Danganronpa V 3 Killing Harmony / Tropes A to D

Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony Trope Examples
A - D | E - H | I - O | P - Z

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A

• Absence of Evidence: In Chapter 2's case, the students almost immediately notice that the time of death isn't included in the Monokuma File, which tips them off that Ryoma died long before it looked like he did.
• Acquitted Too Late: Kaede was not actually Rantaro's killer; Tsumugi was. However, this isn't proven until Chapter 6, long after Kaede was wrongfully executed.
• Advertised Extra: Everyone assumed K1-B0, the robot boy on the initial advertisement poster, would be the game's protagonist. However, the second trailer reveals that the game's true main character is a girl named Kaede Akamatsu. It then turns out to be a double Red Herring with Shuichi being the true protagonist, with K1-B0, Himiko, and Maki being playable for the last trial as well. In fact, with Kaito and Maki being two-thirds of the game's primary Power Trio and K1-B0's vitality in the endgame, ultimately taking down Danganronpa itself in a Heroic Sacrifice, while Shuichi spends so much time after The Reveal in a Heroic BSoD, it could be argued that the initial poster was right all along.
• After the End: The aesthetic certainty looks this way. The classroom shown in the PV looks like it's been abandoned for a while, and there is foliage on the dome. That's because the backstory created for the game says that the school spent a few centuries looking for a new planet after the Earth's destruction was imminent from meteor showers and a virus pandemic before Monokuma piloted the spaceship back to the now-uninhabitable Earth.
• Alternative Foreign Theme Song: Western localizations replaced the ending theme, "Dan Kusari -break-" by Megumi Ogata, with an extended version of the opening theme titled "The END of DNG".
• Ambidextrous Sprite: Kaito always wears his left jacket sleeve and leaves the right side over his shoulder, but his Debate Scrum sprites when opposing the player are flipped so he wears his right sleeve. This is odd considering other characters' Debate Scrum sprites are customized so details such as Kirumi's bangs and Gonta's bug box are always on the correct side. It gets even more odd when the exact way he wears his jacket becomes a minor plot point later in the game, and it's spelled outright that he always wears it the same way.
• Ambiguous Ending: In the game's ending, it is ultimately left unclear how much of what Tsumugi revealed is the truth and how much isn't. As Shuichi notes, the only thing that cannot be denied is that they're alive.
• Ambiguous Situation: Many of the love hotel events are ambiguous about whether or not Shuichi ends up having sex with whichever classmate he brought with him. Some characters' events, like Kaede's, Tsumugi's, Angie's, Himiko's, Miu's, and Korekiyo's, strongly imply that they do end up sleeping with Shuichi (with or without his consent), but other characters' events are somewhat less clear. For instance, Maki asks Shuichi to "make a real family with her", Tenko insists that Shuichi can't be bullheaded if she asks him again to "do anything to her", and Gonta remarks that he's "not going to let [Shuichi] get any sleep tonight".
• And Now for Someone Completely Different: After Kaede is revealed as the blackened in the first trial, Shuichi takes over as the main character. Then, at the final class trial, K1-B0, Himiko, and Maki all became playable characters.
• And the Adventure Continues: In The Stinger, after Danganronpa has been destroyed, the final three survivors emerge from the rubble and wonder what is real or not about the outside world they are about to leave to.
• Anguished Declaration of Love:
  • Maki gives one to Kaito at the end of the fifth trial, as she’s willing to fight to protect him from his impending execution.
    Maki: I’ve never felt this way before! I’ve always fought to kill, but… this is the first time I’ve fought to protect someone! And… I’ve never… been given a nickname like "Maki Roll" before, either. And I’ve never… met someone as stubborn as you before… (starts to cry) And… I’ve never… fallen for someone before.
  • Played for Laughs with Miu in her Fourth Free Time Event with Shuichi. At that moment, Miu is clearly falling in love with Shuichi and even confesses to him in the middle of heartache. At the same time, however, she tries really hard to insist that Shuichi is in love with her instead.
