Nonary Despair 3 is the sequel to the previous two Nonary Despair games, a crossover between Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc and Virtue's Last Reward that takes place in the Yumimori Life Preservation Bunker. In Hope's Peak Academy, a school for the elite of the elite, all specializing in specific skills, 22 students are suddenly kidnapped in the middle of the day. They wake up in strange, small rooms, and once they are let out, are informed that they are what's remaining of humanity. What's going on? After a few days, in which the students slowly start to get used to their new life, the mysterious Zero, a program in the system, and Zero III, an android rabbit, appear, and inform the students that they can escape in two ways;
They can kill another student and not get caught, or they can get 12 BP and open the number 9 door.
Once a student dies, they must have a class trial to determine who the culprit is. If they are correct, the guilty party is executed. If they're wrong? The person they voted for is executed and the guilty get enough BP to leave them all behind.
With tensions running high and the added threat of an Ambidex Game running over their heads, only time will tell who will succumb to the pressure and who will last. Who's the person behind the rabbit, anyway? Who will survive?
So, what'll it be? Ally? Or betray?
Tropes related to this game include:
- Abandoned Area: The Yumiori Mountain Life Preservation Bunker clearly once housed people for whatever its purpose was. Food is abound, rooms to house a large number of people...
- Black-and-Grey Morality: Arguably, the whole game. If you kill someone, well, you've killed someone. If you vote for the culprit, you've played a hand in their death. If you vote betray during the AB Game, you're condemning someone closer and closer to death to save yourself. Not cool.
- Blindfolded Trip: All of them remember being kidnapped, but none of them remember how they came to be there.
- But Thou Must!: Of course, like most people, upon being told that they must kill someone in order to escape, they all scoff and wonder who would ever do such a thing. Who? Five people, so far, that's who.
- Clear My Name: Obviously, no one wants to be caught for murder, so most of the time, someone else will be framed or accused during the trial.
- Trial 1 features Eri being accused of framing her guilty roommate.
- Trial 2 features the culprit drawing the victim out with a note signed as being from Eri. During the trial, Yukari is also a suspect due to a Dying Clue.
- Trial 3 features every character with long hair being accused: Mikami, Yuki, Graca, Sally, Yukari, Umeko, Natacha, and, of course, Eri.
- Trial 4 features Eri being directly accused of murder, due to a shredded sheet of paper in English. She's promptly cleared by the actual culprit.
- And trial 5, completing the cycle, has Eri being accused of murder because of her earrings.
- Sucks to be Eri Narukami.
- Deadly Game: In addition to the obvious one that the source material brings, this roleplay features the ambidex game, where students have to choose to ally or betray each other, adding or removing "BP" points accordingly. It's also stated out of character that students whose BP drop to zero die.
- Death Notification: Once someone is killed, the students are informed in two ways; indirectly, by noting the end of a motive, and directly, by Zero flat out telling them.
- Dwindling Party: 22 woke up in the bunker. As of chapter 6, there are 9.
- Everyone Went to School Together: Unlike Dangan Ronpa, they have memories of their school lives. However, none of them have spoken to each other except perhaps in passing, save for Natacha and Theo.
- Evidence Scavenger Hunt: After each body is discovered, the surviving characters must find evidence to track down the culprit.
- Forced to Watch: At the conclusion of every trial, the students must watch the execution of whoever they voted to be the guilty party, whether that person truly was guilty or not.
- Forged Message: Inverted. There are two instances of dying messages, however, the first was done by the victim intentionally and the second was planted by the murderer to make them seem less suspicious.
- Gilded Cage: The bunker is dreary, with no source of sun or plant life, but there's a large amount of food, bathrooms, dorms, and places for them to entertain themselves.
- Hair-Raising Hare: Zero III and his human counterpart. One is an anthropomorphic rabbit, the other is a human(?) with rabbit features.
- I Have Your Wife: Or loved ones. The second motive involves Zero informing the students that he has whatever is most important to each student held hostage, and if a murder doesn't occur, then they will be killed/destroyed.
- Revealed during the final chapter that this was all a bluff, or at the very least, hadn't actually been done yet when the students read Natacha's file and discover that she had 'been convinced her talent was taken'.
- Informed Ability: While most skills are useless in their mutual murder situation, Arthur, Shiori, Eri, and Yuma have an advantage. Granted, Shiori uses hers for a dying message, and Yuma uses her to kill someone, but, Arthur the coroner and Eri the translator have had their skills be useful during the trials.
- Irony: Multiple examples, too numerous to list. They mostly come from contradictions in what the characters say themselves at one point and then later on. Naturally, this comes from well written characters who develop in time of stress, showing that good people can think and do bad things.
- Kangaroo Court: Yeah, lets throw a bunch of high school students into a fake court to solve a friend's murder, with the impending doom of an innocent's death looming over their heads!
- Karma Houdini: That's the goal of the culprits; kill someone else and get away with it. So far, no one has.
- Limited Wardrobe: All students are depicted as wearing nothing but what they awoke in.
- Nothing Is Scarier: The days after the motive are always the most nervewracking, from the sheer nothingness that happens. Who knows when you're going to turn around and be dead?
- One-Steve Limit: Miraculously avoided anyone having the same first or last name.
- Poor Communication Kills: Since all of the trials have a time limit, anyone who throws things off on enough of a tangent can end up getting an innocent student killed.
- Power of Trust: If, in the first AB Game, they all voted Ally then half of the problems they have now wouldn't exist.
- Properly Paranoid: After the third trial, some of the characters begin to make a decline from trusting of their classmates to anxious. Makes sense, considering the trial featured one student trying their absolute best to make sure the murderer got away with it, so they could leave the rest of the students behind to rot in the bunker.
- Relationship Upgrade: Fuyumi starts off with a budding relationship with Yuma and then Kazumi. Both are found guilty of murder and executed.
- Running Gag
- Fuyumi's desperation to find a phone in the bunker. Is this a phone?
- Yuki's utter incomprehension of normal things, like crushes and winks. Eri gets the pleasure of explaining them.
- It's not a trial unless Eri is accused of murder.
- Arthur has ended perhaps 90% of his conversations by assuming they were done speaking and walking away.
- They were supposed to investigate? Sally totally helped! Yeah! Haha...
- Kazuki is almost exclusively incorrect in his guesses during trials, though they are all well intentioned and thought out with what he knows.
- Slept Through the Apocalypse: Well, apparently. That commercial told them they were humanity's last hope.
- Translation Convention: All characters are speaking Japanese, though it is clearly written in English.
- Translation Punctuation: Many of the students know Japanese along with one other language, so the difference is typically shown with parentheses. And then there's Eri.
- Troubling Unchildlike Behavior: They are all technically children, and this was clear in the very beginning, but after the third trial, there's a very apparent shift in all of them. Sometimes, you have to let someone else die so the rest of you survive.
- Wham Episode: The end of the fifth trial, in which Zero III and Sally are revealed to be the culprits and executed together, Zero glitches out, and the game itself ends. A stranger appears, and the fates of those in the bunker is left ambiguous.
- You Can't Go Home Again: As it was implied early on that there is no world to return to, some of the characters are beginning to wonder if there's even a home left.
- Your Mind Makes It Real: The fifth motive, in which they enter a new area and are infected with a pathogen that has no actual cure. Turns out they're all hypochondriacs. Seeing just one person believe the symptoms to be real makes the others thrive off of it. Shown especially with people like Arthur and Chronos, who showed symptoms but at a slower rate, as they were initially unbelieving.
