Video Game / Yandere Simulator

Don't let kohai notice you!

"That girl is talking to Senpai. That's unacceptable. We're going to have to get rid of her. But how?"

— YandereDev, distilling the game's concept

Yandere Simulator^§[working title] is an indie stealth game for PC, made in the Unity engine by Alex "YandereDev" Mahan. Its protagonist is a high-school girl, the titular "Yandere-chan" (real name Ayano "Yan-chan" Aishi), who until recently was incapable of experiencing emotion until she met her "Senpai" Taro/Taeko Yamada, the first person in her life to actually make her feel something. Addicted to the new emotions her Senpai stirred in her, she developed an obsession with him (or her) at first sight. Unfortunately, Senpai is starting to get pretty popular at school, leading Ayano to dispose of her romantic rivals in any way possible.

Work on the game began in April 2014, with the first notable public build appearing in January 2015^note  (the 2014-era builds are proof-of-concept prototypes with no gameplay at all and were not intended to be widely shared), the free demo, which introduces the first rival Osana Najimi, was released on August 31st, 2020 to promote the a planned crowdfunding campaign to fund the full version. On October 10, 2021, 1980s Mode was released to show proof of concept of eliminating 10 rivals. Along with this, plans for a crowdfunding campaign were dropped in favor of a "live service" model: players were encouraged to donate to his Patreon to fund continued development. Periodic updates tracking the game's progress were made on his development blog.

In September 2023, allegations against YandereDev of grooming a minor were brought forward, something that he would apologize for. Many volunteers and voice actors working with the game, including Michaela Laws (who voiced Ayano and several others) plus Austin Hively (who played Senpai and Jokichi), have pulled out of the game's development and cut ties with YandereDev in response.

Please note that, as this is a game still in development, things can and often do change radically with subsequent updates.

The official website, which has a link to any current builds, can be found here.

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Debug Builds and Developer Videos of Yandere Simulator provide examples of:

A

• Absurdly Powerful School Jurisdiction: If Yandere-chan can get proof of someone committing some sort of infraction or an act that would embarrass the school, she can then turn it into the school counselor in order to eventually get the student expelled for being a troublemaker. In the alpha builds Info-chan gives her a video of Kokona selling her used panties to boys.
• Absurdly Powerful Student Council: The four present members of the Student Council definitely qualify as this. They patrol the school in-between classes on the lookout for trouble. They can't be manipulated, bribed, or intimidated like the other students; in fact, they will shove you away if you get too close to them, and will hear your footsteps if you try to sneak up on them. They have the power to send you to the Guidance Counselor if you're caught misbehaving, and if you make it clear to them that you're a genuine threat, they will pepper-spray you into submission. And then there's what happens if you actually manage to kill one of them...
• Abuse Mistake: In the debug builds, Ayano comes to the conclusion that Kokona is being abused by her father after overhearing a conversation between her and Saki. But when she talks to her, it's revealed that he doesn't come up to her room to abuse her, but to cry about being unable to pay off his debt to a Loan Shark.
• Accidental Pervert:
  • Rival Muja Kina is described as this. According to YandereDev, her trademark is "accidental innuendo."
  • You can claim to be this. If you're caught taking a panty shot, you can feign innocence and claim that the photo was accidental to recover some of your lost reputation. People will still trust you less for it, though.
• Accomplice by Inaction: It is revealed that the Headmaster knows that Ryoba was guilty of at least one murder back in 1989, and therefore knows what her daughter Ayano is really like too.
• Acme Products: Eagle-eyed players will notice that nearly every product in the game — from background props like a coffeemaker to essential items like students' phones — was produced by the SAIKOU Corporation. Like most things in this game, it's a multi-level pun – saikô (最高) means "the best" (which is also Akademi High's motto) and, of course, it's a homophone for the English word "psycho"… no points for guessing why that's relevant to this game.
• Acoustic License: If certain important lines of dialogue are spoken (such as when a student falls into a trap you've set up, or a teacher is informed about a murder), you will be able to hear them anywhere on the map.
• Adjustable Censorship: You can censor the female characters' panties, which makes looking up skirts become peering into an impenetrable shadow. This was added to make life easier for Youtubers, who would otherwise have to censor the shots themselves or risk demonetization.
• Adults Are Useless: Zigzagged.
  • Prior to October 2017, the School Nurse lacked any sort of AI. She could not be interacted with; all she did was stand around in the infirmary as Ayano stole a syringe and drugs from her. Her only reaction was when Ayano failed to pickpocket keys from her.
    "I... don't know what you're trying to do, but if it's supposed to be a joke, it's not funny."
    • The current nurse, however, has full AI and will call you out for stealing — and take you down for murder. She keeps a close eye on her equipment to keep you from taking it. You'll have to distract her by, say, non-fatally poisoning a student.
  • Genka Kunahito, Akademi's Guidance Counselor, was only partly-functional until October 2018 – you could talk to her to tattle on (read: frame) your rival, but she lacked AI, so you could murder a student or twelve right in front of her and she wouldn't bat an eye. Now that she's fully implemented, when you enter her office, you immediately enter the dialogue sequence, so it's impossible to carry a corpse or weapon around her. This, of course, means that if you manage to break the game and bring one in with you anyway, she still doesn't bat an eye.
  • Played for Drama in the Delinquents' backstory video, where the Guidance Counselor's inaction in the case of five students who were severely bullied led to them becoming the delinquents we see today. The only reason they weren't expelled immediately was that the Guidance Counselor struck a deal with the principal to try and rehabilitate them, as atonement for her mistake.
  • If a teacher is alerted to a murder, she will run to the scene of the crime. But if the player has cleaned up the body, blood, and any other evidence, she will assume that she's being pranked and return to her normal routine. She doesn't bother asking the student anything more; she just acts like nothing happened.
  • However, if the player fails to keep the murder scenes neat and a teacher sees it, she'll call the cops. If she then sees Ayano with a weapon and/or blood on her uniform, or if Ayano tries to clean up evidence in front of her, she will grab her and pin her to the ground. A base-stat Yan-chan is unable to overpower a teacher.
  • The police aren't completely useless. If a murder is reported, they will arrive at the school within five minutes^note (that's real-time; in-game time is half an hour). If a murder scene is cleaned up such that there's no evidence that Yan-chan did it, but there's still evidence that a murder took place (like a spot of blood), they will still be suspicious of Yan-chan and keep an eye on her. If you leave any evidence connecting you to the crime at all, they'll arrest you on the spot.
    • This includes if you managed to clean up everything but are still visibly insane. The cops will take Yan-chan in due to her "suspicious behavior", and the text blurb states that they will eventually uncover her crime (lack of evidence notwithstanding), so she will never be able to confess her love to Senpai.
  • Played straight if Yan-chan decides to bully a student and gets the class involved. The teachers won't do anything to stop it or lessen the damage being done. The student can even be Driven to Suicide because no one is stopping the bullying. ^note This is tragically common in Japanese schools.
• Aerith and Bob: The characters in this game have names that range from the Japanese equivalent of John Smith to Two First Names to meaningful names to incredibly lame puns to names that are just made up.
• Affectionate Parody:
  • Of Dating Sim tropes. Ayano is portrayed as villainous and unsympathetic in comparison to the more genre-typical characters, yet the dissonance between her perspective and the saccharine setting forms most of the game's humour.
  • The creator himself has described the game's world as a Dating Sim where one of the background characters has gone nuts and in doing so shifted the game's focus.
• All Anime Is Naughty Tentacles: YandereDev has pointed to "anti-anime bias" as one possible reason why Yandere Simulator is banned from Twitch along with a number of other anime-style games like HuniePop and DRAMAtical Murder, yet Western games with a player-controlled torture scene (Grand Theft Auto V) and full nudity (Conan Exiles) are allowed.
• All Crimes Are Equal: Before the guidance counselor was implemented in the October 14, 2018 build, disrupting class, laughing evilly, and murdering a student in broad daylight all brought the same punishment if a teacher caught you — instant expulsion. This was mainly because the other punishments weren't programmed in yet.
• Alternate Universe: The just-for-fun Mission Mode is one of these. In the Mission Mode universe, Info-chan runs an assassination service (instead of being a Knowledge Broker) and Ayano is a Professional Killer instead of a Yandere. The "Retribution" manga reveals the exact event that set the world of Mission Mode on a different path than the main timeline — in this universe, Taro Yamada was Ayano's first victim.
• Angry Cheek Puff: In the video "Yandere-chan's Childhood", Ayano mentions that as she grew older, she realized that her peers were more emotive than her. One of them is a younger Osana with puffed-out cheeks and Cross-Popping Veins.
• Apathetic Clerk: One of the many shopkeepers seen in the shops in Buraza Town is a teenage girl who greets Ayano just like any usual clerk would, but you can tell by her inner thoughts and her bored expression that she wants her to leave her alone as soon as possible.
• April Fools' Day:
  • YandereDev has established a habit of making April Fool's Day videos, dating back to 2015. For more details, please see the Trivia page.
  • April 1st is a very significant date in the history of the game — it was on April 1st, 2014 that the game was first proposed (and began development the day after). YandereDev has proposed making it Yandere-chan's birthday, as an homage to the game's beginnings.
  • As seen on the Calendar screen, the game starts on April 1st.
  • The video showcasing SNAP mode happened to be released on March 31st, 2020. Considering SNAP mode had been hyped and anticipated for years, several comments noted that it better not be an early April Fool's Joke.
• Arc Number:
  • Ayano has 10 rivals she has to get rid of over the course of 10 weeks. Ayano's mother Ryoba also had to deal with 10 rivals throughout the course of 10 weeks (not counting Sumire Saitozaki, whom she kills in a tutorial).
  • There are 10 suitors for you to hook up the rivals with.
  • The Journalist, Basement, and Headmaster each have 10 tapes.
  • The Guidance Counselor has 10 weeks to reform the Delinquents or else they'll be expelled and she will be dismissed from the school.
  • There are 10 major clubs (not including the Gaming Club, which is unofficial).
  • Mr. Rokuda adds a 10% increase to the interest rate on his loans every 10 days.
  • The Pain Demon's ritual involves offering 10 severed arms.
  • Ayano has officially been stated to be the 10th generation of the Aishi Clan.
  • As of June, 2022, you are now able to hold up to 10 students prisoner in the basement.
• Arc Welding: The Befriend/Betray^note (June 1st 2016) Update ties together all the elements of Kokona's story. Her dad comes into her room when he's drunk not to abuse her, but to cry on her shoulder about his debt to a loan shark – debt he incurred because his late wife was the primary breadwinner and with her gone, he cannot afford the tuition to keep Kokona at Akademi. Desperate to help pay off the debt before it ballooned out of control, Kokona took up Compensated Dating and sold her used panties to a boy from another school. Her best friend Saki, knowing about Kokona's money trouble but not the depths to which she was diving to fix it, took it upon herself to help out by selling her underwear… but she got cold feet at the last minute and threw her bra over the wall, leading to her Friendship Task.
• Arc Words:
  • A meta-example, something that YandereDev constantly points out as a theme and point of the game: "Getting away with murder should not be easy."
  • More to the point, Ayano's declaration: "Senpai. Will. Be. Mine. ...He doesn't have a choice."
• Artifact Name: The "Easter Eggs" found in a secret menu that drastically changes Yan-chan's appearance and gives her different abilities related to the obvious homage. In the earliest builds, way back before they were relegated to a menu, they were considered Easter Eggs, the name just stuck long after their status as a "hidden secret" was rendered obsolete since the introduction of the menu for ease of access.
• Artificial Atmospheric Actions:
  • Until March 2019, reactions to blood, dropped weapons, and severed limbs were not implemented yet. That meant that as long as there was no blood on Yan-chan or any bodies in sight, NPCs would not react to gallons of blood on the ground. On a less creepy note, for a long time, when students interacted with each other, they made the same few stilted gestures, one of which was randomly saluting for no reason.
  • The old animations, including the salute, were replaced in early 2017 with more natural gestures. However, all NPCs in a group will perform them at once as if they're talking over one another.
  • After March 2019, students (and teachers) now react to blood, weapons, and severed limbs on the ground. However, there is still some jank with this mechanic, as whole crowds of people will all notice the object at the same time, and proceed to perform the exact same animation at once — often clipping into one another in the process.
• Artsy Beret: The Art Club members are typified by their berets. If Ayano joins them, she gets one too.
• After-School Cleaning Duty: Between 3:30 and 4 every day. It's the only time of day that Yandere-chan can carry cleaning supplies and not be considered suspicious.
• Ambiguously Human: Played with in-game regarding the Basu sisters – they are rumored to be a succubus and vampire, yet their Student Info profiles state that "only a fool would believe something like that".^note Occult Club leader and rival Oka Ruto does believe it, so make of that what you will. ^{Further Explanation}Word of God says that the line about the contact lenses in their Student Info profile was so that people wouldn't think they were "monsters in disguise" because of their eyes, which implies that they're meant to be normal girls. This is supported by them being just as easy to kill as any other student. However, this doesn't explain their names, or that Sakyu looks nearly identical to Dracula-chan, the Big Bad of Yanvania.
• Amateur Sleuth: The members of the Photography Club will become this if School Atmosphere drops. As more people die/disappear, their personalities shift as they endeavor to find the culprit (i.e. you). At lowest atmosphere, they are essentially walking sentries and will dole out a swift Game Over if they catch you. Of course, this can be averted if you eliminate your rivals non-lethally – the atmosphere will stay bright and cheery and the Photography Club members will just be a bunch of goofballs. If you do go the psycho-killer route, though, you must be very careful to not let them find you out.
• And the Rest: An unintentional example in the first builds to contain the memorial service. If someone is killed and the body is found, the next day, there will be a memorial service for the dead student, complete with a large portrait of them. If multiple students are found dead, there will be multiple portraits at the service. However, in the first few builds to contain this feature, if you killed more than five students, any other victims wouldn't get a portrait.
• Anime Hair:
  • Some of the girls have really crazy hairstyles. One has bright purple twintails, another has long corkscrew Miku-style pigtails, a third has an ahoge nearly as tall as her head, one has two-tone hair, and so on.
  • This also applies to a few of the male students – most of them sport hairstyles that are themselves fairly normal, mostly following the "generic spiky-haired anime boy" cliché, but are bright primary or secondary colors. Then there's Ryuto, whose hair defies all logic and sense.
  • Ayano herself can wear any one of several pre-made hairstyles, running the gamut from normal (like her default 'do seen in the image up top) to absolutely nuts (green corkscrew pigtails that fade to red).
• The Anticipator: In the Halloween Undertale minigame, Oka takes on this role.
• Anti-Frustration Features:
  • The Martial Arts Club allows Ayano to easily overpower others in physical confrontations.
  • The Cooking Club lets Ayano easily build up her reputation by making snacks for her classmates. She can also carry a knife without drawing suspicion.
  • The Drama Club provides access to gloves so that you can frame others for your crimes, and masks to hide your identity when committing murder (though the latter can only be used once).
  • The Occult Club diminishes Ayano's Sanity Slippage when killing others, and makes students and teachers slower at noticing your suspicious behavior.
  • The Light Music Club provides access to a cello case^note (realistically, it's too large to be a cello case; it's closer in size to a double-bass case) for transporting body parts and larger weapons. It also gives you the ability to play a concert for the school, which will dramatically raise your reputation if you do well.
  • The Photography Club lets Yan-chan snap pictures of classmates without drawing suspicion, and prevents the rest of the club from seeing her as a suspect while investigating murders.
  • The Art Club lets you safely walk around school covered in blood, under the pretense that it's just red paint.
  • The Science Club has a homemade roomba that will clean up puddles of blood for you, and blowtorches that you can use to cauterize wounds so that corpses don't bleed at all.
  • The Sports Club lets Ayano carry around a bat or dumbbells without arousing suspicion, and makes Ayano run faster.
  • The Gardening Club lets Ayano carry around a shovel without arousing suspicion, and provides easy access to the garden shed (she'd otherwise have to pickpocket the key from the club's leader), in which may be found emetic poison and a circular saw.
  • The Gaming Club allows Ayano to gain a temporary skill boost in any one of her stats that lasts for the rest of the day.
• Anyone Can Die:
  • This is a game about killing. Well, it can be a game about killing. It doesn't really have to be, but most players choose to murder the other students. However, it's not played completely straight.
  • Senpai zig-zags this. He is not killable during normal gameplay, mostly because Ayano becomes a Shrinking Violet whenever she gets within a yard of him^note (for most of the game's development, his aura was 2m [~6'7"], but it was halved in early 2017 due to the difficulty of walking through tight spaces when he's around). He still has the same hitbox as any other male student, though, and you can kill him in certain Easter Egg modes, but he just magically comes back to life the next day. This video implies that Senpai will be killable in the final game; however, thus far, it's only possible in SNAP Mode.
  • Teachers are killable once you've leveled up your P.E. stat enough. Delinquents can also be fought and killed with high enough stats.
  • Averted with the school counsellor, whose job is to punish Ayano for minor infractions or expel your rivals for larger ones – she is explicitly stated to be unkillable. Indeed, her model lacks a hitbox.
  • Info-chan is also unkillable. She's easy enough to find – in the Info Club room (natch), which is locked from the inside – but players who have glitched in there have discovered that she has no hitbox either.
  • Akademi's Headmaster was not in the game for a very long time, and it was assumed by fans that he would never appear outside maybe a cutscene. But YanDev changed his mind and said this…
    "When the Headmaster is added to the game… try to kill him, and see what happens."
    • A piece of art featuring the Headmaster released shortly thereafter showed him brandishing a taser. The guy also keeps a katana in a case next to his desk. Yeah, Yan-chan ain't winning that fight.
    • When the Headmaster was actually added to the game, it was revealed that he will tase Yandere-chan (resulting in a Game Over) if she approaches him or stays in his room too long. You can't even get close enough to attack him because he's been on to you from the beginning.
  • Other than these few exceptions, you can quite literally kill anyone in the game. There are no exceptions for characters who are relevant to the plot. If you kill a character who is required for a certain mechanic, cutscene, or lore dump, then that thing just doesn't happen. You can lock yourself out of whole chunks of the game by killing people unnecessarily. As the Dev says, "Taking someone's life should have consequences."
• Arc Symbol:
  • The SAIKOU Corp logo. It shows up everywhere, from computers to radios to Yan-chan's phone and even a cardboard box. It's also part of Akademi High's logo, so it appears on the girls' swimsuits and the boys' uniform buttons.
  • Also, cherry blossom petals. They're everywhere in this game, and they're a both a symbol of love and of the impermanence of life — two themes that are central to Yandere Simulator's story.
• Artistic License – Biology: YandereDev has admitted that the "Burning" elimination would actually take longer in real life than it does in the game (several hours versus a few seconds of gameplay). However, it was necessary to speed things up for the sake of the player.
• Artistic License – Law:
  • Lampshaded in the December 2015 update, which introduced the Frame-Up to the game. YandereDev notes that Kokona, your scapegoat, had a rock-solid alibi and a perfectly innocent explanation as to how her fingerprints ended up on the murder weapon – she was a member of the Cooking Club and she earlier used the murder weapon, a kitchen knife, to prepare a snack for her friends.
  • It's also notable that until June 2019, you could go on a killing spree, clean up all the evidence, and leave witnesses alive. You would still get away with the crime, though you might suffer a constant reputation drain (depending on the witness's personality). As of June 2019, eyewitness testimony is now taken into account, but the police will still not arrest Yan-chan unless no fewer than 5 witnesses come forward. Asking someone to follow you doesn't arouse suspicion even at the lowest atmosphere, and even if the student who followed you into a secluded location ends up murdered, the cops don't question it so long as concrete evidence is disposed of. Additionally, there's no forensics involved except fingerprints and blood-typing on weapons and Yan-chan's clothes (the victim's clothes would realistically be examined for fingerprints and foreign DNA, etc.).
    • Accounting for these details would be complicated and difficult for YandereDev, so it's not likely that many, if any, of these smaller factors would ever be considered in the game's programming.
  • In addition, even if it is clear that a murder did happen, the police will give up if they can't catch the perpetrator on the day that the murder happens. The police will leave and the students will be allowed to go home. The students will return to school the next day (or Monday if the murder happens on Friday), and the police will not be there. Realistically, the police would have continued their investigation for weeks, and would still be there searching when the students returned. This one, at least, gets a Hand Wave (see the "Final Game" folder for details).
• Ascended Fanboy:
  • Borderline example: A fan going by the handle "kgftbz" created a mod that allows the player to pose different characters. YandereDev found out about it and loved the idea so much he added his own "Pose Mode" to the game in mid-October 2016. He credits "kgftbz" in this update video.
  • Qvajangel, the 3D modeler who replaced Druelbozo, was a fan who sent in some of his hair models and ended up being commissioned to work on the game.
  • Some of the 2D artists whose work appears in Dev's videos got his attention through creating fanart.
• Ascended Meme: A Word of Saint Paul variant: A parody video made by Mom0ki, Midori Gurin's voice actress, has Midori refer to herself as "Midori Gurinuuu", which is the Fan Nickname given to her by popular LP'er Jay from the Kubz Scouts.
• As Long as It Sounds Foreign: A clear-cut case of Gratuitous Foreign Language. Being set in Japan, most of the characters in Yandere Simulator have vaguely Japanese-sounding names. While most are clearly meant to be Meaningful or Punny Names, in practice, they typically qualify only if you're using a "Blind Idiot" Translation, since the grammar and syntax are either awkward or incorrect^ExampleMegami Saikou, clearly going for "perfect goddess", but only vaguely so and only if the name parts are read separately. Moreover, "saikou" means closer to "highest" or "top", which doesn't fit the context and is never used by itself as a descriptor, or are rendered incorrectly into romaji^ExampleNasu Kankoshi, which translates into "eggplant nurse" instead of "nurse nurse". The correct romaji for "nurse" is "nāsu" with diacritical mark, although the written kanji is correct Some characters will have Two First Names, others, two last names (e.g. Midori Gurin, a.k.a. "green green"). Put simply, these names would sound like absolute gibberish to a native speaker.
• Ass Shove: YandereDev's explanation for how Yan-chan can hide two weapons and a smartphone on her body while nude includes a clip of Metal Gear Solid that states "Well, women have more hiding places than men." (The ability to run around naked was later removed, so this trope no longer applies in current builds.)
• Audible Sharpness: The knife, katana, and prop sword make this sound when equipped.
• Aura Vision: It's called "Yandere-Vision" here. It highlights Senpai (in pink), rival love interests (in red), people whose info you've learned (in green), people who know you've committed a crime (in yellow), incriminating things like blood and corpses (in orange), and useful objects (in cyan). It also shows you the "Red String of Fate" between Senpai and your rival. In addition, you can "tag" students you want to keep track of specifically — this appears as a red circle around that particular student. This is explained as Yan-chan visualizing that student's schedule, which is why it doesn't work on random students until you've gotten their details from Info-chan. For the record, Yan-chan herself has a black aura.
• Award-Bait Song: On May 13, 2018, YandereDev released the planned credits song, "Star-Crossed Lovers", a soft, gentle song about how deeply Yan-chan wants to be with Senpai.
• Awesome, but Impractical:
  • Torturing a captured student enough will turn them into a mindless slave that can be commanded to zero in on your current rival and kill her before committing suicide, without anyone suspecting you. Mindslaves are inhumanly strong due to a lack of self-preservation instinct, meaning that only the strongest rivals can fight back against them — so a mindslave is very much a trump card. The problem is, making someone into a mindslave is incredibly difficult.
  • In order to kidnap a student, you need a syringe with tranquilizer. In order to steal one without the Nurse spotting you, you need to distract her by non-lethally poisoning a student, which requires leveling up your Chemistry stat, and then steal it from the cabinet while her back is turned (In the main game) or get a lockpick from the Yakuza or craft one yourself and use it when the Nurse isn't looking (In 1980s mode). You then have to level up your Biology so that you can use it properly (otherwise you will end up killing the student with the syringe). Finally, you have to either befriend your chosen victim (which requires doing a task for them) or level up your Seduction stat to the maximum, so they trust you enough to follow you into the storage room inside the gym. Only then can you tranquilize them and stash them in the crate to be picked up later. Once you've kidnapped them, you then have to miss whole days of school in order to make their sanity drop by any sizable amount, which ruins your reputation and can cause a Game Over if you're not careful. Creating a single mindslave can take multiple weeks, but if you're willing to put in the work, you can make killing your rivals a breeze.
  • Weapons like the axe or the katana may look cool to use, but Ayano cannot hide them from the other students so easily and they leave bloodstains in her clothes unlike other non-conceivable weapons like the baseball bat do.
• Ax-Crazy:
  • Comes with the territory. Just how much is up to how the player does things. It's just as possible to dispatch your rivals non-lethally, however, as it is to just get the Genocide Ending.
    • If Yandere-chan kills several people, she will begin to lose Sanity. As her Sanity goes down, she gets more and more violent and unstable. She begins to hallucinate, seeing ghostly visions herself killing her current rival in more and more brutal ways. She begins to twitch and giggle uncontrollably, attracting attention. Her murder animations become more and more drawn-out and sadistic, and if her Sanity bottoms out, she will automatically attack anyone she gets close to.
    • In SNAP mode, every ounce of civility and rationality goes completely out the window. Yandere-chan's vision goes completely red, and everyone turns into a black sihouette as she loses her ability to distinguish between people. Her sense of time and space breaks down, and the screen goes glitchy and staticky as she loses the ability to run and instead begins to teleport forward. When she's not glitching through space, she stumbles slowly, head down, looking for all the world like a Silent Hill monster. Anyone who gets near her is messily murdered with Yan-chan's bare hands, as she crushes their skulls, rips out their hearts, and otherwise brutally, gorily, and horrifically takes their lives. It's the absolute most crazy Yandere-chan can get, as she no longer has anything to live for.

