Sandbox / Yandere Simulator Final Game

• Another Side, Another Story: The game is set to include an unlockable called "1989 Mode", which focuses on the girl in the tapes, a.k.a. Ryoba, Ayano's mother. The mode has restrictions such as nothing that didn't exist in that time period (so no smartphones, Info-chan, or social media) as well as stricter school rules. However, it will be less complex than the main game.
• Backstory: According to the developer, there's a big one which will be told from at least three different perspectives.
  • The first revealed to players is a series of cassette tapes left behind by a journalist who investigated a murder by a yandere girl on the school grounds and had his life ruined because of it.
  • There are also cassette tapes from said Yandere, recounting how she kidnapped her senpai after getting off scot-free for her murders. History repeats…
  • The third set of tapes come from the school's Headmaster.
  • There may also be a set of tapes from SaikouCorp's CEO.
• The Bad Guy Wins:
  • YandereDev has stated that every one of the game's endings (except for game overs) will have Yandere-chan get what she wants, just in different ways.
  • The Aishi women have been doing this for as far back as the name goes, taking men, murdering rivals and torturing their "beloved" into submission. The cassette tapes confirm that Ryoba Aishi, a.k.a Ayano's mother, killed for love and has thus far gotten away with it.
• Break the Cutie: Yan-chan can do this to Senpai, as this is an official possibility for an ending. If, for example, Senpai has to watch his sister or his childhood best friend die right in front of him...
• Cannot Spit It Out: Ayano can't confess her feelings for Senpai, at least not until anyone who could take him from her is dealt with...
• Chick Magnet: Senpai, unbeknownst to him, has a talent for attracting a wide array of potential suitors – fellow classmates, substitute faculty, his little sister^note  (though her desire is NOT romantic or sexual in nature; she instead wants him to never get a girlfriend so he won't neglect her)… and a Yandere girl. Yan-chan's goal is to make sure none of the others get in her way.
• Cute Clumsy Girl: The Substitute School Nurse, Muja Kina, is one. Her introduction shows her tripping while carrying a tray of syringes, and her art on the website's character page has her holding an open bottle of rubbing alcohol upside down.
• Dating Sim: Inverted. Senpai's Cuteness Proximity prevents you from talking to him, much less wooing him. Instead, you prevent the other girls from wooing him, either through sabotage or just good old-fashioned murder.
  • If you matchmake your rivals with other boys, however, you get to play a straighter version of this trope by advising the boys how to court their crushes through a dating sim-like minigame shot from their perspective.
• Difficult, but Awesome: Joining the student council is deliberately designed like this. The player first has to meet some very strict criteria to qualify, and once they do manage to join, they will need to perform several mandatory activities each week while still not infringing on the previous rules that would deny qualification, lest they get dismissed from the council. This means less room for error while eliminating rivals. On the other hand, while in the student council, you gain a number of powerful boons, including the ability to walk around almost the entire school freely, the ability to easily command nearly any other student, and unique opportunities to... interact... with Megami when she returns.
• Difficulty Spike: Once student council president Megami Saikou makes her appearance, she'll take whatever measures she needs to in order to stop you, including surveillance cameras, security guards, and a zero-tolerance policy on aberrant behavior.
• Evil Versus Evil: Possibly the case when Yan-chan goes up against the final rival, Megami Saikou. Megami wants a Final Solution for "vulgar creatures" and is absent for the first nine weeks of school for mysterious, possibly shady reasons. Also, her character page says that she will install tons of new security measures and institute a zero-tolerance policy for "suspicious behavior". This is completely justified if students have been dropping dead, but her profile seems to say that she will do this regardless of what the player has done. So even if Yan-chan does nothing but matchmaking and befriending other students, and no one dies, Megami will invade the students' privacy for no other reason than she thinks someone is paying too much attention to Senpai.
• Free-Range Children: You can go anywhere in the school and put people in your basement without worrying about what your parents will think. The reason why? Your parents are gone for 10 weeks. The reason for that is Ayano's mother, Ryoba, found out her old foe the Journalist had been following her. In a panic, he fled to America… and Ryoba decided to "track him down".
• Golden Ending: The creator has stated that there will be multiple possible endings, depending on which techniques the player uses to eliminate rivals, and it has been implied that a Pacifist Run (disposing of rivals by playing matchmaker to hook them up with other people) would lead to this. What such an ending would mean for Yan-chan's character, however, is currently unknown.
• Heterosexual Life-Partners: One of the elimination methods involves becoming this with a rival (from their point of view, at least). You can do favors for a rival until they trust you enough to reveal a Dark Secret. Help them solve the problem related to that Dark Secret, and they may be convinced to let you have Senpai.
• High-Class Gloves: Megami will wear these, making it far more difficult to frame her for murder.
• Japanese Delinquents:
  • Akademi High has them. There are five boys who hang out by the incinerator all day, and deliberately show up to school later than the other students. They can be provoked into a fight, though they will disengage once either side is too beat-up.
  • One of the later rivals in the game will be the delinquents' boss, returning to school after being suspended. She comes late in the story and thus is one of the toughest rivals to defeat, probably due in part to her being the single strongest character in the game.
