Danganronpa Mascot Monokuma Was Designed in 5 Minutes

In an interview with Denfaminico, Kazutaka Kodaka, the creator of games such as the Danganronpa series, revealed that Rui Komatsuzaki, the character designer, drew up Monokuma in five minutes. The theme song for the game also took merely twenty minutes to create.

The interview is with Kodaka and the series composer, Masafumi Takada, as they reflect on the games they made together. Kodaka mentions that when he’d told Komatsuzaki to design a “half-white, half-black bear” with one side being cute-looking and the other being cruel-looking. In five minutes, Komatsuzaki finished the design, and no edits were made to it later on. Thus, Monokuma, the famous mascot of the Danganronpa series, was born.

Takada created the main theme of the series equally quickly, spending only twenty minutes on it. At the time, Danganronpa was a completely new IP. So Takada inserted the name of the series to have players (or even non-players) remember it. Kodaka adds that he’d wanted a song that wouldn’t sound out of place in No More Heroes (Takada also composed for it). He hoped for something atypical, with a repeating melody in a minor key, and that was exactly what Takada delivered. At the end of this segment, Takada says that he never imagined that he would think, “Wow, this is good,” about a track that he composed in twenty minutes, even after sixteen years.

Danganronpa first came out on the PSP in 2010, though ports of it and the other games are available on modern consoles, including mobile devices. The remake of the second game, Danganronpa 2 x 2, will come out on January 14, 2027 for the PS5, Xbox Series X, Switch, Switch 2, and PC.