B-C

• Badass Bystander:
  • Anyone with the Heroic persona (that'd be the entire Martial Arts Club, the entire Sports Club, and Himari Fujita, one of the Gardening Club girls). If they see you kill someone, they'll run up and try to disarm you, even if it ends up costing them their lives.
  • Budo Masuta, president of the Martial Arts Club. Unless you level up your PhysEd stat, he will completely overpower you.
  • Raibaru Fumetsu — Budo's mentor and Osana's unofficial bodyguard — takes this up to eleven. Any attempt to attack Raibaru, murder someone in her presence, or carry a corpse past her will end with Ayano firmly pinned to the ground and her arm broken in at least two places. Her Strength stat is listed as 9 (higher than any other student in school), and bumping up another student's stats to match hers will give them the same abilities.
  • If a student witnesses you murder someone they love (whether that's their sibling, crush, or best friend), they will attack you without hesitation, their strength suddenly bumped up to Budo's level. (Be glad that they don't go up to Raibaru's level...)
  • Even students who don't attack can be this. If someone with a Loner, Social Butterfly, or Teacher's Pet persona sees you kill someone and get away with it, they will spend the rest of the game badmouthing you to the rest of the school, constantly draining your reputation, until you… deal with them. If you try to talk to them at this point, they'll tell you all this to your face.
  • If four or more students witness you kill someone, they will gang up on you and work together to pin you down, regardless of their persona, resulting in an instant Game Over.
  • The delinquents are usually content to hang out by the incinerator, and even if you provoke them into a fight, they will disengage once either side is too beat up to continue fighting. However, if you murder someone in front of them or get spotted carrying a corpse, they will attack without mercy and will only stop once they themselves are dead.
• Badass Teacher: Every single teacher at Akademi has extensive self-defense training. Without the proper stats, attempting to attack a teacher will result in her grabbing your wrist, disarming you, slamming your head into the floor, and holding you down, resulting in a Game Over.
  Sensei: Just WHAT do you think you're doing?
• Barefoot Suicide: Exploited. When Ayano shoves someone from the rooftop, she slips their shoes off before they take the plunge to make it look like they took their own lives.
• Beware the Silly Ones:
  • The Photography Club is made up of a bunch of goofballs who like to have fun. However, if you lower the school's atmosphere to below 80%, they will begin sweeping the school and investigating every single student in it in attempt to find the responsible for all the atrocities that have happened. If any of them sees you commiting murder and you get away with it while the school atmosphere is above 90%, they will hunt you down. They will will follow you around the school looking for evidence of your crimes, and if they catch you committing murder, they'll snap a picture of you and send it straight to the police. Game Over. To illustrate the point, these are some of the club leader's lines when the atmosphere is above 80%:
    Fureddo: Oh, hey! Welcome to our little getaway! Haha!
    Fureddo: Look, I'll be honest: we don't actually do any photography here. We just...eat snacks, read manga, and goof around. If you're okay with that, you're totally welcome to join the club and hang out with us!
    Fureddo: Wanna chill with us? Cool, pull up a seat! Help yourself to some snacks if you like!
  • And these are some of his lines when the atmosphere is below 80%:
    Fureddo: Some seriously bad stuff has been happening lately. We can't just pretend like everything is fine. We need to get to the bottom of this. Everyone in this school deserves to be safe and happy. We won't let anyone turn our school into a dangerous, scary place.
    Fureddo: You joined...quit...and now you want to join again? That's kind of...suspicious. Makes me think you have some sort of ulterior motive. I'm sorry...it's not okay.
    Fureddo: You've got some nerve. Get out. Don't show your face around here again.
    Fureddo: You sick disgusting monster! I don't know how you live with yourself.
  • This also applies to any of the normally-harmless characters who have a loved one at the school. If you kill them in front of someone who cares about them, the survivor will rush you with maxed-out strength and try to take you down.
• Big Bad: Ayano, though just how bad she is depends on how you play her. She can be anything from an Ax-Crazy psychopath to a relatively harmless matchmaker.
• Big Ball of Violence: The rap battle between Osana Najimi and Ayano Aishi ends in this.
• Big Good: Although he doesn't directly interact with our protagonist, the unnamed journalist who longs to bring Ryoba to justice is the closest thing to one that this game has.
• Big Ham: Budo Masuta, president of the Martial Arts Club.
  Welcome to the Martial Arts Club! What brings you here?
• Big Man on Campus: Downplayed. Senpai has managed to draw the affections of eight girls and two adult women at the school (Yan-chan included), but he doesn't seem to have many friends and isn't that special in any particular field.
• Binocular Shot: In the street introduced in the October 17th, 2019 build, there is a pair of binoculars on the sidewalk overlooking the sea, which you can look through for 25 cents. They give this effect. Interestingly enough, if you look closely, one of the boats is a Saikou Corp company boat, and on it is someone who appears to be Kencho Saikou, standing on the deck and watching the street with his own pair of binoculars.
• Blaming the Victim:
  • After learning Kokona gives the money she earns via Compensated Dating to her father so he can repay his debt, Musume (whose father is extorting Kokona's dad) calls them both "pathetic" and states people shouldn't borrow money in the first place if they can't pay debt. She even says Kokona's dad deserves anything that happens to him if he cannot repay her father.
  • If students with the Spiteful persona see Yandere-chan kill anyone they don't like, they'll claim they "had it coming".
• Blatant Lies:
  • If a student catches Yan-chan covered in blood, holding a weapon, or holding a weapon while covered in blood, you have the option to "Apologize" to the student(s) that spotted you, which has Yan-chan lie to them.
    • (if caught holding a weapon) "I found something dangerous on the grounds. I was taking it to a teacher."
    • (if caught covered in blood) "I spilled red paint on myself! I'm going to go clean it up now."
    • (if caught holding a weapon while bloody) "Don't worry. I was just filming a prank video for the internet."
    • (if caught taking panty shots) "It was a mistake! I was trying to photograph something else, I swear!"
  • This is also a possibility when Ayano is sent to the guidance counselor. Technically, there are two options that count as this: "Lie" and "Excuse". However, "Excuse" will have Ayano come up with a reasonable (though false) excuse that will get her out of trouble, while "Lie" results in a ridiculous and obviously untrue explanation that will get her suspended. Some examples:
    • (choosing "Excuse" when caught bloody) "This isn't blood! It's red paint! I accidentally spilled some paint on myself and I was just on my way to wash it off."
    • (choosing "Lie" when caught bloody) "A car... hit a stray animal in the middle of the street... and the blood... splashed on me."
    • (choosing "Excuse" when caught with a weapon) "I found something dangerous lying around, so I was taking it to a teacher to report it."
    • (choosing "Lie" when caught with a weapon) "Someone ran up to me. And put this in my hand. I... uhhh... didn't see their face."
    • (choosing "Excuse" when caught visibly insane) "I wanted to liven up the mood, so I put on a funny little act. I was only joking around. It was a joke."
    • (choosing "Lie" when caught visibly insane) "Oh. Where am I? How did I get here? I guess I must have amnesia."
• Bloodless Carnage: The very earliest builds of the game had this. Blood was implemented in July 2014, three months after development began. Killing someone with a blunt non-concealable weapon (ie katana and axe do not qualify) such as the baseball bat or the shovel will leave blood on the weapon, but will not generate any pools of blood nor leave bloodstains on Ayano, though this is to give them an advantage over weapons that can be hidden.
• Blood-Splattered Innocents:
  • You have the option to set bucket traps over doors, which will spill either water (to force the student to go to a secluded location to change their clothes) or gasoline (to light them on fire). However, if you do the work of murdering a different student and mopping up all of their blood, the bucket of water you dip the mop in will become a bucket of blood, which you can then use as a bucket trap. The student's reaction to being suddenly drenched in blood is exactly what you'd expect.
  Student: What is this? Is this blood?! Where did all this blood come from?!
  • While there is currently no special utility to dumping blood on someone instead of water (other than being especially cruel), this may, in the future, become a way to frame innocents for your crimes.
• Border Patrol: Attempting to walk outside of Akademi results in the screen fuzzing with red static and the words "...Senpai..." The farther the player walks, the more intense the static effect gets.
• Boring, but Practical: Stabbing someone with a knife, a pair of scissors or a box cutter may not look as cool as striking someone with an axe or a metal pipe, but the weapons can be easily hidden and disposed of, not to mention that scissors and box cutters are not considered suspicious as long as they are not covered in blood.
• Borrowed Without Permission: When Ayano is caught stealing things from the Faculty Room and sent to the guidance counselor, she has the option to lie, claiming that she wasn't stealing, but borrowing. The guidance counselor sees immediately through the lie.
• Brand X: While the SAIKOU Corporation's products don't normally fit this trope, there's a notable exception – the video game console owned by Ayano and Pippi is a SaikouStation 4.
• Break the Cutie:
  • Yan-chan can trash someone's reputation via malicious gossip to the point that other students bully them and they stop coming to school. If she takes it far enough, they can even be Driven to Suicide.
  • Yan-chan can kidnap a student. This leads to one of two (thus far) options: she can torture the student to the point that their mind is completely shattered, at which point they will perform a Murder-Suicide against her rival at her command, or the student will be used as a bargaining chip and released, being left "broken" for the rest of the game.
  • Ayano's father had this done to him two decades or so ago, if the basement tapes are anything to go by. So, apparently, did her grandfather, her great-grandfather, and so on for as long as this nightmare has gone on.
• Breast Expansion:
  • In the debug builds, you can adjust the size of Ayano's chest from supermassive to nearly concave on the fly. Though the Dev has said that Yan-chan will be customizable in the final game, it is unknown if her bust will still be adjustable (either in a pre-game menu like Senpai's features, or in-game like the debug builds).
  • You can do this with every girl if you know how to mess with the JSON file in the debug builds. However, things get weird if you set the bust size much higher than 2… or to a negative number.
• Bullying a Dragon:
  • If certain students witness you murder someone and get away with it, they will spend their days telling everyone about Yan-chan's true nature — even knowing the kind of person she is. Doubles as a Heroic Sacrifice, as they almost certainly understand that they're risking their lives by doing this.
  • The game directly calls you out for this if you attempt to gossip about Info-chan.
  • In the Drive Your Rivals to Murder video, Musume Ronshaku viciously insults and slut-shames Kokona, because of the fact that she engages in enjo kosai in order to pay off her father's massive debt to Musume's father. Let's just say it doesn't end well for Musume.
• Butt-Monkey:
  • There's Kokona Haruka, the big-breasted, purple-twin-drill-haired girl.
    • While every student in the game (aside from Senpai) is killable during regular play, Kokona was designated the "Test Rival" way back in 2015, and as such was often used as the example girl in builds and videos to demonstrate the various... creative... methods you can use to eliminate your rival (such as faking her suicide, planting bogus evidence to get her expelled, brainwashing her best friend to kill her, etc.). Crosses over into poor victim territory since Yan-chan can eavesdrop on her conversation about her father and use that to kill her, and can have her bullied badly enough through malicious gossip that she is Driven to Suicide.
    • Lampshaded in the video for the "Drowning"^note (June 16th 2015) update, where the dev sighs as she approaches the fountain and toilet, commenting on her Too Dumb to Live status. Before that, in the June 1st 2015 update, he makes it look like he's going to target Saki Miyu before quickly panning over to Kokona and picking her.
    • YandereDev further lampshaded it in the August 2015 update by referring to her as "everyone's favorite punching bag".
    • He lampshaded it again in December 2015 when explaining the Frame-Up mechanic, saying that at that point, only one student would put her hands on a weapon Yan-chan could then use for framing: "It's… yes, that's right… Kokona-chan."
  • invoked Midori Gurin was created to represent the game's well-meaning but counterproductive fanbase. As such, she exists to be shut down, insulted, and often murdered. Heck, she's been murdered by YandereDev himself at least twice in his update videos – granted, the first time was after she slapped him (to snap him out of a funk), and the other time, she was attempting to murder him because his abuse finally pushed her Berserk Button and sent her over the edge.
    • She has no routine in the debug builds – she arrives at school and beelines to the roof and just stands there for the rest of the day unless the player interacts with her.^note Prior to July 2016, she spawned on the roof too. Next to her are a knife, mop, bucket, and utility sink, just to make killing her that much simpler.
    • Midori was the guinea pig for the "Dismemberment" update video, marking the first time in nearly a year that a student other than Kokona was used to demonstrate an elimination method (though the end of the video showed Yan-chan holding Kokona's severed head, just to ensure that "everyone's favorite punching bag" wasn't left out).
    • As development shifted in early 2016 – fewer elimination methods implemented but more under-the-hood fixes – Midori was getting the business end of the knife more often than Kokona.
    • August 2016 saw the implementation of sanity-based killing animations. It also gave Yan-chan the option of praying to a turtle to, among other things, "summon a victim". Naturally, Midori is the female victim. In the video demonstrating the feature where mashing the Attack button while at low sanity causes the killing animation to loop, Yan-chan smacks Midori in the face with a baseball bat twenty-nine times (plus the initial blow that knocks her down).
  • And now that Osana has been released as of August 31st, 2020, she is the only "official rival" currently in the game, so players can test out every single elimination method on Osana, just as they once did on Kokona.
• But Thou Must!: In SNAP mode, you can't avoid killing Senpai (and yourself) no matter what you do. If you keep wasting time, you will be teleported to a knife, which automatically equips it. If you still choose to waste time, the game will instantly teleport you near Senpai. If you choose to waste time again, the game will teleport you into Senpai's collision mesh, activating the animation and killing Senpai. Once Senpai is dead, Ayano will die regardless of player input. If the player mashes the button, she will kill herself instantly. If they don't, she will kill herself slowly. Justified, as once Ayano has snapped, the only thing left for her to live for is pulling If I Can't Have You… on Senpai.
• Camping a Crapper: It's possible to wait for a student to walk into the bathroom and drown them in the toilet (including while they are vomiting into said toilet).
• The Can Kicked Him: One of the bathroom-murder option, which involves drowning a victim in the toilet.
• Cardiovascular Love: In the logo for the game, sideways pink Heart Symbols are used, and a Yandere is a twisted kind of lover.
• Cassandra Truth: Certain students, upon discovering a corpse, will run and tell a teacher. The teacher will then come to investigate for herself. If Yan-chan is able to move the body out of sight and clean up before the teacher arrives, the teacher will assume the murder claim was a prank, and scold the reporter. That student will spend the rest of the day looking traumatized.
• Censor Shadow: In September 2016, YandereDev inserted a key-command that covers the girls' panties in shadow while keeping the panty shot mechanic in place. He did this to make it easier for YouTubers with monetized accounts to avoid their videos being taken down or age-restricted (thus unable to earn revenue).
• Censor Steam: Deliberately invoked in a Take That! to YouTube's takedown of the uncensored panty shot video. Until March 5, 2019, when characters were getting changed, they were surrounded by a white haze that blocked the view of certain restricted areas of their bodies… and only those areas of their bodies. In the March 5, 2019 build, this was finally changed so that characters wear a towel wrapped around themselves.
• Cerebus Syndrome: Aside from the whole killing people thing, the early builds of the game were fairly lighthearted and humorous. Now, not so much, thanks to nastier ways to kill people, the school atmosphere dropping, Kokona's issues, the Journalist's backstory, and more! However, it's downplayed in that unlike most examples of the trope, the game didn't really become darker over time; the plan for the game was dark from the beginning, and it merely took longer for the gritty aspects to be implemented.
• Chainsaw Good: One of the weapons Yan-chan can use is a circular saw found in the garden shed. It can be used to dismember corpses for easier (though more tedious) disposal. While it can also be used to kill victims directly, note that it has the longest killing animation of any weapon in the game (meaning nearby students have plenty of time to get away), and can't be wielded in close quarters, so anyone who is capable of self-defense and aware of Ayano can overpower her.
• Cherry Blossoms: Invoked. Not only are there cherry blossom trees on the path to school and in the school's courtyard, there is a myth that if you confess your love under the tree behind the school on a Friday, they will accept your proposal guaranteed.
• Clean Cut: Dismembering a student always results in perfectly cut body parts and takes only a few seconds. (Somewhat justified in that Ayano is using a power tool.)
• Content Warnings: The game once came with a Long List of a disclaimer about things Yandere Simulator contained, starting off serious and then delving into comedy. Currently there is a disclaimer which states that what people are playing is only a debug sandbox, there is currently no way to win, many features are unfinished, and that all of the characters are 18 or older even if otherwise indicated.
• Cold-Blooded Torture: Ayano, after kidnapping someone, can do this to her victim in order to completely break their mind. Nothing is shown of what Yan-chan actually does to her victim to break them, but one can surmise that it is anything but pleasant.
• Compensated Dating: Some of the girls in school engage in enjo kôsai, which Yan-chan can use against them to ruin their reputation.
• Convenient Coma: Averted. If a delinquent knocks you into a coma because you attacked them or they caught you with a corpse, or if you electrocute yourself into a coma with your own booby trap, you will be unable to prevent your rival from confessing to Senpai, which is very inconvenient indeed.
• Covert Pervert: Some guys (and girls) at the school are implied to be this. After all, there's a market for Info-chan's panty-shot photos.
• Crapsaccharine World:
  • The bright atmosphere, slice-of-life structure, and calm music constantly playing in the background certainly suggest that this is your standard Dating Sim… and then we meet our Villain Protagonist, find out what she's capable of, learn the backstories of some of the characters, and discover scattered hints at a dark, perhaps even supernatural conspiracy…
  • This is highlighted by the School Atmosphere mechanic. At high atmosphere, the school looks like the setting of a typical high school romantic comedy. At low atmosphere, it becomes more like the horror story setting it actually is.
• Crash-Into Hello: This was how Yan-chan and Senpai met in the 2014-era intro and the 2017 video about Yan-chan's childhood. In 2019, the official Intro Cutscene confirmed that this is how they met.
• Creepy Monotone:
  • If you torture someone to the point of destroying their mind, they will develop this.
  • Yan-chan herself usually speaks in a very flat affect due to being a (formerly) Emotionless Girl.
• Crime-Concealing Hobby:
  • The Art Club allows Yandere-chan to get away with having blood-covered clothes if she's wearing a painter's smock.
  • The Light Music Club allows Yandere-chan to use a cello case to carry around weapons or body parts.
  • The Drama Club allows Yandere-chan to wear masks that hide her identity.
  • The Drama, Gardening, and Sports clubs give Yandere-chan access to items that can be used as an Improvised Weapon, which she can carry openly without being considered suspicious.
• Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass:
  • The members of the Photography Club formed their club as a way to hang out with each other, and avoid having to join an actual club. They use their clubroom to goof around, eat snacks, and read manga. That said, when the school's atmosphere bottoms out, they become your worst enemies.
  • Even the ditziest students will end you if you kill the person they love right in front of them.
• Curb-Stomp Battle:
  • Ayano delivers one of these, every time, to any ordinary student. A skilled and statistically maxed-out Ayano can deliver one to teachers, delinquents, and martial artists as well.
  • The teachers will deliver one to Yan-chan if her physical stats aren't high enough. (In earlier builds, they would hand out one of these regardless of stats.)
  • Budo Masuta, the president of the Martial Arts Club, will easily overpower Yan-chan if the player isn't skilled at the struggle minigame.
  • The Placeholder Delinquents were able to knock Ayano comatose in a single blow.
  • Raibaru Fumetsu will take Yandere-chan down — and break her arm in two places — if she attempts to attack her or her best friend Osana. Unlike most other characters in the game, she can't be defeated by a stealth attack, and even fights off a mindslave assault. Ayano can defeat her, but it's not going to be easy, and will need to involve underhanded methods.
  • The Student Council will pepper-spray Yan-chan into submission if she attacks them directly. They can be stealth-attacked, but they're highly alert, so it's not easy to do so, and actually killing a Student Council member will result in metal detectors and security cameras being installed and the school being locked to the minimum atmosphere for the rest of the game.
  • The Headmaster will tase Yandere-chan into a coma if she approaches him, stays in his room too long, or lets him see her carrying a body. She can't even get close enough to attack him.
• Curtains Match the Window: In the earlier builds, most of the characters had hair and eyes that matched in color. As the school population has been filled out, more and more new characters have averted this, with the result that it's no longer a noticeable trend.
  • Out of the 10 rivals, only 2 avert this: Amai Odayaka (brown hair & green eyes) and Asu Rito (blonde hair & grey eyes). All the others have matching hair and eyes.
  • Senpai is customizable, so it's up to the player whether he averts this or plays it straight. Ayano, who normally plays this straight, can avert it as well if the player changes her hairstyle.
• Custom Uniform: Justified, as being allowed to do so is one of many last-ditch efforts by the Headmaster to boost enrollment at Akademi. The only ones that don't have one of some sort are the clubless students, Senpai, and Ayano (and that can be changed if she joins a club).
• Cutting Off the Branches: It's possible to eliminate the 10 rivals of 1980s mode in any way possible, and it's possible to come away with a bad ending, but there is only one method of elimination per rival that is considered 'canon'. Getting the canon elimination on all ten rivals is the way to unlock the S+ rank and the secret ending. Ryoba's monologues about her rivals shed some light on what those methods are. In addition, canonically, of course, Ryoba gets away with the murder of Sumire/The Phantom Girl and kidnaps her Senpai.
• Cyber Ninja: The "Cyborg Mode" Easter Egg transforms Yan-chan into a Cyborg à la Raiden; she will don black armor with a neon blue visor, and a long silver ponytail. Also, her running speed is nearly doubled, and she gains an "Energy Sword" that immediately dismembers anybody she attacks, while hard rock music plays in the background.