    Miu: Ahhhhh! I mean...! Wh-Wh-What I meant was... ahhhhhh!
    Shuichi: A heartache... I see, so that's what's wrong.
    Miu: Y-Y-Yeah! I'm fallin' for you!
    Shuichi: What!? Me!?
    Miu: You said it first. That you're so worried about me... cuz you're in love with me.
• Anti-Frustration Features: In addition to the "Start from the beginning" and "Start from Class Trial" options when starting a chapter present since the first game and the "Start from Deadly Life" option added in the second, this game gives you the option to start from the chapter's first Free Time period, making it easier to get the Friendship Fragments. This is especially helpful for Kaede's events, which cannot be experienced in Love Across the Universe.
  • A unique case that happens in-universe. In the past two games, whenever the body discovery announcement was played, Monokuma simply says that after a certain amount of time the Class Trial will begin after investigation. This meant that one of the three people that discovered the body usually has to go out and gather anyone else present at the site of the dead body. Now, in this game, whenever there is a dead body discovered, Monokuma now tells everyone to meet up at the site where the dead body is.
• Anyone Can Die: This is a Danganronpa game, where the cast is encouraged to kill each other to escape. No one is safe. Not even the character who was advertised as The Protagonist.
• Apocalypse How: It seems that the meteors and the deadly virus they brought caused total extinction of all life on Earth, with the only exceptions being the students in the Gifted Inmates Academy. Outside of the academy, there isn't even any trace of oxygen to breathe. Then this all turns out to be false.
  • Class Z: Shuichi defies the fictional reality of Danganronpa by believing in his friends' effect as fictional characters changing the world as he knows it, by disappointing the audience rather than giving them the hope/good ending that they desire. The result of this is that K1-B0, the audience's protagonist, destroys the containment for the Ultimate Academy for Gifted Juveniles, and ends the universe of Danganronpa itself, allowing Shuichi, Maki, and Himiko to successfully escape.
• Arc Number:
  • The number 3 shows up a lot in here.
    • During Chapter 3, there were three people that died in the chapter. There were also three "body discovery" videos, although the last one was fake.
    • There are also three main playable characters with ahoges in this game.
    • In addition, three people ended up surviving the killing game.
  • Five is also a common number in this game.
    • There are five characters with ahoges.
    • There are the five Monokubs.
    • There are also five playable characters in the game.
    • There are five official executions in the game if you don't include K1-B0 self-destructing the school.
    • There are also five different killers once you realize that Kaede doesn't count.
  • Fittingly enough, five and three together are 53, which is an important number, albeit only during the climax. Fittingly, the Ultimate Talent Development Plan and Monokuma's Test bonus modes contain 53 playable characters.
  • In reference to previous installments, 11037 shows up again, this time as part of a 59-digit code. It's also the price of the Hope's Peak Academy Monopad theme at the casino.
• Art Evolution: Thanks to more powerful hardware, the game has upgraded considerably presentation-wise. The new interface now allows the player character to appear on-screen during conversations, and the text font used in trials alters on context.
• Artistic License – Music: In Kaede's execution, her hanging body is used to play "Der Flohwalzer" on a giant piano. The majority of the song is played with black keys, while Kaede only steps on white keys which are nowhere close to the keys used to play the song.
• Artistic License – Physics: After the survivors open the door to the outside world, they find they can't breathe and collapse. Kokichi explains that hundreds of years after the meteor impacts, there's no life and no oxygen left, so they couldn't survive out there even if they did escape. Even if the entire earth's surface were sterilized, with no plants to recycle it, there would still be enough oxygen in the atmosphere to breathe for millions of years. Ultimately though, this is revealed to be a lie.
• Art Shift: In Chapter 4, when Miu gets on her knees and begs everyone to listen to her, there's a Deliberately Monochrome reenacting of a Slam Dunk scene. Shortly after that in the Virtual World, the game takes on a top-down view and everyone becomes a pseudo-3D Super-Deformed avatar.
