 Some changes were made to the initial plot of Virtue's Last Reward. During one scene, Dio handcuffs Clover and Tenmyouji to a sink, which prevents them from participation in the Nonary Game (the punishment for not participating is death). Originally, Dio was meant to "do something even more messed up" to Clover, but the president of Chunsoft opposed this scene for "ethical reasons", after which it was changed. In addition, the game originally ended with humanity dying out, at which point a character would go back in time and change the past so that the future would be saved. Uchikoshi later felt this ending was inappropriate following the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and tsunami, so it was changed to be more positive. Uchikoshi also considered including several scientific and philosophical theories / experiments that eventually were left out. These scrapped ideas included Monty Hall problem (a brain teaser based on probability) and Capgras delusion (a mental disorder in which someone believes that a person they know has been replaced with an identical-looking impostor).
