The Hundred Line -Last Defense Academy- review: When getting killed on purpose is a viable strategy

When Danganronpa creator Kazutaka Kodaka and Zero Escape/AI: Somnium Files creator Kotaro Uchikoshi formed (with other industry legends like composer Masafumi Takada) Too Kyo Games, fans of both series wondered if these modern visual novel/adventure game legends would collaborate. It took a while, but that day has finally come. The Hundred Line -Last Defense Academy- is the result, and it is exactly the kind of thing I expected from this dream team project. It’s completely unhinged, basically.

Stab yourself to save the world, trust me bro

Hundred Line’s premise is… a lot. Humanity resides in a dome-covered version of Tokyo sometime in the distant future. The sterile peace (sometimes interrupted by unexplained danger sirens) is burst when the dome is breached by an army of aliens that look like mutated Build-A-Bears, which only seem interested in violence. Protagonist-coded Takumi Sumino, desperate to protect his childhood friend, is confronted by a squat, translucent cartoon ghost with a voice like the narrator of Super Friends. The ghost hands Takumi a glowing, red knife and tells him the solution to his predicament here is to jam it into his chest.

One super power-delivering blood cocoon later and Takumi finds himself in the Last Defense Academy, a school doubling as humanity’s last hope against the invasion. His goal is to, along with a group of absurdly deranged students with similar powers, survive the next hundred days without letting a single baddie through the barriers. If the team succeeds, well, something is supposed to happen to ensure humanity’s future. What that something actually is will only be one of several mysteries and twists you’ll uncover before you’re done with this story.

As far as what I think about the story in a broad sense, it's kind of all over the place. Combining the crass absurdity and "death game" style Kodaka leans on so heavily with more sincere sci-fi world building and mythology-heavy mystery stuff you tend to get from Uchikoshi's work is literally what's happening here. It feels like two styles of storytelling smashed together, with a more coherent end result than you might expect. It's like a bunch of intricately constructed connective tissue slathered in cake frosting and topped with corroded battery acid and bodily fluids. And there's enough of it to last you dozens of hours depending on how many endings you're interested in finding. Out of... several. It isn't boring, I'll say that much. Until it is, but that isn't the writing's fault. We'll get there.

Desperate measures

While this game is certainly a visual novel in many respects, it has a whole video game side too. At its core Hundred Line is a turn-based, tactical RPG, but not like the ones we usually see. The maps never change, but the enemy waves and formations do. You never get to place your units yourself, and you’re often given fewer turns than you have fighters on turn one. Damage is small, HP pools are small, and enemies will ignore you and make a mad dash to the barriers.

This setup isn’t about outmaneuvering your foes, utilizing terrain gimmicks, or grinding your team up to unbeatable monsters. It’s about clawing your way out of a losing situation, and calculating acceptable losses. Your units will die, and sometimes you’re the one killing them in exchange for one desperate, extra attack. They’ll come back in the next wave, but until then that’s one piece off the board.

It’s fascinating, and almost feels like a puzzle game built with moving parts you can’t control. It also gets really hard really fast, but there’s a difficulty option you can toggle at any time for a leg up if you aren’t as skilled in tactics (yo). I appreciated having that available in lieu of being able to grind my way through.

The daily grind

Aside from combat and the story, Hundred Line has a “social links” system that, frankly, is the biggest drag on the whole experience. It barely impacts anything in a meaningful way, but takes up a ton of time and space with many days of “free time” on the calendar. There’s a whole board game-like minigame that has you hunt for ingredients you take to a stuff-making machine, to create gifts. There’s not much nuance here, as you can find one gift each character likes and spam it at them until you max out their bond level to get some silly extra dialogue as a reward.

The few upgrades you can get, in contrast, exist in one menu you can access from two locations for some reason. This part is much more rewarding to engage with, and takes up minimal space. It’s just some light menu tinkering. Weird! Burning so much time on days in which nothing happens, to provide plenty of space to throw items at characters to eventually win a couple lines of sexual tensiony dialogue, just made me resent the Persona series for its crimes against the concept of portraying romance in video games.

Geeks and gimmicks

Speaking of crimes, Hundred Line has some weird characters. It’s fitting of course; if I can identify Kodaka by anything, it’s his love for characters who inhabit a single, identifying personality quirk with the reckless inhibitions of a deranged hentai comic only popular on imageboards because of how screwed up it is. My favorites: A girl who pukes whenever she’s nervous, who refuses to fight until Takumi gives her a designer sick bag, and whose weapon turns out to be a massive armored car. And a guy who has the look, strength, and temper of a violent delinquent, but also has strong moral convictions, helps out at retirement homes, and shocks everyone with his wholesomeness. On the opposite end, there’s a guy whose personality is “screeching poverty boy” and a queer-coded assassin who talks about murder like it’s sex (this could be funny, except for…) and has zero respect for boundaries (...that part). Man swings hard and hits home runs, but when he misses it's a mix of annoying, gross, and horny (derogatory) that's no fun to read.

Meanwhile, Uchikoshi’s work is usually full of science fiction and philosophy, and an interest in structure and form in visual novel storytelling. Exploring the technical aspects of a visual novel as contributing pieces of the narrative is a fun angle whenever I run into it, and Hundred Line goes pretty hard here. Saying much more would be spoiler territory I’d get in trouble for going into, but Zero Escape fans won’t be disappointed.

This sounds like a bunch of different parts stacked onto each other like Lego bricks, and that’s kind of true. In some ways that’s vibe with games like Danganronpa or Master Detective Archives. But there’s a sense of each piece working together in those games to form a fully realized whole. In The Hundred Line -Last Defense Academy-, the visual novel and combat parts hit that target, but the social and resource-gathering elements don’t. And those parts happen to eat up a ton of extra time that grows increasingly obnoxious as you explore the narrative. That stuff is padding that loses more and more substance the longer you play and the more you do a thing I can't really talk about here. That’s a weird sentence, but you’ll have to trust me on that one, just like the kid being told by a cartoon ghost to stab himself in the chest with a magic knife to save the world.

The Hundred Line -Last Defense Academy- is available on April 24, 2025 for the Nintendo Switch and PC. A Switch code was provided by the publisher for this review.

Lucas White

Contributing Editor

Lucas plays a lot of videogames. Sometimes he enjoys one. His favorites include Dragon Quest, SaGa, and Mystery Dungeon. He's far too rattled with ADHD to care about world-building lore but will get lost for days in essays about themes and characters. Holds a journalism degree, which makes conversations about Oxford Commas awkward to say the least. Not a trophy hunter but platinumed Sifu out of sheer spite and got 100 percent in Rondo of Blood because it rules. You can find him on Twitter @HokutoNoLucas being curmudgeonly about Square Enix discourse and occasionally saying positive things about Konami.