Characters / Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors

Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors || Virtue's Last Reward || Zero Time Dilemma

The cast of Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors, and all tropes that pertain to them. For tropes specific to their appearances in later games, see their respective character pages.

Beware for Late-Arrival Spoiler descriptions for later games in the franchise.

Major spoilers ahead. All spoilers are unmarked. You Have Been Warned.

The Nine Players - WARNING: Unmarked spoilers ahead!

In General

• Aw, Look! They Really Do Love Each Other: Uchikoshi himself declared in a Questions and Answers that Lotus and Seven are a canonical couple. Their interactions in-game bounce between annoyance and protectiveness, especially after Seven saves Lotus from Ace.
• Ax-Crazy:
  • Clover becomes homicidally insane in the Axe ending as a result of her brother's death. She grabs the axe that killed the Captain and uses it against Santa, Seven, June, and Junpei.
  • In the Safe ending, Snake goes berserk against Ace when the latter tells him how much he enjoyed killing Clover. And he brings Ace down...at the cost of his own life.
• Batman Gambit:
  • Junpei:
    • He pulls these off in a few scenes in order to force the teams to divide in a way that lets him through his choice of door.
    • In the Safe ending, Junpei exposes Ace by pretending that he switched clothes with Santa. Ace's inability to recognize faces caused him to fall for the trap and reveal himself as the game's villain.
  • Ace does this in the hospital room, forcing the teams to divide in a way that wouldn't allow anyone through Door 3.
  • It's eventually revealed that part of the purpose of the Nonary Game is to punish the four Cradle executives who ran the first Nonary Game. This is partially accomplished by tricking Ace, the CEO, into killing the other three. Though Ace is never forced to do anything, Zero knows him well enough to predict his actions.
• Big Brother Instinct: Snake and Santa are both incredibly protective of their younger sisters. Snake is thrown into a suicidal rage when Clover is murdered by Ace, though Santa's sister is already dead by the beginning of the story (or is she?).
• Brother–Sister Team: Snake and Clover. Also, Santa and June.
• Cluster F-Bomb: Everyone except for Snake and June swears like a sailor at least once in the story. Santa is definitely the primary offender, though.
• Color-Coded for Your Convenience: A really clever bit of both Foreshadowing here: Clover and Snake both wear red and blue respectively. Why is this important? Clover was able to transmit signals, and Snake was able to receive them in the first Nonary Game. This is the same exact color used for the figures during the examples when the theory pops up in-game. But this doesn't end there: June/Akane wore red in the first Nonary game, and she was meant to be a transmitter to Santa, a receiver. Santa himself had traces of blue in his design in the first Nonary Game, not to mention his real name, Aoi, means "blue" in Japanese. And finally, Junpei has both red and blue in his design, hinting at his ability to both transmit AND receive. June/Akane herself also wears purple, which is also the meaning of her name — a mixture of red and blue, which could also indicate her eventual ability to transmit and receive.
• Conveniently an Orphan: Santa and June — that's the reason they were never reported as missing when they were kidnapped by Cradle. Two installments later we get to see the actual reason they are parentless.
• Determinator: Nearly everyone:
  • In the Safe ending, Snake won't stop until he brings Clover's killer down, even if it means enduring a lot of bullets and dying along with his opponent.
  • Seven, who pursued the case of the first Nonary Game nine years ago, which meant tailing a dangerous organization, getting drugged and imprisoned on a ship, ripping apart an airvent hatch to sneak around the area, and delving into an active incinerator to rescue a bunch of young children, eventually succeeding and escaping alive.
  • June, who masterminded the second Nonary Game to both avenge and rescue her past self, even if it meant trying and failing across several timelines.
  • For that matter, Santa as well, who's June's brother, and who became her Number Two for the same reasons as her.
  • Lotus, who has spent nine years obsessively researching the cover-up of the children's kidnapping.
  • Junpei just won't rest until he escapes with June, even if he doesn't in the True Ending. It's touching in the Safe ending, where he firmly opposes Zero's intention of ending the game while claiming that he'll escape with June... only for him to be rendered unconscious from Soporil.
  • Ace is willing to kill as many people as necessary to escape the Nonary Game.
• Dwindling Party: Played with and later discussed when it's revealed that there's more than one door marked with a 9. Shame that doesn't help very much.
• Easily Forgiven:
  • On the True Ending path, Junpei and the others seem to pretty easily forgive the culprits once everything's revealed, especially since they were pretty justified in taking down the Nonary Game creators.
  • If Junpei goes through Door 3 (leaving Clover and Lotus behind to die just so he wouldn't be separated from June), all he gets for it when he returns is a glare and a slap on the cheek. Possibly justified, given that the team returned (subverting the "abandonment" part), they had found Snake, and they had just been through hell. This is significantly changed in the iOS version, as instead of moving on to Door 2 and the Sub ending, Clover takes her revenge on Junpei via injecting him with Soporil and drowning him.
• Everyone Calls Him "Barkeep": Early in the game, all the characters except for Junpei take a codename in case Zero just randomly kidnapped them but is keeping surveillance on them. Never mind that in most cases, they were probably carrying ID when kidnapped... Of course, if they'd all announced their names, Ace would have been clued in to Santa and June's true identity, Lotus's backplot, as well as Seven's story if his amnesia was an act. Which would have made Ace even more eager to backstab them, considering how quickly he moves against the 9th Man and "Snake". Not surprising Aoi and Akane went along with the idea...
• Genre Blindness: Santa, Junpei and June left a loaded gun inside the coffin in the cargo room and didn't make sure that Ace wouldn't take it when they weren't looking. They paid a high price for this. In the same vein, Seven trusting that Santa wouldn't take the gun is what sets off the True Ending.
• Hidden Depths: EVERYBODY. The director had this in mind creating the game - building the characters upon stereotypes, then subverting them.
• Red Oni, Blue Oni: This trope is used in almost every possible form, thanks to subverted stereotypes and numerous reveals. Some key examples:
  • Zigzagged by Clover (who wears red) and Snake (who wears blue). When Snake disappears, Clover's distress makes her become both onis, being alternately passionate and aloof. Clover starts as a bubbly, energetic Red Oni, but becomes a cold and detached Blue Oni after believing her brother died (until she snaps, anyway). Snake, meanwhile, begins as a calm, erudite Blue Oni but after Clover dies goes completely berserk on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge.
  • Santa and June, whose names are homonyms for 'Blue' and 'Red' respectively. Santa's establishing character moment in the prologue would make him appear to be a classic Red Oni, but once all the pieces are collected and he drops the act, he seems to actually be the Blue Oni. June turns out to be the more emotional of the pair.
  • The game also makes more than one reference to red and blue creating purple, although one of these is Lost in Translation.
• Ship Tease:
  • Seven and Lotus, especially when they're the first ones to protest when they, at separate occasions, attempt to perform a Heroic Sacrifice. The excuses they come up with to explain their outbursts aren't very convincing either.
  • Various dialogues between Junpei and Clover in the Library and Cargo Room have this vibe. In the context of the events involving Clover that lead up to said rooms, Junpei giving her the laminated four-leaf clover bookmark and her glomping him when he inadvertently reveals that Snake is still alive, these moments can be read as Clover having developed a bit of a crush on Junpei.
• Shipper on Deck: EVERYONE with Junpei and June, primarily Lotus, who repeatedly teases you about June. Twice as funny due to the boat pun you can make this trope into.
• Skyward Scream:
  • In the Safe ending:
    Ace: ZEEEEEROOOOOOOOO!!!
    Junpei: KAAAANNYYYYYY!!!
  • Santa/Aoi: does this after finding the charred remains of his sister. However, due to the Set Right What Once Went Wrong plot of the game, he doesn't technically end up doing this.
• Theme Naming:
  • Everyone takes up code names based off their number, except Junpei. Ace (1), Snake (as in "snake eyes," 2), Santa ("san" is "3" in Japanese, plus he's got a few stories about "Santa" to tell), Clover (4, like the leaves), June (the 6th month), Seven (which, uh, probably sounded cool and foreign in Japanese), and Lotus (8, like the petals on the flower). Junpei is about to announce his code name but is cut off by Lotus before he can say it, who tells him it's pointless for him to have one since they all know his real name already.
  • The same applies in the Japanese version, where most of their assumed names either have the character for their number in them, or are similar in sound (again, except Junpei). Ace is Ichimiya ("ichi" is "1"), Snake is Ni(e)ls ("ni" is "two"), Santa is the same, Clover is Yotsuba ("clover" in Japanese), June is Murasaki (the character for "six" can be pronounced "mu"), Seven is... Seven, and Lotus is Yashiro (the character for "eight" can be pronounced "ya"). Mu can also refer to nothingness in both English and Japanese... that is, zero.
  • Averted in that Clover's name is actually Clover, well, Yotsuba.
  • Odd Name Out: Junpei, because he was identified by his real name before the Theme Naming was decided on.
• You Wake Up in a Room: The game starts with your character waking up in the cabin of a large passenger ship. Of the nine characters involved, however, only one has amnesia and it isn't you. In fact, Junpei only needs a few minutes to get his bearings before the player sees exactly how he was abducted from his apartment.

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5 - Junpei

#5 Junpei

Voiced by: Tatsuhisa Suzuki (Japanese), Evan Smith (English)

"Do any of you know what the fuck is going on here?! Who's Zero?! What's this 'Nonary Game'!? C'mon! Anybody? Anything?! What the hell is going on?! What are we doing here?!"

The protagonist of the game. Junpei is an ordinary college student who is kidnapped by a mysterious masked man and wakes up in an unknown location with a bracelet strapped to his wrist. Although he is confused and frightened at first, after adjusting to the situation it is shown that he has a sharp mind and a skeptical outlook on life.

His bracelet number is 5. Unlike the other eight, he does not have a codename because his real name was revealed before the group decided to keep them a secret.