D-E

• Dark Is Evil: Ayano's default design has black hair, dark grey eyes, and black stockings, and one of her possible outfits is a black uniform with red trim.
• Dead Man's Chest:
  • A very early test showed Yan-chan able to dismember bodies in order to hide them in a cello case. This feature disappeared for a long time, but a later build put the cello case back in, albeit nonfunctional. The dismemberment function returned in February 2016, complete with circular saw.
  • This trope also loosely applies to the instrument case in the gym's storage room, which Ayano can use to store a sedated victim for transportation.
• Declaration of Protection: Megami Saikou in the Rival Introduction Video vows to keep Senpai safe from whoever is stalking him.
• Defacement Insult: Lower a girl's reputation to the point where the entire school hates her, and her desk will be defaced with horrible insults and calls for her to kill herself.
• Deliberate Values Dissonance: Inevitable, considering this is a game about a Yandere murderer in a Japanese high school made by an American. Some notable examples are the types of Japanese bullying, the creepy character archetypes (Kuu Dere and Oka Ruto are good examples), and the short skirts the schoolgirls wear.^note Real Japanese school uniform skirts are about knee-length or so, though individual girls have been known to hem them up shorter. Prior to the mid-90's, they were calf- or even ankle-length.
• Deliberate VHS Quality: 1980s mode uses a VHS filter for the screen. The different effects can be enabled and disabled in the video settings.
• Dem Bones: The "Spooky Mode" Easter Egg turns every female student into a skeleton (while keeping their hairstyles intact). Originally, this was accompanied with a remix of Andrew Gold's "Spooky Scary Skeletons" playing in the background, but that music has since been replaced with a soundalike.
• Demonic Possession:
  • An Easter Egg, added in the "Perfectly Normal"^note (February 21st 2016) build. One of the demons in the void room, The Horror, has a Ghostly Gape and stumps for arms. Talking to it reveals its arms were cut off, and it wants revenge. Dismembering five students^†(although most players murder the Occult Club members for this trick, it doesn't actually matter who the students are) and placing their severed arms inside the Occult Club room's sacred circle will satisfy The Horror and cause it to possess Yan-chan, with ten demonic arms sprouting up from the floor around her. Anyone (other than Senpai) who gets slashed by the demon's claws is instantly dismembered.
  • Later on, the ritual to summon the Flame Demon was added. To pull it off, you have to heat up a knife with a blowtorch and kill a student inside of the Occult Club's ritual circle. At this point, the Flame Demon will agree to give you "a taste of his power." Use the flaming knife he gifts you to murder five students, and drag their charred bodies into the ritual circle, and he will finally grant you his full power. Yan-chan will then gain a long grey dress and begin to float above the ground, holding two orbs of fire that she can use to incinerate anyone she likes — even Senpai.
  • The latest demonic ritual to be added is the one that allows you to summon the Empty Demon. In order to do this one, you must murder all the school club leaders and drag their bodies into the ritual circle. Once you do this, the club leaders will be replaced by the Placeholder Club Leaders from earlier builds, and Ayano will gain the ability to sic a horde of them on anyone she chooses.
• Destroy the Evidence: Tossing corpses, murder weapons, and bloody clothes into an incinerator and burning them, as well as mopping up the blood left behind, prevents the cops from linking Yan-chan to any crimes. However, if multiple students disappear in rapid succession, they will become increasingly suspicious.
• Despair Event Horizon: Any girl you torture will eventually cross this, leading to them becoming your mindslave. Ayano herself crosses this if she is prevented from romancing Senpai — i.e., you get a game over. Snap Mode is what happens after she's crossed the line and lost her sanity completely. It's… not pretty.
• Developer's Foresight:
  • It's unlikely that you would kidnap a girl and then frame her for murder while she's in the instrument case. But if the cops are called when that happens, the end-of-day text reveals that they found the girl asleep in the case and assumed she hid in there to avoid the authorities. Similarly, if the cops show up for any reason and you have a tranq'd girl in the instrument case, they will find her (she'll have no idea how she got there), and you'll be arrested if you didn't incinerate the syringe.
  • It's unlikely that the school day would end during the five seconds between when a mindslave kills your rival and when she kills herself, but if that happens, the investigation text will say that the police arrested the mindslave.
  • All the members of the Martial Arts and Sports Clubs have Heroic personas. Therefore, if a Martial Arts or Sports Club member catches you committing murder, they will usually either give you a Game Over, or die in the process of trying to restrain you. However, if you manage to find a way to avoid the struggle minigame, then attempt to join their club the next day, the club leader will have unique quotes explaining why you can't join.
    Budo: [if a member saw Ayano killing] It's hard to say this, but… one of our members has a big problem with you. To avoid conflict, I can't allow you to join this club. I'm very sorry.
    Budo: [if he personally saw Ayano killing] You are not welcome here! Leave at once!
    Itachi: [if a member saw Ayano killing] Ugh, I hate this stupid high school drama crap. Look, somebody in this club has a problem with you, so you can't join. This isn't up for debate, so just leave.
    Itachi: [if he personally saw Ayano killing] You're lucky I'm not snapping your neck right where you stand. Get out of here.
  • Some club presidents will be romantic rivals. ^note Specifically the leaders of the Cooking Club, Drama Club, Occult Club, and Sports Club. They will not appear before their designated week, but the other members will still be present and the club will still function. If a rival's club is disbanded before their week, a cutscene will play where the president discovers the fate of her club.
  • Using mods or rapid-fire teleportation in the debug builds to glitch into the Info Club room results in Info-chan shouting at you to "Get Out!" before resetting the week (or crashing the game depending on the build).
  • You can send Info-chan pictures of anything that triggers a camera flag. For example, sending her a picture of the kitten behind the school will have her say one of two things depending on the build.
    "Cute, but I have no use for this."
    "Why are you showing me this? I don't care."
  • In Mission Mode, you have the option of being hunted down by a character named Nemesis. It's unlikely that you'll manage to take a good picture of her face, given that the ideal distance to do so is nearly the same as the distance where she can take you down, and the "face" icon used to indicate that Info-chan has something to tell you about that character doesn't light up for Nemesis. However, should you do so anyway, Info-chan has up to five different messages about her, along with one for a disguised Nemesis. And yes, you can take a picture of her panties, which gets a unique response depending on the build.
    "How peculiar. I don't recognize these panties." (December 2016 – July 2017)
    "Wait… I recognize those panties! This person is extremely dangerous! Avoid her at all costs!" (July 2017 – present)
  • Nobody in their right mind would walk into their own electrified booby trap. If you do so, you get electrocuted into a coma.
• Devious Daggers: One of the main weapons Yan-chan can use, due to its concealability and accessibility, are knives, and the most frequently used weapon in update videos. Compared to the katana, the knife is Boring, but Practical. Obviously, a knife isn't as cool as a katana. However, unlike the katana, Yan-chan can hide the knife in her inventory, keeping it on her person hidden from sight until an opportune moment presents itself. In addition, the katana can only be found in a locked case in the Headmaster's office. You'll have to wait until he leaves the room and then steal the key from his desk to get it. On the other hand, you can find a knife lying on the counter in the Cooking Club, or — at least for development builds — on the roof, right next to a mop, bucket, utility sink, and Midori Gurin. Has achieved Memetic Mutation status with Yandere Simulator LPer Jay from the Kubz Scouts' iconic phrase, "Take this knifu... and end your lifu!"
• Dies Wide Open: Corpses in this game are not programmed to close their eyes; instead, they develop Wide Eyes and Shrunken Irises and stare lifelessly into space.
• Dismembering the Body: A dead body can be hacksawed into pieces so it fits in a cello case for concealment, and likely disposal. Doing this, though pragmatic, is seriously messed up and will take a toll on Yandere-chan's Sanity Meter.
• Disposing of a Body:
  • Kill someone, and you'll probably need to do this. Leaving a dead body lying around can quickly spell Game Over unless you get rid of your weapon, bloody clothes, and any blood puddles, wash off, and calm yourself down.
  • Averted if you perform a bloodless kill, such as poisoning, electrocution, or pushing off the roof. So long as you don't disturb the body afterwards, the death will be presumed an accident or suicide.
• Disappeared Dad: According to the Journalist's tapes, at least one student in the school (his daughter) has this. This is because Ryoba, the yandere the Journalist was chasing after, is now the one chasing him, thus driving him out of the country.
• Dissonant Serenity:
  • YandereDev has a habit of talking about subjects such as stalking, murder, and disposing of corpses in a calm, soothing voice.
    • Like this gem from the aftermath of his (first) e-mail related breakdown…
      "Gee, you're right, green-haired girl. It's time for me to get back to what I'm good at: murdering schoolgirls in horrific ways."
    • Another great example is from the "Kidnapping"^note (October 17th, 2015) update, where he talks about the mechanics of torture.
      "As you can see, our prisoner is no longer watching us as we move around the room, and she's no longer twitching either. This is because we have completely destroyed her mind. There are no traces of a human left inside of her. She's permanently broken, forever. …Let's bring her to school!"
  • The default music is bright, calming, and upbeat, as befitting a game about brutally murdering innocent schoolgirls. The music does become distorted and creepy as Yandere-chan loses sanity, and it will take on a more somber tone if School Atmosphere drops too low. However, you can run through the school taking panty shots, stalking your crush, framing your enemies for crimes, fighting delinquents with your bare fists, sedating students and shoving them in an instrument case to be kidnapped, gossiping about people until they're bullied into suicide, summoning demons, and deliberately ruining friendships, all while cheerful Dating Sim music plays in the background.
  • If you join the Occult Club (which causes you to lose less sanity) and wear the sanity buff panties, you can murder as many people as you like without losing any sanity at all, meaning that the music will stay bouncy and pleasant even as you pile bodies in the hallways.
  • Yan-chan wears a look of pure contentment while she uses a circular saw to dismember a corpse.
• The Dragon:
  • Info-chan, your friendly neighborhood sociopathic Knowledge Broker! Getting her to do you favors is key to some of the sneakier strategies.
  • Umeji, the second-in-command of the Delinquents, serves as this to your rival Osoro.
  • The Student Council are the Co-Dragons to your final rival, Megami.
• Driven to Suicide:
  • You can cause any of your classmates to commit suicide if you damage their reputation sufficiently through malicious gossip. However, only rivals will have a unique suicide cutscene; any other student whose reputation is sabotaged enough to drive them to suicide will just stop coming to school… permanently.
  • What Yan-chan can make a murder scene look like. If she takes the right precautions (not interacting with the body, doing this when both characters are alone, leaving a suicide note including her "reason" for committing suicide, etc.), then she can get away with murder.
  • After a student is completely broken through torture, they can be given a weapon and commanded to kill a student. After the deed is done, they'll proceed to turn the weapon on themselves.
• Dull Eyes of Unhappiness: In 1980s mode, students who are sent to the Yakuza for ransom will return to school with colourless eyes, and their personality changed to coward.
• Dynamic Difficulty: It's called "School Atmosphere" here. People going missing will lower it a little; students discovering corpses, blood, or unexplained suicides will lower it a lot, thus making the game more difficult as they become increasingly paranoid. Killing more students after this will darken the school further, increasing the students' lines of sight, making them more easily scared, and causing them to be more difficult to stealthily deal with. If a student catches you acting dangerous at this point, your reputation will take a nose-dive, meaning that students will be suspicious of you — including, if your reputation drops low enough, Senpai. A week of peace (or someone else being arrested for the murder) will raise the atmosphere again.
• Easter Egg: Both traditional and what might be better termed "cheats"…
  • For the latter, the debug builds have several, accessed via a secret menu, all of which mess with the game in various funny or scary ways for the rest of the day. Whether any of these will remain in the final game (since Word of God insists the debug menu itself won't) remains to be seen; YandereDev has proposed allowing the player to enter cheat codes at the title screen, but whether this will actually happen is still up in the air. If it does get implemented, using any cheat codes would, of course, prevent you from winning the game or earning achievements. See the Trivia page for more information on specific Easter Eggs and cheats.
  • There are others, more correctly called Easter Eggs this time, that the player can only see by messing with the game files in certain builds. Again, see the Trivia page for more information.
  • Certain characters have been called "Easter Eggs" by the wiki, although they're really either Expies (Pippi, Ryuto, Kuu) or inside jokes (Mai, Midori). The Phantom Girl (Sumire Saitozaki), however, really is an Easter Egg. The only reference to her in-game outside 1980s mode is obliquely in the Journalist's Tapes (which are not required listening), and you wouldn't even know she's there unless you either learned from someone else how to see her or lucked into it.
  • The title screen normally shows a cheerful scene of Yandere-chan smiling under the cherry trees on a sunny day. Every so often, it will distort and momentarily shift so that Ayano is bloody and holding a knife, and the background is full of bodies — and then immediately flicker back to the cheerful "normal" title screen. However, if you press "L", you're treated to an alternate title screen concept — which looks a lot more like the horror game it actually is.
• Electricity Knocks You Out: Electrocution can be done in different methods using water and an electrical source, but all of them have the same outcome: kill the other students or render Yandere Chan unconscious.
• Else World: As noted above, "Mission Mode" takes place in an alternate continuity where Yan-chan is a Professional Killer rather than a Yandere.
• Empty Eyes:
  • Originally, when Yandere-Vision was active, Ayano's eyes would lose their highlights. Now they glow red when using Yandere-Vision, and instead lose their highlights when she loses sanity.
  • Once you've tortured a student to their breaking point, they'll have these.
  • Musume Ronshaku will get these after being released from captivity even if she isn't tortured, because the whole experience traumatizes her.
• Escort Distraction: Making friends or having a high seduction stat allows you to ask this of other students. Asking a student to "Distract" another character causes the student to pull the other character into a conversation about romance, clearing the way for whatever illegal activities Yandere-chan might need to perform in that area.
• Et Tu, Brute?: The Betrayal elimination method, which involves becoming friends with a rival. First, you must do a small favor for her to gain her trust, then do a much larger favor to earn her loyalty. After that, you will invite her to Yan-chan's house, where Yan-chan can "Eliminate" her. This is especially cruel, since at that point, you can simply ask her not to confess to Senpai… to which she'll agree, because she's so grateful to you for helping her.
• Even Evil Has Standards:
  • The delinquents are trouble-making bullies who try to goad people into fighting them; however, they will chase you down and relentlessly attack if they witness you murdering someone or carrying a dead body, until they either take you down or die in the process.
  • In the second intro, Yan-chan is openly disgusted with Info-chan's modus operandi. (This particular cutscene has not been updated yet, so it's not clear if this is still true.)
  • Info-chan won't accept panty shots of corpses or unconscious girls — though that may also just mean that she knows better than to keep such incriminating photos for such a… niche market.
  • In the debug builds, if you choose to take the Befriend/Betray route with Kokona, the test rival, Yan-chan will sound audibly disgusted upon hearing that Kokona's father is being extorted by loan sharks. And for a supposedly emotionless psychopath, her tone of voice when she says that she's going to get him out of debt sounds an awful lot like Tranquil Fury.
• Even the Girls Want Her: The Seduction stat gives you special benefits when interacting with male students — making them more likely to trust you, allowing you to manipulate them into doing favors for you, etc. If you max out your Seduction, all of those benefits then apply to female students as well.
• Even the Loving Hero Has Hated Ones: If Senpai, the resident Nice Guy, catches Yandere-chan doing something terrible (i.e. killing someone), he will hate her, triggering an instant Game Over.
• Evil Laugh: The laugh button, if pressed enough times in rapid succession, will cause Yan-chan to let out a maniacal cackle that blows off steam and restores sanity. This is necessary^†(though note that it's not the only way to regain sanity; you can also "use" photos you've taken of Senpai, which is actually quicker and won't hurt your reputation like laughing will) because if students see you looking visibly insane, they'll know something's up and your reputation will plummet; if a teacher sees you like that, it's to the Guidance Counselor with you; if Senpai sees you, Game Over.
• Extended Disarming: Before the rap battle between Osana and Ayano starts, Midori insists that Ayano drop her weapons. (there's enough weapons to fill a grave) ALL of them. (cue chainsaw)

