I Rank 84 Danganronpa Characters

60. Leon Kuwata (AKA The Walking Disappointment)

Out of every character in Danganronpa, Leon is the one I feel had the most wasted potential. A character who was naturally gifted but hated their talent and had their own dreams for the future is a really interesting concept, and at first I was all for Leon. Then his Free Time Events came around, and my dreams were crushed.

Literally the only reason he wants to become a musician is because he wants to get laid. Seriously?? I mean, I'm not completely against the idea, but they could've had the decency to mention it, I don't know, during scenes that the player would be able to come across without going out of their way to talk to him. It feels kind of disjointed from his canon dialogue, too, almost like they thought, this character is too likable. We need to make him douchier so the player will hate him as much as we do. And honestly, given that the only reason he was the first to die was because the creators were sick of his design, it's not a totally insane theory.

If they had gone through with making Leon a baseball star with musical dreams, I probably would've liked him a whole lot more. But they didn't. They made his only goal in life picking up girls, which I guess is a realistic motivation for a teenage boy but could've been conveyed to us a whole lot better than only mentioning it once in an FTE.

On the whole 'killing Sayaka' front, though, I actually can't fault him all that much. It's true that at some point it turned from self-defense to intentional murder, but think about it from Leon's perspective. He's a relatively average high school kid who just wants to go back to living his life. He's just escaped a life-or-death situation, so I can't imagine his critical thinking skills were working too well, and think about what would've happened if he'd let Sayaka live. She was already seriously injured at that point, and even on the slim chance that she would confess to what had actually happened, all people would see would be a dumb jock-type teenager physically assaulting an innocent-looking girl. They'd think he had threatened her to keep her mouth shut or something, and that's the best-case scenario. Most likely Sayaka would tell her classmates that Leon was the one who tried to kill her or worse, and it'd be the word of an internationally famous cute girl against the word of a disreputable-looking aggressive stranger. His reputation would be destroyed, which I realize is a ridiculous thing to worry about in a killing game, but even under those circumstances I could understand being willing to murder to cover it up.

All in all, he's a fine character who had the potential to be great. More of a disappointment than anything else, really.