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S
- Sadistic Choice:
- Monokuma specializes in these, the most basic of which is: Kill one of your classmates, or spend the rest of your life in captivity — and when it comes down to the trial, fess up and receive a gruesome punishment, or escape with the blood of everyone else on your hands.
- Sakura was presented with one as well — work as a mole for Monokuma and then violate her personal integrity and sense of morals by killing someone when Monokuma asks her to, or refuse Monokuma's demands and lose her family's dojo. She manages to get around this choice, however; see Take a Third Option.
- Makoto faces one in Chapter 5; expose a lie Kyoko's told, or let her lie slide. This doesn't look that sadistic until you realize that he's actually deciding either Kyoko or himself to be found guilty.
- Junko also offers one to the surviving students: kill her but be forced to leave for the outside world, which could very well be deadly, or sacrifice Makoto and spend the rest of their lives in peace, but only inside the Gilded Cage of the academy.
- Say My Name: "Daaaaiiiyaaaaa!"
- Scars Are Ugly: The reason why Kyoko nearly never takes off her gloves is to conceal grotesque burn scars she got on her hands from an incident when she was a beginner detective.
- Screaming at Squick: Hifumi squeals in horror after learning Kyoko examined Chihiro's head wound.
- Second Law of Metafictional Thermodynamics: Intentionally invoked: series writer Kazutaka Kodaka has said his main problem with murder mysteries was how underdeveloped the victims usually were, and so the series came to be based around a Cast of Snowflakes put through as much death and psychological trauma as possible. By the end of the game, the entire world turns out to be effectively destroyed just to make them earn their happy ending.
- Self-Contained Demo: The demo for the game features a different first victim, Yasuhiro, and murderer, Hifumi, as to not spoil anything about the actual game.
- Sequel Hook:
- Monokuma rises again after the students escape. Plus, we still don't know what happened in the outside world... or if anything happened at all.
- Also, the escape switch, and the bonus movie that it unlocks, foreshadows Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc IF.
- Slasher Smile: Byakuya makes one before crucifying Chihiro's corpse.
- Spell My Name With An S:
- It's a plot point that Kuwata's first name is Leon rather than Reon.
- The NISA translation removed the U in Kyouko and Touko's names.
- Spoiler Opening: Along with introducing the cast, the opening sequence contains brief flashes Foreshadowing in-game events, most prominently borrowing from a Cutscene showcasing one of the murderers' punishment.
- Steel Eardrums: Other than obvious shock, no one in the group reacts to Monokuma exploding so close to them at the start of the game.
- The Stinger: After the credits, we see a scene where Monokuma comes back to life.
- Sudden Contest Format Change: Near the end of game, Monokuma uses a rigged trial to get rid of Kyoko, only for Makoto to take the fall, leading to him being executed, despite the rules saying only the person who killed the victim being valid as the correct person to be executed. Thankfully for Makoto, his talent for being Born Lucky allows him to survive the execution, giving him the opportunity to confront Monokuma about this. Monokuma initially plans to declare Screw the Rules, I Make Them!, only for Makoto and Kyoko to remind him about the killing game being broadcast, and further cheating would heavily undermine his intended message. Monokuma then decides to challenge the six surviving students to a final trial. Instead of the standard ?figure out the killer? goal, this last trial requires them to solve the Ontological Mystery and work out who is the mastermind controlling Monokuma. Winning this trial will allow them to leave alive, while failure will lead to them all being executed. The rules change again during the trial, after the reveal that Junko Enoshima was Faking the Dead through a Twin Switch, and as such, is the mastermind. Junko decides to try and force the students past the Despair Event Horizon, and changes it so that the vote is now between letting hope or despair win. If anyone votes for despair, Junko wins, Makoto will be executed, and everyone stays in the school. Should hope win through a unanimous vote, Junko is executed, and the remaining six will leave. Makoto successfully rouses hope in the others, allowing for hope to win, and Junko to be defeated.
- Suicide, Not Murder: Sakura Ogami's death turns out to have been a suicide; the victim had just admitted she was blackmailed into being The Mole, and she knew her continued presence was a ticking time bomb that would eventually get someone killed. So she locked herself in a room and drank some poison. Unfortunately for the player, Monokuma tampers with the suicide note, leading Aoi Asahina to believe she did what she did out of despair and try to cover up the suicide to get everyone killed.
- The Summation: Closing Arguments boil down to this, with Makoto giving his take on how the crime was committed before calling out the murderer. He doesn't get to do a Closing Argument summation in chapter 5, because he never actually solved the entirety of how the murder happened. If the player decides to reveal Kyoko's lie in court, Monokuma cuts the trial short and executes Kyoko. If they decide not to reveal Kyoko's lie, Monokuma cuts the trial short and tries to execute Makoto, who is saved at the last minute by Alter Ego.
- Swiss-Army Tears: In Chapter 3, when the students find Hifumi once more knocked out with a bloody head wound, Aoi bursts into tears over Byakuya's cold reaction and cries over Hifumi's corpse, and he awakens briefly before truly dying. Makoto even lampshades this by saying "If this were some world of make believe, this might have been when Hifumi opened his eyes."