F-G

• Failed a Spot Check:
  • In the debug builds before March 2019, NPCs did not notice puddles of blood. So if you dragged a corpse out of sight before a teacher got there, she'd assume the student who alerted her to the murder was playing a prank… even if she was looking at a massive trail of blood leading right to you and the corpse. (You'd still get the five-minute timer to clean up the scene if another student managed to contact the cops, though, and they would notice any blood puddles you failed to mop up.)
  • Dismemberment was implemented in early 2016, but was only done halfway. As a result, until March 2019, NPCs did not react to dismembered body parts unless Yan-chan carried one within their cone of vision (at which point they would react as if they'd seen her carrying a corpse). At the end of the day, a teacher would notice a "blood stain" and call the cops, but they didn't notice the body parts either.
    • The reason for this was that individual body parts are not coded as a corpse, and what programming they did have at the time was slipshod at best. For the first several builds after Dismemberment was added, a clean and sane Yan-chan could literally walk into the middle of a group of students (or her classroom) carrying a severed head and no one would bat an eye.
  • If you kill someone and take a photo (or several) of the scene, but get rid of any physical evidence tying you to the deed, the cops won't check your phone. Early on in development, YandereDev stated that incriminating photos would eventually get you in trouble, but it hasn't been mentioned in a while, making it unclear whether this will actually be added.
    • Until April 2019, the police didn't check dead students' phones either. (After April 2019, you now have to destroy a dead student's phone if they've taken an incriminating picture of you.)
  • Yan-chan will not be suspected for poisoning a student… even if she is practically standing on top of the corpse, laughing like a madwoman, when it is discovered. (Instead, she'll be sent to the guidance counselor for "acting like a clown" — the same thing that happens any time you are Laughing Mad in front of a teacher.)
    • Averted if you try to drag the poisoned corpse away after a teacher sees it. She will (correctly) assume that Yan-chan committed murder and give chase.
  • Students in a high atmosphere school are not particularly observant, often failing to notice that Yan-chan is armed or hear a victim's screams unless they're very close by. This is, of course, realistic, as without any reason to believe otherwise, most people assume that they're perfectly safe at school.
    • Averted in low atmosphere, where students become more observant as paranoia sets in, gaining larger cones of vision and noticing screams from further away. They will even turn around if they hear you behind them, as low atmosphere setting in means that the whole school is aware that there's a serial killer on the loose.
  Student: Your footsteps scared me…
• Failure Is the Only Option: As the debug builds are made just to test out features and check for bugs, they have no win condition. The ostensible win condition, "kill or otherwise deter all 10 rivals and win Senpai's heart", can be started but not finished, as only your first rival, Osana Najimi, appears in the game as of August 31st, 2020.^note The debug builds have, over their course, contained a couple of "test rivals" or other characters who have some attributes of a rival, but none of them have been official rivals, and even if you kill the test rival, the Friday cutscene still states that your (currently only Osana) rival confessed to Senpai unimpeded. But as of the current build, you can at least get a new cutscene featuring Amai if you eliminate Osana.
• Fan Disservice:
  • A major gameplay mechanic involves photographing high school girls' panties. This squicked many people out and was one of the primary reasons for people filing YouTube takedowns and the game getting banned on Twitch. Eventually, an alternative way to gain favors from Info-chan was implemented, where you can place listening bugs in important spots instead. The panty shot mechanic is still in the game, but you no longer have to use it if you want to work with Info-chan.
  • Because all the girls wear short skirts, it's inevitable they'll flash the camera if you kill them because of how you move their corpses (dragging them by an arm or leg). Don't bother taking photos, though. Info-chan's customers are perverts, not necrophiles.
  • The giant naked Titans from the eponymous cheat. They were originally giant naked versions of the existing students, but with Barbie Doll Anatomy. In an attempt to get Yandere Simulator un-banned from Twitch, the dev reskinned them as skinless Titans, exposing their muscles. It's... rather less attractive.
• Fanservice:
  • Female students will strip nude (though they appear wrapped in a towel) in the locker room before bathing. Yan-chan can too… and go on a Full-Frontal Assault. Or at least she could; as of June 2018, it is no longer possible to leave the locker room while nude. It is unknown whether a more elegant solution will be put in place before the final game.
  • Male students (specifically, the members of the Sports Club) will also use the locker room to change, and presumably strip nude as well. However, Yan-chan is not allowed to go into the boys' locker room — at the moment, an invisible wall holds her back, though this may be changed. If you cheat your way into the boys' locker room, you can see that the male students actually just teleport into their new clothes — as you're not technically supposed to be able to see them, there was no reason to animate their changing. However, the dev has suggested that in the future, Ayano may be able to go into the boys' locker room to spy on Senpai.
  • Many of the female characters are extraordinarily well-endowed. Yan-chan can be too if you mess with her model.
  • The girls wear short skirts, and taking upskirt photos is a core mechanic.
  • The Guidance Counselor was specifically designed with sex appeal in mind. Her character model is very busty and gifted in other areas as well, with a very short pencil skirt, shirt unbuttoned halfway down, pantyhose, and heels.
• Fantastic Drug: "The Senpai Effect", the condition that the Aishi women have, turns their object of affection into this according to the "What If The Aishi Family Replaced the Imperial Family?" video. From the first time they interact with them, each Aishi's specific senpai allows them to finally feel emotion that it turns into an immediate physical and psychological dependency, which fuels their murderous actions towards anything that threatens to take them away.
• Felony Misdemeanor: The causes for the Expulsion elimination method are usually extremely minor things. These run the gamut between taking panty shots, smoking, cheating on tests, minor theft, or simply kicking a(n obviously-malfunctioning) vending machine, things that would net the offending student a stern talking-to, detention, or family information at worst in reality. Granted, Expulsion runs on a five-strikes basis, so the player must go out of their way to paint their target as a repeat offender for it to happen.
• First-Person Snapshooter: A primary gameplay mechanic. Pictures that Yan-chan takes can be texted to Info-chan for information on students, or in exchange for favors if they are upskirts. Pictures of Senpai can be also be taken and then "used" to restore sanity.
• Flaming Sword: Downplayed as it's a knife rather than a sword. If you heat up the ritual knife with a blowtorch and put it in the skull in the Occult Club's room, the Flame Demon will offer Yan-chan "a taste of [his] power" by setting the knife on fire. Stabbing people with the burning knife will set them on fire, causing them to burn to death.
• Food Coma: All the rivals from 1980s mode state that they sometimes fall asleep after eating too much.
• Frame-Up:
  • One way you can eliminate a rival is to frame her for a murder that you committed. You can do this by using gloves to hide your fingerprints and using a weapon that your victim has used, usually after manipulating your victim into using that weapon. You obviously need to dispose of your gloves and bloody clothes after committing the murder.
    • Currently, there are two ways to manipulate a student into handling a weapon that can be used to frame them. The first way is to stick a box cutter into an unopened box, and then ask for help removing it, claiming that it got stuck. The second way is to drop any of the non-suspicious weapons (screwdriver, box cutter, dumbbell, etc.) on the ground where a student will find it. If a student finds a weapon that is not considered suspicious, they will pick it up with their bare hands and put it back where it belongs, thus allowing Yan-chan to frame them.
  • The "Expulsion" mechanic requires Yan-chan to report her rival for breaking school rules five times throughout the week. Three of these offenses (possessing contraband, theft, and cheating) require Yan-chan to acquire and plant incriminating evidence on the student or in their bag. Another one (taking panty shots) involves stealing their phone to take the picture. If enough rivals are eliminated this way, Senpai will develop a negative opinion of women.
  • The rather complex "Sabotage" elimination method has elements of this. For example, Osana Najimi wants to take some photos to show Senpai. You can steal her phone, take a panty shot, then let her find her phone; she'll take a pretty photo if she can, but Senpai will look through her gallery and he'll be disgusted with her if he finds an upskirt.
  • Heavily Implied by the headmaster that he framed a random student for Ryoba's crime, remarking that since he lost a few decades of his life on Akademi, he doesn't have much of a future to look forward to.
• Freeze-Frame Bonus:
  • At the starting menu, the shot of Yan-chan standing with a stoic expression can occasionally switch into one where she's holding a knife, her clothes are bloodied, the sky is dark, and there are dead bodies in the background.
  • If you manage to linger on a student's phone screen long enough, there are interesting and funny tidbits from the in-game social media.
  • The box of garbage bags in the school closet has three words on it, and they can be seen if you take a photo. They are "building", "murdering your rich husband", and "disposing of your rivals rawr xd".
• Friend to Psychos:
  • Info-chan, although she's not really Yan-chan's friend so much as they are mutually exploiting one another.
  • If a Spiteful student happens to hold a grudge against another character, and they witness Yan-chan murder that student, they won't alert the authorities.
  Borupen: They deserved it! Don't worry... I won't tell anyone what I saw.
  • The delinquents, who normally avert this (and will beat Yan-chan into a coma if they see her killing someone), play it straight if they witness Yan-chan murder one of the bullies, who in the past, bullied them to the point of considering a suicide pact before becoming delinquents to protect themselves. We don't yet know what exactly they did — only that it was responsible for their facial scars and Gaku's broken arm. If the delinquents see a bully killed, they will respond like a Spiteful student.
  Umeji: The world's a better place now.
• From Nobody to Nightmare: Ayano was this before the start of the game. Sure, she's a sociopath, but before she met Senpai, she was perfectly alright with just plodding along, not bothering anyone. That all changes one fine day when she meets Senpai, and it's all downhill from there; she can do anything from blackmail to murder to torture-into-insanity. (This is, of course, in no way Taro's fault; if not him, it would have been some other poor soul who became the object of her fixation.)
• Funny Background Event: In the "Expelling Your Rivals" video, Kokona dies multiple times in the background, with YandereDev simply ignoring all of them.
• Furnace Body Disposal: The school incinerator in the back of the school.
• Game Over:
  • Losing Senpai to another girl (i.e. failing to take out your rival by Friday evening).
  • Allowing Senpai to notice you. It is very easy for this to happen, and includes…
    • Harassing him too much (this generally means acting clingy and creepy around him, as Yan-chan gets extremely weird when she's too close to her Senpai).
    • Letting him see you performing yandere actions like having a weapon out, murdering someone, being covered in blood, indulging in an Evil Laugh, crouching or crawling when its not necesary, or looking visibly insane. Taking panty shots in front of him isn't a good idea either.
    • Some of the rivals have the "Lovestruck" persona, and will run towards Senpai if they spot a murder or a corpse. If allowed to do the former, they will tell him about what you did and cause a Game Over.
  • If a teacher or the nurse sees you being yandere – murdering a student, trying to dispose of a corpse, or cleaning up evidence of a crime - they will give you chase, and if you forgot to level up your Physical Education stat they will pin you down and cause a game over. Taking panty shots, having blood on your clothes, carrying a weapon, looking visibly insane, letting out an Evil Laugh or being in place you are not supposed to be after being told to leave five times will get you sent to the Guidance Counselor (where there is a risk of a Game Over if you don't successfully weasel out of punishment).
    • While the Guidance Counselor sequence contains dialogue options you can use to get out of punishment, she will only accept each of them a certain number of times — meaning that being sent to her office enough times will eventually lead to a Game Over via expulsion no matter what you say. If you choose to threaten her in order to escape punishment, you will instantly be expelled from the school.
  • Letting the police find enough incriminating evidence (bodies, blood, murder weapons, bloody clothes) will lead to you being arrested. This also happens if you do dispose of all the evidence but are still visibly insane when they arrive. They'll take you in due to your erratic behavior, and the text states that they will soon find out about your crime. ^note Although the dev has said in the past that incriminating photos are also a no-no, there is no indication that the cops ever search your phone. Whether that appears later in development remains to be seen.
  • If at least 5 different witnesses come forward saying that you committed the murder, you will be arrested even if you cleaned up all the evidence.
  • If your reputation score drops low enough, it will be impossible to raise it and Senpai will reject you on sight^note (this is also one of the methods of dealing with a rival). If School Atmosphere is low, being caught performing Yandere actions will cause your reputation to rapidly plummet.
  • Letting School Atmosphere drop low enough will drive the Photography Club to sleuth out the killer haunting their school. If they catch on to you, they will follow you around constantly until they can catch you in the act. And if they manage to snap a photo of you in the middle of a murder, they'll immediately send it to the police, ending your game.
  • If you commit murder in front of teachers, students with Heroic personalities, or those close to the deceased, they will attempt to physically apprehend you, triggering a mini-game where you grapple for control of whatever weapon Yan-chan is holding. If you fail the mini-game, are not holding a weapon when confronted, or are holding an unsuitable weapon^†(any two-handed weapon – katana, bat, shovel, axe, magical girl wand, or circular saw; also, the dumbbell is unsuitable despite being one-handed because it has no blade) when confronted, you will be detained and arrested.
    • If you commit murder in front of at least 4 people, regardless of their personalities, they will gang up on you and instantly pin you down.
  • Normally, if you provoke a delinquent into a fight, he will back off once you are too injured to continue fighting, and walk off while taunting you about losing. But if a delinquent witnesses you murdering someone, he will attack you without holding back, meaning that losing the quick time event enough times will cause him to knock Yan-chan unconscious, before calling the police.
  • Step into one of your own electrified booby traps, and you'll receive exactly what you'd expect.
• Gameplay Grading: 1980's mode features this at the end when Ryoba's on trial for the murder of one or more of the girls.
• Game Within a Game: At night, you'll have the opportunity to play video games on Yan-chan's console, including Yanvania: Senpai of the Night or a Magical Girl: Pretty Miyuki bullet hell.
• Gang Up on the Human: Heroic and Strict characters will not try to restrain brainwashed characters due to the difficulties in programming such interactions. (The in-universe explanation is that a student who has been tortured into mindlessness is so clearly and frighteningly wrong that no one is brave enough to take them on.)
• Glasses Are Sexy: Some of the rivals, including Osana, find boys with glasses attractive. This information is important for the Matchmaking elimination method.
• Goodbye, Cruel World!: Yan-chan can plant a fake one by her rival's shoes if her language skill is high enough. Doing so will prevent the police from viewing the death as suspicious.
• Gone Horribly Right: A meta-example. YandereDev once claimed that development was being slowed down by the torrents of dumb emails he had to read. This was actually done to discourage the primarily-younger fans from clogging his inbox, but it ended up causing people to think he does absolutely nothing but respond to emails all day, and even increased the amount of said stupid emails. He later clarified that the emails aren't actually a problem for the game's development.
• Gory Discretion Shot: Zig-zagged. When Yan-chan dismembers a corpse, the camera focuses on her face as she is doing the deed, not showing the actual dismemberment in progress. The aftermath of her handiwork, however, is shown afterwards. ^note The "cinematic camera" function allows you to see the dismembering… Yan-chan's position rarely lines up with the corpse's, making it look like she's cutting air.
• Gray Is Useless: Unavailable chat options when talking to people have the buttons grayed out.
• Greater-Scope Villain: Yan-chan's mother Ryoba Aishi, an experienced and successful yandere herself who deliberately worked to make Yan-chan into who she is today.
• Group-Identifying Feature: All Clubs have their own accessories. Usually Signature Headgear:
  • Light Music Club: All of them are girls and have a different music-themed hairclip and carry musical insutrument cases with them.
  • Art Club members all wear berets.
  • Cooking Club members all wear aprons and kerchiefs.
  • Drama Club: All of them have purple hair and wear red roses on their hair or clothes as accessories.
  • Occult Club: All of them have black hair and cover one of their eyes (except for the leader and the substitute leader).
  • Gardening Club: All of them are girls who wear flowers on their hair and carry a watering can.
  • Gaming Club members all wear a red bandana (Ryuto and Gema wear it as a headband, Mai wears it as a bow, Pippi wears it as a neckerchief, and Midori has hers wrapped around her phone).
  • Sports Club: All of them are boys (except for the club president) who wear swimming goggles.
  • Science Club: They all have greyish hair and wear lab coats while class is not in session.
  • Martial Arts Club: All of them wear headbands and wear Martial Arts gi when practising.
  • Photography Club: All of them wear a camera around their neck.
  • The Student Council girls all wear a white blazer regardless of uniform customization.
  • The Delinquents are all boys (except for their leader) who have bleached blonde hair and carry bags with weapons in them.
  • The Bullies are a group of five girls who have fake tans, bleached blonde hair, wear tied jackets around their waist and always carry their customized bookbags around.
• Guide Dang It!:
  • YandereDev himself has repeatedly mentioned that the game has a problem with this. Many of the elimination methods, and even some basic gameplay features, are highly complex and nearly impossible to figure out, unless you're subscribed to the Dev's YouTube channel. To make matters worse, it is possible to be misled by early videos. A very early look at sanity in the game shows Yan-chan killing several people and then standing in Senpai's aura to calm down… which is still technically possible, but in later builds will earn you an immediate Game Over if Senpai sees her bloody and insane; you'd need to be in his aura but out of his field of vision. ^note Now nearly impossible as the size of Senpai's aura was decreased by half in January 2017.
  • However, over the past year or so, the Dev has put a lot of work into decreasing instances of this. Many mechanics have been adjusted to be less complex, and several different ways of learning about mechanics in-game have been implemented. Tutorial windows from Info-chan have been implemented that pop up when a player triggers a certain gameplay state (such as damaging their reputation) for the first time. For the price of a few panty shot or a smattering of blackmail material, it is now possible to purchase instructions for various complex elimination methods from Info-chan's "Schemes" menu, and to watch anime in Yan-chan's room that provides "inspiration" for others. In the future, there will be a full, scripted tutorial to explain the game's basic mechanics.
  • Schemes are a thorough inversion, giving you step-by-step instructions to achieving important goals like killing off rivals. They're easily purchased and basically walk you through the means to the end, but any deviation from the scheme causes it to go awry.

H-K

• Hammerspace: Yan-chan can pull weapons and her smartphone out of thin air while naked. YandereDev's explanation is that "women have more hiding places than men."
• Harder Than Hard:
  • YandereDev has proposed allowing Yan-chan to join two different groups on opposite sides of school life – the Delinquents and the Student Council. Joining the Delinquents forces Yan-chan's reputation into the low scores and prevents it from rising into neutral zones or higher, potentially locking her out of certain school activities and making others more wary of her actions. Joining the Student Council saddles Yan-chan with a lot of extra responsibilities, and any misbehavior would get her kicked out immediately. Both are optional, and will likely carry powerful benefits to make up for it.
    • The ability to join the Delinquents was finally added in August 2019. In order to pull it off, you first have to have a low reputation, dye your hair blonde (which takes money), and then defeat every one of the delinquents in a fight. Then, each of the delinquents will offer you a task to prove your worthiness to join their gang. These tasks are generally much harder than those offered by regular students: for example, one delinquent wants you to bring him a knife, which, while obtaining a knife is relatively easy, will bring your reputation down even further if anyone sees you with it. Another delinquent wants you to bring him $100, which will take you some time to earn in the maid cafe minigame. Finally, when you have done a task for every one of the delinquents, you can finally join their gang. Doing so grants you the ability to intimidate any student into doing favors for you, without befriending them first. Because being friends with students unlocks powerful benefits, joining the delinquents is more than a little OP — if you can pull it off.
  • Killing a Student Council member sets the school atmosphere to its absolute lowest the next day, with incredibly stringent security measures all across the campus. YandereDev likens the consequences to raising the difficulty level to its highest possible setting.
• Hate Sink:
  • Midori Gurin is meant to be one of these. She's a Take That! at everyone who sends YandereDev unwanted questions or suggestions. All the other characters — especially the teachers — consider her an annoying idiot who wastes their time, and many development videos featuring her end with her being killed by either Ayano or YandereDev himself. However, depending on one's sympathy (or lack thereof) for YandereDev regarding his e-mail situation, she may instead come off as a poor victim or an Unpopular Popular Character.
  • There are Asshole Victims aplenty in this game that Yan-chan can murder only to further get closer to her Senpai, but at least YandereDev designed them to be despicable for the general standards that they fit into this. Standouts include the bully leader Musume Ronshaku, who does everything on the bully notes with a glee, has plans to backstab her fellow posse when things go south, and happily indulges in Slut-Shaming and Victim-Blaming on Kokona when she realized that Kokona has been roped into Compensated Dating to pay off her father's loans coming from Musume's own father so she could buy off anything she wanted. Or one of your Ephebophile rival substitute teacher Mida Rana, who abuses her position of power to seduce younger students.
• Head Crushing: One way you can defeat your rivals is by crushing them. You increase your strength stat first, then you fill a bucket with weights. Thirdly, you put a note in the person's locker signalling that they need to meet you at the front of the school. Then you go to the rooftop and drop the bucket over their unsuspecting head.
• Heartbeat Soundtrack: Whenever you're in the vicinity of Senpai, your heartbeat can be heard in the background.
• Heartbroken Badass: Budo Masuta, the leader of the Martial Arts Club and one of the strongest students in the game. He originally joined the club in order to impress Raibaru Fumetsu, the original club leader. When he challenged her to a fighting match and won, she promptly quit the club, leaving him heartbroken. To this day, he changes the subject any time someone brings her up.
• Heart Symbol:
  • The game's logo includes several of them, as does the title screen.
  • Hearts will float above the head of any student you seduce... even after you murder them.
  • If a rival passes by another student that has a quality they are fond of, they may look at them and give off little hearts.
• He Cleans Up Nicely: One of the tasks involves asking the bullies why they don't seem to like the leader of the Gaming Club, who wants to ask one of them on a date but can't seem to get them to give him the time of day. They all mention things about his appearance, like his hair and posture. Upon hearing this, the next day he takes the criticisms to heart and cleans himself up. The consequence of this is that all of the bullies, instead of sunbathing by the pool like they normally would, will instead spend their lunch breaks fawning over him.
• Hereditary Curse: Every woman of the Aishi family is born without the ability to feel any emotions whatsoever. Until, that is, they meet a man who they become increadibly emotionally attached to. From then on, their one and only focus in life is to posess that man by any means necessary. Whether he is willing or not.
• Hero Antagonist: There are many people in the game who would love to bring a murderer to justice. This includes the Photography Club, the teachers, anyone with a Heroic persona, any personal enemies Yan-chan makes, and the Journalist from the tapes (though he's more the Hero Antagonist Of Another Story).
• Hero of Another Story:
  • Senpai. Granted, he seems the oblivious fool at times, but imagine the story told from a different perspective – A young man has led a blessed life. He has a best friend he's known since childhood, a little sister who clearly thinks the world of him, he attends a prestigious academy at which he seems to excel, and has the tendency to make friends wherever he goes. For some strange reason, they're mostly women, but that's not a problem. Then one day, those friends start disappearing, or they ditch him without explanation, or they die. Even the sister who loved nothing more than sticking to him like velcro. To top it all off, it's starting to feel like somebody's stalking him.
  • If taken only a little further, it wouldn't take all that much digging to see that this has happened in this school before. Even someone as dense as our hero seems to be isn't immune to simple human reasoning, and once a pattern is pointed out, the human mind naturally follows it. This same story has been playing out throughout recent history, as all women of Ayano's bloodline have been just like her. So, once the young man sees what's been going on, even if he has no idea who or what is responsible, he would begin to guess what's happening now and that he's next. And if he should happen to pick up one of those tapes which are laying around the school grounds...
• Hidden Badass: The teachers. They're easy for new players to underestimate; they look like normal, if a bit nerdy, bespectacled women. But not only can they expel you if they catch you acting yandere, but if you try to attack them with the wrong weapon or poor physical stats, they'll dodge the attack and have you pinned to the ground in a matter of seconds.
• High-Class Gloves: If she joins the Drama Club, Yan-chan can wear a pair of long opera gloves so that her fingerprints won't be on any weapons. However, her fingerprints and DNA will still be inside the glove, so you'll need to dispose of them along with any bloody clothes.
• High-Pressure Blood: Normally averted, as victims who are stabbed only squirt out small amounts of blood from their wound. However, when a mind slave kills herself, she will suddenly shoot out blood like a fountain from her neck for about five seconds before it stops.
• High-Voltage Death: Yan-chan can fatally electrocute a student by using a pipe wrench to create a leak in the water fountain and placing a plugged-in, sabotaged power strip in the puddle. Then all she has to do is give her victim a salty, dehydrating snack, and when they head to the water fountain, they step in the electrified puddle. However if she steps into her own electrified trap, she will simply fall into a coma.
  Unsuspecting Victim: Free food? Sure, I'll take one!
• Hollywood Drowning: Zig-Zagged. You have the option to drown your rivals in the courtyard fountain, the locker room bathtub, pool^†(this and the bathtub coming eventually™), or a toilet. Yes, the unfortunate victims do the stereotypical "thrash and scream," but, considering the context, this is much more realistic than such a reaction would be in an accidental drowning.
• Hot Blade: There's a trio of blowtorches in the Science Club; you can use one to cauterize wounds to minimize bleeding and thus cleanup. Naturally, you can also use them to heat up a knife. Doing this with the Ritual Knife is the first step in summoning the Flame Demon.
• Identical Stranger:
  • Every male student uses Senpai's base model. Before August 2015, they were just palette swaps of him with less robust AI. After August 2015, the boys developed different hairstyles just like the girls always had, but it wasn't until March 2019 that they gained unique faces.
  • Same can be said about the female students, who are all variants of the "Aoi Kiryu" character model (Yan-chan included) but with different hair/eye colours, hairstyles, and breast sizes.^note Technically, the Basu sisters are from a different asset pack – the "Succubus Twins" – but under the hood they're identical to the "Aoi Kiryu" asset model used for Yan-chan (and all the other girls).Info-chan used a unique model in the prototype opening, but her in-game model is the same as every other girl's.
  • Even the teachers used to look like an adult version of Yan-chan, except with brown hair and eyes. In fact, until early 2019, the only girls in the game whose faces were not simply Yan-chan's model with different irises were Rival-chan and Info-chan, the latter of whom is barely visible during normal gameplay.
  • YandereDev has repeatedly attempted to give characters differently-shaped eyes. It took a long time to work, and in the meantime, strange and terrifying bugs happened as a result. It wasn't until early 2019 that these attempts finally worked out.
  • In February 2019, all students finally got a unique face. Now in addition to having different eye colors, hair colors, hairstyles, bust sizes, and clothes, they have a variety of faces as well.
• An Ice Person: One Easter Egg turns Yan-chan into Cirno, an ice fairy from the Touhou Project series. In this mode, she can shoot ice beams that kill almost anyone they hit, including Senpai and the teachers. ^ExceptionsIce-Beams only work on characters with an AI and hitbox; that means Rival-chan, the old Nurse (before she was redesigned), Genka Kunihito, the Placeholder Club Leaders, and the Placeholder Delinquents are unaffected.
• Iconic Item: For ease of understanding which club a student is part of, they all have different items. The Cooking Club, for instance, all wear bandanas in their hair, while the Photography Club has large cameras worn around their necks.
• Idiosyncratic Difficulty Levels: The Alphabet Killer Challenge has different difficulty modes depending on how many cheat items have been used. When no cheat items are used, the difficulty is set to "Nightmare", but when all cheat items are used the difficulty is set to "Baby". The other difficulty modes are just "Extremily Hard", "Very Hard", "Hard", "Normal", "Easy", "Very Easy", and "Extremily Easy" though
• If I Can't Have You…: Ayano says this exact phrase to Senpai upon murdering him in SNAP mode.
• If It's You, It's Okay: An unusual twist on this trope. Aishi women will do anything for the person they've latched onto, including murder without hesitation. Morals and ethics and decency go out the window when their beloved is involved. And they've been doing this and getting away with it for at least seven generations.
• Ignorant About Fire:
  • If you splash a student with a bucket of gasoline and then flick a lit match on them, they will be set ablaze. The student won't try to roll to put the fire out, they'll just scream and slap themselves before burning to death right there.
  • If Loner, Coward, Phone Addict, or Spiteful students witness a student burning to death, they'll step back in shock before running for it.
• I Know Mortal Kombat: If she joins the Gaming Club, Yan-chan can temporarily boost one of her stats every day by playing video games. These include an educational game to boost her school subjects, a horror game to boost her Numbness, a fighting game to boost her Self-Defense, a Dating Sim to boost her Seduction, a role-playing game to boost her social interactions, a stealth game to boost her stealth, and a racing game to boost her run speed. Downplayed in that these stat boosts revert at the end of the day.
• Implacable Man:
  • The teachers were (before the ability to flee from them was taken out) a heroic version, who would chase Yan-chan indefinitely and always know exactly where she was. The placeholder delinquents were even more implacable, always running straight towards Yan-chan, even to the point of floating through the air and running through walls and floors. They could even follow her outside of the map and into the demon realm.
  • Yan-chan herself turns into this in SNAP mode. Nothing can stop her — not delinquents, martial artists, teachers, or even Raibaru can keep her from killing Senpai and herself.
• Improbable Weapon User: Yandere-chan can use a baseball bat, circular saw, crowbar, dumbbell, fire extinguisher, guitar, magical girl wand, pipe, wrench, sewing scissors, screwdriver, or syringe to commit murder.
• In Love with Love: Yan-chan says in the official intro that she's addicted to the way Senpai makes her feel. She never says that she actually loves his personality or truly cares about him.
• Irony:
  • If Oka Ruto sees Ayano commit a murder, she'll refuse to let her into the Occult Club – or kick her out if Yan-chan's already a member – saying her aura is too dark and will attract evil spirits. If she hears Yan-chan is a murderer, she'll refuse to grant membership by saying she heard Yan-chan is possessed by a demon. The irony is that the Occult Club's activities consist of trying to summon a demon. She'll also note the irony of being kicked out of a club about scary things for being too scary.
  • Shin Higaku, Oka's right-hand man and her replacement as club leader while she's not at school, has a similar, but much more logical, line if he sees Ayano committ murder.
  Shin: We study demons… but we don't admire them. You are banished… demon.
• Insidious Rumor Mill: One of the ways the player can eliminate one rival for her senpai's affection is to start a vicious rumor mill leading her to being bullied to death.
• Insistent Terminology: The Easter Egg Menu in the debug builds, despite the fact that the very presence of such a menu makes them not "Easter Eggs", technically speaking. They're actually cheats, and the Dev has said that in the final game they will probably be unlockable either via code-input or achievement.
• Interface Screw:
  • As Yan-chan's sanity decreases, the background music becomes distorted, black splotches appear at the edges of the screen, and ghostly visions of Yan-chan murdering her rival begin to appear.
  • By that same token, as School Atmosphere decreases, the colors become desaturated, Ominous Fog appears, and the music becomes much more somber.
  • When you are in the vicinity of Senpai, the screen turns saturated pink, a Heartbeat Soundtrack is heard, and your normal-paced walk turns into a slow, shy trudge as a series of increasingly obsessive animations plays, ending with a full-on yandere pose. Also, you drop whatever you're holding (weapon, mop, corpse, etc.).
  • If you go into first-person camera mode while wearing an accessory that intrudes into Yan-chan's field of vision (toaster, cyborg helmet, witch's hat), your view will be obscured.
  • The above bullet point also applies to any hairstyle with bangs (Hatred Mode, Slender Mode, etc.).
  • If the player attempts to look up Info-chan's information on their phone, the phone's screen will fill with static as Info-chan prevents the player from learning anything about her, while what text is legible scolds Ayano for trying to dig up dirt on her.
  • Snap Mode begins with Ayano literally shattering the Game Over screen, and goes up to eleven from there. The view is entirely red and black. None of the normal HUD elements are present, replaced by short commands. Running is replaced by an Ominous Visual Glitch skipping you forward, and murder animations are sped up the more you kill. If you take too much time without finding a knife and then killing Senpai, the screen will fill with static and you'll be teleported to your target.
• Internet Stalking: Ayano can stalk other students online to learn about their interests. This will make interactions with them easier.
• It Runs in the Family: Ayano's mother was also a mentally-unstable love-maniac with a propensity for violent behavior. The 1st Basement Tape reveals that Ayano's grandmother was the same way. See here. Word of God says all Aishi women have a yandere personality, in some way or another.
• It Was Here, I Swear!: If a Teacher's Pet student witnesses Ayano commit murder or sees a corpse, they will run to a teacher and lead them to it. If Ayano moves the body out of sight before the teacher arrives, the teacher will scold the student for pulling a prank on her.
• Japanese Delinquents:
  • Akademi High has them. There are five boys who hang out by the incinerator all day, carry blunt weapons such as baseball bats and crowbars, 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 to continue.
  • Before the true delinquents were implemented, the Placeholder Delinquents consisted of five boys and five girls, who didn't show up to school at all, but just spawned next to the incinerator and stood there all day. They would not disengage after a fight — instead, they would just thwack Ayano into a coma with a single blow. Their designs were repurposed for 1980s mode, in which they behave like the present-day delinquents do.
• Japanese School Club:
  • Akademi High has 12 known clubs, 11 of which Ayano can join^†(the club she cannot join is the Info Club, which is Info-chan's "club of one"), which grant her either a passive benefit or access to an item that is otherwise unobtainable or would invite a harsh penalty if a non-member is seen with it. However, there are many ways to lose these benefits permanently, such as…
    • Quitting the club – Yan-chan cannot rejoin a club she's left.
    • The club shutting down for lack of members.^note Because Yan-chan killed or abducted them.
    • The club shutting down because its leader dies or disappears.^note Courtesy of Yan-chan.
    • Being kicked out for lack of attendance.
    • Being kicked out (or denied entry at all) because a member saw Yan-chan kill someone.
• Karma Meter:
  • A Reputation gauge measures how others think of Yan-chan. Complimenting other students, giving them food if you join the Cooking Club, and calling in favors from Info-chan can improve it, thus allowing you to earn your fellow students' trust; being caught doing suspicious things like brandishing weapons, taking up-skirt photos, laughing like a madwoman, committing murder, or skipping class can harm your reputation.
  • This also extends to every student in the game. It is possible to trash-talk your classmates and rivals (though doing so hurts your own reputation if you don't counter it) to the point that they stop coming to school.
• Katanas Are Just Better: Downplayed. It's one of the weapons available in the game, and people who do playthroughs of the debug builds often choose it. There is a bit of Awesome, but Impractical to it, however, since Ayano cannot hide it in her inventory and has to carry it in plain sight unless she hides it in a cello case, a weapon bag or trash can. Also, the katana, like all two-handed weapons, is considered an "unsuitable" weapon for the struggle minigame, meaning you automatically lose if a heroic student or a teacher intercepts you while you're carrying it. In addition, the Katana leaves bloodstains on Ayano's uniform and the ground should she use it to kill someone, which is not the case for other two-handed weapons (with the only other exception being the axe). Finally, you cannot give a katana to a mindslave^note (anymore; earlier builds allowed you to, but doing so resulted in severe clipping issues – the katana would already be through the mindslave's head before she stabbed herself with it).
• Killed Mid-Sentence: "What are you——?" [murdered by Yan-chan]
• Kill It with Fire: You can fill a bucket with gasoline from a Jerry can, dump it on a rival via a clever booby trap, then use a candle to light her up like a flambé dish.
• Knowledge Broker: Info-chan, a girl with a talent for digging up dirt on others and (initially) the president of the Newspaper Club. In the story mode's early development, she was the one who encouraged Yan-chan to murder her rivals so that she could write about the tragedy. This characterization fits with the implication that she is the daughter of the Journalist.
• Knight of Cerebus: YandereDev introduced the idea of a character known only as "The Yakuza." The Yakuza's hypothetical method of elimination shifted the game's tone, as it implied a Fate Worse than Death for the rivals or a death more gruesome than anything already implemented. The "Yakuza route" meant selling kidnapped students as sex slaves or for their organs, and delved deeper into real-life horrors than most fans were comfortable with. YandereDev offered a compromise by moving him to the promised "1980's Mode," which is already promised to be significantly darker than the main game, and whose protagonist (one Ryoba Aishi) is firmly established as a Card-Carrying Villain, as opposed to Ayano's depending-on-the-player morality.
• Konami Code: Inputting the code on the official website's character page changes the page to show the profile of FUN Girl.