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• Affectionate Nickname: Junpei is called "Jumpy" by his childhood friend June.
• Agent Scully: He is a staunch (although this can vary slightly with dialogue choices) skeptic, with a habit of putting down June's occult musings. He tends to be quite good at coming up with the most logical and plausible explanation for some of the more outlandish theories proposed during the game. In true Agent Scully fashion, this makes Junpei wrong about many of the phenomena presented by other players throughout the Nonary Game.
• Ambiguous Situation: Due to the circumstances of his mindlink with Akane, how much he's aware of other routes is unclear. The major reveals of the True Ending, for example, rely on a lot of information given through the Safe Ending, but Akane's POV during that section mentions she's lost contact with Junpei for a while before it picks up again right before the final puzzle, meaning it might be the one point in the game where Junpei actually knows and remembers the other routes.
• Batman Gambit: He is capable of quite a few of these, including tricking other players into choosing the door he wants and tricking Ace into revealing himself as the villain by pretending to switch clothes with Santa (Ace cannot recognize faces).
• Broken Tears: In the Submarine Ending, he cries to the point of unresponsiveness after Akane dies in his arms.
• Captain Obvious: Much of his dialog when exploring his surroundings can come off as this, but a few stunning examples stand out, such as seemingly thumping his chest over knowing how a shower's soap dish works since he's used a shower before.^note This made more sense in the Japanese version, as baths (with a shower head used to rinse before entering the bath) are more common to standing showers, at least over there.
• Chekhov's Skill: The game goes out of its way to hammer the base36 numbering system into Junpei's head during puzzles. Later on, it turns out that the final number 9 door is actually a number q door.
• Childhood Friend Romance: Junpei and Akane have been friends since elementary school. They have deeper feelings than just friendship, however... She praises and admires Junpei every chance she gets, and his biggest concern is escaping the Deadly Game with her. They even share sexual innuendos here and there throughout the game.
• Cloudcuckoolander: A mild example at least. Most notable is during the flooding cabin, where examining the right things causes him to make several ladder puns. While in danger of drowning.
• Companion Cube: In Door 8, have Junpei examine the mannequin more than several times for him to eventually dub it "Science Boy". His attachment to Science Boy can lead to a funny moment or two, especially after the fire breaks out. During the fire, try examining Science Boy and the door Clover went through.
• Cooldown Hug: Gives one to June when they come across "Snake's" (actually Nijisaki's) corpse in the shower room.
• Deadpan Snarker: Mostly internal, but sometimes, he voices it.
• Decoy Protagonist: An odd example: you learn at the very end that the protagonist is actually the June of 9 years ago, seeing things through Junpei's eyes. This is why you can start a new game with your memories intact, because even though Junpei dies, the June from 9 years ago can start over. Though technically this could mean they are both the protagonist. Also, June herself is actually Zero, making her both a protagonist AND antagonist.
• Despair Event Horizon:
  • Hits this hard in one of the Bad Endings. Specifically, the one where Clover goes Ax-Crazy. After he finds out that she murdered Santa, Seven and June, his mind breaks so hard that he actually starts to see Clover as a sort of angelic figure, and is even willing to follow her. It doesn't stop her from killing him and taking his bracelet.
  • It happens to him in the Submarine ending too. Not only does he think that everyone else on the ship is dead, he completely breaks after June dies in his arms, to the point that he barely even registers Seven and Lotus' deaths. Ace probably did the poor guy a favor in the end.
  • He doesn't take Snake's Heroic Sacrifice in the Safe ending very well either.
• Did Not Get the Girl: Akane runs off at the end and they don't get together, not until Zero Time Dilemma.
• Disappointed by the Motive: In the epilogue, Junpei asks Ace why he masterminded the original Nonary Game 9 years ago and forced 18 kids to play a Deadly Game as part of an experiement on morphogenetic fields. He replies that he wanted to find a way to access the field himself... so he could finally see human faces by looking through the eyes of somebody who doesn't have prosopagnosia. Junpei's reaction is basically, "That's it?!" and he immediately puts the duct tape back over Ace's mouth.
• "Eureka!" Moment: The route to the Safe ending relies on him learning from Clover that Snake's left arm is fake. This means when he sees the body in the shower, which has a natural left arm, the realization hits him like a truck that this body couldn't possibly be Snake's.
• Friendless Background: If you check the ladder in the 3rd class cabin, he reveals that he had no friends after elementary school.
• Guile Hero: He manages to get Ace to confess that he's the murderer of Clover and Nijisaki in the Safe ending through tricking him into believing he's Santa, which would prove he has prosopagnosia, and by tricking him into believing he took the Number 9 bracelet from Ace's pocket when he was unconscious.
• The Hero: Double subversion. He is the main playable character, you control his actions, and events play out from his perspective. Then it turns out that Akane has actually been watching him from the first Nonary Game with her psychic powers to find a way to escape the death trap she's been caught in, and you've been influencing Junpei's actions through her. Then the final puzzle comes, and you get to control Junpei for real.
• The Hero Dies: He dies in the Axe, Submarine, and Knife endings.
• Idiot Ball: Subverted, as there are only two dialogue choices that will change the ending received and they don't require much savvy on the part of the player or Junpei. It's impossible to play Junpei as holding the Idiot Ball or with Obfuscating Stupidity, as the game will advance regardless of your choices (the only difference being that the other characters will call you an idiot). In-game, however, Junpei and the rest of the cast spend time batting around the Idiot Ball with any regard to the gun from the cargo hold, which is repeatedly mentioned to be a fatal oversight, on Seven's background, and in the Axe ending, when Junpei sees the weapon in Clover's possession. Since all of these examples are beyond the player's control, Forgot About His Powers is also in play.
  • Only two choices in the entire game actually have Junpei hold the Idiot Ball firmly in hand and have it bite his ass: doors 3 and 2. Junpei's insistence on going through each gets a massive callout from the others and are the only doors to guarantee a bad ending no matter which main route you're on (both doors lead to the Submarine ending with no way to reverse the decision).
• Living MacGuffin: Out of all the Nonary game participants, he's this, and it's the reason for his inclusion despite being the only one otherwise unconnected to the first Nonary game. As young Akane is mind-linked to him specifically as her POV Protagonist in the second game, experiencing everything he does and learning new information consequently that eventually becomes vital for her survival in a specific scenario — Junpei's Golden Ending — he's arguably the reason why the second game had to occur in the first place. Santa even alludes to this as he traps the remaining group in the incinerator and arms it as per young Akane's vision, stating that he chose his codename because Santa 'grants children's wishes', but it's up to Junpei himself to actually do so.
• Mindlink Mates: With Akane. Uchikoshi claims their connection through morphogenetic field is particularly strong because of their love.
• Morality Pet: Subverted; Uchikoshi clarified that she actually does love Junpei, but this doesn't stop her from manipulating him. After all, the point of Zero's Nonary Game was to lead Junpei into an exact copy of the original game's events so that he could save Akane, and it takes a lot of tries with a lot of suffering in each one before they get it just right.
• Nice Guy: A very kind and caring man who's willing to go a long length to help everyone, even the other participants he never knows much about except June who's his childhood friend who also participates.
• The Nicknamer: At least mentally. Before everyone chooses their own codenames, Junpei mentally assigns everyone simple nicknames, like "Lion" for Ace and "Prince" for Snake.
• Oblivious to Love: Innuendos and flirting from June just sail straight over his head despite him crushing hard. It varies by room. If you choose Door 4 at the start, he and June flirt quite a bit and blush during every conversation. If you choose Door 5, you won't work with June unless you force a team through Door 3 (not very romantic) or you go through Door 6 and work with her in the engine and cargo rooms, which are part of the wrong path. For example, going into door 4 has June start fussing with her hair while looking at a vanity mirror. When Junpei scolds her for wasting time, he mentions that "there's no one here to impress", and completely misses June's implication that she's trying to impress him afterward.
• Only Known by Their Nickname: Inverted. He's the only one who is called by his real name because June blurted it out before the group decided to assign code names.
• Only One Name: His surname is not revealed in this game.
• Parrot Exposition: Junpei has a tendency to repeat what other people say.
• Player Character: Double subversion. Throughout the game, you have only been controlling Junpei by proxy. The real player character is 12-year-old Akane, who has been psychically witnessing all of the bad endings during her search for a way to survive the first Nonary Game. Once you learn this, the final puzzle has you control Junpei for real.
• Precision F-Strike: Junpei and Santa are both prone to swearing, but Junpei uses this variant. It usually occurs right before he Takes a Level in Badass and takes a leadership role over the other players.
• Pungeon Master: It's not like he's constantly making puns, but when he does, they're pretty bad, much to the annoyance of the others. It's also his self-admitted reason for not having any friends.
• Surrogate Soliloquy: Junpei conversing with the ladder in 3rd class cabin.
• Unfazed Everyman: Discussed with Santa in the engine room, as Santa points out that the correct response to the events they've faced is some form of a Heroic BSoD, whereas the majority of the cast has kept going through some combination of adrenaline and resolve.
• Xanatos Speed Chess: How Junpei is able to pick which door he wants. Most visible with the door 3 selection and the choice between 1, 2, and 6, where he's able to manipulate damn near the entire cast into getting which door he wants through quick thinking and some sleight-of-hand.
• Wrong Genre Savvy: Thinks that he's in a romance story, and that he should persevere against all odds to win over his shy, sensitive Childhood Friend. However, Akane is a far cry from the compassionate, innocent girl he remembers. In fact, she's Zero, an Anti-Villain Well-Intentioned Extremist who is perfectly fine with exacting murderous revenge on those who wronged her while trying to save her past self's life. The story itself is more like a mystery/sci-fi series, with a touch of horror.

1 - Ace

#1 "Ace" (Gentarou Hongou)

Voiced by: Takaya Hashi (Japanese), Richard Epcar (English)

"What are you going to gain by being so suspicious? That's what Zero wants, you know. This game was set up by Zero, wasn't it? Any game has a winner and loser. Whoever makes it through door [9] is a winner, and those who don't are the losers. Zero is trying to make us fight against one another for that victory. That is why we can't let ourselves fall prey to suspicion. We have to trust one another, and form a strong bond of friendship. Otherwise, we'll end up ensnared by Zero's manipulations."

An older man with a goatee and graying hair. He generally serves as a voice of calmness and reason in the midst of the terror going on in the ship. His bracelet number is 1, and his name comes from playing cards.

His original Japanese alias was "Ichimiya" (from the word for "one").

His true identity is Gentarou Hongou, the CEO of a pharmaceutical company that (re)created the Nonary Game nine years ago as an experiment in morphogenetic fields. He and three others kidnapped eighteen children (nine pairs of siblings) and placed nine children on the Gigantic, and the other nine children in "Building Q", a replica of the Gigantic built in Nevada. After the initial game, he laid low for a while until the present day, where he is kidnapped by Zero and forced to play the game he recreated.

