Main installments: Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc | Danganronpa Zero | Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair | Danganronpa 3: The End of Hope's Peak High School | Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony
Spin-offs: Danganronpa Another Episode: Ultra Despair Girls | Danganronpa S: Ultimate Summer Camp | Danganronpa Kirigiri
Warning! All spoilers below are unmarked.
It's virtually impossible to list tropes for this game without spoiling everything or creating Self-Fulfilling Spoilers because of the large amount of twists and Murder Mystery-related tropes it contains.
Trivia tropes:
- Colbert Bump: The Something Awful Let's Play (here
) of it introduced the game to English audiences, and was responsible for creating a non-Japanese fanbase for the game. It got to the point where there was much more English related buzz about its sequel before it got released, than the first game which was unknown to English audiences. - Cowboy BeBop at His Computer: In an edition of the Guinness Book of World Records that labels Junko as the most popular character from the game to cosplay as, the entry describes the game as one "which challenges players to investigate a fight club overseen by a robot bear."
- Creator's Favorite: Toko, surprisingly enough. It's been outright stated she is in fact the character seen as representing the franchise itself best. To quote character designer Rui Komatsuzaki about Toko: "Much like Monokuma — I think ever moreso than him — she represents this game's worldview. We also have Ms. Sawashiro enthusiastic voice acting, and so she's my favorite character in the game."
- Creator's Pest: Downplayed with Sayaka and Leon; since they were used as the female and male bases that all the other designs were derived from, the designers had to keep coming back to them, and they got sick of them and killed them both in the first chapter.
- Cross-Dressing Voices:
- With Makoto, who has a female voice actress in Japanese (though the dub averts this), and Chihiro, which is played with in both dubs with ultimately the Japanese dub averting this as a form of Foreshadowing while the English plays it straight (possibly because it's just easier to find a female voice actor, rather than a male voice actor who can feasibly mimic the voice of (what first seems to be) a young girl).
- Played straight with Chihiro in most foreign dubs and the Stage Adaptation, which was a Cross-Cast Role.
- Development Gag: One of the songs is titled "Distrust," the game's original title.
- Dueling Dubs: The original game and its anime adaptation were localized and dubbed into English by NISA and Funimation respectively, with The Animation recasting everyone except Makoto (see The Other Darrin below). Therefore, NISA and Funimation's scripts began dueling each other ever since the first trailer for The Animation dropped, with Funimation getting rid of any Dub Name Changes (such as Genocider Sho for Genocide Jack) while preserving the cast's Last-Name Basis and "Super High School Level" over "Ultimate" titles.
- Dummied Out:
- Sayaka, Mukuro, and Kiyondo have a complete set of full-body sprites, but since all three die before they can appear in a class trial, they go unused under normal circumstances. Sayaka and Mukuro's sprites would be used in School Mode in later releases, and they're also used in the demo (in which neither of them are murdered).
- Byakuya has a set of sprites depicting him without glasses; in the final game, he never takes them off.
- The original PSP release has unused Free Time dialogue for Kiyondo, complete with a Free Time event that updates Kiyotaka's Report Card. In the final game, Kiyondo is unavailable during Free Time, and he's killed off not long afterward.
- Fandom Life Cycle: Stage 4. It's a very large and active fandom, but it hasn't reached mainstream accessibility outside of a few Shout Outs.
- Foiler Footage: The demo roughly follows the prologue and first chapter, but has a few differences from the final game, likely to keep the first mystery a surprise; Sayaka and "Junko" are never killed, with Yasuhiro being the botched aggressor turned murder victim instead, with the murderer implied to be Hifumi (which was confirmed by the manga adaptation of the demo). The first promotional video for the anime also shows Yasuhiro as the victim.
- Genius Bonus: In addition to over-sized carnivorous plants in the greenhouse, there are (life-size!) corpse plants (the big red flowers and the "Monokuma Flower"), which is perfect for the general setting and where someone named Corpse Warblade's body was found. You would think, however, that someone would mention the plants' awful smell — then again the "Monokuma Flower" was (allegedly) made by an Ultimate Botanist, and if anyone could make a scentless corpse plant, it would be someone of that level (assuming Monokuma is telling the truth).
- Irony as She Is Cast: Celestia Ludenberg is a Japanese girl pretending to be a French-German noble, and puts on a French accent that easily slips when angry. Marieve Herington, her voice actress, is Franco-Ontarian.
- The Other Darrin: In Funimation's dub of the anime adaptation, they replaced all the voice actors except for Bryce Papenbrook (who had worked with Funimation before on Attack on Titan one year earlier, and was available) as Makoto.
- This ultimately causes Komaru Naegi to have three different English voices. Weirdly enough, according to the DVD commentary, Cherami Leigh (who voiced her in Danganronpa Another Episode: Ultra Despair Girls and whom the studio would have had access to as per her work on Fairy Tail) was getting married at the time of recording, leading to Alexis Tipton voicing Komaru for the few lines she had. This indirectly led to Rachel Robinson (friends with Leigh) voicing Sakura due to being in town at the time.
- On the Japanese side of things, TARAKO replaced Nobuyo Oyama as Monokuma's Japanese voice actor starting with Danganronpa 3 due to the latter suffering from dementia.
- Playing Against Type:
- Monokuma = Doraemon
- Celeste is very much an antithesis of Hekiru Shiina's best-known role, Hikaru Shidou.
- Lucien Dodge as Hifumi. Most of his nerdy characters are usually good-looking and cute. Hifumi is the complete opposite where he is a Gonk and a huge pervert.
- Erika Harlacher, usually known for voicing sweet, energetic girls, provides the English voice of Kyoko.
- Real-Life Relative: Leon Kuwata and Sakura Ogami are voiced by real-life couple Grant George and Jessica Gee-George in the NISA dub.
- Shrug of God: When asked as to how Toko died in the bad ending, writer Kazutaka Kodaka shrugged, admitted he had no idea, and then jokingly stated she had exploded.
General trivia:
- The Japanese instruction manual for the game's PSP version states that Yasuhiro's predictions only come true 20% of the time; in the anime, it's 30%.
- In the original Japanese version of the game, the "Crazy Diamonds" logo of Mondo's gang throughout the game is written in ateji. However, in the localization, all instances of his gang logo were changed to be spelled out in English. This includes the back of his jacket, making Mondo the only character to have a sprite edited in localization.