L-M

• Late-Arrival Spoiler: The 1980's Mode, being a prequel to the main story, casually spoils some background details found via tape recordings. Namely, Ryoba being a love-obsessed Yandere like her daughter.
• Late for School:
  • How the game started in the original intro. As befitting the cliché, in the game proper, you can give Yan-chan a slice of toast constantly hanging from her mouth... or if that's not enough, an entire toaster. There's also a "No Running In the Halls" poster at school that features an anime girl with a piece of toast in her mouth.
  • Being late for class will affect the number of Study Points you can obtain. The later Yan-chan is, the fewer points she'll get for the class. You'll also get special lines from the teachers.
  • If you stay up late reading manga or take time in the morning to torture a kidnap victim, you'll arrive at school an hour later than normal. Class has not started at that point, so you can still get full Study Points, but you will have missed any scripted events that take place during that hour. ^ExampleIn the earlier debug builds, Kokona (the test rival) receives the phone call that clues you in to her Compensated Dating during this hour. On a different day, she goes off to the toilet alone during this hour. It's also the only time period she'll leave her phone unattended, so you can steal it and take a panty shot to get her expelled. In some builds, this hour is the only one where she'll break her path and go to the roof to talk to you about her supposed domestic abuse (at which point you can either push her off to fake her suicide or talk to her to learn the full story).
• Leave No Witnesses:
  • Those who witness Yan-chan commit a crime (or just see a corpse) can have a number of reactions depending on their personality. For instance, Loners will run away and call the police, while Teacher's Pets will go to alert their teacher, and Social Butterflies will run to the nearest crowded area for safety (making sure to call the cops for good measure). If any of these types of student know you murdered someone and you get away with it, they will spread word of your actions, giving a constant reputation penalty. The simplest way to avoid this is to get rid of them.
  • Unavoidable with the Heroic type. If they see you murder someone, they will run at you and try to take you down, prompting a struggle minigame. If you lose, it's Game Over. But if you win, they're dead.
• Lethal Joke Character:
  • The Photography Club are this. They will start the game as a group of lively and energetic students who want to have fun – and they'll continue to be if school atmosphere stays high – but if the school atmosphere drops too low due to Yan-chan's murders, they will become essentially a walking sentry. With easy access to cameras and the internet, the Photography Club students will take a picture of Yan-chan if caught in an act and send it to the police, resulting in an instant Game Over.
  • This also applies to any character known to constantly be on their cellphone – notably the Gaming Club, which is full of joke characters and expies. If a phone addict sees you commit a crime, they'll snap a photo and run away from you while trying to upload it to Instagraph or Fakebook. If you don't catch and kill them by the point the timer runs out, you lose.
• Let's Get Dangerous!: The Photography Club consists mostly of playful students who joined to goof off. However, as school atmosphere drops, they start discussing the murders and keep an eye out for the perpetrator. If the school atmosphere drops low enough, they'll actively patrol the school, looking for evidence of the killer. If they catch on to you, they will constantly stalk you, waiting for you to make a wrong move. And if they catch Ayano in the act while in "full sleuth" mode, they'll take a picture and send it to the police, resulting in an instant game over.
• Life Meter:
  • When talking about non-lethal attacks, in the April 26th, 2018 video, a green one above damaged people's heads that decreases from right to left. To clarify, he's explaining that these will not be included in the game, as there's no reason for Yan-chan to non-lethally attack someone.
  • An Easter egg/cheat mode was later added to the game that allows the player to non-lethally attack students with a giant sword and/or small drones. Once you attack someone, they immediately run out of the school; the point of the mode is to kill as many people as possible before they get away.
• A Lighter Shade of Black:
  • The Delinquents. They're trouble-making bullies who try to goad people into fighting with them, but if they see you hurt someone, they'll beat you senseless.
  • Ayano can be this as well, if the player opts to eliminate her rivals non-lethally. One example from the debug builds: taking the "Friendship" route with test-rival Kokona requires kidnapping the daughter of a loan shark and using her as blackmail to get Kokona's family's debt forgiven. Say what you will about Yan-chan's motives and methods; she still saved Kokona's father – and probably dozens of other people – from crippling debt and danger, and also saved Kokona from needing to prostitute herself to help her father.
  • And now that Osana has been released as of August 31st, 2020, the "Befriend" route with Osana is also a lighter shade of black: Ayano just has to sneak into Osana's stalker's house and take back Osana's cat from him, with no violence required, and nobody innocent being affected because the stalker is very clearly a bad person.
• Limp and Livid:
  • One of the symptoms showing that Yan-chan is visibly insane is her slumping slightly.
  • The "Hatred" Easter Egg in debug mode gives her lank waist-length black hair and has her slouched in a feral posture.
  • It's also the pose of anyone mindbroken by Yan-chan.
• Literal-Minded: In the June 2017 update video, YandereDev tells Midori not to bother him unless she has a bug to show him. She does... only it turns out to be a ladybug. In response, Dev stabs her in the face.
• Loan Shark: There is one operating in Buraza Town. It turns out Kokona's father is in massive debt to him, which is also why she's engaging in Compensated Dating. You can help her out and, in exchange, ask that Kokona stay away from Senpai.
• Locker Mail: To successfully lure students via notes in their shoe lockers, the player can put a request in them for a chat about the right topic(s) at a selected time and location, then tell the student that the note exists.
• Long List: As part of a Take That! against Twitch.tv banning the game from its site, the February 1st 2016 build displays this message before the main title screen, warning players about all of the game's objectionable content. It starts out normal, but quickly devolves into insanity.
  WARNING: This game contains bullying, kidnapping, torture, murder, suicide, graphic violence, partial nudity, kittens, raw sewage, cooked sewage, microwave-ready sewage, true nightmares, eldritch monstrosities, bald assassins, DK Mode, fake tans, Titans, murderous ice fairies, impossibly-strong punches, genocide crusades, spooky scary skeletons, STANDING ON THE EDGE, zombies, vampires, succubi, lewd manga, busty pink-haired schoolgirls, game-breaking bugs, an overworked programmer, and much worse.
• Lord British Postulate:
  • Rival-chan, as an early design of Osana, was created solely to test out the red rival aura, and has no AI or hitbox. Naturally, she was the target of a lot of attempted violence. YandereDev has made two videos spoofing players' repeated attempts to kill her, titled "The Indestructible Rival."
  • Averted with the fully implemented Rival-chan, who is now a character named Raibaru, and serves as Osana's best friend and unofficial bodyguard. While she is extremely difficult to eliminate, Word of God states that she can be killed if you play your cards right.
  • Before the (killable) finished Delinquents were added in 2018, players tried everything they could think of to kill the Placeholder Delinquents. Unfortunately for them, "invincible" means invincible.
  • The Headmaster has also been the target of a lot of murder attempts, despite the fact that not only does he not have a hitbox, but he zaps you unconscious with a tazer if you get too close to him.
• Lore Codex: There is a Content Checklist in the main menu to inform you of how many elimination methods you have used to successfully beat your rivals. This takes different forms in the 202X and 1980s modes.
  • In 202X mode, Info-chan gives you a list of Schemes (options to throw NPCs off so that you can defeat your rivals) via cell phone pause menu.
  • In 1980s mode, they are named Ideas because Info-Chan was not alive at that time to list Schemes. You start off with a fair amount. However, you can pay the hair salon manager for more knowledge, and this will add ideas to your pause menu notebook.
• Love Letter: Implied in 1980s mode menu; Ryoba is holding an envelope with a heart (which can symbolize love) behind her back while at the same school as Jokichi, who she's obsessed with.
• Luke Nounverber: The Aishi family. "Ai" meaning "Love" and "Shi" meaning "Death". They're a family that have done Murder the Hypotenuse to get their love interests over multiple generations.
• Lured into a Trap: If Ayano's Seduction stat is high enough, or if she has befriended the student she's talking to, she can ask that person to follow her, and lure them into a secluded location.
  Yandere-chan: Hey, follow me! I want to show you something cool!
  Unsuspecting Victim: Okay, lead the way!
• Mad Scientist: The Science Club members are depicted as aspiring mad scientists who hope to one day make an invention that will get them noticed and hired by a big company. They've already created a robot that cleans up liquid (i.e. blood), but their plans are much bigger. One member of the club is trying to build a robot replica of her dead sister, another dreams of building a giant bipedal robot, and the club leader openly talks about his plans to take over the world.
• Make It Look Like an Accident:
  • You can push people over the school's rooftop railing. By taking the right measures, such as not interacting with the body and leaving a forged suicide note, you can dupe the police into thinking that the death was a suicide. If you don't leave a note, however, they'll just think it was an accident and that the student tripped over the railing. Regardless of which one you choose, the school will erect a higher fence to make sure it doesn't happen again.
  • You can cause students to accidentally electrocute themselves with a booby trap. As long as you don't touch the body, there's no evidence that the death was a murder.
  • Canonically, In 1980s mode Ryoba made sure to make the deaths of the rivals she lethally disposed of look like accidents.
  • In one of the Mysterious Tapes, the Journalist describes his interaction with Ryoba Aishi immediately after she was acquitted. She found him hiding from the press in an alleyway, and told him that it would be easy to make his death look like an accident.
• Man on Fire: It is possible to fill a utility bucket with gasoline and set it over a door so that when your rival (or anyone else) walks through, they get doused in the stuff. Then touch them with a candle, and...
  Student: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGHH!!!
• Marathon Level: The Alphabet Killer Challenege is this, as it has you kill all the students in the school (except for Senpai) in alphabetical order, and if you are caught misbehaving or someone either calls the police or flees the school, you automatically lose and have to redo the whole thing from the start, so making sure there are no witnesses, hiding corpses and cleaning up any blood they left behind is a top priority (though lockers to hide bodies in spawn in the whole school to make things less complicated and weapons like the baseball bat don't leave any blood behind) There are a set of items in the Student Council Room that can make things a bit easier, but these lower the difficulty level of the challenge the more they are used. The challenge usually takes about one hour and a half to complete.
• Masturbation Means Sexual Frustration: Implied. One of the ways Yan-chan can calm herself down after losing sanity is by "using" pictures of Senpai. The developer stated that exactly how she uses them is... up to the player's imagination.
• MegaCorp: The (fictional) SAIKOU Corporation is the largest business conglomerate in Japan. If a player takes a look around, they can find the company's logo nearly everywhere, including plastered all over Akademi, implying that the school is their personal fiefdom. In fact, it's difficult to find a branded product in the game that wasn't made by SaikouCorp.^note The sewing machine is just about it.
• Missing Mom:
  • At least one of the students' mothers died in childbirth. She was the wife of The Journalist, as detailed in his tapes.
  • In the debug builds, test-rival Kokona has this – her mother died about a year prior to the start of the game's storyline. This left her father unable to afford to keep her at Akademi, which resulted in him becoming a broken lush indebted to a loan shark and Kokona's sketchy moneymaking schemes (Compensated Dating and selling used panties).
• Memetic Mutation:
  • Deliberately invoked in multiple ways, to the point that this game needed its own subpage for Shout-Outs just to contain all of them. Many memetic items have been placed together in a storage room on the school's ground floor that the Dev calls the "Meme Closet".
  • YandereDev himself, due in part to the Dissonant Serenity tone he uses in his videos, has almost become a meme in his own right. It's not uncommon for him to say something in a video that ends up going viral, most notably "Whoa, Technology!".
  • There are several Let's Players who are popular specifically for their Yandere Simulator playthroughs. These LP'ers have introduced plenty of memes into the fandom.
  • invoked And yet… Dev has gone out of his way to avoid the implication this is a "meme game". The update videos show very clearly that YanSim is, at its core, a rather serious game intruding itself upon a Cliché Storm setting that happens to have some funny things on the periphery, which a green player might not even notice unless they actively looked for them.
• Mexican Standoff: During at least one iteration of Mission Mode (mid-December 2016), it is possible (but freakin' difficult) for Yan-chan to complete the Hand demon ritual while Nemesis is after her. Once the ritual is complete, Nemesis can't tackle a floating Yan-chan out of the air, but the demon hands can't dismember Nemesis.^note Doing so with the circular saw triggers the "Infinite Body Parts" bug. Furthermore, Nemesis is prone to spinning while she's within the demon hand ring (making it nearly impossible to stay behind her), and pressing the attack button returns Yan-chan to the floor where Nemesis can get at her. Who kills whom boils down to sheer dumb luck of positioning.
• Mistaken for Pedophile:
  • A version in the debug builds that is not played for laughs. A conversation Kokona has with Saki indicates that her dad comes into her room and… does something to her when he's drunk. However, confronting Kokona about this lets her reveal that he actually goes into her room to cry and unload on her about his debt problems, which he incurred because he can no longer afford to pay her tuition.
  • Exploited in the Mysterious Tapes. Ryoba Aishi was able to weasel out of prison time by convincing the court that the Journalist only went after her because he was a lecherous pervert.
• Mood Dissonance: Ladies and Gentlemen, presenting the special 2015 Christmas carol: "It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Murder".
• Mook Chivalry:
  • If multiple Heroic personalities catch Yan-chan committing murder (for example, if you're dumb enough to charge the Martial Arts Club with just a piddly knife), they will politely attack you one at a time, allowing you to easily dispatch them.
  • The Delinquents follow the same rules - they will wait for their friend to finish beating up Yan-chan before taking their turn.
  • Averted as of the mid-January 2017 build – if Yan-chan attacks a student in front of four or more students of any personality combination, the witnesses will work together to restrain her, each grabbing a limb. However, the mechanic may later be changed to require at least one student with the Heroic personality to act as a catalyst for a group takedown.
  • Also averted with teachers — it's perfectly possible for them all to chase you at the same time.
• Moving The Goal Posts: The goalposts for when Osana will be released keep changing and getting longer, because, when making the checklist, Yandere Dev is "constantly remembering things that [he] forgot to add to the list", and that there is no clear concept on what ideas are to go on a accurate and complete list of what he needs to do before implementing Osana. However, on August 31st, 2020, Osana was finally released.
• Multiple Endings: In 1980's Mode, although it's downplayed in that the same ending will happen either way with one exception. After eliminating the final rival, Ryoba is arrested for Sumire's murder just before she confesses her feelings for Jokichi. At her trial, there are seven ranks the player can get depending on their actions throughout the game. The more innocent you seem to the judge, the higher your rank will be.
  • Rank F: Ryoba aroused so much suspicion that she's declared guilty for the murder(s) she committed. This is the only ending where a guilty verdict happens.
  • Rank D: Ryoba barely manages to avoid a guilty verdict and is regarded with suspicion for the rest of her life.
  • Rank C: Ryoba avoided a guilty verdict, but her reputation still takes a massive hit.
  • Rank B: Public opinion is split 50/50 on whether or not Ryoba is a killer and as such, many people prefer to avoid her.
  • Rank A: Nearly everyone is convinced that Ryoba is innocent, but there are still a few people who doubt her.
  • Rank S: Nobody has any reason to suspect that Ryoba might be a killer.
  • Rank S+: The true ending. To get this, eliminate the rivals using the canonical methods and acquire Rank S.
  • In all cases except Rank F, Ryoba walks free, but is absolutely furious since Jokichi will see her as the girl that was accused of murder on live television and fears that he will reject her because of it. She considers going after the Journalist and decides not to, opting instead to lay low and wait for the attention to go away. With no foreseeable way to confess her love to Jokichi, she resorts to kidnapping him and locking him in her basement, saying that he'll "warm up to her" soon enough.
  • The "Happy" Ending: Only possible through a time paradox, if Ryoba calls the number of Ichikou Saikou (a number she shouldn't canonically know until 1990, but possible to find out in 20xx mode through a discarded letter), she's able to talk to FUN GIRL who tells her how to get her happy ending. Use a stink bomb to drive Ui away so she doesn't witness Ryoba acting suspicious and get away with murdering Sumire, then peacefully eliminate the first nine rivals and woo Jokichi with gifts. The tenth rival won't appear at all and Ryoba will be brave enough to confess to Jokichi. Again, though, this was only able to be possible by breaking the timeline and Ryoba had to literally sacrifice Ayano's existence to do it, so it's obviously non-canon.
• Mundane Horror: This video, illustrating Ayano's mother teaching her how to properly clean up after cutting yourself, followed immediately by a scene of a now older Ayano cleaning a much larger area on her school floor. Nothing in explicitly shown or said, everything is completely innocent when taken objectively, but…
• Murder Makes You Crazy:
  • Every time you kill someone, you lose Sanity. Lose enough of it without some kind of effort to regain it, and you become visibly insane and people won't want to deal with you (least of all, Senpai).
  • Losing a large amount of Sanity is also detrimental to your gameplay, as a fully insane Ayano will be unable to tell people other than Senpai apart (making it impossible to interact with people), will begin to giggle uncontrollably (making it impossible to stay stealthy), and will be unable to resist her murderous urges — meaning that you will automatically kill anyone who gets near you, with no input from the player.
• Murder-Suicide:
  • After you have kidnapped a girl and have broken her completely, you can order her to murder your rival, after which she will off herself.
  • This is what happens in Snap Mode. Yan-chan has the option of killing multiple other students, but it will always end in murdering Senpai and then committing suicide.
• Murder the Hypotenuse: One option for disposing of rivals. If witnesses aren't dealt with, or if Yan-chan doesn't clean up after herself before the school day ends, the police will be called to investigate.