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• All for Nothing: All of his murders throughout the game are done to protect himself from being exposed as the one behind the events of the immediate plot as Cradle Pharmaceuticals' CEO, including his murder of Clover, since she realizes that he stole the [9] bracelet and he has to keep her mouth shut about him being the one who's actively killing everyone. In the Safe and True endings, he gets exposed by Junpei anyway, meaning that his efforts didn't help himself in the end.
• Animal Motifs: Lion. His hairstyle and beard are reminiscent of a lion. And he happens to be the C.E.O. of a company, which is the highest position in that hierarchy. He is technically the king of his company.
• Asshole Victim: Becomes this in the Safe Ending, where he is burned alive. Adding more insult to his death is the fact that he is incinerated to death in an incinerator identical to the one where he trapped the young Akane 9 years before.
• Ax-Crazy: Once his fake bravado falls off, Hongou reveals himself as nothing more than a chillingly realistic portrayal of a sociopath with skin-deep stoicness, yet he is prone to extreme temper tantrums when things don't go his way. This is perfectly illustrated in the flashback sequence of the true ending, where Hongou goes screaming, yelling and cussing when he notices his test subjects have escaped, before furiously shoving the young Akane in an incinerator, laughing for her misery when she can't solve the Sudoku puzzle required to escape.
• Badass Cape: Unrealistic for an ordinary CEO, Hongou's cape tends to float in the wind.
• Batman Gambit: The main reason he offered to stay behind was because without him there was no way the others could enter door #3 and learn that Snake was dead, banking on the fact that they'll want to leave as few people behind as possible and go through doors #7 and #8.
• Beard of Evil: He has a short beard, and he turns out to be the most despicable character in the game.
• Big Bad: Played with. He's not Zero, but his actions in creating the first Nonary Game ultimately led to all the events that happen in the game, and he is the most evil character in the game. As well as this, he's the murderer in the present day Nonary Game, and his motives for committing them are far more heinous than those of Zero's for starting the Nonary Game. And even besides his acts in the present day along with his actions in the past, Junpei's overall goal is stopping him from incinerating Akane in the past, meaning that stopping his past self from killing Akane is the game's actual goal.
• Big Bad Ensemble: He tries to usurp control of the game from Zero, and is the antagonist when Zero’s not running things. He’s also the one who drove Zero to it, and by far the bigger threat.
• Bitch in Sheep's Clothing: He is a quite polite and cooperative man, but he's secretly one of the main villains. A more specific invoking of this trope is right before the second set of doors; he offers to stay behind and put his life at risk (in what turned out to be moot), but this was not because he was a gentleman, but because he wanted the privacy needed to efficiently cover up his murder.
• Chronic Backstabbing Disorder: He betrays both his own coworkers from the previous Nonary Game and the participants of the current Nonary Game with no guilt whatsoever.
• Combat Pragmatist: He never gives his victims the opportunity to defend themselves in the routes where he kills everyone, only thinking about his own benefit. Being unable to empathize with others, he is unable to see this as his own fault and blames his pragmatism on Zero instead.
• The Comically Serious: Santa seems to have a habit of messing with him. It also shows up in the prologue when the group first chooses doors. When Lotus and Santa refuse to go through Door 5, Ace offers a hilarious "And we were doing so well."
  Santa: Look, Ace! It's some kind of snowman secret meeting!
  Ace: Those are just bags full of sand. You use them as a counterweight when you're lifting something with a pully system.
  Santa: Man, you're too serious...
• Cool Old Guy: Easily the oldest of the bunch. He is calm and collected, propagates The Power of Trust and The Power of Friendship, and volunteers to stay behind early on in the game. All of which turns out to be a front; he's revealed to be the Big Bad (not Zero, though — he just created the first Nonary Game 9 years ago), a remorseless sociopath, and a cold-blooded murderer.
• Corrupt Corporate Executive: Actually the head of the company which funded the first Nonary Game experiments, which resulted in the kidnapping and endangerment of eighteen children.
• Death by Irony: In one of the endings, he dies in an incinerator, as a direct consequence of throwing a little girl into it years before.
• Dirty Coward: In the Safe ending after Ace shoots Snake, Snake gets back up and Ace immediately starts acting cowardly by begging Sanke to get away from him and then shooting Snake five more times in the chest and Snake still getting on him with Ace begging Snake that he can save him and so he doesn't have to die. Snake lampshades this by calling him pathetic for begging for his life despite murdering Clover.
• Disability as an Excuse for Jerkassery: He justifies everything he does, no matter how vile, due to having prosopagnosia and wanting to have it cured.
• The Dragon: The second game reveals that he was a prominent member of Free the Soul, the Greater-Scope Villain of that game.
• Dramatic Irony: This will kick in hard once the Safe end is cleared.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: While "love" may be too strong a word considering what he is, Ace did clearly have some affection for his Number Two, Nijisaki, as the revelation in the True Ending that he killed him by mistake clearly shakes him up, with him almost seeming in denial about the fact at first.
• Evil All Along: At first, he may appear to be a gentle, noble and altruistic man, but he is a cruel individual who subjected children to horrible experiments, and only cares about his own life.
• Evil Cannot Comprehend Good: He doesn't understand why would other players be furious at him for murdering Clover, since they barely knew her. He also has trouble understanding that avenging his sister would be more important to Snake than his own life.
• Evil Cripple: The story's villain who suffers from an advanced form of prosopagnosia, or "face blindness." While the condition does cause constant problems, it wouldn't normally be considered a serious disability (it's more often just a symptom of a larger condition, such as atypical autism). Ace, however, seeks a cure fanatically and at any cost.
• Evil Is Bigger: Both the second tallest and second bulkiest character in the game after Seven, and also very, very evil.
• Evil Old Folks: He's at least in his 50s or 60s, given he was around long ago to jumpstart Cradle Pharmaceuticals.
• Evil Sounds Deep: He's voiced by Richard Epcar in the port, who gives Ace a very low voice tone, fitting his evil characterization.
• Faking the Dead: Rather convincingly invokes this in the Submarine ending, faking his death when Junpei, Lotus, and Seven find him next to a dead Clover and Santa. When the three of them leave the room and Junpei gets distracted with June's death, he finishes off his murders by killing every other participant.
• Faux Affably Evil: Downplayed. When he no longer uses the facade of a Cool Old Guy after his reveal in the Safe ending, he speaks in an unassuming tone of false politeness, even when he has committed reprehensible acts and no one trusts him anymore. However, this tone is completely unconvincing anyway since it's quite clear to everyone how evil he is by then.
• Freudian Excuse: His reason for holding the Nonary Game was to find a way to counteract his prosopagnosia (inability to distinguish one face from another; in this case, human faces). He conducted the Nonary Game nine years in the past to see if morphic resonance actually existed and to gain insight. After doing that, he planned on utilizing the morphic fields to get feedback from other people, said feedback describing what the facial features of humans actually looked like. Also, he was himself a victim of the first games which Lord Gordain started and his associates continued well after his death.
• Freudian Excuse Is No Excuse: When he reveals his reasoning for what he'd done in the epilogue of the True Ending, Junpei's response is almost exactly "...That's it?", and when he tries to go in deeper, more "philosophical" detail, Junpei isn't hearing any of it and puts the tape gag back over his mouth. Being unable to see the faces of other human beings ultimately cannot even begin to justify treating other human beings in such inhumane ways, and it's clear that Hongou only really suffered from a wounded ego over having to live with his disability.
• A Glass of Chianti: He, along with his three Cradle executives had a snapshot where they held their glass of wine as a success of their project nine years ago.
• Gone Horribly Right: Ace, and the rest of Cradle Pharmaceutical, set up their Nonary Game for the purpose of getting people to tap into morphogenetic fields, and control people. Ace, in particular, was extremely invested in getting them to tap into full sensory replacement. In the end, one of the children he kidnapped tapped into the fields perfectly. And she used that power to save herself from his twisted experiment, manipulate him (without using the fields on him) into killing his own accomplices, and ruin him financially and legally. The real twist of the knife is that she financed her revenge by buying stocks in Cradle. His own financial success funded his ruin. Even better, the experiment was merely to test the ability to transmit information through space alone, while Ace's destroyer learned how to do it through time as well, which she used to save her own life and get revenge on him.
• Hated by All: Most prominently in the Safe ending, Ace immediately earns the hatred of everyone in the Nonary Game (who doesn't already know who he is) when he's exposed as the murderer that Junpei has been pursuing.
• Hate Sink: Perhaps the most despicable character in the game, principally a result of how he Would Hurt a Child. However, he never shows this side of himself until he's exposed in the Safe and True endings.
• The Heavy: Akane is Zero, but she's only creating the Nonary Game because of Ace's actions. As well as this, he's one of the two participants to commit murder of his own volition and drives much of the conflict in the present Nonary Game, and the only other participant who does commit murder (Clover) only does so because of Ace's actions.
• He Knows Too Much: His main motive for murder. Hongou will seek the death of everyone who knows about the experiment he planned, including the three who helped him create it.
• Heroic Sacrifice: Offers to leave himself behind at one point when the group has to leave someone behind to go through numbered doors. Turns out it wasn't needed. It also turns out that he knew they were just going to end up back where he was in the first place. And he wanted to keep the others from entering Door #3, where "Snake" lay dead after Ace murdered him.
• Hoist by His Own Petard: On two levels. As a result of conducting the Nonary Game nine years in the past, his primary victim (Akane Kurashiki) ends up conducting the Nonary Game nine years later and makes him a participant. Akane exploits his knowledge of that Nonary Game to manipulate him into killing his co-conspirators as her personal Revenge by Proxy.
• Hypocrite: Hongou believes that his prosopagnosia makes him miserable and tragic, but he feels no empathy for the children he traumatized with his experiments.
• I Gave My Word: During the original Nonary Game nine years ago, after he's captured Akane and locked her in the incinerator, he goes back to inform her that if she successfully solves the puzzle, she'll be free to go. He reiterates this when she questions his promise, pointing out that the experiment won't work unless the test subject has a shot at succeeding. He's telling the truth; after solving the puzzle, Akane escapes the facility alive. Hongou doesn't even bother her again for the nine years she spends plotting her revenge and engineering her survival.
• I Just Want to Be Normal: Ultimately, Hongou is motivated by wanting to rid himself of his prosopagnosia so that he may see other human faces like everyone else. The high opinion he has of himself cannot tolerate living with anything less.
• I Never Said It Was Poison: Inverted. Ace's absence of information is what gives him away as Kubota, Nijisaki, and Clover's killer in the Safe ending. Junpei disguises himself as Santa after opening the [3] door with the (5) bracelet, but because Ace can only differentiate each participant with their bracelets instead of their faces, as Ace reasons that Santa's bracelet is (3) and Junpei's is (5), Junpei realizes that he couldn't tell the difference between Snake and Nijisaki, as their appearances are similar besides their faces. However, it's played straight regarding his possession of the (9) bracelet, as Junpei tricks him into revealing that he had it in his coat pocket the whole time after killing off Kubota and taking his bracelet.
• Jerkass: Ace's true personality is that of a sociopathic murderer with no redeeming qualities who uses Disability as an Excuse for Jerkassery.
• Karma Houdini: Being confirmed as the killer of the final Submarine, there is a chance that he will get away with murdering all the participants. Although it is not entirely confirmed.
• Karma Houdini Warranty: Although he managed to avoid word of his experiment and keep his reputation clean for nine years, Hongou ended up in the game he created. In the Safe ending, he is incinerated to death. And in the True ending, he is gagged and taken to the police, and it was confirmed in subsequent games that he was arrested.
• Karmic Death: There's only one ending where he can be killed... and in that ending, he burns. It's especially karmic because due to the way time travel works in this series, in this timeline he murdered a 12-year old girl by throwing her into an incinerator 9 years prior.
• Knight Templar: Possibly. He cries out "I don't deserve this!" on his death in the incinerator. Although this may be more indicative of his Lack of Empathy and being a Narcissist who only cares for himself and cannot understand why his actions deserve any retribution.
• Lack of Empathy: Since he can't distinguish faces, he can't really see people as people, since they all look the same to him. At least, that's his excuse anyway.
• Meaningful Name: In the Safe ending, he's responsible for the five requisite kills to be labelled an "Ace": Akane, The 9th Man/Kubota, Guy X/Nijisaki, Clover and Snake.
• Narcissist: Ace only cares for himself as he kills many of the characters in the other endings with no remorse, until the true ending where he loses and was only concerned if he got out of the Nonary Game alone.
• Never My Fault: In the Safe and True endings, he blames all of his murders in the present day on Akane manipulating him into doing so and not his selfish desire to keep his past a secret.
• Not-So-Well-Intentioned Extremist: Compared to Akane, who is trying to save herself from him. The reason he conducted the Nonary Game 9 years ago was to cure his prosopagnosia by linking with morphogenetic fields to be able to see faces. While this part is seemingly true, the way he went about it all implies that he's willing to go to extremes to solve this mostly For the Evulz, as he doesn't seem to care if he's seen as a bad person after allegedly curing himself of it. This, of course, shows he is mostly doing it more for the sake of his ego than he is anything else. And that's not accounting for the murders he commits 9 years later to hide his corruption from the participants of the second Nonary Game.
• Obviously Evil: Not in terms of his facade, as he is quite convincing as long as you don't question the context behind what he's saying, but in terms of his appearance, his expressions, and the condescending tone he adopts in his every line, it's quite clear he's displaying the typical false charm of your usual sociopath.
• Predecessor Villain: While the Big Bad is technically Akane as the true identity of Zero, her actions only happen because of Hongou, and both of them are also the first Big Bad of the franchise that the player has to defeat.
• Psychotic Smirk: Every time Ace grabs the gun and points at Lotus with it, his mouth slightly twitches in an evil fashion.
• Relative Button: When it looks like he's won in the Safe ending, Ace decides to take some time to gloat to Snake about killing his sister. This turns out to be a bad idea.
• Sadist: The way he gloats about murdering Clover in the Safe Ending says it all.
• Slasher Smile: He gives us a creepy tooth-showing smile when he takes a peek into the incinerator where Akane was 9 years ago.
• The Sociopath: Hongou has an extreme lack of empathy, feels no remorse for his actions, lies frequently, has a false charisma, and always seeks to be in control of the situation. He is also a combination of a high-functioning and low-functioning sociopath. He can be skilled at deceiving and manipulating people, but if the situation is not good for him, he loses his nerve.
• Spree Killer: Goes on a killing spree in the Submarine ending. He murders Santa and Clover and mortally wounds June while Junpei is working through Door 2, then kills Seven and Lotus while Junpei is distracted by June's death, then finally kills Junpei as he mindlessly stumbles to the submarine.
• Token Evil Teammate: Not counting the 9th Man, who dies before the players have even formally introduced themselves, nor decided to figure a way out of the game, Hongou is easily the only one in the entire cast who is a completely and utterly reprehensible individual. While Akane/Zero and her Dragon Santa are Well Intentioned Extremists and Anti Villains while Clover only turns evil as the result of a trauma-induced mental breakdown, Hongou has no redeeming qualities, and is perfectly willing to murder anyone in order to cover his tracks as a Corrupt Corporate Executive.
• Unwitting Pawn: Akane manipulated him into killing his own subordinates as her vengeance for what he did to her in the past in the second Nonary Game and he hadn't the slightest clue that this would help Junpei defeat him in another timeline.
• Villainous Breakdown:
  • Has a truly epic one in the Safe ending after Snake manages to take six bullets and is still able to hold him down and make sure he burns to death in the incinerator.
  • And then another one when Seven disrupted the original Nonary Game nine years ago.
  • And yet another one in the True ending, when he realizes he's fallen into Zero's trap and he's unable to exit the incinerator. Junpei describes him as "broken."
• Walking Spoiler: Of the characters (besides the 9th Man who dies early), he's the person you learn the least about up until near the end. There's a very good reason for that.
• Why Won't You Die?: When Ace sets Snake into a Roaring Rampage of Revenge, he is not afraid because he has a fully loaded gun and Snake is at a distance. Too late he finds out this isn't enough.
  "Y-You son of a bitch! You're...you're a monster!"
• Wicked Pretentious: Exaggerated beyond belief, Ace is the type to wax philosophical while not really meaning any of it, and if he starts talking in that way, he'll never shut up. It gets even more pretentious when you replay the game following the Safe ending and are aware of the fact that he's the Big Bad, making his speeches come off as even more pretentious.
• Would Hurt a Child: He put eighteen children through experiments against their will, then put them in the deadly Nonary Game. Then in a moment of desperation, he viciously grabs June by the arm and throws her into the incinerator as a last-ditch attempt to activate her abilities which although worked, was based on a completely different theory that wouldn't have worked under his hypothesis. All the while he sadistically taunts her regarding her impending death.
• Would You Like to Hear How They Died?: In the Safe Ending, he sadistically taunts Snake by explaining in graphic detail how he murdered his sister Clover. This proves to be a fatal mistake, as it drives Snake berserk and causes him to forcibly restrain him so they both die in the incinerator.
• You Can't Thwart Stage One: He's on both sides of this trope: you can't thwart the original game, his murders, or his actions that prevent you from entering Door 3. It also happens to him in the Bad and True ends.

2 - Snake

#2 "Snake" (Light)

Voiced by: Takahiro Sakurai (Japanese), Taliesin Jaffe (English)

"I am shocked and appalled that guessing at random has not yielded better results."

A thin, elegant man dressed in a regal fashion. He is blind, but is quite capable of getting around easily enough. Clover is his sister, and his bracelet number is 2. His name comes from the expression "Snake Eyes", a term in the dice game craps that signifies 2.

His original Japanese alias was "Niels", using the pronunciation of "two" and the name of a favorite physicist, presumably Niels Bohr.

He was one of the eighteen children who participated in the Nonary Game nine years ago. As a result, he knows a great deal about the game, but because Zero has threatened to kill Clover if he says anything about it, he keeps his mouth shut.