• Ascended Meme: In the localized version of Ultimate Talent Development Plan, Kokichi refers to Fuyuhiko as "Boss Baby". It is a popular fandom meme to compare the two characters' designs.
• Audience-Alienating Ending: Invoked. When Shuichi learns the whole thing was a reality TV show, his response is to create the most bullshit and unsatisfying ending he can think of by having everyone refuse to vote, getting everyone except the mastermind killed.
• Awful Truth: The main theme of the game as the truth isn't always what you want it to be. This is apparent in Chapter Four where Gonta crossed the Despair Event Horizon by learning the truth of the outside world and believing that it would be easier to die, and the students not wanting to believe that Gonta was the culprit of that case.

B

• The Bad Guy Wins:
  • The first trial ends this way, though it's not revealed until much later. The Big Bad, Tsumugi Shirogane, manages to successfully frame Kaede for Rantaro's murder by bashing in his head with her own shot put ball when Kaede's Rube Goldberg device fails to kill him. Kaede is executed believing she caused Rantaro's death, and only in Chapter 6 do Shuichi and company find out her innocence. However, Tsumugi later gets her Karma Houdini Warranty in the form of K1-B0 executing her.
  • Similarly, the fourth chapter's culprit, Kokichi Ouma, gets away with murdering his victim due to manipulating Gonta into doing the actual killing (by implanting Fake Memories of the outside world being dead in the kindhearted Gonta's head, making him believe that the only way to save everyone from this truth is to win the class trial and get everyone executed). By the game rules they can't convict Kokichi for the murder without dying themselves, as the person who actually killed the victim is the only one considered the Blackened, even if everyone knows the guy was manipulated into it. To make matters worse, Kokichi actively mocks both Gonta and the rest of the class during the trial and derives sadistic glee from Gonta's execution. He never faces any comeuppance for this act either (if you don't count his "unsolvable murder" plan failing in Chapter 5 failing) due to blackmailing Kaito into killing him in order to kickstart his Thanatos Gambit, while fully knowing that it would eventually get Kaito executed.
• Bag of Sharing: After Kaede dies in the first chapter and Shuichi becomes the protagonist, everything in the inventory is retained, including class trial abilities and the skill points needed to unlock them. In fact, 15 extra skill points are added, due to Shuichi’s initial friendship fragments being counted as separate from Kaede’s, but he still retains the points awarded from her fragments.
• Bait-and-Switch: The entirety of the first chapter is most appropriately defined with this characteristic. The events are as follows: Kaede unifies everyone; everyone tries to escape; Monokuma retaliates against Kaede's efforts; Kaede takes advantage of said retaliation to kill the mastermind; the attempt fails in two gray ways; the perspective of the player switches from her to Shuichi; after explaining why she tried to kill, Shuichi exclaims about the fact that there was never a mastermind and that his deductive skills failed; after the lament and motivation given to the group, she's brutally executed by Monokuma.
• Beneath Suspicion: In the fourth case, the murderer turns out to be Gonta, who's a kind-hearted and caring person, doesn't do well in social terms or technology (or things aside from his talent), and is certainly not cunning enough to come up with a murder plan or cover it up. Adding the fact that he doesn't remember a thing of what happened during the case, he's such an unlikely murderer that Shuichi never even considers him as a culprit, until Kokichi, who manipulated Gonta into the murder, outright reveals who it is.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing:
  • In the demo, should the class trial proceed as usual, it's implied that Makoto Naegi is the culprit. That means that reliable senior who helps Kaede along is deliberately stranding her into making the wrong decision. Subverted in that Yasuhiro Hagakure is only pretending to be dead, and Makoto and Hajime Hinata are just acting. However it's actually a double subversion, because acting and pretending to take part in a killing game turns out to be a major plot point and part of the mastermind's plan in the main game, extending the Bitch in Sheep's Clothing title to Hajime and Yasuhiro as well. Or rather, their actors.
