Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Accidental Innuendo: During Chapter 2's Closing Argument, Hajime says "I can imagine how badly Hiyoko must have panicked when she came out of the closet" and saw Mahiru's body. As if Hiyoko's "affections" for Mahiru didn't read enough like Les Yay already...
  • Best Level Ever: Chapter 5 is fairly popular. Nagito orchestrates his own murder while making it look like a suicide, and once the survivors see through that, he also ensures that it's virtually impossible to figure out the culprit. When you do figure out who did it, it results in one of the most heartbreaking outcomes to a trial in the entire series.
  • Broken Base: The LP translation for this game on the Something Awful forums included several attempts at Cultural Translation, which were met with mixed reactions; for example, there were accusations that the translation was overly liberal to the point of harming characterization.
  • Fanfic Fuel: Tons, both in regards to the students past as Ultimate Despair as well as the implication that the comatose students will eventually wake up.
  • Fountain of Memes: Nagito's personality is..... interesting, in which his obsession towards hope ended up causing many memes within the fandom.
  • Game Breaker: The Delusion skill, available to buy from the beginning of the game, causes your Influence (health) to regenerate when using focus mode during a trial. Since focus regenerates over time, this effectively gives you infinite health and means you can make incorrect choices with impunity during Trials, though you can still run out of time.
  • He's Just Hiding: Many are clamoring for the possibility that Chiaki could still be around with a backup file. Also, since Mikan's execution involved her being launched into space and we don't see her body, along with her Despair Disease reverting her back to her Ultimate Despair personality, some people thought that she was either the mastermind or an accomplice, and that she would return in Chapter 6.
  • Holy Shit Quotient: The game goes pretty much off the rails when Mechamaru shows up.
  • Idiosyncratic Ship Naming:
    • Ibuki/Byakuya has two different ones depending on the language of the fandom shipping it: "K-Ton" for the Japanese fanbase, a pun on Byakuya's pig ("Ton" in Japanese) based nickname from Hiyoko and the direct translation of Ibuki's talent, and "Heir Guitar" for the English speaking fans, combining a common translation for Byakuya's talent (The Ultimate/Super High School Level Heir) and a reference to Ibuki's music based talent to create a pun on "Air Guitar".
    • Soapies also gets used to refer to Hiyoko/Mahiru, based on Oren's specific translation of Hiyoko wanting to drag Mahiru into the shower with her.
    • "Soul Friends" tends to get used for Hajime/Kazuichi, whether in shipping or just them interacting platonically.
  • Launcher of a Thousand Ships: Hajime, our protagonist, has been paired with ALL the characters in the game and even a few from the first Danganronpa. It leads to the fan joke that, thanks to his underwear collection, Hajime's true talent is being a pimp.
  • Magnificent Bastard: Whatever you think of Nagito, it's hard to deny that his plan during Chapter 5 was really clever, and only gets revealed in its full form in the last chapter. Essentially, in Chapter 4, he finds out that everyone except "the traitor" (Chiaki, unbeknownst to him), including himself, is part of Ultimate Despair. Deciding that everyone but the traitor deserves to die, he sets himself up to die in a supposed suicide littered with Red Herrings. He also intentionally rigs the room to catch fire: his actual planned cause of death is poison gas hidden in a fire grenade, unwittingly thrown by one of the others. Even though the group solves Nagito's trap during the trial down to the letter, it's still impossible to know who actually threw the poison grenade. Eventually, Chiaki reasons that Nagito's Ultimate Luck would logically cause the traitor (in fact, herself) to throw the correct bottle. Chiaki (actually an AI) managing to find a way to out herself against her programming as the accidental murderer is the only reason everyone else lives... as Chapter 6 later reveals that Nagito intended for everyone to guess wrong. Even if Nagito's idea of "hope" is terrifying and deadly, he managed to create a mystery with his death that, for anyone other than Hajime and Chiaki, would have been truly unsolvable.
  • Most Wonderful Sound: There are many who consider Nagito's version of 'Sore wa chigau yo' to be this.
  • Narm: Hajime's Say My Name moment for Peko and Fuyuhiko after trial 2 is rather overblown and uncharacteristic.
  • Never Live It Down: Oh, boy.
    • Nagito is definitely the worst in this regard, as the events of the story have made many people label him as an evil sociopath whose whole character is based around HOPE and wanting Hajime's dick. This despite the fact that literally everything, from statements in the main story to the bonus Dangan Island mode make it very clear this is not true.
    • Fuyuhiko cried only a handful of times over Peko's death, and yet much of the fandom in the west seem to think he's literally incapable of doing anything without her.
    • Mahiru's introduction had her telling Hajime to act more like a man, and after Monokuma takes over, she arranges a girls-only get-together. The fandom promptly labelled her a misandrist and treat her supposedly hating men as one of her key character traits. While she is very much stuck on gender roles and is much harsher towards the male characters than the girls (with her excuse being that she grew up with a lazy bum for a father), the fact remains that many fans blow her sexism out of proportion and ignore her positive traits in the process. She softens up a little with Hajime if you do her Free Time events too as it is heavily implied that she has a crush on him.