N-O

• Nerf Arm: Several usable weapons are props that can be found in the Drama Club. Despite being props, they work just as well as the real thing — the prop sword even makes the same sound as the katana.
• No Fair Cheating: YanDev has stated that using cheats in the final game will disable achievements and net you a special ending where Senpai rejects Yandere-chan for being a dirty cheater.
• No Name Given:
  • "Yandere-chan", "Info-chan", and "Senpai" for much of early development. However…
    • Yan-chan's name got a low-key reveal in October 2015. The social media website she can visit at night lists her as "Ayano Aishi". That name was further confirmed once the official website launched in Spring 2016.
    • That same social media site gives Senpai's name as "Taro Yamada" (basically the Japanese equivalent of John Smith). YandereDev has been unclear about whether this name – along with the female version "Taeko" – is a placeholder or not. While he has expressed a desire to allow the player to choose Senpai's name, the inclusion of Taro/Taeko on the official website suggests that Senpai's "canon" name is set, regardless of how the rest of development goes.
  • Info-chan still lacks a name. The Dev says she has one, but the player will never learn it, mostly because it's not important to the game.
  • For over a month after her introduction, Midori Gurin had no name, so fans called her "Churuya" due to her first dialog being paired with a Nyoron Churuya-san panel (and her in-game character model bearing a strong resemblance to Tsuruya, at least at first). Her name became known once she appeared in the game and her Student Info page was accessible.
  • The Journalist. It is unlikely that we will ever learn his name.
• Non-Lethal K.O.:
  • There are multiple ways to get rid of your opponents without killing them. However, leaving rivals alive at the end of the week does not make Yan-chan a saint.
  • Matchmaking – Set your rival up with a different boy. This is the game's Pacifist Run.
  • Gossip – Trash your rival's reputation to the point she drops out of school.^note  You can continue to sully her reputation beyond that point, but then she'll be Driven to Suicide, thus making this also a lethal elimination method.
  • Sabotage – Each rival will have five "events" with Senpai. Ruin all of them and Senpai will reject her.
  • Expulsion – You catch your rival breaking school rules (or set her up) and tattle on her, resulting in her being expelled (or in the case of Muja and Mida, fired).
  • Kidnapping – If she's not at that cherry tree at 6pm Friday, she can't confess to Senpai, now can she? ^note Currently, no choice exists to release a kidnapped rival unharmed (Musume Ronshaku is not a rival). It may never exist, meaning your only option is to torture your rival until she breaks, at which point giving her a weapon makes her kill herself.
  • Betrayal – If you help a rival out with a major problem and press the "Eliminate" prompt during the subsequent conversation with them, the screen will cut to black as the rival notices something's off with her new "friend", her mood quickly going from confusion to concern to terror… then silence. ^note Currently, this results in your rival being kidnapped, so that entry's description applies.
  • Friendship – If you help a rival out with a major problem and resist the "Eliminate" prompt during the subsequent conversation with them, you can simply ask them to stay away from Senpai and they'll agree out of gratitude.
  • And more!^note "Framing" is nonlethal in the sense that you don't kill your rival, but in order for it to work, you do have to kill someone else, so it's not exactly nonlethal.
• Nonstandard Game Over: There are multiple possible ways in which Yan-chan can lose, depending on what mistakes are made…
  • Heartbroken: If Senpai witnesses Yan-chan's true nature.
  • Senpai Lost: If Senpai accepts a love confession from a rival.
  • Apprehended: If a heroic student or teacher witnesses Yan-chan committing murder or carrying a corpse and manages to overpower her.
  • Arrested: If a dead body is discovered, and there is sufficient evidence to link it to Yan-chan when the police arrive.
  • Exposed: If a student with a phone takes a picture of Yan-chan committing murder (or having visibly committed murder) and successfully uploads it to the Internet.
  • Expelled: If Yan-chan gets into trouble with the teachers too many times.
  • Comatose: If Yan-chan walks into her own electric booby trap or gets tased by the Headmaster, she'll be fried on the spot.
  • Killing 50 students or more results in the headmaster being forced to shut down the school, and Senpai transfers to another school far away.
• Nothing Is Scarier: In 1980s Mode, the game leaves it up to our imaginations what happens to the rivals you pay the Yakuza to get rid of. All we know is that he makes them "disappear".
• Obvious Rule Patch:
  • Discussed with the Mask mechanic. Wearing a mask (which you can gain access to as a Drama Club member) gives you the opportunity to commit murder in front of people without any consequences (so long as you burn the evidence), but It Only Works Once, as masks will be banned afterwards. YandereDev noted in a video that this would essentially mean one free rival kill even if she's near Senpai (killing anyone where Senpai can see you is an instant game over, but if he doesn't know it's you...). The solution he proposed was that if a masked killer struck near Senpai, he would run up to you, take the mask off, and recognize you. This was added to the game about two years later.
  • YandereDev watches Lets' Plays of his game. If a YouTuber finds a way to do something much more easily than YandereDev intended it to be, or in a way that he didn't even intend to be possible, odds are that the exploit will be patched in the next build. One big example of this is the addition of a "Follower Valid" bullet point to the Kidnapping Checklist that appears on the screen whenever you try to kidnap someone. Logically, you should be able to kidnap any student in the school, but the Follower Valid bullet point is checked off only if you have a female student with you who is not a member of the Student Council — because kidnapping animations haven't been added in the game yet for male students or Student Council members, and the game would thus experience weird glitches if someone tried to kidnap them. And then he had to patch out bugs that would let you kidnap one of these by trapping a valid follower in the kidnapping room, then going and getting another (the game treats the first follower as the one you're kidnapping for box-checking, but you will actually kidnap the invalid follower if you tranq them instead).
  • There are a litany of bugs that are a direct result from the player being able to run away if they're spotted committing a crime by a teacher, delinquent, or anyone with the heroic personality. The May 1st build attempts to solve this issue by preventing Ayano from moving if the player is spotted by such characters, therby forcing them into a fight. YandereDev has explained this decision as the logical result of Yandere Simulator's setting — Ayano is working inside a high school, and will have to return the next day; therefore, letting a teacher or Senpai witness you murdering someone will inevitably result in a Game Over even if you escape your pursuer, and thus allowing the player to run away is essentially pointless.
  • In an attempt to combat the proliferation of clickbait videos involving Osana and Raibaru (which as of writing, mid-October 2019, are not finished and officially implemented), YandereDev added some code to the September 1st build that will cause the game to delete any character currently in-game that's been given either one of their hairstyles, or just crash the game outright upon detection. This has ultimately failed, as the "anti-clickbait" code itself was quickly isolated by those who pored through the scripts.
  • To prevent the player from being able to walk up to the rival of the week while they're waiting under the cherry tree for Senpai (the only time of the week when there would normally be no one with eyes on the rival), the September 15th 2019 build added a wooden deck built onto the side of the hill. Each week on Friday, a different club will host their activity on the wooden deck, with their members serving as potential witnesses. This requires a player who wants to murder the rival under the cherry tree to find a way to either get the activity cancelled beforehand (by getting the club disbanded), or get the club members to leave the area (either by befriending them prior and telling them to leave, or intimidating them into leaving as a delinquent) before the rival arrives.
  • Even after Raibaru was introduced, it is, or least was, entirely possible to eliminate Osana within the first 6 minutes of the first day, without the use of any bugs and glitches that result in Raibaru becoming separated from Osana, by simply dousing her with gasoline from a bucket trap and setting her on fire. As of the March 12, 2020 build, Raibaru will pull Osana away from a door if it's rigged with a gasoline-filled bucket. This patch has since been circumvented by getting Osana stuck under a handful of valid drop points from the roof, with which one can simply dump gas on her head by hand.
  • Due to the potential ease of eliminating Osana via the "leaky water fountain electrocution" method, she's been programmed to not accept salty snacks except for one specific circumstance that is unrelated to that method. She'll only accept the snack if one is going for the Expulsion route^ExplanationYou're giving her the snack because you want her to go to a drinks vending machine you've sabotaged beforehand, have her money eaten by said sabotaged machine, and then catch her in the act of kicking the machine to use as "evidence" of Osana vandalizing school property., and thus one needs to purposely lure Osana using distractions in order to perform this electrocution elimination.
  • In what can best be described as an arms race against a speedrunner, Hatsune Elissu, and Yandere Dev, after the demo was officially released on August 31, 2020, almost every patch released every day afterwards contains a fix specifically to counter whatever method said speedrunner used to quickly kill Osana; it was usually within 60 seconds of loading into the map, and somehow getting away with her murder in that amount of time. The whole clash between the two is explained in EazySpeezy's World Record Progression video.
    • On release day, Hatsune breaks Osana's scripted conversation with Senpai by dropping a fire extinguisher within her line-of sight, waiting for Osana to investigate, before killing her and running off, all done within 60 seconds of starting the day. One of the bug-fixes listed in the patch released the very next day is the following: Characters will no longer snap out of scripted events after noticing dropped weapons on the ground.
    • In Hatsune's video with the September 1st build, they break Osana's scripted conversation with Senpai by having Osana see them carrying the extinguisher, waiting Osana to cross the main path halfway between where she started and where Raibaru is waiting, clonking Osana from behind with said extinguisher in plain view of Raibaru, before making a mad dash to the gym teacher by the gate, while still holding the extinguisher (picked specifically because it a large weapon, which attracts suspicion a lot faster than a concealable small weapon), so that said teacher will call them out and send them to the Guidance Counselor before Raibaru starts giving chase (In which case, that's an instant game-ender), again all within a minute. Next day's build had the following fix: Fixed exploit that really did allow the player to literally just run up to Osana and stab her right at the start of the day, in full view of Raibaru., though as seen in Hatsune's next vid, it wasn't very effective.
    • Hatsune responded to the above fix with a video done with the Sept 4 build, where instead of breaking Osana's conversation with Senpai by having Osana see them carrying a weapon, they just run in between the two until they're broken out of the convo. Then Hatsune goes and comes back with the extinguisher, and this time waits until Osana and Raibaru are done talking and have begun walking towards the gate before, once again, extinguishing Osana, and running for the gym teacher. Pay attention to the fact that, despite Raibaru going into chase mode just after Hatsune enters the teacher's line of sight^note The Sept 2 patch apparently reduced the time taken between Raibaru spotting a threat and giving chase., the chase is overridden by the teacher seeing Ayano armed with the extinguisher, and once again sends her to the guidance counselor, saving them from Raibaru. The Sept 6 build had the following fix: It should no longer be possible for Yandere-chan to get caught by a teacher while being chased by Raibaru. In simple terms, this meant that teachers immediately ignore whatever suspicious actions Ayano is performing the moment she gets chased.
    • The Sept 6th build caused a change in Hatsune's strategy, due to the aforementioned fix now requiring that they hit the gym teacher's maximum suspicion BEFORE Raibaru starts giving chase. To that end, it required a light two-handed weapon, such as a bat or crowbar from one of the delinquents, acquired by goading one of them into a fight and winning. YandereDev's answer to this? In the September 7th build, we have this line: It is no longer possible for a teacher to become alarmed by Yandere-chan if a student is about to chase Yandere-chan. Ergo, once Raibaru, or any student who could fight, spotted Ayano doing something that warranted a takedown, the teachers, once again, ignore whatever suspicious actions Ayano is doing in their view.
    • Hatsune's answer to the aforementioned fix? Same as what they did the prior, but this time they drop the weapon when they're in the gym teacher's sight and then immediately pick it back up, resulting in the teacher immediately hitting maximum suspicion, and once again, saving Ayano from Raibaru's vengence. YanDev's counter? For the September 9th build, we have this fix: Teachers will no longer be alarmed by the sight of Yandere-chan picking up a suspicious object if Yandere-chan is about to be chased by someone. Note that he specifically removed the "Picking up a suspicious object to alarm the teacher to avoid pursuit" tactic, and the italicized part is important as we'll see what happens next.
    • When the September 9th build had features that negate the above methods, two workarounds were discovered by Hatsune. The first is laughing in front of Raibaru to break her routine and cause her to go to the lockers. This means that when Osana moves to the location where she's supposed to be chatting with Raibaru, she isn't there, giving the speedrunner the ability to kill Osana without Raibaru witnessing it. They then quickly sneak past Raibaru and then do the same "Drop & Pick Up" tactic in front of the teacher that they did on the September 7th build, which works because Raibaru isn't chasing them nor about to chase them. The second way? laugh in front of the gym teacher to max out her suspicion. It remains to be seen how these tactics will be handled.
  • In 1980s mode, Hatsune Elissu has always found a way to pretty much kill Kaguya, the first rival in 1980s mode, in front of the Investigative Journalist and get away with it, which promptly causes YandereDev to update the game to make the Journalist harder to beat. She has dubbed this the "Beat the "Improved" Journalist Challenge":
    • The first attempt occured in the May 15th, 2022 build, in which YandereDev adjusted the Journalist's AI so it would be impossible to kill someone in the walkway from the town to the school. Hatsune grabbed the weapon bag by Ryoba's locker, then went for a fire extinguisher, waited until Jokichi, Ryoba's Senpai, and Kaguya's conversation had finished, and smacked her in the head from behind, after which she just carried her body over to the tree located east of the school's entrance and hid her behind it. Then she dropped the fire extinguisher and had Yahiko Onda, a student who patrols the school's entrance, pick it up and return it to it's original place, after which she went to the Home Economics Room to get a garbage bag to stash Kaguya's body in, all of this roughly about a minute or so. The following patch changes the game so that the Journalist will already spawn in the school's walkway so he can get a full view of the rival and Senpai's conversation and restrain Ryoba the minute she pulls out a weapon.
    • Hatsune's response to the May 16th, 2022 fix was to interrupt Jokichi and Kaguya's conversation by walking in front of Jokichi, after which she just lures Kaguya behind a tree and the school's entrance wall respectively by giggling, after which she just stabs her with a pair of scissors brought from Ryoba's home, and the Journalist only noticing Kaguya's body, but not the murder itself. To add more insult to injury, Hatsune found two other ways to kill Kaguya and get away with murder. The first one involved saving and loading, which caused the Journalist to be unable to react to murder, and the second one has her keeping a student in place all the way in the back by the school's main entrance (in this case the Gardening Club leader), kill them when nobody is watching, take their corpse in front of the Journalist, who doesn't realize that there's a dead body until Kaguya and Jokichi finish their conversation, and kills Kaguya after both the Journalist and Jokichi have left. All of this in just one minute. YandereDev fixed those bugs almost immediately, and additionaly programmed the Journalist to react accordingly if he witnesses the player throwing a car battery into a puddle of water to electrocute someone.
    • To bypass the May 17th, 2022 fixes, Hatsune used one of the previous methods; keeping a student in place all the way back by the school's entrance, killing them when nobody was watching, bringing their corpse to the Journalist, who still doesn't notice a dead person in front of him until Kaguya and Jokichi's conversation is done, which allows Hatsune to just kill Kaguya after he and Jokichi have left, showing tnat those bugs were not fixed at all. Another way is to lure the Journalist all the way back to the school's entrance, talk to Kaguya to keep her in place before she enters the gym teacher's field of view, and just stab her before the Journalist gets back. In the May 24th, 2022 build, YandereDev tried to make sure he fixed the bugs with the Journalist not noticing corpses... until Hatsune proved in the June 1st, 2022 build that those bugs were not fixed at all, as all her last few strageties still worked.
    • The June 15th saw a fix to all of the previous bugs with the Journalist, so this time Hatsune beat up one of the Delinquents, stole their metal pipe, dropped it near Kaguya and Jokichi so they would notice, and broke Kaguya's neck with it after Jokichi left. The Journalist runs up to Ryoba... but he doesn't do anything and instead runs out of the school to report the death of a student. Another stragety was to kill a student all the way back in the school's entrance, and since the Journalist now follows Ryoba around whenever she is not inside the school area, he walked up to discover a corpse, but not the killer, which allowed Hatsune to just kill Kaguya by making her notice the blood on Ryoba, waiting until Jokichi is far enough, and stabbing her from behind. Finally, a stragety that is similar to the first one has Kaguya noticing Ryoba carrying a fire extinguisher, wait until Jokichi has walked away, and smack Kaguya on the head right in front of the Journalist, who procceeds to run out of the school to report a death, not a murder. In the following update, YandereDev fixed the bugs with the Journalist not restraining Ryoba for murder and adjusted his AI so that he won't leave the area he is supposed to patrol while still following Ryoba if she steps anywhere near it.
    • To bypass the changes in the June 17th update, Hatsune put on the Speedy Sporty Spats before going to school to increase Ryoba's running speed, grabbed a weapon bag, a fire extinguisher, interrupated Kaguya and Jokichi's conversation, smacked Kaguya with the fire extinguisher after Jokichi left, hid it in the weapon bag again, and ran all the way to the gym teacher, pulling out the fire extinguisher in front of her and getting sent to the Guidance Counselor, saving Ryoba from the Journalist. In the next update YandereDev made it impossible for the player to run after the Journalist was about to give them chase. Hatsune Elissu even stated on one of her YouTube posts that YandereDev may have finally improved the Journalist, as she couldn't find any more ways to kill Kaguya without getting caught. However...
    • Hatsune found a way around this issue in the June 18th, 2022 build. Grabbing the weapon bag and the bookbag by Ryoba's locker, getting the car battery from the storage room and hiding it inside the bookbag, filling a bucket with water, grabbing the fire extinguisher and hiding it in the weapon bag, pouring the water in front of the school's entrance, wait until a student steps on it, and throwing the car battery so that student is electroucted to death, with only one other student witnessing the murder rather than the dead body. Upon seeing the student dropping dead, the Journalist runs out of the school and calls the police. Then Hatsune waits until Kaguya sees the body, flees the school alongside Jokichi (who had ran away before her), and simply just kills Kaguya with the fire extinguisher, with zero witnesses whatsoever.
    • Post-June 18th, 2022, murder-but-Journalist-trapped strategies: Hatsune found yet another way of killing Kaguya without having to kill another student. By grabbing a fire extinguisher, hiding it inside a weapon bag, getting close to Kaguya and Jokichi, wait until the Journalist is close enough, interrupt their conversation, quickly go to the western wall of the entrance to distract the gym teacher, quickly running to Kaguya and catching her attention yet again by showing her the fire extinguisher after she has been separated from Jokichi, quickly close the school's gate to force any other students to take the alternate door, wait until Kaguya is about to cross it and killing her with the extinguisher. Ryoba freezes in place after she has killed someone in the school's walkway so the Journalist can apprehend her she's stuck in place, but he's stuck inside the gate. The gym teacher notices the dead body, but doesn't apprehend Ryoba. After this Hatsune just waits until the day ends and esentially gets away with murdering Kaguya.
• Oh, Crap!:
  • Yan-chan has this reaction whenever she gets caught.
  • The students have this reaction when they see something murdery happen. Same for the teachers.
• Ominous Fog:
  • When the school's atmosphere drops to critical levels, the school will have fog blanketing it.
  • This is also an option in the debug builds to decrease draw distance and raise framerate.
• One-Steve Limit: Some characters from the main game share their name with characters from 1980s mode.
  • One of the female students is named Sumire Suzuki. The girl that Ryoba kills in the third floor girls' restroon at the beginning of 1980s mode is named Sumire Saitozaki. Similarly, the leader of the Drama Club in 1989 is named Daichi Suzuki.
  • Geiju Tsuka's real last name, Tsuburaya, is the same as the Cooking Club substitude leader's, Shoku Tsuburaya.
  • Efude Nurimono, whose real name is Eiko Nunomaki, has the same first name as a member of the Occult Club in 1989, Eiko Noguchi.
  • The teacher of Class 3-2 in the present, Kaho Kanogoki, shares her name with a member of the Art Club in 1989, Kaho Miki.
  • Originally Kyoshi, the gym teacher in the present, and Sumiko, the fourth rival in 1980s mode, both had the same last name, "Tachibana". A later update changed Kyoshi's last name to "Tachikawa".
• Only Six Faces: To the extreme — until early 2019, every character in the game had the exact same face. In February 2019, after years of YandereDev assuring us that this would change, it finally did. However, the "new" faces are still modifications of the original face, now with differently shaped eyes and mouths in additions to the different eye colors they had before.
• Our Ghosts Are Different: If you take a picture in the girls' bathroom on the third floor (or by the Confession Tree in earlier builds), you can see a girl with torn clothes and a triangle headband flanked by blue flames. It was later revealed that she was the girl that Ryoba, Yan-chan's mother, killed in the bathroom, and that a future DLC may focus on her attempt at revenge. The tutorial for 1980s mode shows her death at the hands of Ryoba.