---

• An Arm and a Leg: He lost his left arm in a car crash as a child and has since replaced it with a prosthetic.
• Aerith and Bob: His real name seems rather out of place when standing next to people with obviously Japanese names as his name is Light. Zigzagged that it's a pun and his name in Japanese can be rendered as Raito.
• And I Must Scream: Snake, trapped in the coffin. If Santa, June and Junpei die, he will be there to rot.
• Animal Motifs: Snake is... well, snakes. He possesses the tenacity, the calmness, and the determination of one. "Once a snake has ensnared its prey, rarely does it release it" states the narration as Snake holds onto Ace's leg, oblivious to the six bullets inside his chest.
• Artificial Limbs: His prosthetic left arm is conveniently able to be manipulated so that he can slip his bracelet off, though he keeps that one secret. It's also a major plot point, proving that the corpse believed to be Snake, against all odds, is not actually Snake, because it has a broken bone (the ulna) in the left arm.
• Ax-Crazy: In the Safe ending, Snake goes berserk against Ace when the latter tells him how much he enjoyed killing Clover. And he brings Ace down...at the cost of his own life.
• Badass Boast: He has one in the True End. "Thank you for killing the wrong man, but I can't say I like knowing that you want me dead. And even if you didn't, I would still hate you very much."
• Berserk Button: Harming Clover is a really bad idea, and he can be an absolutely terrifying person if that button is pressed. Ace finds out the hard way.
• Big Brother Instinct: Refuses to die when clearly mortally wounded so that he can take revenge for Clover's death.
• Blind Mistake: Downplayed as he had honed his senses enough to recognise others by voice and can competently move around on his own, the one time his blindness screws him over in the plot is him failing to recognise Santa as Aoi Kurashiki since he was going through puberty when they met during the first Nonary Game 9 years ago and wasn't able to connect the voices together until near the end of the game, which would've screwed up Zero's plans if he managed to put two and two together.
• Cool Big Bro: To Clover. It's obvious that they're really fond of each other, and Snake will do whatever he can to ensure her protection, and, as Ace learns, he'll avenge her death in the most terrifying way possible.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: In the Safe Ending; he and Ace are burnt alive in an incinerator and Snake dies while he is bleeding to death after taking in a full magazine of revolver bullets. Snake however takes it in far greater stride since he's getting justice for Clover.
• Defiant to the End: In the Safe Ending; even after being pumped full of revolver rounds, he claw his way to Ace and keeps him pinned down, begging for his life, as the incinerator they're in powers on. Snake laughs defiantly to the end.
• Determinator: Takes six bullets to the chest in the Safe Ending and is still strong enough to take down Ace.
• Disabled Snarker: In a cast full of characters, he's the only one with an obvious disability and is by far the best at making sarcastic comments. And if you make the mistake of underestimating him for his blineness, he'll bathe you in snark.
• Disability Superpower: Although blind, his other senses are so good that you wouldn't even notice this unless he told you. He even mentions that if you tried to attack him, it would be unlikely that you would win. He's not joking. Besides that, his prosthetic arm can be squeezed/crushed, allowing him to take off his bracelet. He only does this as a last resort to avoid suspicion.
• Eyes Always Shut: Justified in that he's blind. He only ever opens them when:
  • In one of the puzzles, when Seven/Clover/Snake/Junpei spell "pipe" in a cheer-leading fashion. Snake has his eyes wide open as he shouts "Gimme a P and an E!"
  • In the Safe ending, Ace tells Snake that he killed Clover - and exactly how he did it - and Snake snaps and his eyes open as he swears to kill Ace. It's actually pretty terrifying.
  • When they're putting together what happened to Snake, his eyes are open in the still where he's going for the DEAD. Though as it turns out, that wasn't Snake at all.
• Handicapped Badass: He's blind, but that doesn't stop him from boasting he would kick most people's asses in a fight. The Safe ending shows his boasts are justified. One of the first thing he does in the game is walk into the opened Door 5 (while everyone is staring at the 9th Man's body), casually turn around and say "Are you trying to kill me? I assume you remember this door is only open for 9 seconds."
  • It's also revealed his left arm is a prosthetic. Still doesn't prevent him from kicking Ace's ass in a Roaring Rampage of Revenge, despite being blind and effectively one-armed, whereas Ace is wielding a revolver.
• He Knows Too Much: Ace's main motivation to kill him is that Snake knows about the first Nonary Game, the one that Ace created. He's aware of Ace's real identity as the CEO of Cradle Pharmaceutical.
• Heroic Sacrifice: In the Safe ending, he holds Ace back so Junpei and the others can escape. The price to pay? He burns alive with Ace.
• Hope Bringer: He became this for the Gigantic group in the previous Nonary Game, who were panicking and starting fights until Snake spoke up and gave them a Rousing Speech alongside a four-leaf clover each he was planning to give to Clover, enabling everyone to work together and make it to the incinerator room.
• I Let Gwen Stacy Die: Snake thinks he couldn't protect Clover from being murdered in the Safe ending, and greatly blames himself for this. To make up for it, he dooms Clover's killer to burn alive along with him.
• Insufferable Genius: He certainly shows shades of this, as he takes no effort to hide how much he knows and how much the others don't. Subverted in that he nevertheless makes an effort to explain things as short and easy as he can.
• Ironic Name: His real name is Light, which is about the worst name you could give to a blind person. Granted, he wasn't born blind.
• Made of Iron: Takes 6 bullets from a revolver in the chest, and just keeps on going.
• Meaningful Name: His codename comes from "snake eyes" (rolling a 2 on a pair of dice), which he notes is extra-fitting considering his eyesight is about as good as an actual snake's (in other words, terrible/nonexistent). Also, during his Heroic Sacrifice and Taking You with Me moment in the Safe ending, he is described as a snake that "rarely lets go of its prey" as he pins Ace down, even after taking six bullets. He even has to crawl on his belly towards Ace once he can no longer stand.
• Murder by Inaction: He's given this option by Zero from the start who left him with detailed knowledge about how the bracelets interact with the REDs, DEADs and the bombs inside of them, which includes a hint that he can choose to withold this information from the others and potentially trick them into dying. This winds up happening to the 9th Man because Snake wasn't able to share this information in time as well as the fact that he suddenly took Clover at knifepoint.
• Not Quite Dead:
  • That dead guy in the shower room isn't him.
  • Also pulls this twice in the Safe ending. First he takes one shot from a revolver and goes down, seemingly dead. About a minute later he gets back up, takes the remaining five shots from the revolver, and goes down again. This time he doesn't even wait a minute before he starts moving again (crawling this time, as he can't stand up anymore).
• Not So Above It All: A princely intellectual with an occasionally bawdy sense of humor. In one potential dialogue, he surprises Clover by rolling with an offhand joke she makes about "reamin'". And of course, there's the aforementioned incident where examining an unimportant pipe one too many times has everyone in the party (Snake included) spell out "pipe" in a cheerleading fashion.
• Sacrificial Lion: Other than the 9th Man, he's the first to fall victim to the Nonary Game. His death is what causes the others to suspect that Zero might be amongst them. Ultimately subverted, though, in that he's not actually dead; the corpse was someone else.
• Self-Destructive Charge: In the Safe ending when he's about to give Ace a taste of his own medicine.
• The Smart Guy: He's quite intelligent and unleashes withering disdain whenever others can't keep up with his logic. On top of that, he has more information from Zero than the others and is re-playing the first Nonary Game.
• Smug Snake: Between his snarky Insufferable Genius tendencies and swaggering confidence, it's possible to read him this way, appropriately enough, at the most up until the Safe ending. His name is Snake and he's smug, but in terms of the trope, it's ultimately subverted; he's a pretty good guy and can back his talk in even more than where his intellect's concerned.
• Taking the Bullet: Snake to Junpei, Seven and Lotus, from Ace in the Safe ending.
• Taking You with Me: Ace shoots Snake with six bullets but, before dying from blood loss, he grabs Ace's leg and makes him stay in the incinerator until it shoots fire. Both of them are burned alive.
• Undying Loyalty: To Clover, given how she is his sister. In the Safe ending, after Ace sadistically gloats about how he murdered Clover, Snake's eye open for the first time and lunges at Ace and doesn't die till Ace is taken down to avenge his sister even if it means dying himself.
• Zombie Gait: When he gets up after being shot the first time, he starts slowly walking toward Ace in a manner the narration describes as being zombie-like.

3 - Santa

#3 (#9) "Santa" (Aoi Kurashiki)

Voiced by: Kissho Taniyama (Japanese), Sean Chiplock (English)

"Didn't I tell you? I'm Santa Claus. It's time for me to go make a wish come true."

Santa, like Snake, is 24, and is quickly defined by his outspokenness and tendency to swear, matching his somewhat punk attire. While he often provides some amount of Plucky Comic Relief, he also shows signs of The Smart Guy and is a particularly helpful team member. Throughout the game, he's determined to keep the players moving and refuses to succumb to helplessness or in-fighting. His bracelet number is 3 and his name is derived from "san", the Japanese word for three, which was unchanged for the English-language version. (In the English version, he asks if any of the other players speak Japanese before announcing his nickname, an acknowledgment to the game's original language.)

He was one of the eighteen children who participated in the Nonary Game nine years ago, along with his sister Akane. Due to an administrative error, both he and Akane were placed in the same testing group instead of being split up as the experiment demanded. He is fully aware of the true purpose of the second Nonary Game, having collaborated with Akane to perfectly recreate the vision that she saw in the closing moments of the first Nonary Game, and to take revenge on the people who put them through the Nonary Game to begin with. His real bracelet number is 9, or 3+3+3 (three threes), which may be a symbol of the multiple roles he's playing during the game. Word of God states that when Junpei hears Zero's voice, Santa is using his psychic powers to communicate with him directly. During the first Nonary Game, he is depicted as having leadership qualities and is saved by Seven, along with Snake. Snake mistakes Santa for Zero during the True Ending, but believes that Santa isn't dangerous or intent on killing them.

---

• Adaptational Dumbass: Downplayed and only applies to one moment. In the Nonary Games port, when Junpei is using his Batman Gambit on Ace to trick him into revealing his prosopagnosia (to confirm his guilt in killing Nijisaki thinking he was Snake), Santa expresses slight confusion over Junpei's gambit when he pretends to be Santa. Disregarding the fact that he should already know what Junpei is doing and that he's one of the people who know of Ace's machinations, Santa never does this in the original DS version, showing that he's at least aware that it's a gambit.
• Badass Boast: He has one in the True End. "I'm Santa Claus, remember?"
• Big Brother Instinct: Although he conceals it in keeping up the facade, Santa genuinely cares for his sister. Everything he does (including helping to recreate the Nonary Game) is to help save her past self, thus ensuring her existence and survival.
• Can't Kill You, Still Need You: He deliberately leaves Ace alive in order to finish the trap and to force Junpei to understand the purpose of the game.
• Cluster F-Bomb: He takes this trope to the point where narration simply describes him as using language that would make a sailor blush. The True End implies that he's always been blunt, but whenever he's serious, he immediately stops swearing. It may or may not be part of his Obfuscating Stupidity.
• The Chessmaster: He and Akane share this role. In the True End, he reveals himself as this to Ace and to Junpei.
• Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass: Underestimate him at your own peril. As a child, he was part of the original Nonary Game and trapped in the incinerator. He saved five in his cohort by telling them to go through the numbered door. Then there's the True End, in which he corners Ace, saves his sister, and goes out with a Badass Boast.
• Deadpan Snarker: Whenever Junpei is in a room with him, he is a veritable fountain of sarcasm and deprecation. If he isn't snarking, it's time to worry.
• The Dragon: To Zero.
• Dragon Ascendant: Inverted. It's due to the Big Bad Zero losing against the actual Big Bad Ace that Santa steps up as Zero at the end of the Safe Ending, rather than the Big Bad Ace being defeated. After June disappears from existence, Santa then returns the remaining participants to their normal lives.
• Dramatic Irony: After the True End, although the Coffin End will also cause this, due to where the game stops. It goes up to eleven in the prologue when he states that Zero has serious psychological issues.
• Expy: His motivations and role in the story are similar to that of Mei Kiridera from 12Riven, a previous work of the author's (who in turn was an Composite Character of two characters from Ever17, Ryogo Kaburaki and Hokuto).
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold:
  • Acts like a bit of a whiny, impatient jerk to the others for a good chunk of the game. However, over time he shows genuine concern for the others, not wanting to leave anyone behind or risk sacrificing anyone. In the Safe Ending, he is just as devastated by Clover's murder as the others.
  • This still applies even when he is revealed to be Zero's assistant and co-mastermind of the game, as the two did not intend to actually cause the deaths of the innocent participants, lying about the bombs and placing fake detonators in their bracelets.
• The Lancer: The way he explains it himself, Zero masterminded the events of the game while he was merely their assistant.
• Meaningful Name: San is Japanese for "three". In addition, he has a few stories to tell about Santa Claus. His real name, "Aoi", is a homonym for the Japanese word for "blue". His sister's name means "scarlet"; when combined, those two colors create purple— Murasaki, the original Japanese alias for "June".
• Obfuscating Stupidity: Pointed out by Junpei, who didn't think much of his intellectual capabilities at first, but wonders if he should re-evaluate this opinion midway through the game.
• Orphan's Ordeal: He and Akane grew up in an orphanage, with him acting as a gift-giving "Santa Claus" to her. More info on their parents is explained in Zero Time Dilemma.
• Promotion to Parent: As he puts it, he "had to be like [his sister's] dad" after their parents' deaths.
• Smarter Than You Look: When Junpei learns that Santa is a stockbroker, he's temporarily speechless, noting that he didn't think Santa looked smart enough. He's surprisingly helpful as a teammate and shows shades of The Smart Guy in the Kitchen. Of course, his success as a stockbroker is the result of him telling his past self the perfect time to buy Cradle Pharmaceuticals stock through Junpei and past Akane, and he's helpful as a teammate because he already played the Nonary Game once before and even helped set up this iteration of it, so he likely knows the solutions to all of the puzzles already.
• The Team Benefactor: He is revealed to be a stockbroker. He uses Aoi's future knowledge of Cradle Pharmaceutical to purchase stocks in the company right before the company develops the wonder drug Soporil, becoming a millionaire in the process. He uses these funds to found Crash Keys, an organization that helps him and June create and run the second Nonary Game.
• Unknown Relative: Junpei was childhood friends with Akane but is unaware that Aoi (aka Santa) is her brother, and seems to be unaware she even had a brother at all.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: He and June both disappear completely after locking the rest of the participants in the Incinerator Room to force Junpei to transmit the puzzle solution to past Akane. Unlike June, he does not appear in the sequels at all, though he is mentioned in Zero Time Dilemma, confirming he is still alive.
• What the Hell, Hero?:
  • He inspires this reaction in the True End when he takes June hostage. Clover is particularly devastated.
  • Receives this again when he reveals he is the assistant to Zero, who is actually June.
• White Hair, Black Heart: Can become this in the Coffin/To Be Continued ending, although it's ultimately subverted in the True end.
• Would Hit a Girl: To be precise, he would pull a gun on one. Subverted in the True End but not the Coffin ending, which leaves his villain status ambiguous.
• Wounded Gazelle Gambit: Junpei suspects Santa of pulling one at one point. It's suggested Junpei is right and that Santa is letting Ace keep control of Lotus (and the others) until Junpei arrives, so that Junpei can learn his true purpose in the game.

