"Welcome to Tsukishima!"
“CONGRATULATIONS~!! Your lucky class has won itself an all paid expense trip to the luxurious city Tsukishima. Yaaay! From entertainment to nightlife, there’s little you can’t do here! We hope you enjoy your stay and experience everything our wonderful city has to offer! After all, you’ll likely be staying a while… Keheheh~”
Moonlight City Panic
is a 20 person Tumblr-based Danganronpa roleplay group. A class comes to on a spacious tour bus, unsure how they arrived there in the first place, to find themselves in the lap of luxury - the city of Tsukishima! With their friendly host and homeroom teacher, Ivy Yosano, there to guide them, there's no way this unexpected field trip could go wrong... right? But when things take a sinister turn, what will the students do? Will they find a way to escape?
Moonlight City Panic demonstrates these examples of tropes:
- Action Girl: Given the nature of the game, they all have their moments to shine, but noteworthy mentions include Alena going from passive and nervous to punching Satoru in the face.
- A House Divided: They begin the game on the same page, more or less, but as time goes forward, some pretty extreme divides start to form.
- Alas, Poor Villain: With the motives that are given, some of the culprits are sent off to their execution with remorse from the surviving characters. And then some are told to go to hell. It's a mixed bag.
- Amateur Sleuth: Actually manages to be averted in a few cases. The cast includes both a defense attorney and prosecutor, as well as a detective, though the rest of the class falls under this category.
- Anyone Can Die: Given the nature of the RP, any of the characters can be the next victim or culprit.
- Berserk Button: From the level headed characters who keep their composure no matter what, to those who seem to be nothing but positive energy, every one of them has something that will set them off, and you know that if Beep-kun doesn't find it himself to make things worse for them, one of the others will press it accidentally.
- Big Brother Is Watching: Beep-kun is always watching. Always listening.
- Black-and-Grey Morality: Arguably, the whole thing. In order to escape, you have to kill someone. If you vote for the culprit during the trial, you have a hand in their death. If you don't vote for the culprit, you're adding to the chances of someone innocent being killed. No one will escape this game without some guilt on their shoulders.
- Body of the Week: Every chapter, at least one student will die, with another being the culprit.
- Characters Dropping Like Flies
- Class Trip: Though none of them remember it, their teacher informs them that their trip to Tsukishima is one of these! They spend much of the game wondering if this was just a tourist city, or built specifically to house them once they were kidnapped.
- Crippling Overspecialization: All of the students have a talent that they're the best at... and sometimes, that's it. They may be the best at what they do, but that doesn't mean they're any good at anything else.
- Cruel and Unusual Death: Much like the source material, when a student is voted as the culprit of a murder, they're faced with their very own, tailor made execution. Usually, they either mock their Super High School Level talent or exploit their deepest fears, ensuring their punishment is as terrifying as possible. Occasionally, a murder victim also dies in a particularly horrible manner.
- Dark Secret: The second motive. Every student received the secret of another student, and were left to decide to confront that person or not. Some of the interactions went well, while others...
- Deadly Game
- Developing Doomed Characters: Good luck figuring out which ones they are before they die. They consist of:
- Pan, SHSL Odorite, Chapter 1 Culprit
- Eto Anno, SHSL Net Idol, Chapter 2 Victim.
- Aika Akiyama, SHSL Paranormal Psychologist, Chapter 2 Killer
- Keinosuke Muneshige, SHSL Shaman, Chapter 3 Victim
- Alena Agyros, SHSL Urban Gardener, Chapter 3 Killer
- Jack Flash, SHSL Babyface Wrestler
- Yuzuki Akibara, SHSL Prosecutor, Chapter 4 Victim
- Iroha Sakurazaka, SHSL Detective, Chapter 4 Killer
- Dwindling Party: They began with 20 students, but the number is rapidly dropping.
- Empty Chair Memorial: Once a student dies, be it by murder or execution, their spot in the trial room remains empty.
- Additionally, they all had rooms and roommates, and after they die, all of their belongings remain as a grim reminder to their roommate of who once lived with them.
- Everyone Went to School Together: After waking up on a bus, their teacher acts as if this class has been together for a long time, even if none of them remember such a thing.
- When Chapter 5 begins, a some of them have flashbacks involving each other, implying that they did forget their time together. However, two of the flashbacks show some concerning glimpses into how they may have all gotten along back then - or, really, how they didn't get along at all.
- Gilded Cage: They're stuck in the luxurious, amazing city of Tsukishima with no way to escape. Not the worst place to be stuck in a murder game, I guess. There's no shortage of food nor entertainment, with new areas opening up after every trial. And, if they so desire, they can hunt for coins and use the gacha machine to get some new loot!
- Laser-Guided Amnesia: Seems to be true; Yosano informed them they were a class and on a trip to Tsukishima, and spoke to them all familiarly, as if she really was their teacher and had been for some time. However, none of the students can remember her, let alone each other.
- Loophole Abuse: They manage to accidentally find one of these in the rules given to them by Beep-kun; all students must sleep in one of the hotel rooms, but it's doesn't have to be the one that belongs to them. This makes it so Alena's sleepover doesn't have a tragic ending, fortunately.
- Mood Whiplash: With a few threads for each character going on at once, it's not unusual to have someone interacting peacefully and happily with someone, only for their other thread being a vehement argument.
- One-Steve Limit: No shared names among this crowd! Surnames and given names are all unique to the specific character.
- Room Escape Game: The third area unlocks one of these. Umi, Hansuke, Yuzuki and Daisuke have run through it a couple of times, and gotten coins for their trouble, but have yet to actually complete all of the rooms since the puzzle changes each time. This leads to the frustration of Umi when she enters the second time around, immediately tries to cheat, and instead faces a time penalty for looking in the wrong location.Umi: ... What the fuck?
- Sadistic Choice: They are given the option of either voting for the culprit of murder, sending them off to execution, or voting for someone innocent, leading to a random student being killed. Either way, someone dies.
- Secret-Keeper: The second motive. With each student getting another's darkest secret, it could go either way, leading to a few situations of the one who received it promising that they won't tell anyone else - though for some, that's all they can say in the face of a threat to their life.
- Series Mascot: Beep-kun!
- Translation Convention: All characters in the game are presumed to be speaking Japanese, even though the game is written in English.
- Win Your Freedom: The only way to escape, according to Beep-kun, is to kill someone and get away with it.
