At time of writing, I have gotten 21 of the 100 endings to Hundred Line, Last Defense Academy. The scale of this game terrifies me, to say the least. If you don't know what this game is, It's a Strategy game made by Tookyo games, a game studio whose name literally means "Too Crazy Games", and their whole goal as a studio is to make games that seem impossible for one reason or another. At the head of this madness are two insane people: Kotaro Uchikoshi, the mind behind the Zero Escape franchise and Ai The Somnium Files, and Kazutaka Kodaka, the man behind the Danganronpa Series. This project was in mind when the company was started a number of years ago, and they released a couple games before this as, essentially, an attempt to try to fund its creation.
What exactly is this creation, you ask? Well stop asking, this is the written word, I can't hear you, but Hundred Line is a Choose Your Own Adventure game featuring 100 endings and over six million characters in the Japanese script. Even crazier than that, you don't even get the chance to really play the game until you've gone through what feels like the full game once already. I'm going to try to be non-spoiler for this review, so let's get into it.
The setup of the game is that you are a highschooler in a strage academy with the surpose of defending the school from "invaders" for 100 days in order to save humanity. As is typical of Kodaka's games, you play as Takumi Sumino, an entirely average person who had a crush on a girl before he got placed in the academy. Your Classmates/Comrades are a colorful cast of characters ranging from A small boy who hates himself to a Killing-game enthusiast who constantly lampshades the writing prevalent in the works of the writers.
Across the 21 endings I've gotten and the 22nd I'm still working on, the writing quality and character emphasis varies... a lot. This is due to a fair few different writers being involved in the game, in charge of different routes, so each route can, at times, feel like you're going through very different stories. Also due to the nature of this, sometimes plot elements just get dropped after certain choices, because that element was meant for the other route that you aren't on anymore. There are also... a couple routes that I'd say were added in an effort to stretch to a full 100 endings, which is lame, but oh well.
The gameplay of Hundred Line meshes a Choose-Your-Own-Adventure book, Danganronpa free times, a weird board game, and a Strategy game. Some people and a few outlets have called it a Strategy "RPG" which I kinda disagree with, more on that in a bit though.
Because first I want to talk about the DR Part. Because honestly, it feels a little tacked on. The Free time sections are when you get to upgrade characters and items, and gather materials to do so. It also when you hang out with characters and give them gifts. Doing so in the "second scenario" unlocks the bonding events where you get... a very brief speech from the character, and a bond rank, which, as far as I can tell, doesn't do anything. It's like if Fire Emblem Supports were worse.
Now, I can understand why this is the way the bonding works, what with the already insanely large script and all, but that just begs the question: why are they in this game at all? I haven't gotten all of them, but the ones I have seen so far reveal very little about the characters outside of what the routes themselves do, amd given the time-travelling nature of doing different routes, these linear statements of bonds don't really make any sense.
A different aspect of the game is pretty interesting: The board game part. How it works is you get two options of numbers of spaces to move, numbered 1-6, you move, and then something happens and/or you get a crafting material, which are used to upgrade characters and items, as well as make gifts. Kodaka has done the board game thing a few time now, and it makes me wonder why he seems so attracted to the idea. It's a fun little mode, breaking up the monotony of free times, though it also used for story missions on occasion.
Finally we get to talking about the combat. It's a strategy game, but like I said before, I don't really think it's much an RPG system. RPG systems are generally defined by characters growing stronger over the course of the game, but while you do upgrade and get new attacks, there's only one damage boost to each attack at the very end of the upgrades. Then there's absorbing hemoanima, which improves the big special attack, but otherwise just gains you more voltage. I think that this game is more of a strategy Puzzle game than an RPG. The goal is to be as efficiently violent as you can, defeating as many enemies and keeping as much AP as you can in order to end the battle in as few turns as possible. This is added onto because, outside of the later-added Extreme and Despair mode, the battles aren't that hard to beat, but they can be hard to S-rank. It's an almost arcade form of gameplay.
Now, the game is aware of how long it is, and that a lot of the battles are repeats, so you can, in fact, skip battles if you've completed a "similar" battle before (Usually meaning fought that boss or gimmick before), which is nice. The feature also exists for exploration missions, but then you miss out on any materials. There's also the persuasion minigame that shows up sometimes. It's... basically an incredibly watered-down form of the MTB from Danganronpa.
It's a fun game. There's not that much competition when it comes to my personal "Game of the Year", seeing as I don't really play many new releases, but this one's definitely up there. I can also see how this game could be dangerous for people with certain gaming habits, like completionists. I think the game is best experienced in smaller bites, going through a few routes and then putting the game down to play something else for a week or two. That's how I've gone through the game so far, I expect I'll probably have it all done sometime early next year. Pretty good value for the price of a game.
Final Ratings