P-R

• Paper-Thin Disguise: When Yan-chan puts on a mask, she is instantly unrecognizable — despite the fact that not only is her distinctive hair still visible, but many of the masks don't even fully cover her face.
• Parody Sue:
  • Mai Waifu is a girl with long pink hair and large breasts who, according to Student Info, has many admirers. However, she has sworn her heart to an independent game developer overseas, (who isn't YandereDev, really). She's a reference to a twitter conversation where the Dev claimed to be a pink-haired Japanese schoolgirl with large breasts in real life.
  • Early in the game's development, YandereDev described the Student Council President as a Mary Sue. The official website's Characters page confirms this with the final rival, Megami Saikou, described as an "untouchable goddess" who is the most beautiful and popular girl in school, unbelievably rich and smart, and has excelled at everything she's ever tried. However, her Sue-ness is not Played for Laughs – she's basically an example of what happens when one of these sorts of characters has it in for you.
• Permanently Missable Content:
  • If you quit a club or get kicked out, you can't join that club again. You can also lock yourself out of a club by killing the club leader or a certain number of members, either of which result in the club being disbanded; or by getting caught murdering someone by a member of that club, which will result in your being kicked out of the club or denied entry.
  • Certain rival elimination methods – most notably Matchmaking – require interaction with specific NPCs. If Yan-chan murders one of these characters early, the elimination method they're connected to won't work. When challenged on it, the Dev said this:
    "Killing people should have negative consequences. One possible consequence: You're ruining your ability to perform Tasks / Elimination Methods that involve the student you killed."
• People of Hair Color: The students in the Drama Club are marked by their purple hair. The Occult Club had a similar thing going on with the same blue-grey hair, but were later redesigned with more varied dark colors. The rest of the clubs, however, have a more natural diversity.
• Phoneaholic Teenager: The Bullies and the members of the Gaming Club spend most of their times with their faces glued to their phones. This actually works as a game mechanic, as each of the Bullies patrols one of the floors of the school (except Musume, who patrols the courtyard) and the Gaming Club plays a Pokémon GO-like game while class is not in session, and if they witness a murder or they discover a corpse their first instinct is to take a picture and send it to the police.
• Pink Mist: Osana's exclusive elimination method. Ayano lures her onto the roof, unscrews the fan cover, and shoves her head in the fan. Osana is quickly decapitated and sliced to bits as blood sprays all over Ayano and the fan breaks down.
• Player Death Is Dramatic: Or failure, in this case. If something happens to cause Senpai to tell Ayano off, thus ruining her chance to ever have him, she'll fall to her knees in grief as the entire space around her turns black while big red letters reading "HEARTBROKEN" appear accompanied by sad piano music.
• Playing with Fire: Should Yan-chan kill five students with the burning ritual knife and place their corpses in the summoning circle, the Flame Demon will grant her the ability to shoot fire out of her hands. Be warned, though: passing through the Placeholder Delinquents' line-of-sight while in this mode triggers them to attack you.
• Point of Divergence: To get the "Happy" ending in 1980s mode, Ryoba must use a stink bomb during the tutorial to drive Ui Tunesu away from the cooking club, meaning she doesn't witness Ryoba stealing the cooking club's knife. This causes a chain reaction: because Ui doesn't witness Ryoba doing something suspicious, the Journalist doesn't suspect Ryoba of murder, and as long as she eliminates her rivals by non-lethal means, will continue to do so. This causes the last rival to not appear at all, and Ryoba is able to confess to Jokichi without the police arresting her.
• Police Are Useless: Zig-zagged. The police will only arrest you if they find iron-clad evidence, such as a murder weapon with your fingerprints on it, or if no fewer than 5 witnesses accuse you of murder. They won't search your phone, won't take into account circumstantial evidence (such as you having led the victim off to a secluded location immediately before the murder), and will only investigate for a single day before declaring the case unsolvable. The cassette tapes seem to bring some justification to this – Akademi High has a long history of being very uncooperative and strict about the police investigating on school grounds. After an incident where a botched investigation of a murdered student led to the only suspect being acquitted, the police now won't accuse anyone of a crime without ironclad evidence, refuse to approach the school unless specifically summoned, and even then will only stay for brief periods of time.
• Predecessor Villain: Ayano's mother was once a student at the same school Ayano attends, and was also a psychotic love-obsessed murderer. She is strongly implied to be the subject of the Journalist's cassette recordings, and the Basement Tape confirms this.
• Psychotic Love Triangle: Back when the final rival was planned to be another Yandere^note (it was Info-chan). Senpai really knows how to attract the wrong type of girls.
• Public Bathhouse Scene: Akademi High is so obscenely wealthy that its showers are essentially a bathhouse.
• Pummeling the Corpse:
  • When Yan-chan is killing someone with the low-sanity killing animation, mashing the attack button makes the last portion of the animation loop. For example…
    • Yan-chan pounds away at the victim's head with a baseball bat (or other large blunt weapons).
    • Yan-chan repeatedly stabs the katana (or other large bladed weapons) through the victim's belly.
    • Yan-chan continues dragging the circular saw through the victim's ribs.
• Punny Name:
  • The school the game takes place in is called Akademi High School. Say it aloud and see what you get. ^note Amusingly, the characters do not pronounce it like "Academy"; they say it like it's a Japanese word ("AH-kah-deh-mee").
    • This pun works on two levels, as "Aka(i)" is the Japanese word for Red, which you'll be seeing a lot of if you play Yan-chan as a murderous psychopath.
  • Kokona goes to a place called "Shisuta Town" to engage in Compensated Dating, while the town that Akademi High is in is called "Buraza Town". ^{Explaining The Joke}It's Engrish for "Sister" and "Brother", respectively.
  • Every rival (or nearly so) is set to have one.
    • Senpai's tsundere childhood friend, who also happens to be your first rival, is named "Osana Najimi". ^{For non-Japanese speakers}This translates to 'childhood friend'.
    • The Cooking Club Leader (Rival #2) is named Amai Odayaka.^note "Amai" means "Sweet flavor".
    • The leader of the Drama Club (Rival #3) is named Kizana Sunobu.^note "Kizana" is Japanese for "snobbish," and "Sunobu" is Engrish for "snob."
    • The leader of the Occult Club (Rival #4) is named Oka Ruto.^note It's Engrish for "Occult."
    • The Sports Club Leader (Rival #5) is named Asu Rito.^note Engrish for "Athlete."
  • Many of the regular NPC students also fit the bill. See the Character page for more information.
    • Every member of the Martial Arts Club and the Occult Club count.
    • The members of the Art Club are named after art supplies.
    • The members of the Light Music Club are named after musical instruments, except for the leader, who is named "Miyuji Shan".
    • Midori Gurin's name is derived from the Japanese word for "green" and the Japanese transliteration of the English word "green". She also has green hair, green eyes, a green phone, green stockings, and green underwear. ^note The last two may not be there, depending on the build.
    • The Basu sisters are named Sakyu and Inkyu.
    • There's also Mai Waifu, who has pledged her heart to a game developer living overseas.
    • Kuu Dere "has never been witnessed exhibiting emotions".
  • Ayano's family name, Aishi, can be rendered using these kanji – 愛死 – which mean "love" and "death", respectively. Fitting, although said sequence doesn't exist as a last name in reality.
  • The loan agency that lends money at absurd interest rates is called Ronshaku Loans. The daughter of the company's boss is named Musume Ronshaku. "Musume" means… Daughter.
• Quintessential British Gentleman: One of your head accessories in the debug builds is a top hat and curly moustache, which causes Yan-chan to spout Britishisms when the player presses the "laugh" button.
• Ragdoll Physics:
  • It is said that, unrefined, the Unity engine considers this a suggestion rather than a reality. As such, it is more likely than not that corpses will do bizarre things, especially when you try to move them.
    • If someone dies by a wall and any of their body clips into it, trying to drag them causes their limbs to stretch and contort horrifically until they finally, uh, pop out.
    • Using an Easter Egg like Falcon Mode or One Punch Mode on someone will send them flying (their bodies will be grossly contorted for a couple of frames the instant the punch connects). If you're inside, chances are the body will hit a wall or floor, at which point the corpse will get stuck and spaz out.
  • Anything having to do with Titan Mode, as the school is not built for having extremely large bodies inside it.
  • Somehow, porting the game to Unity 5 made ragdoll physics worse. It's not uncommon for a newly created corpse to simply spaz out and fly a few feet away before finally settling down.
• Railroading: One of the critiques of the demo builds is how the game, despite laying out several possible means of eliminating rivals, only permits a few to be used successfully, with the rest prevented either by other game mechanics or Obvious Rule Patch. The schemes provided give detailed step-by-step instructions on how to perform successful eliminations without much room for deviation, giving the impression that the game punishes player creativity.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Paired with Rhymes on a Dime to form the backbone of the rap battle between Osana Najimi and Ayano Aishi.
• Red Armband of Leadership: All club leaders wear one, as does the Student Council President.
• Red Eyes, Take Warning:
  • Info-chan certainly counts.
  • Yan-chan's eyes turn red while she is using Yandere Vision.
  • The Mission-Mode-only character Nemesis has red eyes and is a nigh-unstoppable assassin.
  • Before they were removed, Yui Rio and Haruto Yuto both had red eyes and Spiteful personalities. Borupen Saishiki is currently a red-eyed Spiteful student.
  • Averted with Kuu Dere, who has red eyes but is harmless. Ryuto also has red eyes, and is harmless unless he sees you hurt his crush.
• Red Filter of Doom: Upon entering Snap Mode, Yandere-chan and the world around her go completely black and red, while the soundtrack goes completely ominous with the bells beginning to toll.
• Relieved Failure: In her first year, Raibaru was the president of the Martial Arts Club and didn't lose a single duel until the end of the first semester, when Budo Masuta defeated her. However, instead of feeling sad, she felt relieved, because she had wanted to quit martial arts for some time and felt that her winning streak obligated her to continue to practice them. She quit martial arts and promoted Budo the new club leader.
• Romance Sidequest: While YandereDev had long stated that Ayano would have NO interaction, direct or indirect, with Senpai until the end of the game, he appeared to change his mind by 2017. In the Progress Report video from that January – much of which revolved around explaining Senpai's hidden Sanity stat – he floated the possibility of allowing the player to leave him anonymous notes and gifts as a way of restoring his sanity, in order to try and avoid the likely bad endings resulting from violently murdering Ayano's rivals (especially Osana and Hanako). Actually dating Senpai during the game will never be an option, so this trope is downplayed even if gift-giving is implemented.
• Rooftop Confrontation: The original plan for the game was to have Yandere-chan and the final rival (who was at the time planned to be Info-chan) fight a rooftop battle in the rain. This was later scrapped.
• Running Gag:
  • Up through September 2016, any time YandereDev wanted to show off a new method of eliminating a rival, he would invariably test it out on Kokona Haruka, the purple-haired girl. Lampshaded in his poisoning tutorial.
    "Because Yandere Simulator doesn't have an official rival yet, we're going to pretend that one of these girls is our rival."
    [approaches the six rainbow girls and stands in the middle of their circle]
    "Okay, let's just pick a girl at random…"
    [takes out camera and focuses it on Saki, the teal-haired girl]
    "For today, the rival is going to be…" [suddenly moves the camera over to Kokona] "You."
  • In the video for the August 2015 update, he refers to her as "everyone's favorite punching bag".
  • When demonstrating the dismemberment mechanic, YandereDev uses Midori (his other Butt-Monkey) as the test subject, but at the very end of the video, he reveals that he had already dismembered Kokona and the video fades out with Yan-chan carrying Kokona's severed head towards the camera.
• Runs with Scissors: Scissors are available in the sewing room. Yan-chan can run with them in her hand or hidden away. But if anyone gets hurt, it's not this trope; it's Shear Menace.

S

• Sailor Fuku: The default uniform for girls is a white and blue sailor outfit, which YanDev learned after the fact is actually the uniform for middle school girls. Three uniforms more befitting a high school girl are available as alternates.
• Sanity Meter:
  • Represented by a cardiograph. Killing people, being covered in blood, and being around bodies brings it down; while looking at photos of or being around Senpai, secluding herself, or laughing maniacally brings it back up. Let it go down too far, and Ayano becomes visibly insane. This is problematic, since letting Senpai see you in this state will trigger an instant Game Over (and letting other students see her causes her reputation to tank), while letting a teacher see you being insane gets you sent to the guidance counselor. Played with a bit in that this meter doesn't technically represent Sanity Slippage – Yan-chan has screws loose to begin with (she'd have to, to conjure up a plan like hers in the first place). The meter just represents how openly batshit she appears.
  • Losing a large amount of Sanity is also detrimental to your gameplay. A fully insane Ayano will be unable to tell people other than Senpai apart (making it impossible to interact with people), will begin to giggle uncontrollably (making it impossible to stay stealthy), will develop "intrusive thoughts" that manifest to the player as shadowy hallucinations of Yan-chan killing her rival, and will be unable to resist her murderous urges — meaning that you will automatically kill anyone who gets near you, with no input from the player.
• Saw Blades of Death: The gardening club’s handheld circular saw is able to be taken and used as a weapon. It’s also needed for dismembering corpses, which can provide easier transport or the ability to disguise the body parts as pieces of random trash when used in tandem with a tarp.
• Schedule Fanatic:
  • YandereDev has a tendency to be one, trying his best for nearly three years to release updates to his game on the first and fifteenth of each month, along with an update video (plus critical bug-fixes in between). He didn't always succeed. His desire yet inability to keep to his self-imposed deadlines were the direct cause of his email-related rants in 2015 and early 2016. Slower than expected progress on Osana into 2017 nearly caused him to crack from stress and led him into a partnership with tinyBuild, which was later terminated because — you guessed it! — they were slowing him down.
    • He took two-week breaks in Fall 2015 and Fall 2016 (both times to play new video games), but admitted a bit of guilt over doing so – he released a bug fix during his 2016 "vacation". He felt slightly less guilty over taking a week off in Summer 2016 to go to Anime Expo, as he got to meet fans of his game.
    • In September 2019, he took another vacation, and again expressed guilt about it. It was two days long.
  • So what should you email him about? (1) If you've encountered a bug in the most recent build of the game and can explain to him how to reliably reproduce it. (2) You want to help with the game and have the résumé/CV/portfolio to prove your usefulness – the game's website has a list of areas where help is most needed. (3) You want to show him your fanwork (he likes seeing fanart and cosplay photos). Other than that, best to leave him alone or he'll get very crabby very quickly.
    • The website's "Contact" page has a very useful (and entertaining) guide on when to email Yanderedev. That is, if you list your reason for contacting him as something you're not supposed to, the normally lurid pink website will turn blood red, the heart designs floating in the background will turn into broken hearts, and a drawing of Yan-chan will appear brandishing a knife in full yandere mode with the text "YOU DIDN'T LISTEN!"
• School Bullying Is Harmless: Averted to the point that it's the basis of two elimination methods (and the formation of the Delinquent gang). The Bully clique, led by Musume Ronshaku, will harass the person at school with the lowest reputation. If it's your rival (or some poor student you just needed out of the way), you can use them to eliminate her by having her bullied so badly that she refuses to go to school, or even commits suicide. It it's a Fragile student, then if you bully them badly enough and then lie that someone else is the cause, they will snap and kill the person you indicated before committing suicide.
• School for Scheming: Akademi was founded in the 1980s as basically one big training simulator for Megami's aunt to learn how to become a better company leader, and the other students would later receive jobs at Saikou Corp. In the present, Saikou Corp still has a strong grip on the school, including some mysterious, unknown purpose.
• School Setting Simulation: The game is built around a high school as its setting. As your main objective is to eliminate your rivals under a deadline to get to Senpai, you'll be blending in with the students and participating in class activities and clubs to raise your attributes, giving you more creative ways to murder your rivals with. Your constant obstacles will be the teachers, whom if they discover that you committed a murder, will catch you and get you expelled, triggering an automatic Game Over, and they'll usually defeat you in a Curb-Stomp Battle if you haven't invested enough in physical activities to stand a fighting chance.
• Scientific and Technological Theme Naming: Most of the Science Club members have Punny Name-style Theme Naming, including Kaga Kusha the club leader (effectively Japanese for "scientist"), Horo Guramu ("hologram"), Yaku Zashi (effectively Japanese for "chemist" or "pharmacist") and Meka Nikaru ("mechanical"). Homu Kurusu is the Odd Name Out, though she's named for the alchemical/magical noun 'homunculus'.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here:
  • If a delinquent witnesses a corpse without knowing you did it, he'll say this before running away.
  • Students with the Loner, Coward, Phone Addict, or Spiteful persona will run out of the school after seeing a murder, severed limb, or corpse. Loners will call the cops; Cowards and Spiteful students will not. Phone Addicts will upload a photo to social media; if the photo is of a corpse or limb, this merely causes the police to head towards Akademi, but if the photo is of Ayano in mid-murder, this will cause an instant Game Over.
• Script Breaking:
  • If you use an Easter Egg mode to kill Senpai… pretty much nothing happens. Yan-chan will somehow stalk him home at the end of the day and, in an Obvious Rule Patch, he'll magically come back to life the next morning. ^note Prior to February 2016, he stayed dead but the game acted as if he was still alive. Otherwise, it's the same as if you had killed any other student.
    • This used to be true for the teachers, too. However, as of the "Sanity Animations"^note (August 2016) update, killing a teacher results in her staying dead and a new randomly-generated teacher taking her place the next day.
    • The game's code was later adjusted to trigger an "easter egg state" when the player has an Easter Egg activated. This means that Ayano cannot be arrested or apprehended, and many of the game's limiting features are disabled. This allows the player to mess around without having to deal with the normal rules of the game.
  • As of the "Befriend/Betray"^*(June 2016) update, if you start Kokona's storyline, kidnap Musume, but then kill Kokona before the end of the day (making sure to clean up your mess), the rest of the sequence – filming the ransom video, having a text conversation with Kokona, and the cutscene of Kokona visiting Yan-chan's home the next morning – will still play out normally. However, Kokona will not be at school the next day or in your basement if you chose to "eliminate" her during the cutscene.
  • Before the "Manipulating Students" update (where all of Kokona's scripted events were removed), if you performed the "Befriend" elimination sequence – where you ask Kokona to not pursue Senpai, and she agrees – but finished it by Tuesday night, Kokona would still pine over Senpai during her pre-scripted dialogue at lunch on Wednesday, which makes her come off as a liar.
    • This was also the case if you somehow managed to pair her off with Riku by 5:30pm Tuesday. She would still pine for Senpai the next day despite otherwise spending her free time in blissful happiness with her new beau.
• Serial Killer: Ayano can be played as this, with multiple methods of killing people available to her and the player.
• Shear Menace: Ayano can use the scissors in the sewing room as a weapon.
• Shipper with an Agenda: One of Ayano's many options for Removing the Rival is playing matchmaker, hooking a rival up with someone who has a crush on them (and is not Senpai).
• Shock and Awe: Through some engineering^note (tampering with a water fountain to create a leak, using a sabotaged power strip to electrify the resulting puddle, and then giving a student a salty snack to compel them to go to the water fountain), it is possible to electrocute someone to death. You can also electrocute yourself if you're not careful.
• Short Teens, Tall Adults: The (entirely female except for the headmaster) faculty tower over all the students, despite most of those students — Yan-chan included — being old enough to realistically have equalled or surpassed them in height.
• Shovel Strike: Zig-zagged. Ayano can use the shovel from the gardening club for digging graves and as a weapon. When doing a stealth attack from behind, Yan-chan uses the shovel handle as a fulcrum to break her victim's neck. Yan-chan's frontal assaults play this trope straight, but a shovel is unsuited for defending against Nemesis, martial artists, teachers, or anyone else who decides to tackle Yan-chan.
• Shrinking Violet:
  • Ayano gets this way around Senpai. She can't bring herself to confess to him unless she knows there aren't any rivals for his affection. Whenever he's near her, she'll drop whatever she's holding as she begins to lose her cool. If Senpai notices Yan-chan acting like this around him, he'll slowly get creeped out to the point that he'll eventually tell her to get lost, resulting in a Game Over.
  • Oka Ruto, the Occult Club President, is this. Her default walk cycle is shy and nervous, and she speaks with a quiet, halting voice. Many of her lines of dialogue suggest that she's lonely despite being the leader of a club.
  • Light Music Club leader Miyuji Shan was this the year before the game takes place. Over the summer, she completely and mysteriously changed her personality, so that now she is a confident, outgoing punk rocker.
  • Shin Higaku, Oka Ruto's right-hand man, has many of the same mannerisms as Oka.
  • Horuda Puresu fits the bill. She has bangs and the same default walk cycle as Oka, and spends all her time alone on the roof, reading. She's also usually the target of bullying.
  • Anyone traumatized (but not mind-broken) by Yan-chan will become this.
• Single Girl Seeks Most Popular Guy: Ayano plays with this trope in that she didn't know (or care) Senpai was that popular. Other rivals might be the same way. Actually, Senpai isn't popular at the start of the game, though the attention he gets from girls as the game progresses changes that status.
• Shout-Out: This game is packed to the gills with these, so much so that it needed its own unique Shoutout page to handle them all. The ones unique to the debug builds and developer videos are described in detail on the Trivia page. The ones intended to be in the final game can be found on the aforementioned Shoutout page.
• Shown Their Work:
  • Sometimes in the videos or on the blog, YandereDev will explain elements of Japanese culture that are in the game, such as why Yan-chan removes the shoes from a girl as she tosses her to her death, what bullying looks like in Japanese schools, and what exactly Compensated Dating is. An early post on the blog also has information he learned from an actual Japanese high school teacher, such as what a typical day looks like.
  • In the January 2nd 2017 blogpost, while introducing a new game mechanic linked to Osana, he explains what an emetic is^note (if you drink it, you barf) and why there would be a bottle of it at school^note (so the nurse can make a student barf out poison).
• Signature Instrument: All members of the Light Music Club have Punny Names, and most have Meaningful Name, related to their prefered instrument:
  • Miyuji Shan: Guitarist. "Miyuji Shan" is a Japanese-style pronunciation for "Musician".
  • Gita Yamahato: "Gita" is a Japanese-style pronunciation for "guitar".
  • Dora Tamamoto: "Dora" would be short for "Doramu", Japanese pronunciation for "drum", and "Tamamoto" refers to Tama drumkit brand.
  • Kiba Kawaito: "Kiba" is a modified "Kiboodo", which is "Keyboard" pronounced as Japanese people would do, and "Kawaito" is derived from Kawai keyboard instruments brand.
  • Beshi Takamine: Subversion of Meaningful Name, Punny Name Bassist, and the Odd Name Out. "Beshi" is "Bass" pronounced in a Japanese way, and Takamine is a brand of musical instruments that releases guitars and basses. A jack-of-all-trades, she can play almost any instrument, but none of them to a professional level, except for the bass, but that's not a huge character focus. Leaves complicated stuff to her bandmates. Willing to play back-up instruments (such as the maracas) when the song calls for it.
• Single Woman Seeks Good Man: Gender Flipped in the Budo vs. Taro rap battle. Taro says he doesn't care what a girl looks like — just that she's nice, and maybe likes reading like he does. Time will tell if this holds true in the game proper, but if it does, Yan-chan may have her work cut out for her...
• Sitting on the Roof:
  • A lot of the students like to congregate on the rooftop during lunch or before class.
  • If a girl's reputation has been wrecked by Yan-chan's gossip, she may sit alone on the roof while her former friends congregate elsewhere, leaving her an easy mark for our Villain Protagonist.
• Sixth Ranger Traitor: Yan-chan can be this for the Photography Club – as dangerous as they can be to your quest to keep Senpai to yourself, they're very trusting of each other and would never suspect that the killer is one of them…
• Soft-Spoken Sadist:
  • YandereDev speaks in an incredibly calm and pleasant tone about bullying, blackmail, kidnapping, torture, and murder.
    • The very first noteworthy example, from Spring 2015, sets the tone for what would come.
      "Hello. Today, I'm going to show you how to kidnap a girl in Yandere Sim." (audible smile) "Let's get started."
    • One of the greatest examples (of many) came in April 2017 when he began a video with this gem.
      (cheery tone) "Let's start off with some good news. I've made progress on Osana!"
      *Yan-chan removes the AC unit's cover, grabs Osana's pigtail and feeds it into the fan, messily decapitating her, then faces camera*
      (ignoring the carnage) "However, I haven't made enough progress to make a whole video about Osana just yet."
• The Smurfette Principle:
  • Asu Rito, the 5th rival, is the president of the Sports Club and the only female member too.
  • Osoro Shidesu, the 8th rival, is the leader of the Delinquents, and the only female Delinquent at that.
• Soundtrack Dissonance:
  • The game's standard background music is much too cheerful for the game's premise. However, if Yan-chan's sanity drops (generally through murdering multiple people), the music will become distorted.
  • If the school's atmosphere drops too low, the standard music will take on a more foreboding tone, upping the bass and muting the bouncier parts.
  • Any of the Easter Eggs in the Debug builds that use copyrighted music (all have since been swapped out for soundalikes) – for instance, just hearing "Guren no Yumiya" in Titan Mode is a bit distracting. However, you can turn off copyrighted music or mute the music entirely… which makes the spectacle even crazier.
• Spear Counterpart: In test builds released prior to December 2015, the boys – well, the Rainbow Boys at any rate – were literally just male versions of the original six female students, although their AI base is different. Sending their photos to Info-chan revealed that the boys and girls who shared hair/eye color were in the same classes. They also used to be in the same clubs. The only real difference between them at that point was their personality type (girls were all "Loner"^* {originally "Coward" before that term was mapped to a different type} and boys were all "Teacher's Pet"). Over time, things became much more varied, until late 2018 when the "Rainbow Twelve" were removed from the game entirely to make room for more important characters, with the excpetions of Saki, Kokona and Riku. The others did return for 1980s mode though.
• Spoofy-Doo: The Photography Club is modeled after the Mystery Gang, with the characters being lookalikes and having familiar-sounding names, although their Scooby-Doo Expy is a kid who sometimes claims to be a dog who's been turned into a human by magic. If you fly under the radar and keep the school's overall atmosphere high, they're just a bunch of slackers goofing off together. However, if you give them reason to believe there's a Serial Killer in school, they suddenly become your worst nightmare: hyper-vigilant sleuths who travel in a pack, actively look for clues and keep an eye out for suspicious behavior, and always have cameras on them. If they suspect you personally, it'll get even worse, since even if you clean up all the evidence, they'll take to stalking you to catch you in the act and ensure you can't get away with it again.
• Symbol Swearing: Played with during the rap battle between Osana Najimi and Ayano Aishi. The single swear word during the rap isn't censored, but the Big Ball of Violence after the rap has symbols (?!#@#**@@!#?#@) flying out of it, implying that the Angrish is censored swearing.
• Stalker Shrine: Ayano's bedroom has a shrine to Senpai that she can build via collectibles. Currently, the shrine comes fully stocked with a toothbrush, and half-eaten apple, a framed photo, a used Band-Aid, a lock of hair, and a pair of Senpai's boxers, and how Yan-chan acquired these items is little more than a Noodle Incident. However, in the future, it will probably be on the player to get ahold of them via sidequests.
• Stalker with a Crush:
  • Ayano is this. However, the point of the game is to not be noticed by Senpai until all of Ayano's rivals have been eliminated. If her obvious obsession creeps him out too much or he sees her true nature, it's Game Over.
  • Other students can develop crushes on Yan-chan if she becomes popular and/or seductive enough. Their persona changes to the Stalker persona to match.
• Stalker without a Crush:
  • Yan-chan can stalk the rivals (or anyone else) to try to find information that she can use to her advantage or find an opportunity to murder her.
  • Attracting the unwanted attention of the Photography Club but also evading arrest triggers the Stalker persona in them, causing their members to focus their entire attention on catching Yan-chan red-handed. The same happens if you murder someone's best friend or loved one and get away with it.
• Star-Crossed Lovers: Literally the title of the credits song, an Award-Bait Song that's soft and gentle, about how deeply Yan-chan wants to be with Senpai. In fact, one bit of the lyrics is:
  And all I aim to prove, is that we're taking on life like star-crossed lovers.
• Static Screw: If the player attempts to exit school before the day is over, the screen will fill with static and a message will appear stating "No... I must not".
• Strangled by the Red String: In-Universe, the matchmaking mechanic, with Yandere-chan holding the strings. Thanks to Ayano's manipulation, the matchmade rival will fall deeply in love with her suitor and start dating him (and forget all about Senpai) in a single week.

