenager, he has a sharp intellect and even sharper tongue, and once he is pulled into the Tomodachi Game, he starts showing a darker side to him that his friends had never known.
- The Ace: Played with. It's easy to see Yuuichi as this, given that he ultimately dominates every round he's in, but as he himself admits, he's not necessarily the most talented player. He doesn't quite have Tenji or Kei's academic talents or analytical abilities, his instinct pales in comparison to Satone's, and he's not even considered the best liar... but what he has going for him is sheer and utter ruthlessness. As the administrators note, it's less that he's a "genius" and more that he's a "monster".
- Anti-Hero: There is no mistake that he does do well-meaning things for his friends. Though how he does them often makes it seem like he would be a villain in another story.
- Awesome by Analysis: The Tomodachi Game in its very core is a social game that relies on outwitting his opponents to make it out on top, and Yuuichi can spin a gambit web with the best of them by picking up on subtle clues and acting in ways he predicts his opponents won't be able to catch until it's too late.
- Batman Gambit: He analyzes the situation and predicts exactly how his opponents would react, and most of the time, his predictions are spot on.
- Berserk Button: While he is a nasty person to be around and won't hesitate to inflict retribution on his enemies, anybody that does anything to Yutori tends to be on a very short leash of his patience.
- The Chessmaster: Katagiri Yuuichi is a very good example of this, he planned out everything in the hide and seek arc flawlessly. Not only that, but even in the other games he participates in, he manages to fully utilize everything at his disposal, in order to execute his plan perfectly.
- Clueless Chick-Magnet: Being Oblivious to Love, he doesn't realize at first that both Yutori and Shiho like him.
- Creepy Good: Out of context, you wouldn't expect the guy with a tendency to make Slasher Smiles and Psychotic Smirks to be the hero.
- Guile Hero: He manipulates his opponents and has a deep understanding of human psychology.
- The Leader: While he isn't the most charismatic person of his group of friends, he is the one who believes in their bonds the most, and is often the main force behind their victories in consecutive Tomodachi Games.
- Morality Pet: Yutori Kokorogi is one for him that keeps him grounded in his faith in his friends and of the goodness in people. As expected, he is not happy to learn of her true nature.
- Sanity Slippage: He starts off the series as relatively normal, but slips more into his buried personality as the game goes on. It's particularly noticeable in the fourth round, where he's suffering from an injury that leaves him with no energy to even pretend to be nice.
- Self-Made Orphan: Although he might not know who his real parents are, it was revealed that he was directly responsible for causing the death of his mother and his mentor who taught him how to swindle others.
- Slasher Smile: When his darker traits surface, there is very little keeping him from looking like the very people he has to survive against.
- Teen Genius: He outsmarts pretty much everyone he is playing against with his wits and analysis.
Shiho Sawaragi
- Voiced by: Yume Miyamoto (Japanese), Caitlin Glass (English)
One of Yuuichi's friends. She is their class vice-president has a strong sense of justice and is the one who will correct people that behave boorishly, even if it is coming from her own friends.
- The Ace: She's pretty, popular, strong, and smart.
- Action Girl: She relies largely on her strength to solve her problems.
- Ambiguously Evil: Judging from Tenji's perceptive on his backstory. It might be hinted that Shiho might be a twisted person who puts up a nice facade and that her sense of justice might be a lie. Also, the next time we see her, she appears to have joined the admins of the Tomodachi Game. However, when Yuuichi and Tenji see her again, when the latter lashes out at her, she denies being the traitor and walks away, and then when confronting Kei, she tells him she was framed by the real two traitors of the Katagiri Team, and that she was taken hostage, so she might be a Red Herring Mole and Good All Along.
- Bully Hunter: She's quick to beat up anyone picking on Yutori.
- Childhood Friends: With Tenji, unbeknownst to the rest of the group until the second round.
- Daddy's Girl: Has a strong relationship from her father and looks to him as her role model in how to do right by others.
- Dude Magnet: Shibe has an open crush on her, Tenji secretly likes her except not really, and Tenji's former best friends were also in love with her.
- Informed Attribute: Many people insist she is righteous and has a strong sense of justice, but in the beginning of Tomodachi Game she insists nobody looks into who stole the trip's funds because she believes her crush did it.