  • One-Scene Wonder: Izuru Kamukura only appears in one scene, not counting Hajime's hallucinations in the final trial, and yet is very popular in the fandom.
    • The fake Makoto created by Junko also gets tons of fanart and is almost always included in spoiler-heavy fanvideos despite having even less screen time than Izuru Kamakura.
  • One True Threesome:
    • Sonia/Kazuichi/Gundham are shipped as this.
    • Chiaki/Hajime/Nagito is also rather popular, primarily among the Japanese fandom.
  • Player Punch: As if the circumstances behind the end of the Chapter 5 trial weren't bad enough, the game forces you to manually choose Chiaki as the culprit. Sonia begging Hajime to stop doesn't help matters.
  • Scrappy Mechanic:
    • Improved Hangman's Gambit might as well drop the 'improved' part for many people, mostly because not having the right letters appear fast enough will actively harm you as the screen floods with pieces crashing into one another. It's made even worse in the localization, which somehow chooses the longest possible words/phrases (up to thirteen letters, with most Hangman's Gambits being multi-word phrases of around ten characters) whereas the Japanese version would only use words with an average of five characters. The Hangman's Gambit was never a particularly well-loved mechanic, but the sheer length of most answers and the new rules allowing letters to crash off-screen (damaging your health) turned it from a short and relatively painless affair to a divisive mini-game that required perfect execution in order to Platnium the game.
    • Logic Dive is also this trope. Functionally, there are plenty of players who think it was a good addition and that it eliminates some of the issues the first game had crafting Nonstop Debates. As with the "Improved" Hangman's Gambit, though, the problems are in the mini game's mechanics.
    • Even the Panic Talk Action, formerly the Bullet Time Battle, isn't immune! Some players hate the new format, some are indifferent, and some prefer it. And then there's the change to the Final Strike....
  • Self Fanservice:
    • A comparatively minor example occurs with Ibuki. She has a stitch running down most of her left thigh, which fan art tends to omit, although likely because it's an easy detail to miss in the first place.
    • Strangely inverted by Chiaki, who is occasionally drawn as rather chubby, when she's anything but in the actual game. It might be because she has breasts that look out of proportion with her body, so making her thicker makes them look more suited to her build and less just for Fanservice.
  • Ship-to-Ship Combat: While it's not that large, there is a noticeable shipping war between Hinanami (Hajime/Chiaki) and Komahina (Nagito/Hajime).
  • Stoic Woobie: Peko Pekoyama. She was abandoned as a baby only to be taken into the Kuzuryuu family... to be raised as a hitman/bodyguard for their son. She was told she only a tool, to the point even her name reflects it, and it stuck with her regardless of how many times Fuyuhiko pleads with her to drop that kind of mindset. She thinks of herself as being without purpose without her master because that is what a tool is. She even killed Mahiru to avenge the dishonor Mahiru helped bring upon the Kuzuryu name by trying to protect the murderer of Fuyuhiko's little sister so he wouldn't have to and try to save him by giving him a chance to escape the island without needing to dirty his hands.
  • That One Boss: The "horse" Monobeast in the Magical Girl Miracle ★ Monomi minigame. It needs to be stunned or baited to be hit, or it will trample its hooves and auto-hit Monomi, but if the player hits the sharpened "mane" blade on the jump (which is frequently with the mode's shoddy hit detection) then Monomi will instead take damage and fall right into its attack zone, so baiting is the most frequent method. But it also sometimes fires off boomerang blades that seem programmed to hit Monomi mid-attack and knock her out of the line if it doesn't charge after her into the damage field. It is far and away the most difficult boss in the minigame, handily eclipsing both the later Monobeasts and Monokuma himself.
  • That One Level: The Chapter 4 Class Trial can become this on the first time, as it's very difficult understand most of the case without being confused, thanks to the secret about the structure of the Funhouse.
  • They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
    • The motive of Chapter Three is a disease that causes people to have altered personality traits. This could have lead to a number of interesting character interactions or creative symptoms which could complicate the case, but only a total of four characters get the disease.
    • Mikan being the culprit of Chapter 3 has a few. For starters, she doesn't really comment much on killing Hiyoko despite her spending most of her screentime bullying her. Another was how she killed Ibuki. Because Ibuki's Despair Disease made her gullible, she could have had Ibuki kill Hiyoko and then herself. It would have explained why in the fake suicide video, Mikan's bandages were missing.
    • Chapter 4 has the entire theme park. It has a lot of interesting attractions and a bunch of creative locations that would have been awesome to see a murder take place in. But instead, once you go into the Monokuma Express, you're taken to the Funhouse. While the Funhouse did make for one of the most complex and tragic chapters in the series, the theme park could've achieved the same result if they expanded on it a bit more.
  • Woolseyism: On the other hand from the above-mentioned Broken Base, there are those who think Oren and Fedule's fan translation was Better Than Canon, and to this day grieve its premature cancellation.
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