  • For the game itself, there's Tsumugi Shirogane, who seems like an innocent and harmless cosplayer, but is actually the mastermind of the game.
• Bittersweet Ending: Shuichi, Himiko, and Maki end up escaping the killing game while also preventing any further killing games from occurring, but it came at a cost of K1-B0 sacrificing himself so they can survive, and their future in the outside world that may not welcome them is uncertain.
• Black Blood: In true series tradition, the blood is once again a bright pink.
• Bragging Rights Reward: Beating the Death Road of Despair minigame during Chapter 1 (i.e. at its hardest difficulty) will grant the player the sight of the students exiting the academy and ends with Kaede trailing of a Flat "What" before it fades to white. The player then gets an exclusive Monopad theme and 100 Monocoins, before the plot resumes as if the player had failed as expected.
• Breaking Old Trends: Quite a few series trends we saw in the first two games were abandoned in this one.
  • Most notably, this is the first main series game where the protagonist is one of the murderers (or at least the person convicted for the killing), the protagonist dies, and the player takes control of a different protagonist for the rest of the story.
  • This is the first main series game to not have an Ultimate Lucky Student in the main cast.
  • This is also the first game where Megumi Ogata doesn't play a character. At least, not one introduced in this game, anyway. That doesn't stop her from singing the credits song as usual, though (at least in the Japanese version).
  • This is the first game where Junko Enoshima isn't the mastermind. Doesn't stop Tsumugi from pretending to be Junko Enoshima the 53rd in order to keep with tradition though.
  • Unlike the first two games, this game's Chapter 1 culprit Faces Death With Dignity and is prepared to be executed. And unlike the first two games, the Chapter 2 culprit tries their hardest to escape execution.
  • This is also the first non-spinoff game where the protagonist is a girl. For the first chapter, anyway.
  • This is the first game where the student with an unknown talent dies.
  • This is also the first game where the Ultimate Hope dies.
  • The Ambiguously Brown female character has a talent completely unrelated to sports, doesn't establish a strong bond with the Big Guy of the group, and doesn't survive the killing game.
  • It's the first time that the Stalker with a Crush dies, also, unlike previous Stalkers With a Crush, this one actually manages to form a bond with the character they have a crush on, albeit posthumously.
  • The character with a Non-Standard Character Design this time around isn't a pervert and has a much more serious personality that the previous ones.
  • Unlike Makoto and Sayaka from the first game, and Fuyuhiko and Peko from the second game, none of the students knew each other before coming to the school.
  • One of Shuchi's objectives in joining the Danganronpa series was to break an in-universe old trend and become the first Ultimate Detective blackened. He doesn't go through with it in the actual story, though.
• Bus Crash: In this game, everyone from the previous games apparently died unexpectedly in a meteorite shower and our cast consists of the only survivors. The false story In-Universe says that, at least, because in this game, the previous games are fiction like they are in the real world, and the story was constructed by the Big Bad to implant false memories.
• But Thou Must!:
  • At the end of every trial, you have to vote for who you think is the culprit, which you can either go with the rest of your classmates, or vote for someone else like the victim. However, in Chapter 5, the game forces you to vote for the culprit, and won't allow you to choose anyone else.
  • Subverted in a way at the end of Chapter 6. In order to actually progress and end the killing game, the player will need to ignore rigged minigames and questions by letting their time limit run out.
  • In the Ultimate Talent Development Plan, in one event involving a MonoMono Machine, both options are "Give it a spin!"

C

• Call-Back: The Chapter 5 execution in this game is a throwback to the execution of Jin Kirigiri in the first game's prologue.
• Captain Obvious: During Chapter 3, after the Caged Child ceremony, Korekiyo takes off the sheet off the cage to reveal Tenko, unmoving and lying in a huge pool of blood. Korekiyo's reaction? "Something... is amiss..."
