Much of the game's development was spent balancing the gameplay between Danganronpa S's various modes. One part of this was by making it so that the different characters and their rarities did not affect the core gameplay too much, as which characters players unlocked was heavily luck-based. According to director Shun Sasaki, balancing wasn't finished until much later in development, on account of it being improved bit by bit with new features implemented. Supposedly, the game's microtransactions were added in order to prevent frustration from players being unable to get their preferred characters.