4 - Clover

#4 "Clover" (Clover)

Voiced by: Yukari Tamura (Japanese), Wendee Lee (English)

"I would'a thought a guy your size would have bigger balls than that."

A cheerful girl prone to rapid swings of emotion. She is Snake's sister and her bracelet number is 4. Her name comes from the number of leaves on a Four-Leaf Clover.

Her original Japanese alias and real name was "Yotsuba", which means "clover" (literally, "four leaves").

Like her brother, she participated in the Nonary Game nine years ago. Unlike her brother, she was one of the subjects at Building Q in Nevada, rather than at the Gigantic with Snake, Santa, and Akane. As such, she knows a lot about the Nonary Game, but was told by Snake never to mention it to anyone.

---

• Ax-Crazy: In the Axe ending, she completely loses it and goes on a killing spree out of revenge for her brother.
• Berserk Button: Hurt or insult Snake and let her find out about it, and she'll let you have it. Like brother, like sister, in other words.
• Break the Cutie: Clover goes through hell in the Nonary Game. If the thought of drowning at 6 AM wasn't bad enough, her brother is doomed to blow up beyond Door 3, and one of the people who carry her around the ship to investigate is his merciless murderer. No wonder she ends up going insane in the Axe ending.
• Cassandra Truth: Zero being one of the participants among the game. The one who first suspects this possibility of which turns out to be true is Clover. While at first it's difficult to believe since when comparing the project to the people, as the page of work taken up is rather ambitious and would more than likely require an organization of multiple people spectating from the outside to finesse it, the people who are actually Zero are really two of the nine people among themselves: Akane Kurashiki (June), and her secretary, Aoi Kurashiki (Santa).
• Cute and Psycho: She's a rather bubbly Genki Girl, and also the most mentally unstable member of the cast besides the Greater-Scope Villain. The stress of being forced into a death game again and Snake being presumed dead can cause her to have a psychotic break and go on a killing spree, murdering Santa, Seven, June, and Junpei.
• Despair Event Horizon: She'll cross this in some way in nearly every path. It's only possible to save her from it in the True End path.
• Drives Like Crazy: The True End's epilogue, where she speeds in an SUV, making a very bumpy ride for the passengers. Justified in that they're in the middle of the Nevada desert, and there's no one or nothing around to watch out for. Ace is tied up in the trunk, feeling the worst effects of the ride.
• Entertainingly Wrong: In the Axe Ending, she murders Santa and Seven because she concluded that they were the only ones who could have killed Snake. Her logic is that they are the only pair of players whose bracelets add with Snake's to reach a digital root of 3 and can't be exonerated through some other method^note Ace would have had to cooperate with the deceased Ninth Man, Lotus would have had to cooperate with a second Snake, June would have had to cooperate with Clover herself, and Junpei would have had to cooperate with another version of himself, and the idea of a trio^note Ace, Santa, and June or quartet^note Ace, Santa, Seven, and Lotus of killers would violate Occam's Razor. However, she isn't aware that a bracelet can still be used to open doors even without its owner and that Ace pocketed the Ninth Man's bracelet, allowing him to kill Snake on his own.
• Four Is Death: She, the one with bracelet number 4, goes on a killing spree in the Axe ending. She is also the first casualty among the main characters during the Safe ending.
• Four-Leaf Clover: Clover uses this as her numerological motif. This ties into the clover bookmark in the second Nonary Game and Snake's nine clovers in the first one.
• Genki Girl: One might get the impression she is one at first, but this is quickly subverted when her brother goes missing and is thought to be murdered, and she falls into a depression. It will only get played straight in the True Ending, when they find Snake alive and well, after which she will spend most of the last two puzzles bouncing around.
• Girlish Pigtails: Both pigtails are at least as big as her head. Goes nicely with her status as the cute young girl.
• Girl with Psycho Weapon: In the Axe and (iOS-only) Syringe endings.
• Giving Someone the Pointer Finger: Her "forceful" pose has her doing this, mostly when she's frustrated or angry. Prepare to see her do it quite a few times if you go through the same doors as she does.
• The Glomp: Does this to Junpei when she finds out that the dead man in the shower wasn't Snake and her brother is probably still alive.
• Gyaru Girl: Dresses like one, down to the short skirt and huge teased hair.
• His Name Really Is "Barkeep": Like Junpei, she's using her real name, but unlike Junpei, she's pretending it's an alias.
• Kill the Cutie: The energetic and cute Clover is undeservedly chased down and stabbed In the Back in the Safe ending. The reason? She knows too much about the Nonary Games.
• Older Than They Look: She's actually around eighteen, but her in-game portrait, seen only from the waist up, looks closer to twelve or so. She also appears in the sequel, and looks a bit closer to her age.
  • In Virtue's Last Reward, she actually says she's 21 years old, and that 999's Nonary Game happened a year ago, implying her age in 999 is actually 20. Then again, she said this in response to being asked if she was old enough to drink, so she might have been lying about it.
  • That being said, Clover is still the youngest of the Participants of the Second Nonary Game that takes place in the Present.
• Only Known by Their Nickname: For the entire game, we only know her as "Clover", as in the four-leaf clover. A meta subversion occurs, though: her real name actually is Clover.
• Only One Name: Uchikoshi suggested both she and Snake have the unofficial last name "Field" as a joke in a Q&A session. ^note If you don't get it, say it out loud.
• Pink Means Feminine: Her hair and part of her clothes are pink, but that doesn't mean she's precisely innocent.
• Puppy-Dog Eyes: "There wasn't a man alive that could have resisted those eyes."
• Quirky Curls: Her hair gives the idea of Genki Girl and (probably) its subversion.
• Real Name as an Alias: Clover is her real name. It's only by coincidence that it happens to fit the Theme Naming of the other code names.
• Sanity Slippage: The signs are clearly there after Snake's death, but it's only in the Axe ending that she goes off the deep end.
• Slasher Smile: Clover gives us one in the Axe ending. She's violently insane at this point in the game, and is not afraid to chop your arm off to take your bracelet with the aforementioned axe. The shot of her unsettling smile can be quite creepy the first time around.
• Spree Killer: Goes on a killing spree in the Axe ending, murdering Santa and Seven for apparently killing Snake, then June for trying to protect them, then Junpei for his bracelet.
• Tears of Joy: She cries out of happiness and relief when she finds out Snake is still alive.
• Tempting Fate: The above quote. She says this to Seven after he complains that finding the DEAD behind door number 8 almost gave him a heart attack. The very next room, she gets a good Jump Scare in the form of a creepy mannequin sitting on an operating table.
  Seven: Heh... Well, I guess it would'a been weird if you actually had any balls.
• Took a Level in Jerkass: She becomes abrasive after Snake, her brother, vanishes after a Let's Split Up, Gang! moment. She's mostly silent and depressed, but has the occasionally nasty outburst.
• Took a Level in Kindness: Should you give her the laminated four-leaf clover, she mellows a bit after her personality switch. The Jerkass is almost completely gone once you're on route to the True ending.
• Troll: Uses Clover, which is her real name, as a Code Name, completely aware that the participants of the first Nonary Game who she's currently in the room with know it's her real name.
• Tsundere: A rare non-romantic example of a Type B Tsundere. For the most part, she's very friendly and cheerful until someone is trying her patience, at which point she turns very rude and condescending.
• Undying Loyalty: Just as Snake is to her, she is to Snake. Her fall into despair is literally caused by his apparent death, and her main targets in the Axe Ending are the only people who (with the given evidence in said ending) could have killed him. Like Brother, Like Sister indeed.
• Vitriolic Best Buds: With Seven. "Best buds" may be stretching it, but while they frequently fight with each other (verbally, at least), Clover does not even think about leaving him behind when he volunteers and Seven is just as devastated as everyone else when Clover is found dead in the Safe ending.

6 - June/Murasaki (Akane)

#6 (#0) "June/Murasaki" (Akane Kurashiki)

Voiced by: Miyuki Sawashiro (Japanese), Rena Strober (English)

"I'm not really Zero. Not yet. Perhaps you could say I am... less than Zero."

An old friend of Junpei's from elementary school. She's always helpful and works hard to make sure no one is left behind, although she is occasionally prone to feverish spells. Her bracelet number is 6, and her name comes from the sixth month of the year.

Her original Japanese alias was "Murasaki", from the word for "six". The word's literal meaning of "purple" also applies to her clothing, her eye color, and certain other aspects of the game. As later suggested by the real name and bracelet number of "Cap", the mu syllable can be interpreted either as "six" or "nothingness".

She was one of the children who participated in the Nonary Game nine years ago. At the climax of her Nonary Game, Akane became psychically linked with present-day Junpei and witnessed him play the second Nonary Game. Furthermore, Akane has a unique power that let her perceive every possible variation of events in the second Nonary Game, and transmit this information to Junpei to help him out.

This psychic link would save her life, as present-day Junpei would help her solve a puzzle that freed her from the last lethal trap of her Nonary Game. However, this chain of events caused a Temporal Paradox: if the events that she had foreseen did not occur, then Junpei would never be in a position to become psychically linked with her past self and thus save her life. And so, Akane schemed with her brother Aoi to recreate the events she had foreseen in the past, masterminding the second Nonary Game to safeguard her own life while also taking revenge on those who put her through that ordeal in the first place.