- Sympathetic Villain, Despicable Villain: While the game's Big Bad is an Ax-Crazy Nightmare Fetishist who does things to satiate her despair fetish, Junko's assistant and twin sister, Mukuro, is her devoted servant who ultimately does things for Junko out of love for her, and as a result, Mukuro entrusts her life to Junko. Unfortunately, Junko herself is a narcissist and sees everyone as expendable as long as it's to satiate this fetish, including her sister, whom she executes in her Monokuma form during Chapter 1. When the students find this out in the final chapter, they are understandably shocked, and though they don't show it clearly, they sympathize with Mukuro having to become the victim of someone who never actually loved her for who she was.
T
- Tea Is Classy: Celestia Ludenberg is actually a Japanese girl named Taeko Yasuhiro who puts on airs of being an elegant, gothic European woman. She resents people finding out that gyoza is her favorite food, since she goes around telling them it's tea.
- Tempting Fate: If a character is too happy, you can bet they're going to be involved in that chapter's murder. Sayaka implies that she has a crush on Makoto? Not only is she killed, but she had him pegged as her fall guy. Mondo and Kiyotaka become friends? Mondo kills Chihiro and Kiyotaka becomes completely broken. Hifumi finds his "ideal 2-D girl" in the ironically male Alter Ego and Kiyotaka bounces back after meeting Alter Ego? Kiyotaka's the next victim and Hifumi is killed by the person who convinced him to murder him. Sakura and Aoi, by far the kindest students? Sakura is The Mole and commits suicide, leaving Aoi heartbroken. Alter Ego gets over being a computer program and promises to help? Monokuma steals and crushes him. Makoto helps Kyoko screw over Monokuma? In the bad ending, Kyoko's the next one to be executed thanks to Makoto himself.
- Ten Little Murder Victims: An interesting case of this. Junko Enoshima is the first mole who set up the murder game in the first place, but she operates from a distance and uses two moles through the course of the story, neither of whom kill anyone. One of them outright kills themselves while the other's publicly offed by the mastermind, and later used to frame one of the students.
- Theme Music Power-Up:
- An arrangement of the title theme plays during the Closing Argument toward the end of each trial, when the protagonist explains how the murder happened and exposes the culprit once and for all.
- The theme plays again during Chapter 6's final argument, as Makoto convinces each of his surviving classmates to overcome despair and vote against the mastermind.
- There Is No Kill Like Overkill: The mastermind decides to kill herself with every execution she has given to the killers in one big swoop.
- This Is Reality: Spoken in Chapter 3. Monokuma also states this during Chapter 1:Monokuma: We aren't living in a Shōnen manga story. There is no such thing as dying without dying. This is reality!!
- This Is the Final Battle: Invoked by Kyoko before the last investigation, and The Animation milks this for all it's worth.
- Trailers Always Spoil: One of the first trailers released for the official English release of the game makes it blatantly obvious that Leon is the first killer, as well as showing the lack of Sayaka and Junko in the first trial scene. Then there's the one that not only shows Makoto on the conveyor belt in "After School Lesson" getting closer to the crushing machine, but the parts where he falls through the trapdoor into the garbage room. To make it even worse, most of these things are also spoiled by the opening movie that plays every time the player opens the game.
- "Truman Show" Plot: It is revealed by Monokuma in Chapter 5 that everything happening inside the school is being broadcast all over Japan. To go even further, the game even ends like the Trope Namer movie, with the characters leaving the only world they know to venture into the "real" one.
- Tonight, Someone Dies: In contrast to the previous chapters, Chapter 5 shows the player the upcoming corpse at the beginning of the chapter. However, since the body is masked, the player isn't really getting any hints about who's going to die...
- Two Dun It: Near the end of the game, it's revealed that there are actually two Masterminds who are collectively Ultimate Despair. Subverted in that one of them betrayed and murdered the other early in the game.
- Two-Teacher School: Despair Academy is suspiciously lacking in faculty — aside from Monokuma. And his idea of "teaching" is trying to get people to kill each other. The school also once had a human headmaster, though he is murdered before the game begins. The flowers on the desks in the staff room imply they were all killed as well, and the mastermind says everyone at the school died except for her class.
U
- Undignified Death:
- All the executions count as this. There's being bludgeoned to death by a pitching machine, being turned into pancake topping by a high-speed motorcycle stunt, being burned at the stake and then run over by a speeding firetruck, and being crushed into a ball by construction equipment. Monokuma seems to get off on killing people in sadistically comical fashion.
- Cruelly, cruelly subverted with Kyoko's execution in Chapter 5's bad ending: she's crushed to death by a giant block. The subversion is that Kyoko starts with a stoic expression, then becomes fearful, then shows acceptance while being fearful. So her death swings from dignified to undignified and back again.
- Same goes with Makoto in that chapter's true ending: he sweats bullets and almost gets crushed until Alter Ego overrides the machine and stops the block. He still ends up falling down a garbage chute, though, and Monokuma gloats that slowly starving to death on a pile of trash is actually an even worse death than just being flattened instantly.
