The Hundred Line – Last Defense Academy is an interesting beast of a game. Headed by Kotaro Uchikoshi and Kazutaka Kodaka, the lead writers on the Zero Escape and Danganronpa series respectively, it takes a lot of cues from these games but deviates almost completely in the gameplay. Instead of being a visual novel story broken up by characters attempting to survive some sort of killing game, the meat of the gameplay is instead tactical turn-based combat. A completely different kind of experience for sure.

The Hundred Line opens with protagonist Takumi Sumino having a very normal morning living inside the sprawling Tokyo Residential Complex, an entire city trapped within walls and a ceiling that he has never been outside of. Suddenly, the complex is attacked by some strange monsters, and Takumi has no choice but to fight them, only to find himself losing and then regaining consciousness far away from the Complex at what he comes to learn is the Last Defense Academy.

Takumi and another 10 students all wake up in the Academy and are told by their new commanding officer Sirei (a weird little robot that I am not sure if I find cute or utterly repulsive) that they must remain in the school for the next hundred days, fighting back more of those monsters; though he calls them invaders. This is the main crux of the game, living through those hundred days to hopefully leave at the end and fighting the invaders whenever they make an appearance.

On the Defensive

Something I noticed pretty immediately about The Hundred Line – Last Defense Academy is that it has some serious pacing issues. As I mentioned, there are attacks by the invaders that need to be pushed back whenever they occur, but the game doesn’t have any real sense of pace or structure. Where the Danganronpa titles have clear chapters that are literally marked by a title card and a very consistent rhythm between the visual novel segments and the trials, Last Defense Academy is missing that. The attacks occur at pretty random intervals, and there are often large stretches of time spent between them where very little happens. I partially blame this on the 100 days; a Danganronpa game usually only lasts around 30 days by my count, and are still decently long without feeling like they drag.

“There isn’t enough meat on Last Defense Academy to keep it engaging the whole way through…”

There isn’t enough meat on Last Defense Academy to keep it engaging the whole way through, especially during the long breaks between both plot and combat, where Takumi has free time to spend and little to spend it on. The other characters in the school offer very little in the way of dialogue until very late in the game, when Last Defense Academy’s equivalent of social links finally unlocks. While talking to other characters does net a small stat boost, I never noticed any significant change due to them. There is also the option to give gifts to your teammates, which has the same effect as just talking to them until the social links unlock and work in a very non-intuitive way. Gifts have to be crafted, and can only be done one at a time, which takes up half of your day. It makes doing so feel like a chore, and on multiple free days in a row, my eyes would glaze over as I was just crafting gift after gift and getting barely any reward for it.

The other way to spend your free time is by going on expeditions to collect items. They are used both to craft gifts and to level up your character’s abilities for combat. Expeditions take place in a board-based game where you pull cards to determine how many steps you can take and then pick one of two options to determine whether you get items or get penalised in some way. These events are randomised too; remembering that selecting a certain option got you penalised last time does not matter, because this time it could be the other way around. Eventually, I stopped using logic and would just select the first option, no matter what it was.

The Hundred Line – Last Defense Academy Review – A very long semester

Luckily, though, the combat in The Hundred Line – Last Defense Academy is very good, so good that I wish there was more of it. It’s nowhere near an even split between time spent fighting and time spent languishing around in the school, which is unfortunate because the strategy-style combat is one of the game’s high points. Each character has an interesting collection of abilities that can be used in synchronicity with others in so many different ways. Enemies on the field have different abilities too, and a really cool mechanic where killing any enemies stronger than basic cannon fodder actually replenishes one point of AP for your team, so you get another move you can make that turn.

Your team members are only able to perform one action before they become exhausted, and from there, can only move one space or attack from where they are already standing, so good positioning or team synergy is essential to keep your turn going as long as possible. I personally had a character dealing four base damage on each of his attacks that I would have constantly got buffed by another character to remove his exhaustion and let him go at it again. These two were a deadly duo for me, and I loved it whenever they both spawned on the same side of the map.

The map has four sides total, though they aren’t always all in play. Each side of the map has a barrier generator that must be protected, as its destruction results in a game over and a re-do. It’s important to keep an eye on each side of the map and determine which one needs the most help. Sometimes, if one side was holding pretty well, I would go through the effort of dashing another character over to a side that wasn’t, to give them the extra help.

“Good positioning or team synergy is essential to keep your turn going as long as possible…”

Performing actions during your turn also fills up a bar that gives you access to a special attack that deals a bunch of damage across a wide area, though the exact shape of the attack varies character to character. These attacks don’t cost AP, but do stun the character who executed it for the next turn (unless you have a character nearby who can cure the stun). These moves are great for boosting that AP because you can often take out multiple high-level enemies at once, but it’s a good idea to be careful about who you want to do it, because they will be out of commission for the next turn.

There are also specific buffs for characters that need certain requirements to be met before they apply. One character only gets hers if she doesn’t move on her turn; one only gets it if she does move. My favourite of these buffs is for a character who gets a damage boost whenever the special attack bar is full, so it’s always a good idea to remember to attack with him first before using a special attack. So much goes on during these combat sections, and it is all very mechanically rich and satisfying to use. Each character is so different and heaps of fun to learn just how to get the best out of them.

