The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy: The Kotaku Review

2 days ago 6

Over the past year, I have spent at least three individual nights yelling over the din of a loud New York City bar to try and sell someone on The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy. Too Kyo Games’ passion project visual novel/tactics RPG hybrid is the kind of thing that you can easily convince someone is impressive, but getting anyone to get over the hump of its magnitude and actually play it is something that still eludes me as we approach the end of the year. I think at a certain point, I accepted that as long as I could get someone to respect The Hundred Line, that was enough for me. If anything, I consider the fact that it’s such a hard sell to some people a testament to its accomplishments.

The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy might sound like too large an undertaking for the average person, even someone who might be interested in its bold premise. But even if you don’t get around to it, know that even the most celebrated games will never be as daring as Too Kyo Games’ incredible Hail Mary.

Like most works by Danganronpa lead Kazutaka Kodaka, The Hundred Line follows a group of high school students trapped within the walls of an academy. Though they’re not in a killing game like the unfortunate stars of Kodaka’s signature series (at least, not initially), the group of oddballs, freaks, and like, one or two normal teenagers are caught up in a violent scheme against their will. These kids are told that they’re here to defend the titular school from waves of alien invaders because something within its walls is a key to saving humanity, but before they can inquire further, their captor, Sirei, a ghost-like mascot character who’s obviously taking notes from Danganronpa’s Monokuma, is found sliced up in a trash can just off campus.

Now these kids are stuck defending this school for 100 days and without any clarity. The three months and change pass with them all having to find the strength to fight for something they don’t know if they truly believe in, as they instead find belief in one another to get them through.

The Hundred Line’s 100 days are filled with silly antics, tragic breakdowns, and compelling mysteries. This is every signature pillar Kodaka has skillfully mastered over the years of creating high school whodunnits, all wrapped into a three-month timespan. Each day as the clock ticks down, a new clue to what actually brought these kids to the Last Defense Academy is unearthed, and with every passing night, a sense of dread lingers over even the smallest interactions. Is everyone here trustworthy? Is everything as simple as it seems? If you know Kodaka’s work, you know the answer is “no,” but even a knowledge of murder mysteries like Danganronpa and Master Detective Archives: Rain Code as well as the cyberpunk dystopian anime Akaduma Drive couldn’t prepare me for what I’d find on the other side of The Hundred Line’s tactical battles.

As the “Last Defense Squad” grows in combatants over the course of 100 days, each member takes on different, highly specialized roles in combat. All of their big personalities manifest in different fighting styles and weapons only they can use, all spawning from a force called hemoanima within them. This is why these particular kids are fighting on behalf of humanity; they’re the only ones who can.

That specialization is why Hundred Line’s combat doesn’t quite match the strategic play of something like Baldur’s Gate 3, as it makes each battle feel like a puzzle to solve. Most characters have only one or two attack patterns; Kako, for instance, a meek younger sister in the group, uses a sniper rifle to avoid the scrap, and thus excels at long range. Then there are bolder heroes like the main protagonist, Takumi, who wields a sword that puts him on the front lines as he seeks to lead the group.

Some might find these rigid roles limiting. Hundred Line’s battles don’t feel like free-for-all scenarios in which you’re meant to move pieces around a board to your whim. Battles often spawn your heroes on different sides of the school, and those characters might not have great synergies with each other, so it’s up to you to figure out how best to defend the Last Defense Academy from incoming alien forces with the mini team comps you’re given on each side. The greatest strategy in Hundred Line is improvising, and sometimes that means making a big play that will take some of your own team members off the board in favor of giving the survivors an opening.

Each battle is divided into waves, and your characters are all revived at the beginning of a round, so it’s perfectly viable to sacrifice a character knowing they will come back shortly. Some of my favorite plays involved using a character’s ultimate ability, a high-impact attack your unit can perform when low on health in exchange for their life. Killing certain enemies grants your team more actions before the opposition’s turn, so using a self-sacrificing ultimate to take out some of my foes and let one of my other combatants whale on a boss a few more times is a sacrifice I’m willing to make. Those decisions aren’t something you typically strategize around; they’re just making the most of what you have in the moment.

After all, those spur-of-the-moment plays and intricate synergies are in service of taking down a mindless horde of aliens that mean to harm humanity, right? We should feel nothing tearing through them to save all our friends and family waiting to return to Earth after they’ve been given the all clear…right?

Spoiler Warning

The Hundred Line’s 100 days come to a close pretty quickly, all things considered. The average player will hit that deadline in about 30 hours. But there’s a reason, even after having seen the end of those 100 days, that I never reviewed The Hundred Line when it launched in April, and still wasn’t ready to when I declared it an easy contender for 2025’s Game of the Year the following month. It’s what happens after you reach that final day that makes it one of the most ambitious and important games of the year.

By the time Takumi and the rest of the Last Defense Squad reach the 100th day, pretty much everything has gone wrong. You’ve lost members of your team in the war, one of your own has betrayed the mission, and the thing you sought to protect has been destroyed, but what you’ve lost may be your only hope to make things right.