- The Hero: In a sense. While Yuuichi is the protagonist, Shiho is the one with the most "heroic" personality and begins to receive much of the spotlight after her righteousness is confirmed as genuine. If you skipped ahead to later chapters, you'd be forgiven for thinking she was the protagonist and Yuuichi to be the shady sidekick.
- The Lancer: Acts as this for her friends as she does whatever she can to keep them on the right path.
- The Mole: Tenji suspects her of being the true traitor of the group, though this is later debunked.
- Scars Are Forever: Has a nasty gash that goes down from her right shoulder to between her bosom that is normally hidden from view with her clothes.
- Tomboy and Girly Girl: Is the Tomboy to Yutori's Girly Girl by being the more proactive person whether it involves disputes in school or if such happen outside school.
- The Vamp: It's suggested that she intentionally seduces people for sinister reasons. However, it's eventually proven false.
Tenji Mikasa (SPOILERS UNMARKED)
- Voiced by: Daiki Hamano (Japanese), Josh Bangle (English)
Warning: Due to the number of spoilers associated with this character, all spoilers are left un-marked. New readers beware.
Initially shown as one of Yuuichi's friends. He is often the mediator between his friends' disputes. He is later revealed to be the mastermind of his friends' kidnapping, but also tells Yuuichi that there is a bigger force at play that is involved in their lives that can only be unraveled by beating and dismantling the Tomodachi Game.
- The Atoner: He spends the duration of the Friendship Game of Hide and Seek trying to make amends with Yuuichi for his betrayal, and from then on tries to do the same with Makoto and Yutori.
- Badass Bookworm: A proud nerd, but also physically strong enough to pull two people out of the ocean.
- Character Tics: He has a habit of adjusting his glasses especially when he's planning something.
- Childhood Friends: With Shiho, unbeknownst to the rest of the group until the second round.
- Creepy Good: Not unlike Yuuichi, he's not above using his more unsavoury qualities to freak people out.
- Crocodile Tears: He sheds such fake tears while pretending to have a breakdown so his friends would forgive him when it's revealed that he's the traitor.
- Determinator: In the third round, where he manages to persevere through dehydration and starvation out of faith in Yuuichi.
- Living Emotional Crutch: Tenji's father was one for him to such an extent that being hit with the betrayal of two of his old school friends and saddled with a massive 200 million yen debt didn't even make him despair as long as he knew he could count on his father to help him. Which makes his father's sudden death that much more devastating on him.
- The Mole: He is the one responsible for the missing field trip funds and the one who forced his friends into the Tomodachi Game. However, things only get much more complex from there on.
- The Only One I Trust: After the events of the third round, Yuuichi calls him the person he trusts most, given that Tenji risked literal death for Yuuichi's sake and thus his sincerity has been verified in a way that others' aren't.
- The Smart Guy: Yuuichi calls him the genius of their grade mentally, and he does very well academically. He eventually becomes The Lancer once Shiho disappears from the group.
- Stalker without a Crush: The series initially presents him as the opposite, but he's very much not in love with Shiho and did it solely as a means of gathering info. He's not exactly ashamed of it, though, and freely uses the fact that he was a literal stalker to unnerve his opponents.
- The Stoic: At first, though he proves himself to be Not So Stoic in the second round, finally fed up with Shibe's Innocently Insensitive behaviour. That said, he was faking it, but he still proves to be Not So Stoic in other ways, such as losing it when Yuuichi gets the better of him. In general, while far from the likes of Shibe or Yutori, he proves to be much more emotive than before after The Reveal.
- Teen Genius: The resident academic genius.
- Walking Spoiler: Trying to dance around his specific entries without dropping big story spoilers related to him specifically would be akin to reading a classified text page from the CIA given his ties to the events of the first arc.
- Wham Line: He reveals to Yuuichi that the Tomodachi Game that they are caught in happens to be his second game.
- Wise Beyond Their Years: Tenji was running a business in middle school! It's tragically played with, though, in that for all of his smarts, Tenji was still a teenager who depended on his father for emotional support, and losing that was not easy for him.
Makoto Shibe
- Voiced by: Tomohiro Ono (Japanese), Aaron Campbell (English)
One of Yuuichi's friends who is the School Committee Chairman. Though he means well, he is also tends to say insensitive things at times.
- Bad Liar: He tends to get flustered every time he lies. This ends up being an important point—see Cannot Keep a Secret.
- Big Fancy House: His family is rich and he lives in more comfort relative to his friends.