• Justified Tutorial: One of YandereDev's goals is to create a tutorial where Kokona shows Yan-chan the ropes during a rehearsal for a school play about a serial killer.
• Late for School: Being late to class even once will bar Yan-Chan from joining the Student Council, as they only want the best of the best, and being tardy disqualifies you from that. However, becoming a part of the Student Council will allow Yan-Chan to be up to a half hour late to class without penalty, since everyone will assume you were working on important Council business. Any later than that would result in Yan-Chan being booted from the Council.
• Matchmaker Quest: Every rival has a secondary crush so you can set them up with someone other than Senpai.
  • It may or may not be possible in the final game to hook up NPC students known to have mutual crushes.
• Multiple Endings:
  • The full game is set to have several endings. While Ayano will always get what she wants (Senpai), the way she gets it affects him and changes their dynamic – will he be lonely and desperate, distrustful of women, or paranoid and near-catatonic?
  • There will also be a unique ending for those who kill all the students in one day.
• Nintendo Hard: YandereDev has said that he'd like his game to be this, at least if you plan to play Yan-chan as an Ax-Crazy psychopath. At the same time, he acknowledges that a line has to be drawn somewhere, and if enough people think that the game is so hard that it isn't enjoyable, he'll take steps to dial back the difficulty. His own words…
  "Getting away with murder… should NOT… be easy. *Beat* With that being said, it should be fun."
• Pacifist Run: As noted in "Non-Lethal KO" above, there are multiple ways to take out a rival without killing them. Setting your rivals up with boys who aren't Senpai definitely counts as this. The dev has hinted that doing this might lead to a unique ending.
• Purely Aesthetic Gender: Senpai can be either male or female. Yan-chan is always a girl however.^note  Many fans have demanded the opportunity to play as "Yandere-kun", and the Dev – who has said he finds the idea of a male yandere distasteful – has nonetheless halfheartedly offered up programming it as a stretch goal once the crowdfunding campaign happens. In March 2017, he put in a debug command that transforms Yan-chan's model into a male, because he wanted to see if he could do it after he discovered a mod that attempted it; however, she's still a girl in those builds as far as the programming and dialogue are concerned.
• Raincoat of Horror: There are at least two raincoat outfits that help keep blood off your clothes (the darker one is occult-club-specific), likely as a send-up to this trope.
• Removing the Rival: The entire purpose of the game. You can get rid of rivals by having them be bullied so that no one likes them or by pairing them off with someone else. You can also literally remove them, lethally or otherwise.
• The Rival:
  • Obviously, every girl/woman with a crush on Senpai is this.
  • Every boy with a crush on a girl who likes Senpai would see him as a rival and vice versa.
  • It turns out that in 1989, an Investigative Journalist took it upon himself to look into a murder at Akademi, which was also committed by a Yandere. He made himself her rival, but failed to prove her guilt and eventually had to flee the country.
• Romance Sidequest: Averted. Despite the game's premise, it is not possible to interact with Senpai (such as asking him out on dates). The Dev has said that romancing him normally would defeat the purpose of playing as a Stalker with a Crush.
  "Yandere-chan will confess her love to Senpai when the time is right, once all of her rivals are eliminated. Until then… Don't. Let Senpai. Notice you."
  • However, he has also implied that it will be possible to give Senpai gifts anonymously to cheer him up after you've eliminated rivals. The reason for this has to do with the "Sanity" entry below.
• Sanity Meter: Senpai has a hidden Sanity stat that will take a continual pounding throughout the game. Seeing blood or loose weapons hurts his sanity a little; seeing a corpse hurts his sanity more; seeing his suitors (your rivals) dead deals a bigger hit. You can mitigate this by giving him anonymous gifts. However, watching Osana and Hanako die right in front of him will render him basically catatonic. And if he discovers you were the one who killed them… it probably won't end well for you.
• Single Woman Seeks Good Man: All of the rivals for Senpai, as well as Yan-chan herself, are basically this.
• Slice of Life: The story mode is told in a day-to-day fashion, with Ayano having one week (five school days) to get rid of the rival love interest, and a new rival popping up the next week.
• Story Branching: Though the game has a rather simple linear format – you like Senpai, so do ten others, get rid of one each week – exactly how you deal with them and interact with other students can change the game significantly. You can spend your time boosting your popularity to make classmates serve you, or just murder everyone within one day. You can boost your stats – through study, clubs, or panty-buffs – to make it easier to woo, harm, or manipulate others. As for your rivals, you can take them out in any one of over a dozen ways, ranging from matchmaking to social sabotage to just stabbing them in the neck.
• Technical Pacifist: Although you can do a traditional Pacifist Run (see above), you can also trash a girl's reputation down to the point where she'll be bullied out of school and Senpai will reject her (but not driving her to suicide), or you can plant fake evidence of her cheating and get her expelled. Hey, nobody got physically hurt!
• You Lose at Zero Trust: Senpai won't accept Ayano's love confession if her reputation is poor. This extends to rivals as well; if you damage a rival's reputation enough, Senpai will reject them.