The Hundred Line -Last Defense Academy- is Kazutaka Kodaka's magnum opus

Though my favorite routes might be the ones written by Kotaro Uchikoshi. Masafumi Takada returning for the soundtrack and Rui Komatsuzaki returning for art make me glad that Too Kyo games is still around and successful. This is an absolutely massive game, and my feelings about it are complex and hard to cover.

I love Danganronpa, Danganronpa 2, and Danganronpa V3. This game tells a better story than all three of those, in my opinion. You could make the case that with “100 endings”, it certainly gets more tries. But I feel like Kodaka’s madness was tempered by Uchikoshi and company in this game.

It could also just be that I’m more of an Uchikoshi fan, so adding any of that Uchikoshi flavor to Kodaka’s stuff just makes it way more exciting to me. And Uchikoshi’s influence is definitely all over this game, even if the moment-to-moment flavor feels strongly Kodaka. I say that this is Kodaka’s magnum opus, by the way, because I think Uchikoshi already had his with Virtue’s Last Reward.

I should caveat my thoughts here with: I didn’t “play” a single second of this game. I watched Ash play it the entire time. But it’s mostly a visual novel. Yeah, there’s a strategy game component, but like Danganronpa before it… I consider this aspect more of a minigame to break up the storytelling. Heck, you can even skip most of the combat by the halfway point.

Eventually you unlock a story flowchart you can hop around, Uchikoshi style, and that’s when things really opens up.

I will say that some of the routes didn’t hold my interest. I won’t call any of them trash or terrible, but I think that the goal of “100 endings” was overly ambitious. This game is absolutely freaking massive, and we unforutnately ran out of willpower before seeing all it had to offer. I think the game could’ve used a little more editing both in terms of cutting less interesting routes, and then actual copy editing (looooots of extra words, typos, grammatical mistakes—nothing too bad, and somewhat understandable given the absolutely massive script size).

I don’t want to spoil anything about the story for you, reader, but… I really grew to love Hiruko, Eito, and even Darumi. All of the characters have at least something fun going on for me (well, except maybe Gaku lol).

For murderheads and mystery folks missing some classic Danganronpa killing game nonsense, don’t worry, they included routes that have lots of murder and killing game nonsense too. But the important routes are not about that. And I think you’ll enjoy them a lot more, too, if you get to them.

Despite the high profile list of employees at Too Kyo Games, I didn’t love Master Detective Archives: Rain Code (2023) and didn’t finish it, and I didn’t even buy World’s End Club…

I really hope that this game’s critical reception has been reflected in financial success and that Too Kyo Games can survive and continue to experiment with the stylish visual novel inspired format for video games.