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• A-Cup Angst: Heavily implied when she compares herself to Lotus and Clover when you examine her card in the Cargo Room behind Door 6.
  June: I know guys go for women who look like Lotus... But! But, but! I'm trying too! I'm doing the best I can! So please, don't call me a board, or a trash can, or a cutting board—
• Affably Evil: In spite of being Zero, and while her personality is mostly an act to hide the fact, she continues to be friendly to others despite the fact and doesn't drop the facade even when given the opportunity to do so. This includes just before The Reveal that she is the true Zero after Junpei recites Ace's crimes in the true ending. Along with this, she's ultimately conducting the game for altruistic reasons, that being to save her past self from Ace.
• Affectionate Nickname: Junpei calls her "Kanny".
• Agent Mulder: Believes in occult tropes like the mummy's curse and automatic writing. Though the True Ending reveals her to be Zero, she retains these quirks in Zero Time Dilemma, which is set after the events of 999.
• Ambiguously Evil: On one hand, she kidnaps 9 people, forcing them to play Deadly Game and masterminds 3 deaths. On the other hand, she did this to save herself from being burned alive, does her best to ensure that those she doesn't want dead won't die (like faking the bombs) and those she wants dead won't be missed. Combined with the fact that she's a Consummate Liar, it's extremely hard to tell if she's truly evil or not.
• Anti-Villain: She's behind just about everything in the present timeline, but her intentions were either noble (saving the life of her past self), or understandable (exacting revenge on the people who put her and many other children through life-threatening experiments).
  Uchikoshi: My intention was to create the world's worst heroine, but how well did that work out? She's pretty bad, but there's still some sense of purity in her, and she's also noble. I guess...you could categorize her as a genius... Her motives are too grand in scale for an ordinary person to ever understand her.
• Batman Gambit: Her whole plan to have Ace (Gentarou Hongou, CEO of Cradle Pharmaceuticals) kill his own subordinates relies on her knowledge of his need to protect his true identity from the other participants of her Nonary Game. Inevitably, he falls for her tricks every single time and in fact ends up killing them, like she planned him to from the start.
• Because Destiny Says So: Alternate explanation of her motive to revenge. 9 years ago, Akane saw a single specific way of saving her own life, which included deaths of three Asshole Victims. Regardless, if Akane wanted their death, to fulfill her vision, she had to ensure it the way she did. It should be noted that in the timeline where Junpei saves her, she does not end up killing the worst of her four targets - the man who would have killed her 9 years ago - and is by all accounts content with him being arrested.
• Beneath the Mask: She shows the player her dark side as Zero in the True ending.
• Big Bad: Plays with this in a surprising way: the current Nonary Game is being run by Zero/June/Akane and her secretary Santa. As it turns out, they are actually Well Intentioned Extremists trying to punish the four men responsible for the first game and to get Junpei to save June's life. Time travel loops and all that. So the actual Big Bad ends up being Ace, or rather, Gentarou Hongou, CEO of Cradle Pharmaceuticals, creator of the original Nonary Game and murderer of past Akane, as the person who set everything into motion.
• Big Bad Ensemble: However, she’s masterminding the game to get back at Ace, and save her past self from him.
• Break the Cutie: Akane seems greatly affected by their situation and the mistrust within the group. The events of her Nonary Game traumatized her so much that she resorted to extreme, coldhearted means in order to set things right.
• Broken Bird: Implied to be her true nature, caused by the first Nonary Game traumatizing her so much. There are hints of this throughout the game too, like her Freak Out upon discovering the body in the shower room, with her reaction akin to a PTSD trigger.
• The Chessmaster: The last person you'd expect, due to her ability to see and communicate with the future and its infinite timelines. She shares this role with Santa, as they both pose as participants of the very game they've been masterminding the whole time.
• Childhood Friend Romance: Junpei and Akane have been friends since elementary school. They have deeper feelings than just friendship, however... She praises and admires Junpei every chance she gets, and his biggest concern is escaping the Deadly Game with her. They even share sexual innuendos here and there throughout the game.
• Cloudcuckoolander: June is quirky, to put it mildly. Some of her comments when searching rooms with Junpei make her sound like a straight up Expy of Maya Fey from the Ace Attorney series. After listening to her talk about automatic writing and possession, Junpei develops a headache. She seems to consider being trapped in a freezer the perfect time to talk about imaginary substances and chemistry. Justified, as the crazy superstitious talks are hints to the fact that she's a walking supernatural phenomenon.
• Conspiracy Theorist: While exploring puzzle rooms, she idly comments that she believes in the existence of precognition and cursed mummies. Although given the reveals set later, this wouldn't seem like a unreasonable stretch for her.
• Consummate Liar: Her mask never drops, even when she must fake concern for the man who nearly murdered her as a child.
• Conveniently an Orphan: Explains her connection to Santa and why her death was never properly reported after the rest of the children were rescued.
• Covert Pervert: Her first thought when Junpei examines a bed in one of the cabins? Blushing and muttering, "Haha, no... it's much too soon for that..." She also teasingly suggests that they shower together when looking over the same cabin's bathroom.
• Create Your Own Hero: Hongou forcing Akane to be a test subject for his experiment on morphogenetic fields 9 years ago leads Akane to manipulate him into killing his subordinates and creating the second Nonary Game to save herself from him Because Destiny Says So.
• Cute Is Evil: Akane is an unsuspecting cute girl, and a legitimate Nice Girl to boot. Reaching the True ending eventually reveals that she is the real Zero, but only because she was required to do so in order for Junpei to connect with the psyche of her past self during Ace's Nonary Game nine years ago.
• Dead All Along: In the True ending, you are told that the girl who died in the first Nonary Game was named Akane Kurashiki. Ultimately subverted, though, because she never died thanks to Junpei being able to save her through their mind link. The people who told you she did either are lying or don't remember correctly.
• Determinator: Will do anything to achieve her goals. 'Anything' includes causing the deaths of herself and other people.
• Die or Fly: Esper abilities are heightened by fear and trauma. Being kidnapped, trapped in an incinerator, and being forced to solve a sudoku puzzle on pain of death by burning will do it.
• Died in Your Arms Tonight: June dies in Junpei's arms in the Submarine ending, thanking Junpei as she reflects on their childhood memories together. The song accompanying the scene doesn't help.
• Disc-One Final Boss: She's Zero, but the biggest threat is Ace.
• Dying Declaration of Love: As she bleeds to death in the Submarine Ending, she tells Junpei that she's "always liked him", making him break down even further as he tries in vain to keep her alive.
• Even Evil Has Loved Ones: She continues to love Junpei even after becoming Zero.
• Even Evil Has Standards: She may be willing to kidnap 9 people and orchestrate murders of Cradle Pharmaceutical staff, but she doesn't hurt people for no reason. Players who weren't her targets did not have detonators in their bracelets nor bombs in their bodies. Once they completed the game and escaped the "ship" (in actuality the Nevada base) they were even given transportation back to civilization.
• Evil All Along: She is Zero, which you only learn about long after finding out Ace is the reason she created the current Nonary Game.
• Expendable Alternate Universe: Is willing to screw over the participants of the Nonary Game (including Junpei, Santa and herself) many times over multiple continuities until she can bring about a timeline where she gets exactly what she wants.
• Face of an Angel, Mind of a Demon: She acts like a sweet and goofy young lady, but is secretly the manipulative and vengeful Zero. The story is built on subverting the reader's expectations, and the revelation of Akane's true nature may well be the biggest surprise it has to offer. That said, it's downplayed since she truly loves Junpei, her primary motivation is to prevent her twelve-year-old self from horrifically burning to death, and the four people she wants revenge on really have it coming.
• False Crucible: As Zero, she subjects all the game's participants bar Ace and the 9th Man to this. There was neither a bomb inside their bodies, nor a detonator in their bracelets. That being said, this doesn't prevent any of them from being killed by other means, such as murdering each other (as all the bad endings show).
• Forced into Evil: An example as a result of circumstance rather than direct outside intervention. If she doesn't recreate the Nonary Game exactly as she saw it nine years ago and put Junpei and co. in life-threatening danger, the Stable Time Loop that saved her life will fail to close and she will die horrifically.
• Freak Out: Has one when you force your way into Door 3, with her, Santa and Seven, and run into Snake's body. Or rather, what is left of it. Everyone is shocked, but June produces a scream that is described as "not entirely human" and begins to tear out her hair, until Junpei manages to calm her down. Endgame revelations indicate one of two possibilities for interpreting this: either it's all an act since she knows that the body isn't Snake's and she had planned out his death, or she's having some kind of PTSD flashback to being locked in the incinerator, the extreme reaction compared to any other times explainable by the fact that if this scene happens, you're headed for a failed outcome for everyone, guaranteed.
• Freudian Excuse: Akane wanted to save the life of her past self and take revenge on Cradle Pharmaceutical, the corporation who ruined her life.
• From Nobody to Nightmare: Was originally a sweet little orphan girl who the first Nonary Game's creators thought they could easily dispose of. One Traumatic Superpower Awakening later, she is alive, angry, and out to kill her enemies for what they did to her.
• Gas Mask, Longcoat: When she’s dressed as Zero.
• He Who Fights Monsters: In order to escape the original Nonary Game and punish the original game's creators, she masterminded her own Nonary Game, subjecting many innocent people to trauma and possible death.
• Hidden in Plain Sight: Akane is Junpei's childhood friend, and is the only one among the participants who has an explicit connection to another participant. Somehow, this goes unnoticed as a hint that she's the mastermind and set up the current Nonary Game because of an event involving her past relations to him, said event being that she got caught in Ace's trap in the past when she returned to pick up a doll that Junpei gave her.
• Hidden Villain: She's Zero, meaning she's the reason everyone is stuck inside the Gigantic.
• I Am Not Pretty: In the Cargo Room (Door 6), checking her own card will cause her to say that she's not attractive to guys, unlike Lotus and Clover.
• Idiot Ball: Her decision to run back for a memento of her childhood sweetheart rather than escape the deathtrap and approaching psychopath causes her to be trapped and all the fallout it brings on others.
• Ironic Nickname: In a sense. She's based off the Enneagram's Peacemaker archetype, but she's not very at peace with herself or the world.
  Uchikoshi: She's the sort of woman who'll do whatever it takes to achieve her goals. Even though she seems like a nice girl, she's always plotting rather cold things.
• I Have Many Names: Four, to be exact. June, Akane, Kanny, and Zero.
• Innocent Innuendo: Invokes this a lot, bordering on The Tease. Though given she knows everything about Junpei's actions, it may not be so innocent...
• Karma Houdini: Masterminds everything and gets away with all of it. Even most of her victims completely forgive her in the True Ending. This is justified by the whole 'precognition' thing- she can see the outcome and potential flaws of any plan she makes before it even happens, and also by the fact the Nonary Game eventually answered questions all of them had. And subverted by the third game, where she gets put through the wringer. Repeatedly.
• A Lighter Shade of Black: Akane is the confirmed mastermind of the current Nonary Game, but she's certainly better than Ace, who pushed her to becoming a villain as a result of his fundamental apathy and callousness towards the lives of other people, and only targeted the people who ruined her life directly for the sake of vengeance, while leaving those uninvolved out of the question, as opposed to Ace who targets people indifferently and has no regard for the life of anyone whatsoever.
• Love-Interest Traitor: Played With; she is Junpei's primary love interest, then is revealed to be Zero, the one who put the events of the game into motion. But even if she does take him into dangerous situations because of what's needed to save her life, nothing ever suggests that her feelings for Junpei were anything but genuine. He seemingly doesn't hold her motivations against her in the end either.
• Love Makes You Dumb: During the first Nonary Game, she decided to run towards a murderous psychopath so she could retrieve a gift Junpei gave her. This nearly cost her her life.
• Maiden, Mother, and Crone: Each of her names represents a different side of her personality. Akane is who she was, and is used in reference to her innocent child-self. June is who she is, the false mask she puts on during her Game. Zero is who she will be, a killer who has largely lost her innocence.
• Mindlink Mates: With Junpei. Uchikoshi claims their connection through morphogenetic field is particularly strong because of their love.
• Narrating the Present: She's the narrator of the story through Junpei's eyes.
• Nice Girl: Very kind, warm and selfless when she retorts against Lotus's cold-hearted suggestion to abandon others to save their own skins. Even when she is revealed to be Zero all along and the mastermind of the current Nonary Game, nothing suggests that her niceness towards the others was an act, though she does feel genuine malice primarily towards Ace and his cohorts.
• Nominal Villain: Zero is forced to run the second Nonary Game as she previously foresaw its existence, and her life depends on information obtained from that foresight. She is fully aware that it's an evil act and tries to minimize the impact it has on innocent people, but is still forced to become a fugitive afterwards. If Junpei takes entirely the wrong path and disrupts the future game, Zero surprises the player with the declaration, "You misunderstand. You haven't lost... I have lost."
• Obfuscating Stupidity: Acts like a Cloud Cuckoolander, is actually the mastermind behind the whole game.
• Pay Evil unto Evil: Orchestrates three murders on Cradle Pharmaceutical staff and makes sure their CEO spends the rest of his life in prison because of what they did to her and 17 other kids.
• Plucky Girl: She is optimistic and hopes for everyone to gets along, and strongly disapproves of Ace's attempt to sacrifice himself.
• The Power of Love: Uchikoshi states that the reason she is able to BOTH transmit to AND receive from Junpei through the morphogenetic field, and across time in addition to distance, is due to the strength of their love for one another.
• Ret-Gone: Certain bad endings (like the Safe/Zero Loses ending) result in June mysteriously disappearing, presumably because Junpei failed to save her past self, which means her present self never existed.
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge: One of her motives for creating the second Nonary Game is to punish the four men responsible for the first one, which nearly got her killed.
• Samus Is a Girl: The masked villain Zero proves to be the female June.
• Sanity Has Advantages: In comparison to Ace, Akane seems to be driven by wrath towards her enemies, but she knows what she's doing is wrong and is even able to outsmart Ace in the process, getting him trapped in a version of his own Nonary Game and using it against him. Meanwhile, when Ace's treatment of her in the past became apparent, he was so Ax-Crazy even back then that she came to realize that he was a threat to her life and took the measures required to save herself from him in the future. Granted, this is under a situation of Because Destiny Says So, and said destiny eventually ends up leading her moral compass to be skewed to the point where she's fine with letting herself die multiple times over even MORE than she is in this game if it's to save the world from a virus.
• Satellite Love Interest: Is this until she's not; most of her screen time up until the finale relies on her being with Junpei with not much else in the department of having dynamics with the other players. Of course, the True Ending reveals that she is neither a mere love interest nor a flat character.
• Save Scumming: Her past self uses this to guide Junpei towards the true end. She treats the other timelines (where things generally ended badly for the most, if not all the game's participants) as inconsequential, only caring about bringing about a continuity where she survives and gets her revenge. She's essentially murdered the entire cast by proxy in at least one timeline.
• Secret Identity Vocal Shift: Her mask has a voice modulator to disguise her true identity when she's acting as Zero.
• Secretly Dying: Played With. Her current self isn't dying, but her past self will die from being incinerated by Ace if she can't save herself by matching the Psychic Link she had to Junpei in the past within the present Nonary Game. It Makes Sense in Context.
• Set Right What Once Went Wrong: The reason behind the game is to save Akane from being killed by Ace in the past.
• Single Woman Seeks Good Man: She has been in love with Junpei ever since childhood, due to his kind and selfless nature and his sense of virtue and justice (as shown when he confronts bullies who engage in animal cruelty and threaten Akane). Despite being revealed to be Zero, her love for Junpei is genuine, as confirmed by the sequels.
• She Is All Grown Up: Santa wasn't kidding when he said she was "cute as a button" as a kid. And just look at her now.
• Sixth Ranger Traitor: She is the last participant of the Nonary Game that is introduced to the player, but is also part of the Big Bad Ensemble and is the reason the participants are trapped in the current Nonary Game. Or much rather, Ace is the reason she is conducting this game to save herself from him.
• Sneaky Departure: During the final puzzle, present Akane and Santa somehow manage to leave the incinerator without anybody noticing (admittedly, it helps that Junpei - the only one who fully realizes what's going on - is busy saving past Akane, and everybody else A.) Thinks they're about to die, and B.) Don't know that Akane and Santa are the masterminds).
• Stepford Smiler: Combination of B and C, depending on your interpretation of her personality. Throughout the game, she acts cheerful and kind, but she's actually a vengeful soul, out to take revenge on those who have wronged her.
• They Look Just Like Everyone Else!: Akane looks like a completely ordinary person, and even acts like it too, but she's the one conducting the Nonary Game in the present to save herself from Ace.
• Timey-Wimey Ball: Her 21-year-old self has to set up a Deadly Game to save her 12-year-old self's skin. If Junpei makes choices such that he cannot transmit the way out to young Akane, old Akane goes bye-bye.
• Used to Be a Sweet Kid: She has no qualms about killing 3 people who ruined her childhood and putting innocents in danger to save herself (though not as much danger as she would have them believe).
• Villain Protagonist: She sets up 3 people to die and instills massive panic in innocent people, and her younger self is the true protagonist of the game.
• Walking Spoiler: Like all the characters, she is not who she seems to be. Mainly, she’s Zero.
• We Do Not Know Each Other: She and Santa are siblings, and working together to facilitate the Nonary Game. They hide this, of course.
• Well-Intentioned Extremist: Her desire to live is understandable. The murders she orchestrates to achieve that goal, however, reveal another, darker motive for her actions. Namely, Revenge. She's also willing to sacrifice alternate universes in order to save her past self. Uchikoshi even admits she'd be perfectly fine with killing someone as long as it benefited her.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: She and Santa both disappear completely after locking the rest of the participants in the Incinerator Room to force Junpei to transmit the puzzle solution to past Akane. She makes a return in the sequels.
• Wounded Gazelle Warcry: Acts more afraid than she really is to make Junpei feel motivated to protect her, and to shift suspicion off herself from the others, especially Ace.
• Xanatos Gambit: The entire Nonary Game is an elaborate plan to save her life in the past! In this case, because of the multiple timelines, (here's where the Gambit comes in) its failure condition is also its success condition.
• Yamato Nadeshiko: As described by Kinu Nishimura. It's all a facade of course.

