Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair

Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair is a 2012 videogame, developed by Spike Chunsoft and directed by Takayuki Sugawara. It is the second game in the Dangan Ronpa trilogy.

Hajime Hinata is a student who is about to join Hope's Peak Academy, a school for elite students. However, he has difficulty to remember why he was able to enter this kind of school. In his first day, he and his other freshmen (Nagito Komaeda, Gundham Tanaka, Kazuichi Soda, Teruteru Hanamura, Nekomaru Jidai, Fuyuhiko Kuzuryuu, "Byakuya Togami", Chiaki Nanami, Akane Owari, Sonia Nevermind, Hiyoko Saionji, Mahiro Koizumi, Mikan Tsumiki, Ibuki Mioda and Peko Pekoyama) are gathered on a classroom and meets their supposed teacher, a small rabbit-like mascot named Usami, who suddenly reveals the room was placed on a tropical island, and that they're on a school trip.

The students are obviously confused and shocked by all of this, including Hinata, but the lack of any apparent danger makes them soon decide to relax. That is, until the self-proclaimed Headmaster, Monokuma, arrives at the island, and determines that instead of befriending themselves like Usami wanted them to, the students have to kill each other if they want to escape the island. Each murder will be submitted to a trial between the students and if the killer manages to get away, the remaining students will be executed. Before Usami's resistance, Monokuma activates giant machine-weapons called Monobeasts and uses one of them to tear her to pieces.

The fear begin to dominate these young men and women. Fear of Monokuma, and fear of each other...

Tropes used in Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair include:

• 2½D: The player can pan around the environment, but the characters and props are all paper cutouts. It is even possible to pan around said paper cutouts.
• Absolute Cleavage: Akane's top isn't able to fully contain her huge breasts, resulting in this.
• Abusive Parents: All over the place. Mikan states in her Free Time events that she was beaten up at home and at school and she became a nurse because she became so good at patching up her own injuries, Kazuichi mentions his father beat him for skipping school (because he knew his parents couldn't afford the fees for the school trip), Gundham refers to his father as a "demon", Hiyoko is partly such a Bitch In Sheep's Clothing thanks to being bullied by her maternal family and Akane states that she has multiple half-siblings and some of her stepfathers got too familiar with her.
• All Of The Other Reindeer: A milder example of this than most but most of the students are somewhat dismissive of Hajime for not having/not remembering his talent, with Nagito in particular going out of his way to remind Hajime of being "talentless" during a large portion of the game.
• Amnesiac Hero: Hajime suffers from constant memory lapses and doesn't remember his Ultimate Talent.
• Arc Number: 15 and 16.
• Arc Words: The words "hope" and "despair" are very prominent all throughout the series.
• Asshole Victim: Nobody feels sorry for Hiyoko when she's found dead and mostly her death is used to discuss when Ibuki must have died.
• Badass Boast: Just before Gundham is executed, he declares he "will fill hell with true hell!"
• Bi The Way: Teruteru seems to be a straight pervert at first, but says his tastes are pretty open when he gets the chance of putting sun lotion on a muscular man.
• Big Bad: The entire game franchise has been involved in defeating the root of all evil, most particularly Junko Enoshima, who is the main reason behind the entire tragedy and the unfolding of bad events.
• Big "Shut Up!": Nekomaru and Kazuichi have quite enough of Nagito's insane ramblings and both of them do this and the start of Chapter 2.
• Black Blood: Or pink blood, in this case, as a form of censorship due to the Japanese game-rating systems. Dialog indicates that it's actually red in-universe.
• Break the Haughty: Fuyuhiko gets hit hard with this in chapter 2 when his refusal to cooperate with others and his hotheaded personality have disastrous consequences and directly result in both Peko and Mahiru's deaths. He becomes a much more humble and likeable person afterwards.
• Breaking the Fourth Wall: Monokuma begins to call Usami "Monomi", saying he has renamed her along with changing her appearance. She complains about it and then realizes he changed her name on the game's interface.
• Butt Monkey: Nobody likes Monomi except for Chiaki, regularly telling her to shut up and in general distrusting her as either working for Monokuma or for being generally useless.
• Camera Fiend: Mahiru, being the Ultimate Photographer and all.
• Chekhov's Gag: Mikan falling in fanservice-y poses actually proves vital to the first trial because it proves that a certain person was missing at the time because there's no way he wouldn't have noticed and commented on it.
• Cloudcuckoolander: Chiaki's mind always seems to be kinda out there, coming up with slow responses and thinking of the world like a game.
  • Gundham lives in his own little world most of the time, thinking he is the Dark Lord of Destruction.
• Closed Circle: The main cast on a archipelago on the middle of the Pacific Ocean with no plane, boats or way of communicating with the rest of the world.
• Dead All Along: Chiaki Nanami, as Danganronpa 3: The End of Hope's Peak Academy reveals that she was the very first victim of "The Tragedy".
• Distaff Counterpart: Both Gundham and Kazuichi are a genderflipped example to Celestia from the first game, using their eccentric personalities as a mask to reinvent themselves after being bullied in their childhoods.
• Fatal Flaw: Mahiru and Fuyuhiko's hot-tempered, argumentative personalities lead them to acting rashly without thinking about the consequences...
  • Mikan Desperately Craves Affection and will do anything to feel accepted, especially by someone she likes.
    • Peko is too much of a doormat to her boss and sees herself as a mere extension of their will.
• Gilded Cage: The tropical island isn't half-bad. Unfortunately, nobody's allowed to leave unless they commit a murder and get away with it.
• Heroic Sacrifice: With the remaining survivors' lives at risk, Chiaki Nanami reveals herself as the traitor among the group, saving everyone but resulting in her and Monomi getting brutally executed by Monokuma.
  • Before this, Nekomaru jumps in the way when Monokuma shoots Akane with a bazooka for disobeying the rules and trying to fight him.
• Humongous Mecha: The Monobeasts, giant animal-like robots that obey Monokuma and serve as his enforcers.
• I Just Want to be Special: Hajime tries not to let it show but he secretly feels inferior to his classmates due to being the only one without a talent. It's this need to feel special that directly drives him to agreeing to become Izuru Kamakura.
• Large Ham: Nekomaru is imprisoned in a constant state of shooting words out of his mouth.
• Loving A Shadow: Kazuichi is obsessed with "Sonia-san" and sees her as the perfect princess he's always dreamed of while being ignorant of Sonia's personality quirks. Similarly, Sonia seems Gundham as the brooding, dark angsty guy but seems unaware of his hidden personality traits since she's totally blindsided when it turns out he's the culprit of the fourth trial.
• Momma's Boy: Two positive examples with Teruteru and Gundham, who are humanised by their love for their mothers, though Teruteru takes it to somewhat Knight Templar levels.
• Morality Pet: Mahiru is the only student who Hiyoko likes and treats kindly.
• The Mole: Monokuma implies there's a traitor in the group working for Future Foundation.
• No Good Deed Goes Unpunished: Like Ishimaru from the first game, Ibuki's attempts to unify the students by throwing a gig to cheer everyone up backfires horribly and she ends up being murdered specifically because she was the one trying to keep everyone's spirits up.
  • Mikan overworks herself to try and help the infected students in Chapter 3, leading her to pass out more than once because she forgot to rest. And then she herself gets infected by Despair Disease.
• Out Of Focus: Out of all the surviving students, Sonia is notable for never being involved in any of the cases in any chapter, unless you count her suggesting Hiyoko go to the music venue to change her clothes.
• Pet The Dog: Kazuichi making a Mecha-maru doll for Akane to cheer her up.
• Picky Eater: Hiyoko only eats a very specific brand of candy - this proves relevant when the candy found at the scene of a murder is a lemon gummy, which the brand Hiyoko likes doesn't make.
• Red Herring: Considering the grim-dark nature of the series, thinking that Usami was the villain was a natural conclusion because of her excessively sweet personality contrasted with putting the students of a Closed Circle situation where they were forced to cooperate. Then Monokuma appears and tears these theories apart.
• Reluctant Fanservice Girl: A running gag with Mikan is she has a tendency to trip and fall and land in embarrassing poses, usually ones that display her panties. She finds all this very mortifying, but it turns out she does it on purpose to get attention, even if her embarrassment isn't fake.
• Satellite Character: It turns out that Peko is one to Fuyuhiko, seeing herself as nothing more than a tool to carry out his will. To be fair, his parents raised her as his bodyguard and tool ever since both of them were kids.
• Skewed Priorities: Fuyuhiko is the Ultimate Yakuza, so things like killing or violence are the norm to him, but catching Hajime and Mikan sleeping in the same bed together in the hospital? That's just outrageous!
  • He also scolds Akane for trying to fly the helicopter they find because she's underage!
• What Could Have Been: Akane was originally planned to be the Big Bad of the game - the kanji in her surname, Owari, means "end", to contrast with Hajime's name which can translate to "beginning".
• You Wake Up in a Room: Happens to the protagonist, who has no memory of how exactly he arrived on the island in the beginning.