- Mondo and Celeste also Face Death with Dignity, undignified as the method of execution turns out to be, and Alter Ego doesn't seem to be entirely aware of what's happening, but Leon has to be physically dragged from the courtroom after breaking down and begging for his life.
- Unexpected Gameplay Change: The class trials' minigames are broken down into the following:
- Multiple Choice: Choosing the correct answer out of three for a question.
- Choose Truth Bullet: The same deal as Multiple Choice, only choosing one of the truth bullets the player has in hand instead.
- Non-Stop Debate: Literally shooting down contradictions with the aforementioned truth bullets during an argument between the students.
- Hangman's Gambit: Filling in blanks to complete a word.
- Bullet Time Battle: Breaking through a student's Ad Hominem arguments in a Rhythm Game.
- Identify the Person: Choosing one of the students as the culprit behind the murder.
- Closing Argument: Assembling how the murder went down by placing events on manga-style strips.
- Unspecified Apocalypse: In the last trial, the Mastermind a.k.a. Junko Enoshima reveals that the reason the students weren't actually trapped, but instead choose to stay inside the school for the rest of their lives, was because of: The Biggest, Most Awful, Most Tragic Event in Human History, which caused the downfall of society. However, the specifics of it aren't shown until the second game.
- Utsuge: There are 15 kids that are for the most part very likable and interesting characters. Since this is a killing game, the player will watch most of these teenagers be killed or kill their fellow students through either conventional murders or executions in order to survive. If the player happens to get attached to any of the doomed cast members, they will feel bad, and even if they don't, the set-ups of the cases can be rather depressing.
V
- Varying Competency Alibi: During the trial for the murder of Chihiro, Byakuya proposes that Toko is the murderer due to her split personality in the form of Genocide Jack on account of the fact that Chihiro's body was mounted up hanging. However, Makoto is able to figure out that Genocide Jack is innocent in this due to how precise and specific she is with her killings as she kills with specially-made scissors and hangs her victims with said scissors while Chihiro was bludgeoned to death and hung using a power cord, along with the fact that Genocide Jack only kills men. Chihiro turns out to be a boy, but Genocide Jack didn't know that.
- Viewers Are Goldfish: Flashbacks to not even a full scene ago happen fairly often, with one flashback showing something that happened roughly thirty seconds beforehand. In particular, flashbacks to the scene where Kyoko first informs Makoto of Mukuro's existence happen on a near-constant basis during Chapter 5.
- Voice Grunting: For the most part. However, some scenes (generally those with a full-screen illustration) and all Class Trials (with exception of fail-related dialogues) are fully-voiced.
W
- Wake-Up Call Boss: The second murderer is much harder to take down than the first was, letting players know just how easy they had it in the tutorial case. This case is far twistier than the first, since the player goes through two red herring suspects before figuring out that the crime scene location was altered to conceal the true sex of the victim. Makoto is only able to unmask the true culprit through getting him to divulge information he couldn't have known if he wasn't involved.
- Warmup Boss: Leon is by far the easiest culprit to nail, for several reasons. The dying message left by Sayaka, "11037", is the biggest tipoff, since it's actually not a number, but Leon's name written upside down, with the crossbar of the N slightly smudged out. Although this can be considered a case of Difficulty by Region, since the clue is exactly the same in the Japanese version, and a native English speaker would pick up on the true meaning of the message much easier and quicker than a non-native speaker.
- Wham Shot: It’s mentioned that the final victim has a bunch of wounds that are a few days old, but they’re written off as irrelevant at first and never shown. When it’s suspected they in fact may be directly linked to the real cause of death in the final chapter, they’re added as a Truth Bullet which are now depicted as several stab-like wounds all over the body. This is not long after it’s recalled how many people had died, along with Junko being skewered several times like the current corpse’s condition.
- Who Murdered the Asshole:
- Chapter 3 has Hifumi Yamada as the second victim. He's a perverted jerk otaku who no one in the cast likes, so he's understandably not shown to be mourned by most of the students, though Aoi is the one who mourns the most.
- Chapter 5's victim is at first ambiguous, but is eventually revealed to be a member of Ultimate Despair, Mukuro Ikusaba, who is thought to be the mastermind and is believed to have been killed by Kyoko to stop the killing game. While it turns out she is the accomplice of the true Big Bad, said actual Big Bad is the one who killed her in the first place and is the real Ultimate Despair, Junko Enoshima.
- Win Your Freedom: The game's ultimate goal.
- The Worf Effect: Discussed. When the trapped students of Hope's Peak Academy hope that the police will save them, Monokuma mocks them by saying the cops exist just to get overwhelmed to show how dangerous the villains are.
- Writing Indentation Clue: In Chapter 1, Kyoko uses this to figure out that the victim called the murderer into the room where she was killed.
- Wrong Genre Savvy: A meta example: The player is potentially this if they choose to reveal Kyoko's lie in court in Chapter 5. An experienced player would think they're playing a Ace Attorney-style game where the truth counts over everything, and therefore reveal her lie, but in this case they're actually playing an "outwit-the-mastermind" game, where throwing Kyoko under the bus is what Monokuma wants. And the game makes sure to rub it in the player's face if they fall for it.
