You Must Play The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy
Especially to truly understand how wide the scope of it actually is.
Danganronpa is a series that I fell in love with a while ago. I would play them late into the night because it was a story and world that intrigued the fuck out of me despite some of the annoying uncomfortable horniness that existed throughout the narrative. I love mysteries so the game was perfect for me. Then after I finished all 3 I decided to play the Zero Escape games which were much harder and less...advanced. Much of those stories in the early ones were just walls of text. But they provided one of the most interesting ideas for a game I had encountered, an examination of the idea of videogames and Jung collective unconscious theories and where you can jump between realities to ones where you didn't die.
Those two games were both made by the same developer even if they were different creators. Well, now, after a very long time and a whole lot of blood, sweat, and tears those creators have formed their own studio to create a new game. A game far more ambitious and detailed than any one they've made before. That game is The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy, a truly fucking amazing game that I believe is far better than both the Danganronpa games and the Zero Escape games that came before it. It is the peak for branching narratives that I don't think any game will ever be able to match. I have so much love for it and took me a fucking long time to “finish”.
Important Note: I wanted to get the "true" ending of the game where I got all of my questions answered and I did manage to complete 43 endings and had been playing for 88 hours. But then, rather depressingly, my save got deleted and the last save in my Steam cloud was 20-30 hours prior and at 18 endings. As much as I wanted to keep playing to get to that mythical ending that would answer all my questions, and then do an Actual Ending section here, after such a large amount of play time lost, I decided to just review it as is and eventually, on my own time, get that ending (which I might talk about in its own article eventually). Despite that, I adored my time with it.
The Premise
The world is dying, but there is one hope for humanity to yet survive, and that is something you get to discover in The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy. You play the teenager Takumi Sumino whom, after he fights against monsters that attack his home, the Tokyo Residential Complex, gets knocked out and whisked away to Last Defense Academy where he wakes up alongside 9 other teens who all had a similar experience to him when the Complex was attacked. There you fight invaders (the monsters from before) to protect the school for 100 days, after which humanity will be saved. You face a tremendous fight ahead of you and, eventually, you will find out the truth about the invaders, your purpose at the school, and the reason the world seemed to be dying, but only after making choices that change the entire story and allow you to get to that 100 days over and over and over again until you get over 100 endings.
The Good
There was this moment when I hit 60 days in the academy where I started to try to remember if the game had started with a chapter screen. In Danganronpa the game is split into a prologue and then around 6 chapters. So I began to wonder if this game was structured in a similar way. I just couldn't remember if that was a thing. This experience of trying to remember the structure of the game did not go away. Far from it, the closer I got to day 100 the more intense the experience became. I just needed to keep playing to see not just how the game went on but how the game was even structured. This experience ended with me finding out on day 100 that no, in fact, the game is not structured that way, it is in fact structured in a much more interesting way.
Instead of chapters you have this map/web of routes for you to play through to learn more and more information about the world and characters in the game (my small clip of the web below is after my save file was deleted so it is much less filled out than it should be). Routes that are branched off when you reach moments where you have to decide your future, to make a decision. It's an amazing way of getting you to want to keep playing and I adored loading back in to my prior decision and seeing how uniquely different or uncomfortably similar the other decisions were than the one I had chosen prior.
One thing I didn't expect to like in this game was the core combat. I played the demo during the first Steam Next Fest of the year and didn't really think id enjoy it. Now that I've played so much of it I realize I enjoy it a ton. It's turn based where the player has a turn where you can do as many actions as you have AP (which you get at the beginning of your turn). If you want to spend all of it on your strongest character doing their attacks, great. Or if you want to be more strategic and spread out your actions by person, also great. The game is all in a grid system that allows you to see where your attack or buff actions will affect, similar to a DnD game honestly. Then the enemy turn happens and they each can move and then attack if they are near a player character. The bosses occasionally can attack more than once but that's incredibly rare. You also have Voltage that builds up a certain percentage per attack done and attack taken. That Voltage will allow you to, once it reaches 100%, unleash one characters ultimate which does a ton of damage, relatively. You have 300 possible max so if you do a bunch of actions and strategically wait until a boss pops up, you could do 3 ultimates in a row. Of course when you do an ultimate that character is fatigued and can't do anything until the next turn. Each character has their own type of class weapon (ranging from a normal katana to a literal car with missiles and rail guns attached) and style so their basic and ultimate's all vary and adhere to the kind of character they are. After each battle you also get upgrade materials which allow you to upgrade people's possible actions and unlock a couple new ones. The combat is incredibly fun, doesn't take too long, isn't frustratingly difficult, and has the kind of variety that is fucking perfect for this kind of game.
