The cast of Simulacra 2. Warning: spoilers for both this game and the prior games will be unmarked.
Law Enforcement
You
The player character, either a reporter who is interested in the supernatural or a detective and skeptic. You work alongside Detective Murillo to solve the case of Maya's murder.
- Intrepid Reporter: One of the options is to play as this.
- Necessarily Evil: Much like in the first Simulacra, the player must masquerade as the missing character (in this case, Maya) to an acquaintance with a hopeless crush on her. Doing this is a requirement for the Golden Ending.
Detective Murillo
A character returning from the first game as the player's mentor. He heads the case on Maya's murder.
- The Bus Came Back: Last we heard from the Detective in the previous game, he just arrested Greg (in the Golden Ending).
- Hero Antagonist: On the Golden Ending route, you end up having to oppose his efforts to pin Maya's death on one of her three friends.
- Hopeless with Tech: He has very little knowledge of modern technology and a very old-fashioned attitude towards it. Several amusing texts and phone calls from him consist of him accidentally calling or texting you while struggling to work his own phone.
- Inspector Javert: He becomes convinced that one of Maya's friends killed her to take the deal with The Ripple Man, even though this is not the case at all. If you try to get them to put aside their differences, he will become antagonistic towards you.
- My God, What Have I Done?: In the Downer Ending when the player tells him none of Maya's friends were responsible for her death as she was the one that actually made the deal with The Ripple Man, he's horrified to realize he was wrong about his assumptions and even says the trope name nearly word to word since now there's another victim to The Ripple Man.
- Wrong Genre Savvy: He is this, and if the player listens to him too closely, they can become this as well — although he understands the supernatural nature of the case, he is convinced that one of Maya's associates is directly responsible for her murder via The Ripple Man's deal. This is due to all of their pettiness and need to be ahead in the game, as well as the many lies and bad deeds they've committed in order to come out on top. In reality, although they are shallow hypocrites, they all also had genuine admiration for Maya and owed a great deal of their success to her. As such, none of them would have made such a deal without her confirmed approval. If the player doesn't take efforts to fight against this, it will lead to a Downer Ending.
The Friends
General
A quartet of social media influencers who came in contact with the Ripple Man. One of them made a deal for getting rid of all criticism and restoring their reputations, but the price was Maya's life.
- Asshole Victim: They are a group of Bad Influencers who crafted online personas from lies and show no hesitation in exploiting the goodwill of fans or throwing each other under the bus, with Rex in particular being a Con Artist who defrauded many people. The plot kicks off with Maya being murdered and assimilated by the Ripple Man (though it later turns out she inflicted this on herself for the sake of her friends) and the other three can potentially meet the same fate.
- Bad Influencer: The story revolves around a group of four of these and the deal they made with the Ripple Man to erase all negative comments and increase their fame, which led to one of them dying. On the surface, they seem alright, but as you venture through the game, you see that their online personas are utter lies.
- False Friend: The four friends start out as this, as they're only joining together as a unit for the sake of increased viewership, and don't actually care very much for one another. This becomes increasingly obvious in the endings where they turn on one another and accuse each other of making the deal that killed Maya, inevitably causing one of them to actually make the deal and get themselves killed. However, throughout the course of the game, they can actually become real friends.
- Fire-Forged Friends: The end result of following the game's Golden Ending, which requires the player to unite the three living characters and convince them to work together instead of accusing one another of killing Maya. If they succeed, the game ends with them posing together for a picture similar to the one from the start of the game, with their friendship much more genuine after what they have been through.
- Hypocrite: All of them are this, as their "influencer" personas come into heavy contrast with who they really are. They are more than happy to lie, cheat, and steal to get their way, but frown upon others who do the same.
Maya
The murder victim whom you and Murillo are investigating. She was part of a team of influencers, but was killed by the Ripple Man as payment for a deal to erase criticism on Kimera.
- Asshole Victim: Zig-zagged. You learn she was quite the hypocrite who encouraged her friends to fabricate false personas for attention, but she was ultimately a normal woman who had no idea what she was getting into.
- Bad Influencer: Maya, the victim whose death you are investigating, is a vegan vlogger who preaches honesty to her fans, but eats meat and cheese while being the one who encouraged her friends to fabricate personas for attention.
- Hypocrite: Despite preaching honesty and positivity to her fans, she encourages her friends to lie about who they are in order to attract more attention. She also eats meat and cheese despite claiming to be a vegan.
- Plot-Triggering Death: The plot is driven by an investigation into her murder, which came about because someone made a deal with the Ripple Man using her life as payment.
- Unwitting Instigator of Doom: She took the deal with the Ripple Man to erase all criticism targeted at her and her friends, not knowing her own life would be taken as payment. This triggers a murder investigation that causes her three friends to turn on each other suspecting that they took the deal, and potentially leads to one or all of them becoming additional victims if the player makes the wrong choices.