- Break the Cutie: Out of everyone in the group, he probably takes the game the hardest, though things start looking up for him after the fourth round. And then they promptly go downhill for him again.
- Cannot Keep a Secret: Anything he catches wind of won't be a secret for much longer. Something Tenji overlooked when he was trying to isolate Shiho from the group in Backbiting Sugoroku.
- Chivalrous Pervert: He's a teenage boy with sex on the mind and isn't great with personal boundaries, but anyone who dares to actually hurt a woman or make her cry will face his wrath.
- Dumb Is Good: He's overall one of the most pure-hearted characters in the series. It's probably not coincidental that he's also Too Dumb to Live, with Manabu flat-out stating that Shibe is the stupidest player he's seen yet in the game.
- Has a Type: He likes cool, mature women (e.g. Shiho). It's suggested that this is because of his mother complex, though it's later revealed that it's because Miyabe, his Cool Big Sis maid, was his first love.
- Innocently Insensitive: He's prone to running his mouth and doing as he pleases without considering how it might hurt others.
- The Mole: For undisclosed reasons, he ends up betraying the others, though unlike most cases in the series, he's very notably unhappy about it and can barely bring himself to say a word to his friends.
- Momma's Boy: He was very attached to his mother before his parents divorced, to the extent that he was taking baths with her long past the socially acceptable age for it.
- Rich in Dollars, Poor in Sense: The most he can offer to his problems outside of physical effort is the promise of money. And he can't even use that as leverage once his father is murdered and is revealed to have been in financial turmoil before his death.
- You Have to Believe Me!: The crux and main drive of the fourth Tomodachi Game revolves around proving Makoto's innocence to his classmates following his father's murder.
Yutori Kokorogi
- Voiced by: Satomi Amano (Japanese), Dani Chambers (English)
One of Yuuichi's friends. Though meek, she tries to do what she can in order to keep her friends together.
- Abusive Offspring: Her mother, despite being alcoholic, is a decent human being. In Shiho's flashback, we see Yutori abusing her own mother for keeping drinking alcohol against her wishes and even going as far as to threaten to zap her for it, until Shiho caught her red-handed.
- Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: As the second round, she can be vicious underneath her seemingly sweat demeanour. It's later revealed to be an act, for the sake of Yuuichi's plans... but later rounds establish her as a far, far bigger one than previously seen.
- Bully Magnet: She was bullied in middle school until she started paying off the bullies, and still occasionally gets picked on in high school.
- Damsel in Distress: She is often the one various people use as a threat to Yuuichi and her other friends as she is not as capable as the rest of her friends.
- Empty Eyes: She has those eyes when she learns of Shiho's feelings towards Yuuichi and especially after she sees her being touchy with him.
- Fan Disservice: A flashback during the second game shows her dating a man for money to pay her bullies to stop going after her. He asks her to cosplay and take pictures in an outfit he likes, which emphasizes her curves but is clearly played to be uncomfortable for her. Later on after the 3rd game, she's kidnapped by a group and has her shirt and bra slashed open with a knife, leaving her large breasts hanging out and just barely covered for the entire game. One of the dares the group gives her is to dance naked in front of them, or have Yuichi get his hand stabbed three times. Once again, it's emphasized how sexy the group finds her but she's in tears at the thought of the dare and can't commit to it even with Yuichi being threatened with harm. Finally, in order to win the 4th game, Yuichi goes to a bedroom alone with her and makes her erotically strip out of her clothes, leaving her completely naked except for her underwear, with Kotorogi using her hands to try and cover her boobs (which spill out anyway due to their size). He then insists she remove her hands as well, with the plan being to shoot a naked video of her to seduce and blackmail a teacher into helping. Again, the frame is a full-body shot of her with just her underwear on and her boobs spilling out of her hands, but she's clearly mortified at what she's being asked to do and later is totally silent despite saving her friend from the 4th game with the tactic. Yuichi later apologizes immensely since even he recognizes it was too far.
- Honey Trap: Yuichi uses her to win the 4th game by filming a video of her stripping out of her clothes to her lingerie, and then going completely topless, then using it to entice and blackmail a teacher to help them. Yuichi goes out of his way to make Kokorogi act as erotically as possible, in her own words, so it works just as planned.
- The Load: She doesn't do much aside from trying to help her friends.
- The Mole: She is the true traitor of the group, who has secretly hated everyone but Yuuichi all along.
