Kaito Momota

Kaito Momota’s a character from the game Danganronpa V3. In the game, students are trapped in a high school by a murderous robot bear Monokuma, and forced to kill each other to esacpe. Specifically, when a student murders another, there will be a class trial that happens where the rest must find who murdered them. If they guess the right person, only the murderer dies; however, if they guess wrong, the murderer goes free and everyone else will die.

All of the students also have ultimate talents, meaning they excel in a specific field. For Kaito, it’s him being the Ultimate Astronaut. He was so determined to be an astronaut that passed the astronaut exam, though he actually had to forge documents to even take it, and was almost in hot water before the higher ups decided they liked him and bailed him out. He still is in training, but it’s likely he’ll be able to go to space one day.

His main inspiration and main source of support into becoming an astronaut was from his grandparents.

Kaito’s personality can be described as headstrong, confident, wannabe leader, charismatic, idealistic, naive, stubborn, kind, loyal, and inspiring. He has a lot of confidence in himself and his capabilities to the point that he seems pretty arrogant, especially with how he makes people who are clearly more competent than him into his “sidekicks”, but he never uses his high confidence as an excuse to look down on others.

He’s someone who prefers to follow what his heart wants rather than what logic dictates, and trusts his intuition on things the most. He has a good bit of emotional intelligence (at least in understanding the intentions of others), and this allows him to tell fairly easily if someone is trustworthy or not. And once he decides somebody is trustworthy, he’s gonna be loyal to them until the end. However, this means that he ends up relying so much on his emotions, faith, and intuition that he literally ignores the facts of the matter if it goes against what he believes in (especially if it’s a severe judgment, like that someone he trusted is actually a killer).

His character does demonstrate two important things: the importance of trust, for one. Not only that, but also the importance of “understanding the heart” when it comes to mysteries, which means understanding that you have have empathy for the person you’re suspecting to really determine if they’re even the type of person who can commit a crime. He’d probably agree with the quote “without love, the truth cannot be seen” from Umineko. However, his character also focuses on the downsides of emotion and trust, that being that you cannot rely on it entirely when you must reach the truth. Because after all, your intuition may be wrong, and you have to understand that even if your emotions say otherwise, it is possible the person you trust can be capable of horrific things.

The way in which Kaito’s character ties into the themes of truth are best shown in chapter’s 2 and 4. In chapter 2, Ryoma is murdered, and the 2 main suspects are Maki and Kaito. Even though all evidence points to them being the only ones without alibis, because Kaito has trust in Maki, he completely ignores reason and decides she cannot be the culprit. However, it is due to this trust that they’re able to uncover the actual truth: the alibis of the others don’t actually exist.

Meanwhile, in chapter 4, Miu is murdered, and Gonta is very clearly the culprit. However, because Kaito trusts Gonta and his intuition tells him Gonta’s good at heart, he stubbornly refuses the evidence laid out to him believing Kokichi somehow did it (despite it being proven Kokichi couldn’t possibly have done it), which leads to tensions when Shuichi has to take the side of truth and prove that Gonta did it.

Besides the flaws of Kaito being too idealistic, naive, and trusting, there’s one other major character flaw he has. While he does act pretty confident, and usually doesn’t use his confidence in himself to look down on others, deep down he feels a bit insecure about some of his shortcomings. Specifically, he was a bit jealous of Shuichi, because of how smart Shuichi was and how Shuichi always saved them from certain death in the class trials. Probably, him calling Shuichi his “sidekick” rather than his equal (or Kaito saying he’s Shuichi’s sidekick) was him internally showing his insecurity over how much better Shuichi was.

One final flaw is that he’s very stubborn and can get heated fairly easily, even when he knows that he shouldn’t be angry, like when he was mad at Shuichi’s wimpy behavior in chapter 1 (even going so far as to punch him) after Kaede died (of course, Kaito was likely just emotionally charged seeing someone he liked die) and when he’s angry at Kaito after Gonta’s death, even though Shuichi didn’t really do anything wrong by correctly pointing out Gonta was the culprit.

Oh right, I should mention, but here were all the people in Kaito’s killing game: Kaede Akamatsu (Ultimate Pianist), Rantaro Amami (Ultimate ???), Ryoma Hoshi (Ultimate Tennis Pro), Kirumi Tojo (Ultimate Maid), Tenko Chabashira (Ultimate Neo-Aikido Master), Angie Yonaga (Ultimate Artist), Korekiyo Shinguji (Ultimate Anthropologist), Gonta Gokuhara (Ultimate Entomologist), Miu Iruma (Ultimate Inventor), Kokichi Oma (Ultimate Supreme Leader), Maki Harukawa (Ultimate Assassin), Shuichi Saihara (Ultimate Detective), K1-Bo (aka Kebbo, Ultimate Robot), and Tsumugi Shirogane (Ultimate cosplayer).