Arya
One of the four friends.
- Bad Influencer: Arya preaches friendship while being willing to throw her friends under the bus at the slightest opportunity if things go wrong.
- Hypocrite: She preaches the goodness of friendship, especially where Maya is concerned, yet more than once attempts to throw everyone in her group, Maya included, under the bus in order to scrape her way to the top.
Mina
One of the four friends.
- Bad Influencer: Mina, the aspiring musician, makes up stories about hardship and loss to milk sympathy from her fans. One example we see is her claiming to have lost her friend in a hit-and-run, which motivated her to pursue her music career, when really she was just a witness who had no personal connection to the victim at all.
- Hypocrite: She openly falsifies stories about her life and her grief in order to gain more fans and more sales. Arya in particular comments on her appearing to be a needy crybaby, when in reality, she is just as cutthroat as the rest of them.
- Wounded Gazelle Gambit: She claims to have suffered a deep emotional loss with the death of a close friend from a hit-and-run, which she credits as her source of motivation and pain to pursue her music career. In truth, she was just a witness to the crime, and is pretending she was personally involved for the sake of milking sympathy from viewers.
Rex
One of the four friends.
- Bad Influencer: Rex, the "entrepreneur", is perhaps the worst of the four. He claims to be running a legitimate business that can make people successful and let them play by their own rules. His business is an MLM (Multi-Level Marketing) company — ie, a pyramid scheme created to scam "employees" out of their money. He's even willing to doxx victims of his fraud for attempting to expose him.
- Con Artist: He runs a Multi Level Marketing (MLM) company — in other words, a pyramid scheme. He even doxxed one of the people who attempted to expose him.
- Hypocrite: His entire modus operandi is based in fearmongering and lies. Specifically, his business is nothing more than a thinly veiled pyramid scheme, and when this is outed by some of the people who had their livelihood stolen by it, he responds by doxxing (outing the personal information of) one of the people responsible and essentially siccing his fanbase on them.
Others
The Ripple Man
The Simulacrum and antagonist of the game. It makes deals with people where it erases criticism and controversial posts out of existence in exchange for someone's life. Maya was its latest victim, and it wants her friends as well.
- Achilles' Heel: As a Digital Abomination, it cannot do anything if a victim is in a place with no signal or internet connection or has an analog device, which a near-victim discovered and exploited to escape it.
- The Bad Guy Wins: In all endings except the Golden Ending, it claims at least one of Maya’s friends.
- Big Bad: It assimilated Maya into itself and seeks to do the same for her friends, and you must stop it.
- Deal with the Devil: It can turn anyone into a social media celebrity, or preserve their good status if they are in trouble, but it will take a soul to assimilate into itself in return.
- Digital Abomination: Following the footsteps of the other two games, this game features a functionally identical digital entity in the form of The Ripple Man, a Simulacra who targets desperate influencers seeking to boost their popularity and rid themselves of criticism — for a price, potentially at the cost of their lives as it assimilates them into itself.
- Enemy Within: Happens to everyone who makes the deal with it, as it essentially bursts forth from the dealmaker's face and absorbs them into its consciousness.
- Final Boss: The last part of getting the Golden Ending requires you to delete Arya's, Mina's, and Rex's Kimera profiles by completing three timed puzzles while it tries to stop you.
- I Am Legion: When introducing itself, it says “WE ARE RIPPLEMAN”, and it uses “we” pronouns to refer to itself. Notably, despite the other two Simulacras also absorbing victims into themselves, they both used singular “I” pronouns.
- Karma Houdini: In all endings — even if you save Arya, Mina, and Rex from it, the entity still gets away.
- Meaningful Name: It is called the Ripple Man because it causes ripples in the air whenever it appears.
- No Biological Sex: Despite being called the Ripple Man, it, like other Simulacrums, seems to lack a real gender, speaking with hundreds of voices in both genders.
- Non-Indicative Name: While Ripple is very indicative of the ripples it makes in the air, it is not a Man but a genderless being.
- Reality Warper: It can erase any criticism and controversial posts off someone's social media, and even help make them famous.
- This Cannot Be!: It becomes more and more frightened and confused the more Kimera accounts are deleted, not comprehending how Puny Earthlings are actually wounding it, and even quoting the trope name word-for-word.THIS CANNOT BE. YOU HAVE ALREADY SUBMITTED!
- Villainous Breakdown: It has a pretty big one in the Golden Ending where they are stunned that the player managed to get three influencers, who were at each other's throats prior, together and outsmart the evil A.I. being.
- Voice of the Legion: It speaks in several voices at once, likely the voices of the souls it absorbed prior.
