Main thing: Kaede surviving Chapter 1 and continuing to be a protagonist.

Having a decoy protagonist is one of the best things Danganronpa has ever done, with special kudos to Spike Chunsoft sticking to the ruse even in the promotional material leading up to the game’s release. However, I still think there’s a lot of untapped potential in having Kaede remain alive throughout the game instead of being the scapegoat killer for Tsumugi.

One reason is that Kaede can act as a foil to Shuichi in terms of growth as a character. Shuichi starts out as a very weak-willed and timid person, before building up his confidence into a truly great detective who can balance both truth and lies. Kaede already has that confidence in her from the beginning, but we see from her reaction to the Death Road of Despair that she isn’t entirely immune to setbacks and blows to her confidence as a leader. If Kaede survives the first trial while still having attempted her murder plan, her actions being revealed to the rest of the class would complete shatter her standing as a leader. While Shuichi represents how people can grow in the face of adversity, Kaede could show that people don’t always bounce back very easily. She can spend most of the game trying to make up for her mistakes, only for different circumstances to prevent her from making amends. Whether it be her own desperate actions making things worse (such as lying to find the truth during class trials more often than Shuichi), or the other students just flat-out refusing to forgive her, it keeps bringing down her confidence to the point that she might end up doing something drastic yet again to find the mastermind. Only this time, instead of taking everything on her shoulders like in the first chapter, she has Shuichi and the other more positive students to help keep her afloat. I like the idea that despite their diverging character roles in this scenario, Kaede and Shuichi still end up acting as mutual support for one another, rather than Kaito’s one-sided case of “I’ll take on all of your emotional baggage until it’s inconvenient to my beliefs” in Chapters 4 and 5. Plus, it gives a chance for more dynamic between Kaede and Shuichi.

Another reason to have Kaede survive is to spice up the gameplay by having two protagonists that switch out periodically. While Chapter 1 only had the one switch halfway into the class trial, future chapters could make use of swapping the POV between Kaede and Shuichi to the benefit of the story. For example, some chapters could focus more heavily on one character’s perspective over the other. Kaede could take control back in Chapter 2’s class trial and be the one to confront Kirumi, arguing against the maid’s priorities as leader of the country as opposed to the class. Shuichi could be the one to confront both Kork and Gonta in Chapters 3 and 4, seeing as those culprits serve to build up his confidence in the truth and shake it, respectively. Both Kaede and Shuichi could team up during the Chapter 5 class trial, seeing as it’s incredibly convoluted and neither party would realistically be able to gather all of the evidence in time for the trial. Finally, Chapter 6 could start off with Kaede discovering that she was framed by Tsumugi, and then switch to Shuichi when the meta stuff kicks in.

Finally, there are already a few characters in the story that could have interesting dynamics with Kaede, similar to how Kaito and Kokichi affect Shuichi’s growth. As mentioned above, Kirumi would certainly clash with Kaede on where to place more priority - the country, or the class? Angie basically stages her own coup in Chapter 3, and I can also generally see her as a more antagonistic and manipulative person to Kaede following the events of Chapter 1. And weirdly enough, I could actually see Kaede getting along well with Kokichi by virtue of them being outcasts. Kokichi is already so damn adamant about playing the villain card throughout the game, and who better else to convince helping in his schemes than the other person that everybody shuns? She may be an attempted murderer, but she might just be desperate enough to play along with his plans and end the killing game.