T-Z

• Take That!:
  • YandereDev likes to do this whenever outside forces attempt to prevent exposure of his game.
    • After his video explaining the panty shot mechanic was flagged for inappropriate content on Youtube, YanDev added the feature to strip Ayano naked (with clouds of Censor Steam covering the objectionable bits... and only those bits. Although the characters all had Barbie Doll Anatomy anyways), stating this was his way of getting back at them. (This mechanic was later replaced: now characters wear a towel while nude, and are not visible to the player while they're showering. Presumably YandereDev got over it.)
    • In mid-January 2016, YanSim got banned from livestreaming site Twitch without adequate explanation. As a result, the February 1st build opens with a joke Warning Screen with a Long List of "inappropriate" things the game contains – starting sensibly (bullying, kidnapping, torture, etc.), but becoming increasingly ridiculous (various states of sewage, game breaking bugs, an overworked programmer, "and much worse"). He later dropped the screen for being too narmy, but it got the point across.
    • Working under the assumption that Twitch's issue with the game was the naked (though Barbie Doll Anatomy) Titans, YandereDev changed the texture of the Titans' skin... to a low-resolution photograph of what is apparently red feathers but when stretched kind of resembles muscles (it looks more like bacon). A later build changed the Titan skins again, this time to something more resembling the source material, exposed muscles and all.
• Takes Ten to Hold: If more than four people, regardless of their persona, witness Yandere-chan commit murder, they'll combine their forces and restrain her. However, when three or less characters see Yandere-Chan commit murder, unless they have the Hero persona, are part of the student council, or are teachers, are generally incapable of self-defense and resort to just running away if they have the Social Butterfly, Spiteful, Loner, or Coward persona, to calling a teacher if they have the Teacher's Pet persona, or snap a picture of her and send it to the police if they're a Phone Addict (or just happen to have a phone at that time).
• Take That, Audience!: The third installment of the critically acclaimed Kuudere Simulator is this towards impatient fans that won't stop bugging YandereDev about implementing Osana, so he gave them what they wanted… in the most anti-climatic way possible: Kuudere-chan spawns Osana with a button press, whips out a gun and shoots her in the face, then gives a Deadpan Snarker reaction.
• Tampering with Food and Drink:
  • The player has the ability to poison a rival's food to get them out of your (and Senpai's) hair. As a bonus, when a student gets a teacher to examine the scene, they call an ambulance rather than the police, keeping Ayano free of suspicion unless she tries to move the body.
  • The game also contains emetic, sedative, and headache-causing poisons. By distracting a student during lunchtime, you can tamper with any student's lunch. Lethal poison is lethal; emetic poison causes the student to run to the bathroom and vomit; sedative causes the student to go to the nurse's office to take a nap; and headache poison causes the student to go to the nurse's office to ask for medicine. In gameplay terms, the emetic and sedative are two non-lethal ways to remove a witness from the area. (Emetic poison also forces a student to go to the bathroom, which is usually fairly secluded and offers various ways to drown someone.) The headache poison causes the nurse to unlock the cabinet with the headache medicine inside... which also contains a tranquilizer, which Yandere-chan needs to kidnap a student. If she's quick, she can steal the tranq while the poisoned student is being treated.
• Tastes Like Friendship: If you join the Cooking Club, you can make snacks that you can hand out for a huge reputation boost^±(one plate nets you 45 points if you hand them all out, 54 points if you use a buff).
• Teacher's Pet:
  • One of the personality types. In this case, their reaction to seeing a murder/corpse will be to run and tell their teacher, drawing them to the scene of a crime and making it more difficult to cover up. It is possible to make the Teacher's Pet look like a liar by cleaning up the scene of the crime before the student and teacher return. If Yan-chan successfully tidies up the scene, then the teacher won't believe the student. However, if the Teacher's Pet witnessed the murder, they will try proving that Yan-chan killed a student, constantly draining your reputation. Their fate afterwards depends on the player. However, it is recommended to kill them before another slip up happens or Yan-chan's reputation drops too low.
  • It's notable in the early builds that almost all male students not in the Martial Arts club qualified as this (while the girls were almost entirely Social Butterflies). This began to change as the finalized clubs were implemented; some boys in the Drama club are Social Butterflies, the Sports Club are Heroes along with the Martial Arts boys, the boys in the Photography clubs are Sleuths, some boys in the Science Club are Loners, etc. It's now more split by club than by gender.
• Tears of Joy: During her love confession, if Senpai tells Osana he loves her back, she will start crying out of joy.
• Teens Are Monsters:
  • Villain Protagonist Ayano can murder and bully her classmates.
  • Info-chan blackmails others, was the one to suggest killing others to Yan-chan (in the original now-scrapped opening), and her currency is Panty Shots, presumably without the subject's consent.
  • The established Gang of Bullies can and will bully students with low reputation. Even if that student is Driven to Suicide, they will continue gossiping without remorse. In fact, they nearly drove the current delinquents to a suicide pact.
• Theme Naming: All the club leaders, except for Asu Rito, Amai Odayaka, Fureddo Jonzu, and Kizana Sunobu, are basically named for their club: Budo Masuda (His first name means "Martial Arts"), Oka Ruto (Her name is "Occult"), Gema Taku (His first name is basically "Game"), Geiju Tsuka (His name means "Artist"), Miyuji Shan (Her name means "Musician"), Kaga Kusha (His name means "Scientist"), and Uekiya Engeika (Her name (植木屋園芸家) translates to "Gardener Horiculturalist").
• This Means War!:
  • If any of the student council members die or go missing under any circumstance, Megami will correctly assume that Ayano had something to do with it^note Ayano's involvement is necessary in order to harm or remove them from the school, whether it be by direct actions such as a stealth attack, or indirect actions such as manipulating someone to kill them, and effectively declares war on her by establishing a litany of security measures, including security cameras and metal detectors.
  • The Sleuths, along with anyone whose loved one is killed by Yan-chan, also fall under this if they find out that she is responsible for the deaths. They will stalk her constantly, 24/7, without breaks, trying to catch her in the act.
• Throw the Dog a Bone:
  • Most early videos showcasing elimination methods used Kokona as a guinea pig, but the June 1st 2016 update video finally showcased a method that does not require harming her in any way. Instead, Yan-chan befriends her and helps her out of an unpleasant situation. Then, when Kokona visits Yan-chan's home to thank her, Yan-chan simply asks Kokona to back off Senpai, which she agrees to out of a sense of honor. The end of that video states the next elimination method to be added to the game would be Matchmaking, which meant that unless Dev picked a different guinea pig (unlikely), we would get to see Kokona happy with another boy.
    • Defied. The next elimination method implemented wasn't Matchmaking; it was Crushing and Immolation.
    • Of course, when Matchmaking was implemented at the end of September 2016, Kokona was the test dummy again. To put the icing on the cake, Dev declared at the end that Kokona's time as the game's resident Butt-Monkey had come to an end.
  • YandereDev will occasionally have Midori ask legitimate, non-stupid questions, including ones he'll admit he has no satisfactory answer to, such as how exactly the skirt inventory system will work if Yan-chan isn't wearing a skirt (whether that be because she's wearing pants, is naked, or is hypothetically a man) or why all the students keep coming back to school when it's obvious there's a serial killer loose in it. invoked
• Time Stands Still: The Witch Mode allows Ayano to stop time after calling "Time Stop!", which stops time, and starts it up when calling "Time Start." However, items like the school gate can still be activated and moved. Colors are inverted when time is stopped.
• Too Awesome to Use: Wearing a mask and using the edge of the rooftop is very powerful aids to getting away with murder. The mask will conceal your face, meaning that you can commit murder in front of witnesses and get away with it as long as you're not apprehended or Senpai doesn't see you (in which case he will run up to you and rip off the mask), and the rooftop railing is a place to push students over the edge, which kills them without producing any fingerprint or DNA evidence. However, both of these will only work once. Murdering while wearing a mask will result in masks being banned, and a railing death will result in a ten-foot-high fence being erected (if the school determines that the person died from falling off the building; if that doesn't appear to be the case, or Yan-chan managed to hide the body, then the railing stays as it is).
• Torture Cellar: Ayano's basement is used to trap students she kidnaps, where she psychologically tortures them and breaks their minds. It's also the place where Ryoba tied up her senpai to make him hers. Her mother did the same thing to her father.
• Totally 18: The game comes with a disclaimer that all of the characters are 18 or older regardless of what the game itself says, or even what YanDev has said in the past. This was done, at least in part, to get around laws that ban depicting sexualization of or violence against minors (most notably in Australia).
• Trash Landing: Notable aversion. Yan-chan can position a dumpster just so, so that a student she pushes off the roof will land in it. They still die. (The reason for doing this is that it makes it possible to hide the body by covering it up with more trash.)
• Troubled Fetal Position: In the case of ghe Basu sisters, as well as Osana and Raibaru, killing the person they are the closest to (or otherwise removing them from their life) will result in them sitting in a position with their knees pulled to their face.
• Twitchy Eye: The more Yan-chan's Sanity meter drops, the more obvious her mental instability becomes. At mid- and (especially) low-level, she'll have a noticeable twitch.
• Two Girls to a Team: Most clubs have three male members and two female members. The only exceptions are the Gaming Club (which has three female members and two male members), the Gardening Club, The Light Music Club, the Student Council, the Gang of Bullies (all of which are female), the Sports Club and the Delinquents (both of which only have one girl, their respective leader). This shows up yet again in 1980s mode, with the sole exceptions being the Light Music Club, which is all-female, and the Student Council, which is all male.
• Unintentional Uncanny Valley: An In-Universe meta variation occurred not with people, but with clothes. YandereDev mentioned that, prior to a programming breakthrough in May 2016, he could add assets not associated with the "Aoi" model to the game – other articles of clothing, for example – but they would glitch when the characters moved. He gave the example of wearing a pair of pants that would not move with the body of the person wearing them, and that it gave everything an unnatural and eerie feeling.
• Underboobs: You can see Yan-chan's when you go into Venom Snake mode.
• Unstoppable Rage: If you kill a student in front of that student's loved one, the survivor will bum-rush your ass and return the sentiment with compounded interest.
• Unusually Uninteresting Sight:
  • Until early 2019, while people would react to bodies or body parts (body parts only if you were holding them), they would have no such reaction to blood, weapons, or body parts on the ground. If a Teacher's Pet called a teacher over to the scene of a murder, she would assume it was a prank if Yan-chan simply dragged the body around a corner, ignoring the blood trail. In early 2019, reactions to such things were finally implemented, with appropriate horror.
  • The Magical Girl Wand Joke Weapon is (depending on the build) undetectable by police. You can leave it, obvious and bloody, at the scene of the crime, and the police won't find anything.
• Unwanted Assistance: Midori in development videos is constantly interrupting YandereDev and harassing him by asking questions he's heard many times before and offering unwanted advice. In the game, she spends all day on the roof sending emails to an unnamed game developer.
  "I wonder if he already answered this in the FAQ? I'll ask him anyway!"
• Unwinnable by Design:
  • Teachers are easily capable of outrunning a base-stat Ayano, so triggering one to pursue her will bring about an inevitable detainment and game over (if you have no single-handed weapon, that is; if you do, then the same rules governing Martial Artists apply).
  • Turning on the incinerator (which locks it for an hour in-game – ten minutes real-time) without disposing of the murder weapon or bloody uniform ^note (puddles of blood and random corpses do not link the murder to Yan-chan – these pieces of evidence instead negatively affect school atmosphere rather than rendering the game unwinnable) first, while the five-minute police countdown is in action, does this.
  • Antagonizing a delinquent (by murdering someone in front of them or letting them see you with a corpse/body-part) inevitably leads to Yan-chan getting beaten into a coma. While in normal circumstances, they are content to beat her up and let her go, if they see her true nature, they will keep attacking her until she is down.
  • Attacking Raibaru or anyone else in front of her by any means will only result in her apprehending you after breaking your arm multiple times to ensure that she does. Even most 'underhanded methods' such as stealth attacks and distractions will not work on her.
• Unwitting Instigator of Doom: In the tutorial, Kokona asks for Yan-chan's help rehearsing a play about a serial killer, thus giving Yan-chan the idea and the practice to kill her rivals.
• Vague Age: YandereDev never explicitly provided the ages of many characters. While we the audience are to assume that they mostly fall within the age range of highschool students (e.g. Ayano being in second year, making her approximately 16-17 years old), Word of God has it that everyone in the game is 18 or older, per the provided disclaimer. This is likely done in order to skirt around the accusations of the player being able to do things that are Harmful to Minors, or actions that are sexual in nature towards young teenagers that can be considered illegal.
• Vague Hit Points: The Shoot 'Em Up-type Games Within a Games have mooks that die quickly enough such that this is used, as compared to the bosses.
• Video Game Caring Potential:
  • Yan-chan is able to play matchmaker and eliminate her rivals by getting them together with other guys as a nonlethal option.
    • She can also befriend her rivals by helping them with their major problems. In turn, they could return the favour by agreeing to not pursue Senpai.
    • She can befriend any student by helping them with something. The standard placeholder task is to help that person with their homework, but you can also get Hazu a drink of water, help Pippi with her broken video game console, retrieve Ryuto's lost bandana, or help Gema get a date.
• Video Game Cruelty Potential:
  • You can sabotage a rival's social standing, damaging your rival's reputation to the point that she stays home in fear of bullies and Senpai refuses to accept her confession. Beyond that, you can further trash her reputation until she is Driven to Suicide – note that doing this is not required, as you will have already ruined her chances with Senpai; the only reason to do it is if you really have it in for the girl and want to twist the (proverbial, in this case) knife.
  • Yan-chan can eavesdrop on students and learn their darkest secrets – drug addiction, Compensated Dating, pregnancy, etc. – and exploit them by staging their deaths as suicides or posting about it on social media to instigate bullying.
  • It's also possible to torture and mindbreak students. This is especially cruel since the person you're doing this to is someone you befriended earlier, and since the end result kills two students, one of them your rival and the other one your victim as she kills herself after killing your target, having nothing else to live for.
  • You can befriend your rivals just so that you can betray them after having earned their trust and kill them in a private location. This one's especially cruel because if you ignore the prompt to kill them, then Yan-chan will simply ask them to stay away from Senpai and they'll accept out of gratitude, meaning that there's no reason for them to die at this point.
  • You can bully students with the Fragile persona to the breaking point, and then frame someone else as the cause of their misery and thus get them to murder a student of your choice without getting your hands dirty.
• Video Game Cruelty Punishment:
  • After reading an article about the game that expressed concerns about how it might be trivializing serious social issues like bullying, YandereDev wrote a thoughtful response that acknowledged the concerns and even considered including a mechanic in which if a student is bullied into suicide, the bullying option becomes unavailable, as the rest of the students become horrified at their actions. In 1980's mode, if a rival is bullied to the point of suicide, the court will call it a deliberate murder, thus contributing to Ryoba's guilty verdict worse case scenario.
  • If you let the school atmosphere drop to very low levels, you will end up losing more reputation for suspicious behavior and students are more alert of your actions, making it harder to kill students.
  • If the school's atmosphere drops to critical levels, members of the photography club will start patrolling the campus in search of the murderer, and will have you arrested immediately if they catch you and take a picture, thus making them among the toughest opponents in the game.
  • Also, trying to damage a girl's reputation counts. If you don't get the details exactly right, your reputation will tank. However, if you uncover dark secrets, you can use this to your advantage by damaging the girl's reputation severely without losing too much of yours.
  • Taking trophy shots of your dead victims will backfire tremendously if the police take you in for questioning and search your phone^note (if they search your phone; currently that mechanic does not exist). And no one is going to accept a panty shot of a dead girl – Info-chan's clients are perverts, but not in that way.
  • While it is possible to kill members of the student council, doing so will upset Megami, causing her to add security cameras and metal detectors to the school. These new security measures will make other students feel like the school has become oppressive, so the school atmosphere levels will permanently drop to the lowest level.
• Villainous Rescue: The "Befriend/Betray" elimination method is this; Ayano helps her rival with a serious life problem (loan sharks, stalking, etc.) in order to earn her trust. From there, she can either ask her nicely to stay away from Senpai, or kill her while her guard is down.
• Villain Song:
  • . Yan-chan got two official ones for the 2015 holiday season: "It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Murder" and "Yandere-chan is Coming to Town" (the latter courtesy of Ayano's own voice actress).
  • There's also "Senpai Notice Me", which was given approval by YanDev (he and Midori have a dialogue at the end of the video).
  • In February 2017, three of the game's voice actresses^*(Michaela Laws [Ayano], Brittany Lauda [Osana], and Caitlyn "Mom0ki" Myers [Midori]) got together and made this, a glorious parody of the "Epic Rap Battles" series.
• "The Villain Sucks" Song: 2016 saw the release of a Christmas-themed one called "You're a Mean One, Yandere-chan" (again sung by Yan-chan's voice actress).
• Violence Is Disturbing:
  • In update videos, YandereDev does his best to invoke this.
    YandereDev: Remember... Yandere-chan is not a good person. She's a monster.
  • Many of the killing animations (especially the low-sanity ones, and especially the mindslave animation) are deliberately horrifying, in order to make it absolutely clear what kind of person our hero is.
• Wide-Open Sandbox:
  • Discussed in a video, with YandereDev contemplating adding a number of previously unconsidered features to the game, including a small town, to prevent it from becoming boring, with a warning that doing so would necessitate extending development time by at least half a year and/or soliciting for additional funds to hire professional aid.
  • For several years, the game contained a simple prototype town. There was nothing to do there; you could simply ride around on your bike and do wheelies. It was later removed, and then replaced with a 2D part-time-job minigame, and an online store with which to buy weapons or other items. The small town feature is most likely permanently scrapped.
• World of Action Girls: This game is rife with them.
  • Ayano herself definitely counts. She will do anything to win her Senpai, up to and including murder. She knows her way around a weapon, can fight delinquents, martial artists, and teachers and win, and if you play the serial killer route, will spend a lot of time lugging around corpses.
  • Asu Rito is the President of the Sports Club. She is described as extremely athletic, and her Student Info says that "many of her classmates predict that she'll be winning gold medals at the Olympics in a few years."
  • Osoro Shidesu is the leader of the Delinquents, and the second-strongest student at school. She supposedly defeated an enormous group of bullies with her bare fists, and wears one of the defeated bullies' coats as a trophy. Most people at school are scared of her.
  • Megami Saikou, the final rival, has been training her whole life to take over control of Japan's largest MegaCorp. As such, she has extensive self-defense training and will not hesitate to take down anyone who attacks her.
  • Every faculty member at Akademi High (all of whom are female except for the Headmaster) is trained in self-defense. They will respond to a murder by chasing down and pinning Ayano to the ground, and if directly attacked, they will curb-stomp a base-stat Ayano.
  • Kyoshi Tachikawa, the gym teacher, in particular. In addition to all of the above, she is a retired competitive swimmer and a world-famous athlete, with a total of 23 gold medals, including 8 won in a single year.
  • Ryoba Aishi definitely counts, for the same reasons as Ayano.
  • The whole Student Council, all of whom will chase you down and pepper-spray you if they catch you hurting someone. However, Aoi Rygoku, who serves as the council's enforcer, who is missing her right eye, and is explicitly described as "physically intimidating", particularly counts.
  • Every girl in the Martial Arts Club, along with one girl in the Gardening Club (Himari Fujita), has the Heroic personality — meaning that they will charge Yan-chan if they see her committing murder and attempt to take her down, even if it costs them their lives.
  • Raibaru Fumetsu, Osana's best friend, is the founder and former president of the Martial Arts Club. She may look like a cutesy Girly Girl with her Girlish Pigtails, pink scrunchies, and friendly demeanor, but if you attack her — or commit murder in front of her — she will tackle you to the ground and break your arm, resulting in an instant and unavoidable Game Over. In addition to being incredibly strong, she has lightning-fast reflexes, and will sense a sneak attack coming and easily dodge a bucket trap. Rumor is that she can even fight off a mindslave. She is incredibly badass.
• World of Technicolor Hair: Characters with normal hair colours co-exist with students who have technicolor hair with no questions asked.
  • Many of the earliest implemented students fall under the latter category: Midori has green hair, Kuu Dere has light blue hair, the Basu sisters have pink and purple hair respectively, Mai Waifu has pink hair and so on.
  • Senpai has black hair by default, but he can be customised at the beginning of the game to have a more unusual hair colour.
  • Some of the clubs seem to follow a pattern with the hair colours of the members. The members of the Drama Club all have purple hair and the Light Music club all have (most likely dyed) two colours in their hair.
  • Downplayed in 1980s mode where most students have natural hair colors, though there are still a few with unusual shades, including half of the rivals.
• Work Info Title: The title contains the game's genre.
• Yandere:
  • The main character is one, and the game revels in exploiting as many clichés and associated tropes as possible.
  • The main character's mother is/was one. She killed the girl who is now a ghost who hangs out in one of the school's bathrooms.
  • The Basement Tapes take this a step further by stating that Aishi women have been like this for generations.
  • The final rival was originally planned to be a second Yandere. This was later scrapped, and Megami Saikou took her place.
• Yet Another Stupid Death:
  • Go ahead, attack the nurse, a teacher, or especially Raibaru with a knife. See what it gets you.^note If you don't have your Phys-Ed stat up to at least Level 1, the nurse and the teachers will curbstomp you; if you have leveled up, then it's up to that stat and your own button mashing skills whether or not they die. In the case of Raibaru, she will break your arms and apprehend you no matter how you try.
  • When you're done messing with the nurse/a teacher/Raibaru, act dangerous around the delinquents. Surely the fight against a 5-student group armed with bats and crowbars will go well. Heck, they dare you to try.
  • Try to take a panty shot of a girl while in a faculty member's field of view. They have a special line just for that.
    I saw that! You disgusting pervert! How could you do such a thing?! I'm taking you to the counselor immediately!
  • Senpai also has a special line if he catches Ayano acting lewd.
    What the hell are you doing? That's horrible! Stop it, you creep!
  • Make yourself a threat to a Student Council member. You know, the ones who patrol the school, are nearly impossible to sneak up on, and carry pepper spray? Sure, that'll end well for you.
  • Stand in a blood fountain (of your own indirect creation) while Senpai is watching. He won't have any problem with it at all. It certainly won't be an immediate game over.
  • Lie about a classmate on social media. That'll sure boost your popularity. ^note (Of course, real life has countless examples of this working unpunished more often than the game's consistent penalties for it would indicate, but still.)
  • Try to steal the answer sheet from the table in the Faculty Room when six teachers (or just Kyoshi) are there. I'm sure they won't notice or care.
  • Attempt to either flirt with or threaten the guidance counselor. Especially threaten.
  • Try to clean up evidence (such as a puddle of blood, a body part, or a blood-stained weapon) right in front of a teacher. Surely that won't implicate you in the murder.
  • Rigging a drinking fountain to electrocute anyone who uses it and then using it yourself grants a unique^note formerly given by the delinquents Game Over in which Ayano is rendered comatose.
  • The same "Comatose" Game Over is given if you attempt to kill the Headmaster while he is pointing a taser at you. It takes a special kind of stupid to get this one.
• Zerg Rush: If you commit a murder in front of four or more witnesses, they will gang up on you and overwhelm you through sheer force of numbers, even if most or all of them are normally incapable of self-defense on their own.

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"Thank you for following the development of Yandere Simulator."

— YandereDev at the end of all his videos.

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