• Cash-Cow Franchise: In-Universe, Danganronpa is such a cash cow that not only have there been fifty-three installments in the series without it losing any popularity (and that's not even counting Danganronpa Zero or any of the spinoffs), but somewhere along the way it was able to be adapted into a reality show on the scale of The Truman Show itself, where teenagers kill each other for real, and everyone (including the teenagers who willingly sign up to be contestants before getting mindwiped) is fine with that as long as it means they get more Danganronpa. Several "previous installments" with goofy subtitles are mentioned in the sixth trial. This can almost make one wonder if the writers are trying to make a point.
• Cassandra Truth: In the first Rebuttal Showdown, Ryoma deduces that Rantaro's murderer sneaked out of the library after killing him and then feigned ignorance after regrouping with everyone else, but Kaede insists he's wrong because she thinks she herself is the culprit. It's not until the last trial that his deduction is proven to be on the right track, but because of the mastermind's manipulations, there was not enough concrete evidence to point to the real killer and save Kaede from execution.
• Cast of Snowflakes: As always, the design for every character differs wildly from the others. Enforced In-Universe for the sake of the show: everyone arrives in relatively normal school uniforms, but are forcibly changed into more unique and colorful "uniforms" soon afterward.
• Cathartic Chores: In the first chapter, Kaede, waiting in a classroom to see if her plan to capture the Big Bad has worked or not, becomes so anxious that she grabs a broom and starts sweeping the whole room.
• Censor Shadow: Kaede's face and torso are completely shadowed out after she has died of asphyxiation and stoning while the iron maiden/piano lid shuts on her during her execution.
• Central Theme: Lies versus the truth. Which is better—a comforting lie or a painful truth? Is it possible for a lie to lead to a deeper truth? Where does a lie end and the truth begin?
• Chuck Cunningham Syndrome: Although Monomi survives Danganronpa 2 (if her duel there with Junko is any indication), she does not appear in this game, nor is she mentioned.
• Closed Circle: This time around the students aren't stuck in the school building—the dormitory is a separate building, and the students are free to wander the grounds. It's still a closed circle: a huge dome encloses the entire area.
• Color Motif: Pink/Magenta. The color has been heavily used in advertisements and in the game itself as a way to represent lies. Whenever lies are used in the court, pink eyes appear on the screen and a good part of the game interface switches to pink, including the bullets themselves (The Truth Bullets appear as white letters, while Lie Bullets are pink). During the game's opening, a pink eye appears blinking, right after a bullet is filled with pink. Also, a shadow of all characters appears during their introductions, with their pupils colored in pink. Kaede, the Decoy Protagonist, also wears pink clothing to better contrast her to Shuichi, our true protagonist, who's associated with "honest" blues.
• Company Cross References: The Despair Dungeon: Monokuma's Test sub-game is vaguely inspired by Spike Chunsoft's Shiren the Wanderer Mystery Dungeon series. Many of the enemies in the sub-game are taken from Shiren and given a Monokuma-themed skin.
• The Computer Is a Lying Bastard: The skill obtained from Rantaro's Free Time Events has the same description as one of your Influence-increasing skills. That's the wrong description; what it really does is reduce the Influence deducted if you make a mistake during a Class Trial.
• Cooked to Death: Chapter 3's execution, "Cultural Melting Pot", has Korekiyo executed via being tied up, spun around, dropped down a pit, and promptly boiled alive in a cauldron. The cauldron claims a second life when Monodam sacrifices himself to fan the flames, sealing Korekiyo's doom.
• Cowardice Callout:
  • Kaito calls Kokichi a coward for always hiding his true thoughts, feelings and intentions and never trusting, and says he's just like Monokuma in that respect.
  • Kokichi Oma gives his classmates a "Reason You Suck" Speech, accusing them of being too afraid to find a murderer by pointing fingers to the point that they hide behind trust and The Power of Friendship, and the way he words it means no one is able to counter his argument.