7 - Seven

#7 "Seven"

Voiced by: Kenta Miyake (Japanese), Edward Bosco (English)

"H2O... H must mean "hot", and O probably stands for "orphans"... So H2O must be made of 2 hot orphans..."

A towering mountain of a man wearing a beanie and suffering from amnesia. Despite his bumbling nature, he is very dependable and well-equipped for solving problems. His bracelet number is 7. His name comes from... the number seven.

His original Japanese alias is also the English word "Seven".

He is a detective that searched for the missing children that were forced into the Nonary Game nine years ago. He was caught and locked in a cell in the Gigantic, but managed to escape and also save many of the children in the process. After these events, he attempted to track down the mastermind Gentarou Hongou to bring him to justice, but never found him.

He claims that he was unable to save Akane, and that she was the only child to die in the original Nonary Game. However, this contradicts the chain of events that led up to the creation of the second Nonary Game. Considering that he is one of the only eye-witnesses to the events of the first Nonary Game, it is very likely (but not confirmed) that he is either collaborating with Zero, or that Akane tampered with his memories using her Esper powers.

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• Ambiguously Brown: His skin is a tad darker than everyone else's, but he otherwise doesn't have much to indicate a sure ethnicity. He is Japanese though, as confirmed in VLR.
• Ambiguous Situation: In the final moments of the story, Junpei realizes there is a discrepancy in Seven's story about 9 years ago. He said that he saw Akane's charred corpse after the incinerator went off. However, as Junpei saved Akane from being incinerated, there would have been no body for Seven to see. Snake, being blind, wouldn't have been able to see it, but Seven definitely would have. Junpei briefly wonders if the past somehow changed, but then he sees that Seven's expression seems calmly content and wonders if perhaps Seven had been in on the plan from the start as well. It would certainly explain his Easy Amnesia as being faked. No answer is given.
• Beergasm: He drinks the booze from the Casino and was about to drink pure ethanol in the Operating Room.
• Big Damn Heroes: Saving the children on the Gigantic nine years ago. He also throws himself at Ace in the True End, freeing Lotus and disarming Ace, so the present as well.
• The Big Guy: Easily the largest of the group, and possibly also the strongest. Whenever force needs to be applied to something, the other characters mostly turn to him.
• Cowboy Cop: Described as being one.
  Seven was a lone-wolf detective, who valued his own code over the rules, doing what was right over doing what you were told.
• Does Not Know His Own Strength: When Junpei likens the Mercury symbol to Lotus ("the woman symbol with devil horns"), Seven laughs and tousles Junpei's hair in what he likely thought to be a friendly manner, but Junpei feels his neck is going to snap, even though it was clear Seven did try to keep his strength in check.
• Easy Amnesia: Seven doesn't remember things concerning his identity. Unlike most examples, it's justified in that it's probably a side effect of the gas. This type of amnesia goes away in a couple of days. However there is that pesky nine hour time limit. Hinted to be a subversion in the True Ending, because he says that Akane died 9 years ago, yet she's alive and well in the present.
• Face of a Thug: He's a bit of a brute, and the beanie and scars probably don't help either. Lotus in particular wants nothing to do with him... at first. He's definitely one of the good guys, though.
• Genius Bruiser: He comes up with the idea to use tools and other items to hold doors open so that the party can backtrack without having to use the numbered doors. He used to be a detective as well.
• Gentle Giant: Seven's size and stature rarely comes into play; he is a very polite, and surprisingly academic, detective. He did physically need to keep Junpei back when he tried to save Snake.
• Gratuitous English: On how he chose Seven as his codename in the Japanese version.
• Hero of Another Story: He saved the children from the first Nonary Game on the Gigantic nine years ago.
• Logic Bomb: His head "feels like it's about to explode" after he regains his memories and realizes that Akane had been present... despite having died 9 years prior.
• My Greatest Failure: His failure to save Akane nine years ago.
• No Name Given: Even Uchikoshi states that he didn't really think of Seven's real name, unlike Lotus's semi-official name. Even in Zero Time Dilemma, Junpei still calls him Seven despite having spent the past year working with him as a detective and having plenty of time to learn his real name.
• Scars Are Forever: The creator revealed that Seven got his scars from an incident after the first Nonary Game. He fought a large evil organization and took some nasty hits.
• Scary Black Man: Subverted. He looks the part, but he's actually a pretty nice guy (though he can be quite a smart ass). He's not actually black either.
• Spanner in the Works: His interference allowed the participants of the first Nonary Game to escape.
• Vitriolic Best Buds: With Clover. "Best buds" may be stretching it, but while they frequently fight with each other (verbally, at least), Clover does not even think about leaving him behind when he volunteers and Seven is just as devastated as everyone else when Clover is found dead in the Safe ending
• You Are Number 6: Well, he's named Seven instead of Six. Goes for all characters in a sense, but Seven is the only one who simply picks his number as his nickname. In the Japanese version, he chose "seven" as it was pronounced in Gratuitous English; it would be the equivalent of having himself named Sieben.

8 - Lotus

#8 "Lotus" (Hazuki Kashiwabara)

Voiced by: Rie Tanaka (Japanese), Valerie Arem (English)

"Junpei, are you just screwing around?"

An older woman dressed as a belly dancer. She has an abrasive and aloof personality, and tends to act only towards her own self-interests. Her bracelet number is 8, and her name comes from the number of petals on a lotus.

She is an incredibly intelligent computer hacker, working as a digital security consultant, who only dresses like a belly dancer because she likes the fashion. She has two daughters, both of whom were involved in the first Nonary Game.

Her original Japanese alias was Yashiro, from the word for "eight".

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• Absurdly Youthful Mother: As revealed in the Submarine path, she has twin daughters who are roughly Junpei's age, which surprises Junpei and Seven.
• All There in the Manual: Only her last name is mentioned in the game itself. A Q&A on the official English website states her first name is Hazuki, but even that is just a "possibility" more than an official name.
• Berserk Button: When Lotus is called old or otherwise, such as being called an "exhibitionist grandma." She, at different points, kicks the shit out of Santa and Seven.
• Butt-Monkey: Since her (8) bracelet is necessary for Ace to leave the Nonary Game with his (1) and the 9th Man's (9) bracelet, she dies or is targeted in pretty much every ending where he slips past the other participants in his scheming.
• Damsel in Distress: Gets taken hostage at gunpoint in two of the endings and is murdered in two others.
• Death Glare: While trying to solve the laboratory puzzle, Junpei calls her an old lady. This is Lotus' reaction◊.
• Debt Detester: Uses this as justification for not wanting Seven to sacrifice himself in the "Coffin" ending.
• Generation Xerox: Take one look at Nona and you'll immediately see she looks like a young Lotus.
• Glamorous Single Mother: Uchikoshi states that she's divorced from her ex-husband Ichiro Kawashibara.
• Hidden Depths: Though she seems to be self-serving, she's willing to sacrifice herself if it helps the others and gets her closer to the truth of what happened to her daughters.
• Hidden Heart of Gold: She starts out as brash and initially doesn't seem too concerned with sacrificng someone when the situation asks for it. While she never loses her directness, the game hints that her aloof and detached behavior are mostly a front, which begins to crack as you get closer to the true ending. Just compare the Lotus that proposes to simply leave people behind with the Lotus who rather stays behind herself than, say, leave behind Seven.
  • She may have manipulated Clover into voting for her favour when deciding on a person to sacrifice in order to continue with the game, but Lotus is the one to punch Ace in the face, upon discovering that he was the one who murdered Clover during the Zero Lost route.
• Hollywood Hacking: Surprisingly averted. When a console needs to be hacked, said hacker writes a simple program to perform a basic but valid operation, namely brute-forcing the password. Unfortunately, programming does not work that way, especially on what is basically a DOS Prompt that is locked, but at least it refers to a real-world concept. Furthermore, even basic computer security would either impose a time limit until you can try logging in again or outright block you after several failed login attempts to prevent precisely this kind of hacking.
• Informed Deformity: Other characters keep commenting on how old Lotus is. She doesn't look old.
• Insufferable Genius: Is an IT wiz, and gets very short with people who aren't.
• Jerkass Has a Point: Lotus bringing up the fact that - for anyone to survive the game at all - people will have to be left behind, thus sparking conversation on who it will be. It was brutally pragmatic, but also necessary - nobody knew at the time that everyone could escape the game. She was just trying to solve a bad situation the only way she knew how. And given the tense situation they were in, it's perfectly reasonable that Lotus would want them to decide on who they'd sacrifice as soon as possible. Letting time pass would only make it worse.
• Locked Out of the Loop: She spends most of the true end being held hostage by Ace, and as a result has absolutely no idea what's going on in the final confrontation.
• Mama Bear: She's been investigating the Nonary Games to find out what happened to her daughters who she fears were traumatized by said events.
• Ms. Fanservice: If there's one blatantly attractive and Stripperific woman in the cast, it's her. Her large boobs and lack of clothing get a lot of attention, even from characters.
• Older Than They Look: She's actually in her 40s, despite appearing to be in her 20s.
• Playful Hacker: About the only time she's happy throughout the Nonary Game is when she's figuring out a computer, and she's really good at it.
• Precision F-Strike: Drops one after she has had enough of hearing about the things she doesn't get after being Locked Out of the Loop.
  Lotus: What the hell?! What! The! Hell?! What in God's name are you talking about?! It's "9 years" this and "9 years that" and when it's not 9 years something then you're talking about some sort of fucking "experiments"! You aren't making any sense!
• Rapid-Fire Typing: Junpei likens it to machine-gun fire.
• Running Gag: Lotus tends to get quite abusive when mentioning that she is unmarried or, well, abusive. Expect some comic relief scene for most of the time.
• Smarter Than You Look: She's actually one of the most competent puzzle solvers in the game. And that's not even considering what happens when you put a computer in front of her. She also shares her knowledge of morphogenetic fields, which proves quite valuable to Junpei. The fact that she even knew about it seems to impress even Snake.
• Stripperiffic: Her outfit leaves very little to the imagination. Lampshaded by Seven and Santa, who call her an exhibitionist.
• Sultry Belly Dancer: She's dressed like one because she likes that style, according to the Q&A. It's one of her hobbies, in fact.
• Teen Pregnancy: Downplayed. She was around 19 years old when she gave birth to twins, Nona and Ennea.

