Fairly early on in The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy, a character makes a rather tongue-in-cheek comment about two video game companies merging. “Sooner or later, one of their flagship series always ends up getting buried.” You can’t help but feel bad for the fans, they say.
As someone who considers herself an adoring fan of both Kazutaka Kodaka and Kotaro Uchikoshi, this remark hit surprisingly close to home. The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy is the latest release from Too Kyo Games, and the love child of Danganronpa creator Kodaka and Zero Escape mastermind Uchikoshi. The pair worked together in the past and released World’s End Club, but Hundred Line feels like the first, true collaborative effort that hopes to emulate the success of their previous outings.
For the most part, The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy works as a compelling visual novel with a narrative that hooks you. It’s also very Danganronpa-coded, though. And if I’m being honest with you, I’ve always been more of a Zero Escape girlie, which is why it pains me to see that the DNA of Uchikoshi’s writing mastery is so subtle here, and only fully kicks in when you’re well deep into the story.
Danganronpa Revival
Hundred Line puts you in the shoes of protagonist Takumi Suomi, who lives in the Tokyo Residential Complex. His life is ordinary. Every day is the same as the last. His neighborhood might be blanketed by some sort of forcefield that prevents him from seeing the sky and anything outside of its boundaries, but he’s okay with that.
One day, everything changes as mysterious invaders show up and destroy the TRC. He, along with a few other teenage survivors, discover a power called hemoanima that allows them to use special abilities to fend off these invaders.
Kodaka isn’t shy about referencing Danganronpa here. Shortly after the prologue, Takumi wakes up in a classroom along with his fellow survivors, and even the art looks derivative of that iconic opening scene from the first Danganronpa game. We’re immediately introduced to the rest of the class, including a pair of creepy twins, your token crazy girl, and a hotheaded gangster-looking boy who actually has a heart of gold.
As you might expect, there are references to killing games and murder trials. To top it all off, there’s a mascot in the form of a little translucent brain blob named Sirei who tells you what to do.
Don’t get me wrong. I love Danganronpa as much as the next visual novel sicko, but at some point — after the countless references and Darumi’s pushes to start a killing game — you gotta wonder if Kodaka is just a one-trick pony after all.
The Tactical RPG Combat Shines Here
At some point, Hundred Line starts to shake things up. This game is 70% visual novel, and 30% tactical RPG. Developed in conjunction with Media Vision, the tactical RPG portion actually ended up impressing. In-between the story bits, you’ll be thrown into the battlefield, where characters can move around square spaces on a large grid to attack enemies.
The combat system revolves around AP, which determines how many actions you can take in a single turn. Any unspent AP gets carried over to the next turn, which could give you a significant advantage if you plan things out carefully.
Each character comes with a unique kit. For instance, Takumi is your basic DPS bro who comes with easy-to-use-and-understand slash attacks. Takemaru is a tank who doesn’t deal much damage, but boasts high armor and can absorb a ton of attacks. Darumi is a ranged character who likes taking cover behind an ally and dealing damage from a short distance away.
As you attack and get attacked, a gauge starts to build in the top of the screen, allowing you to access special moves that could instantly end a fight.
I found myself impressed with the combat system. Battles feel more like puzzles rather than high-pressure fights you’d find in the likes of XCOM, though you can also tone down the difficulty to make battles a breeze if you’re just here for the story. They do take up a lot of time, though, which I found could be detrimental to the pacing of the story. And the pacing itself is already, well, not great.
Where’s the Hook?
Frustratingly, The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy takes a very long time to “get good.” The first five or six hours are spent dangling carrots in front of the player, only to yank them away repeatedly. Very early on, there are multiple instances where a character might tease some sort of big reveal or exciting piece of info, only for it to get taken away in a frustrating, albeit predictable, way.
Doing this once is fine. But two or three times? That’s a bit much.
To make things worse, unlike Danganronpa where there’s a very clear gameplay cycle, Hundred Line often feels like it’s meandering. Because the carrots keep getting taken away from us, the characters are left clueless and aimless, and so too is the player.
Without spoiling too much of the story, I was surprised by how little of a role mascot Sirei had to play early on. I found myself missing his Monokuma-like presence and expected him to take on a similar role of taunting the students and drip-feeding crucial info, but that’s not the case here. Without a proper narrative driver or clearly defined antagonist, you’re often left wondering what the point of everything is.
It doesn’t help that the Free Time sections here don’t feel as well thought out either. You can spend time with the other survivors to level up Takumi’s stats, but your early game interactions are all shallow and surface level. It takes a very long time for the characters to finally show some depth and nuance, and I was grateful to get to that point eventually, but I can’t help but compare it to how Danganronpa handled these social segments. The latter wasn’t shy about letting you get to know its cast better right from the get-go, and I wish Hundred Line could’ve eased up on the reins a little.
That Zero Escape DNA Is Still Present
This isn’t to say that Hundred Line is all derivative with no original ideas. About midway through the story, you start to see the direction it’s headed in, and that’s where things get really interesting. Unsurprisingly, it’s the Uchikoshi-esque writing that hooks and unsettles you.
Even at the beginning, there are very subtle hints of things not being what they seem on the surface. Each time your party successfully kills an enemy commander and absorbs their powers, you’re filled with an ominous sense of foreboding. Something isn’t quite right about what you’re doing. When the characters talk, occasionally there are mentions of strange sci-fi concepts and technical jargon and the game takes time to explain them to you.
It’s all very reminiscent of Zero Escape. I found myself missing those long-winded explanations of Alien Hand Syndrome and The Blue Bird, knowing that most of these scientific theories may never play a significant role in the story, but they always added that much-needed mysterious flavor that kept you hooked.
Whenever these bits of dialogue popped up Hundred Line, I found myself subconsciously sitting up a little straighter, making sure to pay attention to every detail that could be a hint. It’s moments like these that reminded me of why I loved these games so much.
It’ll please you to know that there is indeed a huge payoff to look forward to in The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy. And yes, the payoff is very much worth it.
At the end of the day, I was glad to have experienced Kodaka and Uchikoshi’s latest work. While The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy feels more Danganronpa-lite at times and doesn’t leave nearly enough room for Uchikoshi’s brilliant writing to shine, it’s still a stellar reminder of what made both creators’ signature games so special in the first place. Hundred Line serves as a strong baseline of what’s possible when two creative writers get together, and I’m certainly looking forward to whatever they cook up next.
A review code for the game was provided by the publisher. You can check out our review policy here. Reviewed on PC.
