In the demo version of The Hundred Line -Last Defense Academy-, you get to experience a surprisingly addictive week of slaughter, mystery, and crude humor. Clocking in at somewhere between two and three hours, it gives a good idea of what to expect in the final product, and so far, I’m really enjoying what the game has to offer.
The story of The Hundred Line -Last Defense Academy– follows Takumi Sumino, an ordinary high school boy living an ordinary life with his ordinary family. He lives in the Tokyo Residential Complex with them, and has a childhood friend slash potential romantic interest named Karua. One day, while he and Karua are on their way to school, a siren blares out over the TRC. However, it’s not the usual drill. Bizarre monsters appear from out of nowhere, massacring citizens left and right. When they’re about to kill Karua, a strange mascot resembling a gross version of Shinigami-chan from Rain Code appears and unlocks hemoanima — a strange blood-based power — within Takumi. With this new ability, Takumi fights off the monsters, but then the mascot, Sirei, transports him away from the TRC.
After waking up in an unfamiliar school with a group of other strangers, Takumi learns that Sirei conscripted them in a war against the school invaders. Though no one really knows anything about these invaders, they do know that they’re after something inside the school — something important to the fate of the universe. To protect their loved ones from the impending apocalypse, Takumi and his new friends pick up arms to fight off the invaders. But things aren’t as simple as they seem (not that they were simple to begin with).
As you might expect from a project with Kodaka as one of the main writers, The Hundred Line -Last Defense Academy- features a colorful cast of characters. We’ve got a (canonically) gross siscon, a manic pixie emo girl who belongs in the world of Danganronpa, and a cute mechanic who’s ready to lose her lunch at the slightest provocation, among others. This shouldn’t come as a surprise if you’ve played previous games from him or the team, though.
Since the demo covers the first seven days, only a handful of characters receive much attention. This also has to do with the fact that the vast majority of the cast straight up aren’t interested in fighting against the school invaders due to fear, confusion, and Sirei’s caginess. Hopefully, The Hundred Line can avoid the pitfall of Super Danganronpa 2, in which some characters only exist for a gag or one-off purpose. It does feel familiar to that series, though, in that a good chunk of the first chapter features the characters refusing to participate in the story’s main conceit. Between the music (which sounds like a knockoff version of Danganronpa tracks) and Darumi’s existence, there are a lot of little in-jokes for Danganronpa players.
As a note, I couldn’t change my voiceover language until I unlocked the main options menu. This took me about an hour to do. You also can’t change the language while you’re in the game, and I didn’t realize this until after I beat the demo, meaning I played the whole thing in English. That was a drag for me, since I was excited for a good number of the Japanese cast. Everyone’s performance was really good, though, with special props to the voice actors for Takumi and Takemaru. Eito’s voice actor really sold his shtick well, and I have a new appreciation for Tsubasa’s English voice actress for how much of herself she put into her “URK!”s.
Speaking of the voices, I couldn’t tell if this was a bug or a feature. But in certain scenes, only some characters will have fully-voiced lines. For example, in one conversation, Takemaru was the only one whose lines were fully voiced. Everyone else only had the little sound bites and grunts. That was kind of weird.
The Hundred Line -Last Defense Academy- is a tower defense TRPG in which you have to clear victory conditions (usually routing all enemies or killing a specific commander) while protecting the barrier generator at the back of the map. Each turn, you have a set amount of shared AP. So long as you have AP, a character can take action as many times as you please, though you’ll have to account for them becoming Fatigued. You can also get AP back through kills or hemoanima boost, or let excess carry over. It’s pretty satisfying to chain your AP recovery methods to let a character attack, like, five times per turn and mow down a whole crowd of invaders before they can get anywhere near the generator.
After each wave, the game revives any fallen characters, and restores everyone’s HP to max. So fighting to keep them alive isn’t that big a deal. In fact, the game even gives you bonus points for how many of your units die, either to an enemy or with a special suicide attack. Of course, you still have to time when you toss your unit to the metaphorical wolves, since losing too many units can leave you defenseless against the perpetual advance of enemies. The enemies generally keep moving forward until they reach the barrier and can self-destruct near it. As protecting this barrier is your main goal, students have to stop as many as possible before they can reach it, and they can’t do that if they can’t move from their tile, or if they’re stunned after an ultimate attack.
Since it’s still early in the game, it’s not that hard once you get the hang of the system. The revival and healing mechanic between waves really opens up a lot of options, since you can be as reckless as you want. The characters don’t level up in battle, either, as you can enhance them during your free time. So there’s no need to keep anyone alive just so they can get experience points. Losing Takumi near the end of a wave only warranted a shrug, whereas a good unit’s death in another TRPG (especially a protagonist) would’ve required a restart. I’m hoping the later stages will introduce some different gimmicks and victory conditions, or amp up the difficulty, to keep it from becoming stale.
Outside of battles, you can spend time with your allies or explore the world outside of the Last Defense Academy. Exploration reminds me a bit of Ultimate Talent Development Plan from V3. You can choose how many steps you take on a Monopoly-like board, with some tiles giving you a text-only event and two options to choose between. No matter what you decide on, you’ll receive a reward, but some “wrong” choices will deplete your HP. This will carry over into battle, so you’ll want to keep an eye on that. Exploration gives you resources (though I didn’t get a chance to use them in the demo), and the main story requires you to do it as well.
Finally, in Danganronpa, Free Time was a way to speak to other characters and get to know them a little better. While The Hundred Line -Last Defense Academy- also has this, the free time events are a lot shorter, and don’t really give as many details about everyone. You can receive points to improve Takumi’s grades, which level characters up and give them more options during exploration. But it doesn’t look like there’s an affection system or deeper character interactions through Free Time. Again, though, as this is the demo, it’s hard to say for sure. I do hope that we can learn more about everyone in Free Time, though. Some of the character stories in Danganronpa gave new insight that would be out of place in the main story, as well as offered more minor characters the chance to shine.
With a simple yet intriguing storyline that’s already set up multiple questions and clues, a surprisingly addictive tower defense combat system, and some pretty likeable characters, The Hundred Line -Last Defense Academy- feels like a game that someone can easily sink hours upon hours into. Seeing the reminder at the end that the game is coming out in late April 2025 rather than any time soon was a bummer, as I really wanted to know more about the academy, the TRC, and the invaders. As it’s only about three hours long, give or take, I recommend anyone who’s interested to give it a try.
The Hundred Line -Last Defense Academy- will come out on the Nintendo Switch and Windows PC via Steam on April 24, 2025. Previewed on Windows PC.
Published: Feb 23, 2025 12:00 pm