9 - The 9th Man

#9 "The 9th Man" (Teruaki Kubota)

Voiced by: Nobuo Tobita (Japanese), Cam Clarke (English)

"A-Ah... Oh my God, oh my God, there's no time left... Listen! I was lied to! He lied to me! He put me in here! It was him! He killed me! It was him!"

A jittery and nervous man with glasses who seems to know more than he should. His bracelet number is 9. Although written with different kanji, the first syllable of his family name is a homonym of the word for "nine".

His true identity is Teruaki Kubota, one of the four men responsible for the first Nonary Game nine years ago. While Gentarou Hongou was the mastermind behind the project, Kubota was the one who designed the technology used in the Nonary Game. With that in mind, he attempts to break away from the group to escape on his own after Hongou (as Ace) tricks him into believing that the DEADs were changed so that only one person had to verify them. He dies soon after, and his death immediately serves as a lesson on how deadly the game truly is.

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• Advertised Extra: Appears frequently in promotional material and is advertised as one of the main characters of the game, yet he dies in the first act of the story soon after being introduced. Possibly justified too, due to the Anyone Can Die nature of the game, where no one can be fully trusted.
• Asshole Victim: Initially, the others are absolutely horrified of his gruesome death, but it is easy to not feel the slightest amount of pity for him when his true identity is revealed later on.
• Broken Pedestal: He had a great respect for Ace/Hongou, because he was his boss and in a way, his friend. But when he discovers that his boss doesn't feel the same respect, it's too late for him.
• Chekhov's Gun: His number 9 bracelet and knife get taken by Ace for use later on.
• Corrupt Corporate Executive: At least he's not as bad as Ace.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: He is trapped behind door number 5 alone, sobbing and begging for his life while being unable to disable his bracelet which eventually detonates the bomb in his gut. The game goes to explicit lengths describing his gruesome remains.
• The Evil Genius: He was the man who prepared the technology behind the Nonary Game 9 years ago. The bracelets, the REDs, the DEADs, the numbered doors... He got all these to work. You find out in the True ending.
• Explosive Stupidity: He REALLY shouldn't have trusted Ace when he told him that the DEAD only required one bracelet to deactivate the bomb in his gut. And he designed the system in the first place!
• Face Death with Despair: Within the first half hour or so of the game, the Ninth Man dies after locking himself behind a door from the rest of the main group. His final moments are spent in panic and confusion as he's about to be exploded by the bomb in his stomach.
  "..T-This wasn't supposed to happen! This is wrong! This is wrong! O-O-O-Open the door! Please! I'm begging you! Help me! Please, get me out of here! Get me out of here! A-Ah... Oh my God, oh my God, there's no time left...! A...Aahh... Aaahhhh... Gyaaaaaaaaaaaaaaht—!"
• He Knows Too Much: One of the reasons Ace wanted him dead is that he knew about Ace's identity and criminal past.
• His Name Is...: Before he dies, he warns the other 8 people about "him" lying to the 9th Man. It's unknown whether he was referring to Ace or Zero, but in the former case, Ace makes his last words a lot clearer during the confession.
• Horrible Judge of Character: He believed Ace when he stated that the doors only require one person to go through and deactivate, this gets him killed.
• Killed Off for Real: Out of all the participants, he is the only one who dies no matter what since his death comes before any route splits off.
• Mad Scientist: Sort of. He was one of the men behind the original Nonary Game and responsible for developing the necessary technology.
• Never Trust a Trailer: He seems like he's going to be much more relevant to the plot in the promotional material. However, he dies in the prologue. He does serve a bigger purpose in the backstory, though. So he's pretty much still considered one of the main characters, even if he only has an indirect appearance.
• No Name Given: He doesn't even get a nickname as he blows up very early in the game. You actually do find out his real name later, though.
• Obfuscating Stupidity: He only plays speechless for a few minutes before pulling a knife on Clover.
• Obviously Evil: The moment he's introduced, the 9th man appears the most suspicious and creepy of them all, being and stuttering, panicky mess of a human being and too nervous to even properly introduce himself. It doesn't take until a minute or two before he pulls out a blade, threatens Clover and blackmails himself into a trap that was set up for him.
• Posthumous Character: You only get to know his real name and backstory long after his death.
• Sacrificial Lamb: Exploited. Zero uses him to trick everyone else into believing that they too will explode if they don't follow the rules. In reality, the only ones carrying bombs are himself, Guy X, and possibly Ace, the people responsible for the first Nonary Game.
• Small Role, Big Impact: At least in regards to the current Nonary Game. The 9th Man gets all of one scene before his death. Said death shows just how serious the Nonary Game is, his bracelet and knife become major MacGuffins, and the motives behind his murder are later explained when Ace shows his true colors.
• Starter Villain: The first person to blatantly antagonize the others besides Zero, and he's dealt with quickly.
• Story-Breaker Power: Why he's a Sacrificial Lamb. The number 9 can be added to any combination of numbers without changing the digital root, allowing for an easier time escaping all the numbered doors.
• Time Bomb: He gets tricked into setting off his timer, which explodes in his stomach, killing him.
• Too Dumb to Live: Sure, you could attribute his buying Ace's lie about the reprogrammed DEADs to simple gullibility... until you realize that he would have just gotten stuck at the next set of numbered doors anyway, rendering his gambit to go through Door 5 on his own pointless. Even worse, as one of the designers of the original Nonary Game, he of all people should have known this. Just what the hell was he thinking?
• Unwitting Pawn: Ace convinced him to go through Door 5 alone by telling him that the DEAD no longer required everyone to identify. He died in an attempt to escape on his own, just like Ace wanted.
• We Hardly Knew Ye: Out of all the main characters, he is the least developed as he dies very early on and his death is unavoidable on all routes.
• You Are Number 6: Or rather, You Are Number 9. The 9th Man is the only thing the rest of the cast calls him.

Others - WARNING: Unmarked spoilers ahead!

Zero

The mastermind of the Nonary game, who kidnaps the players to force them to participate. Can be heard over the speakers.

See Akane Kurashiki for more details.

The Captain

The Captain (Kagechika Musashidou)

Not actually the captain, but a man dressed as one. His true identity is Kagechika Musashidou, one of the four men responsible for the first Nonary Game nine years ago. He was the one who financed the Nonary Project. Hongou was given a note in which he was asked to confess, and be released. Musashidou was brought in as a witness, although this was just a Batman Gambit by Akane to have him killed off by Hongou.

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• Asshole Victim: He was responsible for funding the First Nonary Game and his death is mourned by none.
• Corrupt Corporate Executive: One of the masterminds behind the first Nonary Game.
• Fat Bastard: He is fat and helped finance Hongou's experiment.
• He Knows Too Much: He knew about Ace's identity and role in the first Nonary Game. Ace feared that he could pose a threat for him as he was poised to tell the truth about the Nonary Game, and killed him.
• Posthumous Character: The players only discover him as a corpse behind the #1 door.
• Red Herring: A corpse dressed like a ship's captain wearing a #0 bracelet. Obviously, this is Zero, right? No one is fooled, and it's such an obvious red herring that Junpei feels like Zero is mocking him.
• Walking Spoiler: As you'd expect, considering he first shows up as a dead man and for no particular reason.
• What Happened to the Mouse?: An encounter between Clover and him happens offscreen in the leadup to the Safe ending, but he himself is not mentioned, nor what happened to him afterwards in that timeline.

Guy X/Mr. X

Guy X (Nagisa Nijisaki)

His true identity is Nagisa Nijisaki, one of the four men responsible for the first Nonary Game nine years ago. He was the second-in-charge of the Nonary Project. He is killed by Hongou, mistaking him for Light. This was orchestrated by Akane, who swapped his clothing with Snake's.

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• Asshole Victim: He was never interacted with but given his status as Hongou's right-hand man already establish that he was definitely not a nice guy.
• Body Double: You think Snake actually died behind Door 3? Turns out it was this guy, and the killer couldn't tell who they killed.
• Corrupt Corporate Executive: One of the masterminds behind the first Nonary Game.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: Suffers the same gruesome fate as Kubota, being trapped behind door 3 where the bracelet detonates the bomb in his gut. His remains are so grisly that Junpei and the others can't even tell who it is aside from wearing Snake's clothes.
• He Knows Too Much: He knew about Ace's identity and role in the first Nonary Game. Even without the "Snake's clothing" deception in play, Ace would have likely killed him.
• Identical Stranger: Downplayed and ultimately Subverted: At a glance, it wouldn't be impossible to mistake him for Snake, given their similar lean frames, sharp facial features, but on closer inspection, the finer details of their facial features are extremely different, not to mention their hairstyles. This is the key feature that implicates Ace: Anyone could recognize his face was completely different, but not if the killer had prosopagnosia, the inability to process faces, which Junpei tricks Ace into admitting about himself.
• Lean and Mean: He is as thin as Snake, and participated in the creation of the nonary project.
• Murder by Mistake: He was wearing Snake's clothes, so his murderer mistook him for Snake. This fact helps to prove the identity of his killer, since a person who couldn't tell faces apart would have easily fallen for the ruse. This is also Played With, as his murder was only a mistake on Ace's part; Zero very intentionally set him up to be murdered in such a specific way.
• Number Two: He was the right-hand man of Gentarou Hongou, the CEO of Cradle Pharmaceutical. Hongou killed him because he thought it was Snake, who knew his past as the creator of the Nonary Game. It makes sense he mistook him for Snake, though, as Hongou can't differentiate human faces and Nijisaki was dressed as Snake.
• Posthumous Character: We learn about his existence long after his gruesome death. Partly because he was injured so badly that he was unidentifiable and mistaken for Snake.
• Something about a Rose: Has a rose in the photo of him and the other executives.
• Walking Spoiler: Like the other two characters here, his existence and involvement in the story is a massive spoiler.

Lord Dashiell Gordain

Lord Dashiell Gordain

The creator of the original Nonary Games. An English eccentric millionaire, he was a survivor of the Titanic's submersion and later obsessively attempted to purchase everything related to the Titanic. He purchased All-Ice and the Gigantic (after its incident in WWI). He is the creator of the original Nonary Game- he would take young Englishmen who'd accumulated massive debts and force them to play Nonary Games on the ship, and he would enjoy the show with his millionaire friends as they bet money on who would survive. All the losers were burned in the incinerator as a sacrifice during a ceremony (which the robes Snake woke up in were used for.) After many years of this, Gordain died of old age, but the games were continued by his successors. Ironically, Ace was kidnapped during the last game.

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• All There in the Manual: Most of his information was uncovered by interviews with the director himself, Question 44.
• Evil Brit: Ever since he created the Nonary Game.
• Evil Debt Collector: Taken to the logical extreme in his backstory.
• Greater-Scope Villain: Gordain introduced Gentarou Hongou to the Nonary Game concept, which inspired Hongou to make the Nonary Game that would set the plot of 999 proper in motion.
• Man of Wealth and Taste: Well, he was a lord...
• Posthumous Character: He's only mentioned in passing once throughout the game, being long since dead.
• Walking Spoiler: Get a load of this guy. Although he's far too busy being dead to be walking in a literal sense.
• When It All Began: He created the trend of the Nonary Game.

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