A big part of The Hundred Line is how it has integrated your replaying of the game into its core narrative. I'll go over this in the ending section more but I do have an important plus to state first. Naturally, you having to replay large sections of the game to get all the endings might seem tedious, might seem annoying as fuck because of all that combat. Combat in the game is great, as I've talked about, but replaying the same battles over and over and over again would be awful. So, thankfully, the game just allows you to skip those similar battles, without losing out on upgrade materials. This also snowballs the more branches you go down because, chances are, you'll have done a battle similar in one of the other branches and you'll get to skip it if you want. It's an amazing feature that makes the replaying much more fun!
Going off of that, you might be thinking "oh no, I have to replay 100 days over and over every single day? Even if I can skip some battles that sounds exhausting". Well, yes. It would be. But thankfully that's not how this works. Every branched narrative has moments where days are skipped. Sometimes for simply speeding up the narrative when the days are basically all the same, sometimes because of Takumi passing the fuck out for days on end. It's a nice way to make going through the branches narratives much more satisfying and less intimidating.
There's a lot of small decisions overall that are based on making it easier for you as a player to be able to have a quicker time getting through the different branches. Keeping your upgrades is particularly nice because even when you go back to make different choices on past decisions you don't have to re-upgrade stuff. You're able to just upgrade your teammates and know that no matter what you'll be fine. As I've said, the past couple of positives are very smart choices from the developers to make their game, one that's core gameplay is about going through and getting different endings.
Subversion of expectations is at the core of Hundred Line, but it's deeper than that too. Sometimes the game takes what it's taught you for the last 65 hours and says "I know you're expecting this thing to happen because of what we've taught you, but what if this happens instead?". The game is so filled with twists and turns and I often found myself saying the equivalent of "woah" near the end of the routes I was on. It was insane and Ill talk about that a little more in the Endings section.
The Bad
There are a few problems I have with the game. First, I wish there was more voiced lines. This is next to impossible because of just how much dialogue there is but I'd still have liked more. It lead to me just feeling like I was reading a novel. Which isn't inherently a problem as I fucking loved the game, but it still was a disappointment.
Second, and more influentially, I wish the game showed its face faster. I had to play for 15 hours to really get to the game. I completely understand why this is, it's a subversion of expectations that is played really damn well and makes you think the game is going to be just like the other visual novels you've played. But then, once the hundredth day hits, you realize how different this game is and it becomes just wonderful, but I wish the first part was faster. I don't like when a game takes 10-15 hours to get good. That said, the game is good throughout those 15 hours. It's just not what it becomes afterwards. Again, I just wish that time went faster, even by a couple of hours would have helped me really get into and finish the game sooner. By the time I have written this review I've been playing it since release day and it took me a month to push myself to get to 100 days.
Now time for a mild frustration. My second run through I had to deal with how, during this Killing Game that became a thing earlier in my run, I was not given time to level up. At all. I continued to gain level up material so I figured I'd reach a point where I'd be able to level up again, but going through so much of the game without ever being able to level up the people I had left was not something I expected to happen. Thankfully, I eventually was given the opportunity to level after 60 days but this streak lasted for far too long. It sucked.
Something that I think should have been fixed is that the only way to level up your bond with your teammates is by giving them gifts. NOT spending time with them. It took me a very long time to have this realization. Spending time with them just increases skills they're associated with, but doesn't do shit for their affinity towards you. It kinda fucking sucks. I don't get why they made the decision to not just have spending time with the person increase their affinity by a smaller amount. It just doesn't make sense. You're literally spending time with your teammates, you get prompts saying you understand them better after spending time with them. Why not just increase the affinity with that too just slower. Now, an important note is that you find out what gifts they want because when you spend time with them it will unlock different wishlist item groups they desire. So spending time does make it easier to level the bond up in that you get to know what they want, but it still feels like it should have been improved somehow. There’s also so many damn gifts (shown above) that you really just get frustrated with how many you have to scroll through (even if there are filters) and deal with all to just do something that could have been done more interestingly if you could advance faster with gifts but still advance with just spending time with them.
Finally, something that also isn't for everyone is how HORNY this game is. It's very characteristic for this Dev but, I dunno, it will always feel weird having so much Horny dialogue come from teenagers. Even some of the weirdest dialogue comes from one character who says he spent time providing "company" to older women on the street in order for him and his sister to survive. It was only later that I discovered that he was not in fact a high schooler and a teenager, but was actually a fucking middle schooler. It is this kind of thing that can be frustrating to deal with. It didn't drag down my experience much but you should be aware it is there.
The Endings - Detailed/Reaction
**Start Spoilers**
The ending section here is going to be rather different from what I usually do. Mainly because there's 150 endings and I can't cover them all. And also because, the whole point is that you redo the game over and over to get the different endings. It's pretty nuts as a concept because the game leads you to believe that it's just another visual novel story. But it's not. Not even close.
