The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy REVIEW
With intriguing mysteries, a colorful cast, and fun strategic moments, The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy is a gem of a game that never gets old despite its staggering length. As a perfect blend of styles and humor from Kazutaka Kotaka, creator of the popular Danganronpa series, and Kotaro Uchikoshi, creator of the equally popular Zero Escape, The Hundred Line will more than satisfy anyone who enjoys bombastic sci-fi stories with a resonant emotional core.
The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy follows Takumi, a boy living in an apartment complex in Tokyo. He’s an ordinary student living an ordinary life with his mother and childhood best friend Karua, and doesn’t expect that to change. However, an invasion of otherworldly creatures turns his life upside down. He finds himself, along with a handful of other high school students, conscripted into a war against a ruthless army of invaders. They must defend Last Defense Academy for one hundred days, as well as find out who brought them there and why they were chosen for this task.
The game’s first hour of storytelling combines familiar Japanese storytelling motifs. There are influences from Danganronpa, with a group of teenagers trapped in a school, and echoes of Zero Escape, with the characters trapped in an unknown future. But the most obvious parallel is Evangelion, with a team of teenagers becoming humanity’s last hope in a battle with mystical aliens threatening to bring about a new apocalypse.
The game’s unusualness is evident not only in its premise, where a group of insecure, violent, and reckless teenagers find themselves in a deadly trap, but also in its bold combination of two genres that rarely intersect. Like Vanillaware’s 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim and ATLUS, it intertwines elements of a visual novel and a turn-based strategy game, evoking associations with Fire Emblem.
The adventure part is done in a classic style: the player moves around the school (a 2D side view, reminiscent of Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair), communicates with classmates, develops relationships and follows the development of the plot.
However, the combat system is something new for Kodaka and Uchikoshi’s projects. Although it cannot be called revolutionary, battles take place on a field similar to a chessboard, where the key task is to defend the base, preventing enemies from breaking through. Each hero has their own combat characteristics, unique abilities and special techniques that help to effectively destroy opponents.
Unlike Fire Emblem, there is no permanent death mechanic – fallen allies are revived after the battle. However, there is an interesting detail: if a character dies in battle, he gets the opportunity to deliver a powerful final blow before dying. Enemy units attack quickly, sometimes even ahead of their allies, which makes the process dynamic and tense.
The combat scenes are mostly organized in the format of waves of attacking enemies. The lack of positional advantage is somewhat disappointing: attacks from the side or from the rear do not provide any bonuses. In addition, there is no system yet that determines the strengths and weaknesses of the heroes depending on the weapon used.
It is possible to distribute action points at your discretion: you can move multiple times or attack with the same character in a turn. But at the first stages, the battles seem quite simple, one can only hope that over time the mechanics will become deeper and more interesting.
Also worthy of attention is the exploration system, reminiscent of a simple board game with movement on cells. Moving around the map, the player can collect resources to improve characters, fight more or less rare opponents and, eventually, reach key points where boss fights await him. There is nothing new in this mechanic, but it perfectly dilutes the long episodes of the visual novel, making the gameplay more varied.
The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy also has its share of violence. Some characters are grotesque in the best traditions of the game’s authors – all of them become the main characters of a variety of comic, and not so comic, scenes.
All of this is complemented by Komatsuzaki’s signature touch, which has defined the visual style of Kodaki’s games for almost a decade. Even Shirei, the little jelly ghost who runs the school, is clearly a reference to the villain Monokuma, and some characters inevitably evoke associations with the heroes of Danganronpa.
Stylish, brutal, provocative, The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy is an interesting mix of Kodaka and Uchikoshi’s work, complete with a new turn-based combat system. It seems rather simple, but has potential for development.
Kodaka said while promoting the game that he considers The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy his “best work” and a game that is close to his ideal. Having experienced it ourselves, we have to agree. The game is unique and unforgettable, and it is a magnum opus that Too Kyo Games will be hard pressed to surpass in the future.