• Crapsaccharine World: Tsumugi claims that there is absolute peace in the outside world, but because everything is so peaceful, everyone is bored out of their wits and need to watch teenagers murdering each other on TV just to get some excitement in their lives. And said teenagers all willingly and eagerly sign up to get their minds wiped and Fake Memories implanted so they can murder each other on their favourite TV show, if the tapes are to be believed.
• Crapsack World:
  • Chapter 5: The end of all life on Earth. After the Future Foundation was able to suppress the Remnants of Despair and rebuild the world, a meteor shower began, and these meteors carried a lethal virus that threatened to infect everybody. The participants of the killing game were immune to the virus (except for Kaito Momota) and were dragged into the Gofer Project to put them in cold sleep and send them into outer space until the spaceship colony found a new planet that could support human life. However, Kokichi Oma, a Remnant of Despair, brought Monokuma aboard the arc, redirected the spaceship back to Earth, and designed the killing game with the intention of plunging humanity's final hope into despair.
  • Chapter 6: Everything in the above bullet point is all a lie. The world was never destroyed in any sort of apocalyptic event, and the Remnants of Despair are nothing but fiction, as is Dangonronpa itself. However, the Danganronpa franchise is so popular that it spawned a reality TV show where teenagers willingly and excitedly sign up to be mind-wiped and implanted with the identites of Danganronpa characters so they can murder each other on TV, placating a world that has become too peaceful, laking any sort of conflict. At least, if the mastermind is telling the truth...

D

• Damn You, Muscle Memory!: The PC port has many control differences compared to the PC ports of the previous two games. The right mouse click fires the truth bullet and left click fires the silencer, while it was the opposite in the previous games; Enter highlights observable objects rather than Tab, Esc fast-forwards through text and exits areas rather than Ctrl and R respectively, and F3 brings up the controls instead of Esc. Fortunately, all of these except the mouse can be changed by editing the game's config.txt file.
• Darker and Edgier: The game has been described by the developers as "psycho cool", and uses a darker aesthetic compared to Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair. The executions have also gotten much more violent, on par with or even surpassing the brutality of Leon Kuwata's execution.
• Dark Reprise: During Kokichi's fake body discovery in Chapter 3, a high-pitched piano tune plays instead of the standard body discovery music. When the same music plays in Chapter 5 but eventually fades into the normal body discovery music, it's the first clue that Kokichi is the real victim in this case.
• Deconstruction: The final chapter of the game deconstructs the entire franchise. Not only are the previous installments in the game actually fictional, as are all of their events in the world of V3 (Despite what Chapter 5 leads you to think), but the many aspects of the series are seen as nothing but amusement to the masses that watch the killing games happen, of up to 53 seasons worth. It even rips apart the Hope vs Despair dynamics of the previous franchise installments as well. While despair is still seen as horrible, Shuichi comes to the conclusion that Hope itself as portrayed in the series is just as bad, as Hope winning against Despair will merely encourage Team Danganronpa, the true masterminds of the franchise, to make more needless killing games. It takes not Hope or Despair winning, but Disappointment winning instead to end the grisly TV show, once and for all.
• Death Trap:
  • The ramp of books and flashing camera set up in the library, intended to lure the victim to the bookcase while a cannonball rolls down the ramp and drops on their head from above.
  • The occult ritual, which has the participant unknowingly kneeling on a see-saw floorboard, which is used to propel them upwards into a sickle-blade sticking through the bars.
• Demo Bonus: Transferring your save data from the demo into the full game causes you to start off with additional money, the Nail Brush item (needed to unlock one of the early extra scenes), and the Machine Gun skill (normally only available through playing minigames in an area that isn't even accessible until the second chapter).
• Destroy the Security Camera: In Chapter 5, Kokichi uses one of Miu's EMP bombs to shut down all the electronics nearby, including the nanobots filming everything that the Mastermind uses to keep tabs on everyone, to deliberately obfuscate who the culprit and victim are so not even Monokuma will know, nullifying the game. It works for most part until Shuichi eventually discovers the truth.