- Morality Pet: She is one for Yuuichi, who tries to be kinder while in her presence. Key word being tries.
- Ms. Fanservice: Not deliberately, but she's even referred to as "the sexy Kotorogi" by the Tomodachi Game host. She has by far the biggest boobs in the series (in spite of adult women also being present), and is in several situations where her clothes are either damaged or she strips and her huge boobs are shown off or used to seduce others. Bleeds into Fan Disservice in some of these moments since she's obviously very uncomfortable when asked to use her body to win people over.
- Prone to Tears: She lacks the emotional strength to handle the Tomodachi Game. It's why Yuuichi tries to keep her in the dark for as long as he can.
- The Quiet One: She is a very shy girl and was bullied earlier in life before she met Shiho.
- Reluctant Fanservice Girl: She's extremely embarrassed to have her cup size shared with the group in the second game, and dresses conservatively without making any effort to draw attention to her body. She also dislikes sexual attention because of how uncomfortable it made her in high school when she dated a man for money. She still gets the attention in part because of how curvy her body is and her massive chest.
- Shrinking Violet: She's painfully shy and doesn't talk that much.
- Tomboy and Girly Girl: Is the Girly Girl to Shiho's Tomboy.
Other Players
Kei Shinomiya
- Voiced by: Kensho Ono (Japanese), Derick Snow (English)
- Awesome by Analysis: His specialty. e.g. In the Friends' Murder Game round, where each player is blindfolded and transported by car so that they won't know where on the map they are, he's able to deduce his new location from the length of the ride, position of the sun, etc.
- Badass Bookworm: Despite his short stature, he's a skilled athlete and fighter.
- Honorary True Companion: Despite Group's C (understandable) distrust towards him, he proves to be a loyal ally.
- Insufferable Genius: He is happy to remind you that he's a genius, and he isn't wrong.
- Jerk with a Heart of Gold: He's a cocky, manipulative, and slimy self-proclaimed genius. However, he can also be quite devoted when he wants to be, and it's later noted that in spite of his attitude, he's a rather kind person (to his detriment).
- Teen Genius: Like Yuuichi and Tenji.
Kuroki
- Voiced by: Jun Fukuyama (Japanese)
- Even Evil Can Be Loved: His ex-girlfriend (who even left him because of his abusive behaviour) is the only person to show him any consideration. Unfortunately, this actually just highlights further how awful of a person he is, as he completely ignores this.
- Hate Sink: Both out of universe and in-universe, Kuroki is shown to have no redeeming qualities, to the extent where Yuuichi's plan to lessen the debt of every player in the first Adult Tomodachi Game—including a fair number of Asshole Victims—excludes Kuroki, and Kuroki alone.
- Stupid Evil: He suffers a devastating defeat in the first Adult Tomodachi Game, but it's pretty clear that a lot of it was brought on by his own Jerkass behaviour, even by the standards of the game, including not taking any of the lifelines his ex-girlfriend gave him.
- Would Hit a Girl: He uses Yutori as a victim in his fake game and rips off her fingernails in the process before trying to rape her if she loses. He attempts to try and kill Reiko when she catches wind of his ploy, but is quickly overpowered before he can land a hit on her and arrested.
Saori Miyabe
Originally the maid who serves the Shibe household, who ends up in the Tomodachi Game due to a grudge against her employer.
- Good All Along: Of a sort. Although seemingly an opponent in the Adult Tomodachi Game, she's actually one of Yuuichi's allies, albeit purely so that she can test Shibe.
- Yamato Nadeshiko: Dark-haired, elegant, and appears submissive, underneath which lies a clever and dangerously vindictive personality.
Satone Kaidou
One of Group C's opponents who debuts in the All-Bet round. After her group's defeat at Yuuichi's hands, they agree to serve underneath him.
- Gut Feeling: Satone has an uncanny intuition, allowing her to completely dominate any gambling games and immediately know who's trustworthy or not. The one thing that stops this from being a Story-Breaker Power is that she's perfectly willing to bet on what's most entertaining, not necessarily what would pragmatically benefit her.
- Happily Adopted: She's not Kaidou Tsukasa's biological daughter, but they still love each other dearly, with her being a Daddy's Girl for him.
- Older Than They Look: Despite looking rather young, she's in her twenties.
- Tsundere: She bites Yuuichi's hand. Her father reassures him that that's her showing affection.