It’s your future

The writing in The Hundred Line – Last Defense Academy gets less of a glowing recommendation, though: it’s hit and miss. Because the game needs to stretch itself out over so many days, the plot is incredibly back-loaded, and there are so many questions that are raised in the beginning that are dropped and then not picked back up again for a very long time. It also has an issue with stakes; it’s established very early on that characters cannot die when within the school grounds. There is a machine called the Revive-O-Matic that is exactly what is says on the tin, if a student dies while in the academy, they can be brought to the machine and be revived, if they die out on the field but still within school ground, a drone comes to collect them and then also just delivers them to the Revive-O-Matic. It meant that a lot of the conflict in the game felt a little toothless.

There was a point early on when a character in the Academy started threatening other team members and saying she was going to kick them out of the school, and all I could think was, how? What is she going to do? Kill them? They will just come straight back. I felt this way about a lot of the tension, and it was a shame, because I could tell the game wanted me to be a bit more invested, more tense, but I just kept remembering the Revive-O-Matic and thinking, whatever, just kill them, it wouldn’t even matter.

Most of the characters are very solid and likeable. There are a couple that fall back onto annoying tropes or gags that stayed their welcome too long, losing any of the humour they had after the first conversation. It’s a shame because some of the character choices are legitimately funny. I especially love this character who tries to act like she is a real deal samurai, but she clearly just gets all her knowledge from manga because she keeps getting samurai stuff and ninja stuff mixed up. However, there is also a running gag where another character keeps implying that the samurai wants to have sex with her sword, and it was not funny even once. It kept going the whole way through, and I did not care for it.

As I mentioned earlier, though, social link mechanics take a very long time to be introduced, which means that outside of the main story, there is little to learn about these characters and their personal lives. At least, not until you have already been hanging around with them for many, many hours. It does leave some of them feeling a little flat, especially the ones who entirely hinge on unfunny bits and seemingly have nothing else to them.

“The storytelling is lopsided and leaves the middle half of the game empty and frustrating.”

The ongoing mystery in The Hundred Line – Last Defense Academy is intriguing; finding out who the team is fighting and why, or how the group got to the academy in the first place are good touch-stones to keep your interest piqued, but as I said earlier there isn’t much progress on any of this until the back end. Each of the characters is able to use Hemoanima, a unique type of mutated blood which provides supernatural abilities and allows them to summon weapons and fight during the combat sections. Further information on that isn’t dropped until a decent way through the adventure, and a proper resolution on it takes even longer.

This isn’t to say that a long-running mystery is a bad thing, just that something like that needs more breadcrumbs; it needs to feel like there is a trail that the player is following and not just like the answer is dumped on them towards the latter half of the game. Lots of the intrigue in The Hundred Line – Last Defense Academy is like that, questions that just don’t go anywhere until too late where they are answered all at once. The storytelling is lopsided and leaves the middle half of the game empty and frustrating.

The Danganronpa of it all

It’s been incredibly difficult for me to write this review without making comparisons to Danganronpa in every single part of it, and this is not for lack of trying. The Hundred Line – Last Defense Academy tries to insist that it isn’t Danganronpa, but it insists it so often and so loudly that the comparisons become impossible not to make. Not only do the lead artist and composer from the series return for Last Defense Academy, (doing great work as always, the art and soundtrack SLAP), but there is a character in the game that seems to make it her sole mission to remind you about Danganronpa every five seconds.

Darumi probably gets off the worst of all the characters when it comes to running gags, if only because hers is the loudest. She can’t go even two sentences without asking when the killing game is going to start, or directly referencing the names of mini-games from the series. Even during combat, one of her voice lines is just ‘It’s killing game time’, which it blatantly isn’t, because this game isn’t Danganronpa, I swear. The occasional reference would be fine, but the game is so full of them that, as a fan of the series, it just started to frustrate me. I would groan every time Darumi opened her mouth, and if I saw anything shaped like Monokuma I would roll my eyes. It’s so overbearing, and for a guy who says that he doesn’t want to make Danganronpa anymore, Kodaka sure doesn’t want to shut up about it. There are so many character developments that went exactly in the way I was expecting, because I had already seen them in Danganronpa, I spent so long trying to convince myself, no there’s no way that they are going to do that again, and then they did, I was wrong for assuming anything different.

It’s such a shame because there is a lot of new stuff that The Hundred Line – Last Defense Academy does well. The combat is a stand-out for one, and some really interesting stuff does finally start happening towards the back end of the game that actually took me by surprise, but I had to slog through an incredibly boring experience to actually get to it while being reminded that I could just re-play Danganronpa instead the entire time. It made it impossible for me to meet Last Defense Academy on its own level; all I could do was make comparisons and complain about how it was worse than Danganronpa, because it couldn’t help reminding me of it constantly.

7

Good

Positive:

Engaging tactical combat
Awesome soundtrack
Interesting story

Negative:

Poor pacing
Long stretches with nothing to do
Some game mechanics don't show up until too late in the game

The Hundred Line – Last Defense Academy is interesting; it does a surprisingly good job of meshing together the visual novel and strategy game elements in a satisfying way, but it just falls so incredibly short on the pacing that it makes it hard to properly enjoy these elements. There are some very cool developments in here, but it just takes so long to get to them that it almost feels like they are never coming. I have my complaints with it, certainly, but there is some truly great design in there, and I wish it got a chance to shine. For what it’s worth, Kodaka-san, I hope you don’t go bankrupt and quit making games forever.