• Developer's Foresight: Subverted In-Universe. Occasionally, Kokichi asks Monokuma about how the killing game would go when faced with unlikely circumstances, such as two different murderers or the culprit vote at the end of each trial resulting in a tie. Monokuma actually lacks that foresight, though, and usually makes up something on the spot.
• Did They or Didn't They?: Many of the love hotel events strongly imply that Shuichi ends up "hooking up" with whoever they meet up with. Exactly how strong the implication is depends on the character.
• Died in Ignorance: Aheart-breaking example occurs here. Kaede, the first Decoy Protagonist of the series, dies in the first chapter, fully believing that she killed Rantaro, repeatedly calling herself a monster. She dies a horrific 8-hour execution in the process (if the clock behind her is to be believed). It is not until near the end of the game that we find out that it was in fact Tsumugi who killed Rantaro, and Kaede's shot put missed him. It is one of the first very hard pills to swallow for both the player and Shuichi, who becomes the most determined he has ever been from this reveal, stopping at nothing to make Kaede's final wish, that they will end the game and be friends, come true.
• Disability Alibi: In Case 4, the murder happened in a virtual world, that Miu altered, and planned to murder Kokichi in it. To make sure her plan would work, she altered his avatar so that when her avatar touched his, he'd be paralyzed. During the trial, when the player tries to defend Kokichi, this is pointed out, making Kokichi virtually and physically incapable of strangling her.
• Disposable Woman: The Bait-and-Switch first chapter has players control female character, Kaede Akamatsu. Her role is to die early in the story in order to motivate male character Shuichi Saihara to be more confident.
• The Dog Bites Back:
  • Sick of being abused by Kokichi, Miu Iruma eventually orchestrates a plan to kill him and escape the academy. Too bad that he saw it coming, though...
  • After being exposed to the Awful Truth that's behind the killing game, Shuichi goes through a Heroic BSoD from all the psychological torment he's been through. When he snaps out of it, he directs his rage at Tsumugi, Monokuma and the audience, and convinces the rest of the survivors to end the killing game and prevent all future killing games to come.
• Dub-Induced Plot Hole:
  • In the localized version of chapter 5, the murder video shows Kaito's arm farther out from his body, and visible before the press goes down, which shows his shirt. However, Kokichi wasn't wearing a shirt when he entered the hydraulic press, so this is a plot hole. This was changed from the Japanese version (presumably to show the hole in the sleeve which was missing in the Japanese version), where Kaito's arm was closer to his body and thus hidden from the camera before it came down, which is how the switcheroo was pulled off. A similar error happens earlier, when the Chapter 1 verdict wheel is inexplicably changed to show Shuichi's pixel icon without his hat.
  • The game consistently uses a different word to refer to the Big Bad (首謀者, commonly fan-translated as "Ringleader", instead of the more common 黒幕), a nuance ignored in the localization, which sticks to just using "Mastermind". This causes problems because, in the final trial, Tsumugi says that, while she may be the mastermind (首謀者), the actual mastermind (黒幕) is the outside world desiring the killing games. This results in the localization having Tsumugi claim they're both the mastermind, turning a fairly major twist revealing the true meaning behind a seemingly minor detail into utter nonsense.
  • Also in Chapter 6, when the mastermind explains how the Danganronpa TV show is "everyone's killing school semester" (the game's Japanese subtitle), one of the audience comments says that they finally get it. Since the English subtitle is changed to "Killing Harmony," referring to Kaede's death in the first chapter, this instead comes off as an unexplained Late to the Punchline gag.
• Dueling Player Characters:
  • After Kaede is revealed to be a Decoy Protagonist and you assume control of Shuichi, your first order of business is proving Kaede is a murderer.
  • In the final chapter, after Shuichi crosses the Despair Event Horizon, you assume control of K1-B0 and at one point have to defeat Shuichi in a Rebuttal Showdown.

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