Your first time round you'll end by deciding to go back in time after consuming the traitors cryptoglobin. The team escapes to the artificial satellite as Takumi heads back to day 2. You even get to watch the credits and go back to the main menu making you think the game is somewhat over! You also see that there's some crazy stuff going on, when the escape pod comes back down and the team is trying to contact Takumi before he goes back to the past, but they're too late.
Then you go back in time and get given your first major decision, to kill or not to kill Eito. This will be your major split. From here you go down different paths towards different decisions that can all lead towards different endings. Some allow you to reach day 100 again, some not so much. I got one around day 47 that gave me an ending within a few minutes. It was my first sign that many of the endings don't actually require you to play the 100 days over and over and it made me very happy.
The endings in The Hundred Line are varied and numerous (and also each have numbers and names) and allow you to make so many different decisions that lead to so many different outcomes. Some even require you to have reached other endings before being able to continue on the path you're on to get to that next ending. There are multiple of these and they are numbered. When you hit one of these locks you get told you have to go unlock other endings to be able to continue. These locks usually happen at a moment when the story has hit a rather large development. For instance, in the branch that isn't the Killing Game (as in, stems from the decision to not participate), you'll reach a point where you see someone in the middle of the night when they shouldn't be and that they're actually coming from a secret room. The story, and the school itself, continues to develop on every branch you go down.
They also sometimes have different themes to them, some are actual endings you might expect that give some kind of conclusion while others are dumb comedic endings that let you enjoy the characters being weird and themselves, or the weird circumstances of the story of that route (like how one route leads to a sickness spreading throughout the school that...makes everyone infected with it get a fish head and make loads of fish puns). Even one has to have the mascot character come in after the credits to try and explain what just happened (it got very meta there at the end and was fucking hilarious). The variety in theme and tone really helps with not feeling like the endings are retreading the same thing over and over and over again. A particular feat since you're often retreading the same enemies and battles over and over again.
There's also the moments I mentioned about where they take everything the game has taught you and throw it out the fucking window. For instance, I was at the end of a route where your dead comrades turn into Zombies and you discovered it's from a creature that lays eggs in their victims. Some lay eggs in dead bodies and those dead bodies then come back to life as zombie like creatures. Some simply inhabit live people and take them over (like the Goa'uld from Stargate). Anyway, at the end I made a decision that got Takumi to be taken over by one while he was alive. I thought "well that was an interesting and tentacle filled ending" then went back to a prior decision to try the parallel route. It was then that I found out that that parasite that inhabited Takumi actually came back with me and had been taking control of Takumi periodically and without his knowledge and killing his friends. You literally find out that the other timelines, the other routes, actually have impacts on each other. They don't exist in their own existence, they will ripple if it makes sense. It's a moment that made my jaw fucking drop and made me have so much more of a drive to keep playing even though I had been playing for 67 hours at this point.
There's also of course reveals that happen throughout the different endings that add multiple layers to other endings that you discovered both before and after this new information. For instance, you eventually discover that you are not in fact on Earth but on a completely different planet called Futurum that Humans have been colonizing, something we do fucking everywhere we go. This adds so much depth to the rest of the game because you now have the knowledge that there's more to the story about why the team exists at all and, even if they don't have that information that was discovered in prior endings. There's some good Meta gaming that goes on where you know more than the characters and it provides a really interesting dynamic as you continue along the different routes.
To make a long story short (too late), it's a genuinely amazing accomplishment that the developers did and I am immensely impressed. This is nigh impossible for other larger developers to do and it made me fall in love with the game more than I have any of these developers prior games. Danganronpa and Zero Escape have nothing on this game, at least gameplay and ending wise.
**End Spoilers**
The Conclusion
This is not a game that I expected to love as much as I did. It's not a game I thought would have 100 hours of gameplay in. Yet, I write this solely thinking that there are so few problems with the game, how could they have possibly been able to survive long enough as a company to make it? Well, put simply, they almost didn't. One of the main Devs has talked about how much debt they went into for the games development and how hard it was to get through it without the company collapsing in on itself (here’s one of the many articles/interviews about it). The fact they managed to get it out at all is a massive accomplishment but add in the fact that the game they made is this varied, this filled with strange weirdness, this funny, this filled with mystery, makes me just truly astonished at their ability as developers.
The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy deserves all the praise it has gotten and deserves far more attention than it has gotten. It's the culmination of what Danganronpa and Zero Escape were working towards. It's a game that makes you want to keep playing, a game that is so fucking amazing that I can't recommend it enough. You need to play this game, you deserve to play this game. If you don't, you're doing yourself a disservice. Play it, laugh at it, find the heartwarming moments heartwarming and the mysterious moments mysterious. It's truly one of the best games of the year so far and it is just sitting there, waiting for you to play it.
Meow,
Cat
I’ve been hesitating to play this for a while, worried it’d suck all my free time. But after reading your review… okay, I have to play this game🤣. If I want to dive into this dev’s work, would you recommend starting with The Hundred Line or Danganronpa?