Deep in the depths of the Last Defense Academy, the team has found what they were recruited to protect: a baby swaddled in flame who has spent these three months gathering power to cover the planet in undying fire, killing the rest of the invaders and allowing humanity to finally return and rebuild. This baby, like the rest of the crew, is able to use hemoanima, and since he’s been storing up his power for all this time, he is far more powerful than any of the others who are capable of using it.

However, when one of your crew betrays the mission and kills this fire-covered baby, they’re able to absorb his charged-up power and wield it in what seems like a final boss fight. In this fight, the ex-party member’s “Specialist Skill,” or an ability that only they have, is upgraded. When Takumi defeats them, he absorbs all this energy. Typically, his power is to rewind turns in battle, but now that gift is more far-reaching than it has been in the last 100 days. Now, Takumi can rewind much farther. In fact, he’s now able to go back all 100 days, and that’s what he does, hoping that maybe this time, he’ll be able to save humanity.

At this point, The Hundred Line puts a 2 on its title screen, and Takumi must relive the 100 days and try to salvage the mission. Using the knowledge you have from the first time you saw this whole thing go south, you can get it right this time…maybe. This is where Kotaro Uchikoshi, Hundred Line’s co-director, known for his work on the Zero Escape series, grabs the wheel. You don’t just watch the 100 days play out again as Takumi makes all the right decisions this time; you have to make calls that will drastically change the course of events. The Hundred Line has over 20 routes, with each branching into one of several endings, all culminating in 100 possible conclusions. You can jump around the timeline as many times as you need to until you’ve either seen them all or you’re satisfied with the conclusion you received, but it’s up to you to use all you learned from the first route to try and find a better conclusion than the dire one you found the first time.

The Hundred Line’s many routes range in quality. Some of them are gags, like one that abandons all the stakes to make the story a slice-of-life comedy or a harem anime arc; others are genuine tactical challenges, like one that requires you to engage in long battles almost every other day in the three-month run. Broadly, The Hundred Line’s many routes are chances for its writing team to morph and mold its core premise into different genre stories. There’s a route that turns into a slasher story, another that riffs on zombie fiction, and there’s even one that turns into a Danganronpa-like killing game.

Yes, there is arguably a “true” route that solves the broader mysteries, but the degree to which Hundred Line is willing to remix everything you think you know about this story to deliver something entirely unrecognizable is such an incredible swing that I can’t believe Too Kyo Games pulled it off. Giving you the reins to steer the story in one of its many directions is a bold move that can easily lead to moments of incredible discovery but also to frustration as you reach what feel like dead ends or time-wasting conclusions.

Some of these storylines will tell you things you won’t find out elsewhere, and so playing through all 100 routes isn’t just something for the sickest of completionists; it does genuinely help fill out everything you do and don’t understand about the world you spent 100 days defending with blinders on. All 22 routes and 100 endings are equal parts supplementary reading and fully curricular. The real choice to make, then, is how long you want to spend with your hand on a wall, walking down the dark hallways of the Last Defense Academy to see every corner.

I have only seen a handful of endings myself, and I told myself I’d go back to see more of them as the year went on, but I didn’t get around to as many as I wanted. In that way, I also recognize what an undertaking it is to play The Hundred Line, and I am arguably its target audience.

The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy

Back-of-the-box quote:

“The world’s most ambitious choose-your-own-adventure book.”
Developer:

Too Kyo Games
Type of game:

Visual novel/Tactics RPG with 100 endings
Liked:

The staggering breadth of genres represented in its multiple routes, the engaging, puzzle-y nature of its tactical battles, the incredible ambition.

Disliked:

Some routes aren’t great.
Platforms:

PC, Switch (played on)
Release date:

April 24, 2025
Played:

~70 hours

That’s why I can’t judge anyone too much who doesn’t get around to what is essentially Kodaka and Uchikoshi’s final form. The Hundred Line is perhaps one of the clearest examples of a creative team making something for themselves, even when their back was against the wall. Too Kyo Games was in danger of financial ruin before The Hundred Line launched, and it still made something utterly unwieldy to the average person, rather than aiming for a general audience that might lap up something more palatable.

So when I get a “Wow, that sounds cool, I’m definitely not going to play it!” when I’m shouting about The Hundred Line in a loud bar, I get it. The most ambitious choose-your-own adventure experience in all of video games, full of annoying characters, a few dud routes, and a lot of trial and error as you jump around its branching timeline in search of a glimmer of hope, is a hard sell that even the most impassioned advocacy can’t always overcome. But The Hundred Line is still an achievement that most developers wouldn’t even entertain in a pitch, and Too Kyo Games made it when the studio had everything to lose.

Too Kyo Games easily could have set its niche obsessions of killing games, branching narratives, and mind-bending twists aside and created something that aimed for the widest personal audience in hopes that it would save the studio. Instead, it committed to what it knows, leaning into what has always made its leads’ work so memorable. Where others might have pumped the brakes on their ambitions, Too Kyo slammed its foot on the gas and hoped there would still be another route to follow when it reached the end. The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy may not be for everyone, but anyone can see what it’s done and know that it’s earned their respect.

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