As for character relations, with Kaede Akamatsu, Kaito was very friendly with her and immensely respected her, for how she always tried to keep spirits up and tried to lead the group into not giving up and surviving. However, it turns out in a mistake, Kaede set a trap that ended up killing Rantaro rather than the mastermind, and thus she was killed at the end of chapter 1. Kaito was probably fairly shocked and saddened by this.

With Ryoma Hoshi, Kaito actually used to look up to him as Kaito used to play tennis back in the day. Though, now he doesn’t really get along with Ryoma. It turns out Ryoma’s girlfriend was killed by the mafia, so Ryoma ended up killing them as well, and thus becoming an inmate. Because of this, he has basically given up on life and trying to find a meaning in it. Kaito gets pretty frustrated with this and how Ryoma just gave up so easily, and they frequently clash. This shows another flaw with Kaito, how sometimes his stubborn and overly-optimistic way of thinking leads to him acting harsh towards someone struggling. Though, even so when Ryoma dies Kaito regrets having been too hard on him. It’s possible that him realizing this leads to him being less hard on Maki and Shuichi in trying to help them grow, at least not without reason. Honestly he probably would have invited Ryoma alongside Maki and Shuichi to the nightly exercises if he lived.

With Kokichi, he and Kaito seem to pretty much hate each others guts. They are essentially total opposites of each other. Kaito is overly trusting, while Kokichi is overly distrusting. Kaito wears his heart on his sleeve, while one can never truly guess what Kokichi is thinking. They clash around the nature of how to find the truth of something, with Kaito relying more on emotion and Kokichi relying more on cold logic. It also doesn’t help that Kokichi frequently acts infuriating and as if the killing game is fun. In the end of chapter 5, Kokichi gets attacked by Maki (who thinks Kokichi’s the mastermind), and in order for Maki to not become the blackened, Kaito is forced to participate in Kokichi’s plan: Kaito will kill Kokichi with a hydraulic press and hide himself such that not even the victim’s can be determined, thus leading Monokuma to not knowing the culprit and invalidating the killing game. It’s here when Kaito realizes that it’s possible Kokichis’ actions this whole time were also to help the others survive the killing game.

He also had an important relationship with Shuichi. After Kaede died, seeing also that Shuichi was possibly at danger of closing himself off and not reaching out, he reached out to Shuichi and basically made Shuichi his “sidekick”. He supported him in the trials whenever Shuichi had to make the difficult decision to accuse somewhat, that is until it went against Kaito’s own emotions in chapter 4. Eventually though, Kaito comes to terms with the fact that Shuichi was right, and he shouldn’t always rely on his intuition to trust everyone. He believes Shuichi has the potential to crack open any truth, for how he can balance having faith with using logic. As mentioned, Kaito felt a bit insecure seeing Shuichi contribute so much in class trials, but he comes to terms with this and tells Shuichi that he was jealous.

As for Maki, Kaito helps Maki grow and stop closing herself off from everyone, like he had done with Shuichi a bit earlier. While a lot of the others distrusted Maki and were wary around her (especially after it was revealed she was the Ultimate Assassin), Kaito was HIM and reached out to her, and was able to bridge the gap so that she, Shuichi, and Kaito would become friends. Kaito mainly did this simply because his intuition told him that Maki was a good person.

Finally, as for Kaito’s fate, eventually in chapter 5 Shuichi is able to determine that Kaito is alive and Kokichi’s the one that’s dead. Shuichi also realizes their intentions and begins to try to lie to say Kokichi is actually the one alive, but this is when Kaito decides enough’s enough and reveals himself. He only prolonged the trial to get more info out of Monokuma and hoped Monokuma may stop the killing game out of not having enough knowledge. At the same time, Kaito had a disease and he’s about to die. Before Monokuma can execute him, he dies from his disease (and also gets launched into space, achieving his dream), so thus he dies on his own terms and with a smile on his face.

One final thing, but in an attempt to get Shuichi and Maki to be more open, he decides they’ll have training every night together.

As for his physical appearance: he has spiky, dark purple hair with lighter purple highlights that stands dramatically upward. He wears a purple suit jacket with a cosmic or starry pattern visible on the inside lining, over a white shirt with a maroon abstract design. His shirt is partially unbuttoned, and he sports matching purple pants. His pose is dynamic, with one fist clenched and his jacket flaring open, giving an energetic and confident impression.

He's also VERY scared of ghosts.