0.5/5 ★ – NoyDaCoy's review of The Hundred Line -Last Defense Academy-.

I wanted to enjoy this game. I played over 50 hours of it to try to find what people loved about it. I've been a Danganronpa fan and a Zero Escape fan for years now, so in concept, this was such an exciting project. After playing the demo, I was skeptical, but still hopeful that I could at least find some enjoyment once the full game dropped. Seeing nearly exclusively positive reviews, I was ready to give the game a second shot after the lackluster demo, only to find that my original suspicions were correct: I hate this game. I know that that is strong language, but I encourage you to read this entire review before discounting my opinion, as I stand by my statement. The initial premise is somewhat interesting. A special mission to save humanity from alien invaders that only a couple of teenagers could fix. Not exactly an original idea, but one that at least started the story with some intrigue. The relationship with Takumi and Karua felt more forced than it did cute, and I wasn't thrilled with most of the other characters you meet at the beginning of your hundred day journey. They all had very distinct personalities, but most felt very one note compared to the more nuanced Danganronpa and Zero Escape characters that I had fallen in love with before. "Surely they'll get better," I kept saying to myself, hoping that each character would get more personality than their one quirk that they started out with. While a few characters succeeded at this, a vast majority did not, and I was left with only a couple characters that I even slightly cared about. It certainly didn't help that our protagonist is perhaps the worst protagonist in any piece of media I have ever witnessed. The entire point of having a protagonist in your story is to move the plot forward, to bring the reader/watcher/player through the story. The amount of times that you have to drag this milquetoast out of his bed in order to do anything in this game is FAR too high for a character that is supposed to be the motivation for continuing the story. A majority of your hundred days in the academy are either spent in bed or having free time, in which you have only a few choices for what to do. You can talk to your party members for an extremely brief event where they spend time with you and increase your stats, give them a gift to skip this event and get a higher amount of stats out of them, or train by doing a battle or exploring outside in a board game styled exploration segment. None of these events feel worth your time or energy, with the events you get with each character being maybe 5 textboxes long at most. Later in the game, you gain access to more proper free time events, but even these are so incredibly barebones that it feels insulting to call them that. Each time, you get maybe a dozen textboxes of the character talking at you, with your protagonist having no dialogue or banter with them the entire time. It is such a baffling decision to me after experiencing the powerful character moments that I am used to in both previous series these developers worked on. Instead of attempting to make connections with these one note, predictable characters, you could choose to battle or explore to power up your moves and abilities. Except that none of these powerups feel worth it at all with how easy the battles are in the first place. I played on the most difficult setting (of which there are only two, by the way), and I could still wipe out most waves of enemies in one turn with enough brainpower. The system is fun for the first few battles, but pretty quickly they become nuisances, killing the pace of the story to make you participate in an hour long wave of combat. All of the battles play out the same: take out the powerful enemies in as few moves as possible to gain more turns, then deal with the smaller foes who slipped through the cracks, wait until the boss shows up, then hit the damage sponge for 2-3 turns until it dies. The game rewards you for having your party members die, so there is barely any reason to be careful at all through the fights. I never found any of the battles challenging, including final bosses on various routes, making the combat in this game get far less engaging as it went on. Surely that's fine though, right? I mean, I didn't exactly play Danganronpa for the gameplay. Putting aside a boring battle system, surely the story can help this game recover, right? Unfortunately, I was wrong in this assumption too. It's awfully hard to care about a story with characters that you're not engaged with, but it is even more difficult when the story is written very poorly. The reason I enjoyed Danganronpa and Zero Escape so much was the amount of questions and theories I had throughout the experience. I loved being able to think ahead about the greater mystery, future culprits, character motivations, and more, all throughout the experience. In Hundred Line, however, most of these questions are so uninteresting that they aren't worth theorizing about, answered immediately so you don't have time to think about, or answered so many hours later that the reveal was not even worth the time and effort it took to get there. Death doesn't matter, since the deus ex machina of the Revive'O'Matic instantly resuscitates anyone who dies, in and outside of battle. That in combination with the entire gimmick of the game being the existence of several routes and choices and timelines means that everyone who "permanently" dies can just be revived or seen again on a different timeline. This completely destroys the appeal of the story, making almost none of your actions have consequences, especially since they are being piloted by an extremely apathetic protagonist who barely cares about what is happening. Speaking of the timeline gimmick, let's talk about that next, shall we? Zero Escape and AI: The Somnium Files did this masterfully, and made those experiences extremely memorable. One of my new favorite games, In Stars and Time, does this gimmick in a way that made me cry several times. Does this experience even hold a candle to those examples? If you're still reading this, you've probably guessed that my answer is no. It took 30 hours to reach the first ending of the game. Throughout that adventure, you are provided with zero (0) choices to make. You are railroaded into one ending from the start of the game until the 30 hour mark, after which you gain access to the flowchart. From there, you get to tackle the rest of the 100 endings in whatever order you desire. This felt awful throughout that first 30 hours. The marketing for this game centers around the ambition of having 100 different endings, the first tag on the Steam store page is "multiple endings," it's unavoidable to play this game without realizing that it has a bunch of endings. Knowing this, being railroaded through one ending when there are plenty of sections that *could* have been interesting choices feels so unsatisfying. Once you finish that ending, you are looped back to the start of the game, in which you have the knowledge of your first run through, and get to choose what you do with said knowledge. While interesting in concept, having Takumi be the bearer of this knowledge is awful. He still acts incredibly apathetic to everything going on, and frequently goes against the choices that you are finally able to make. When tasked with saving one group of students or another, he still went to try to save one from the group that I didn't choose, leading to worse situations for the party. Since it is not the true ending of the story, the first, required ending is very unsatisfying. There are some cool moments near the end of the game, but once the final antagonist is revealed and their motivations are laid clear, it was so comically bad that I could not take the game seriously. Especially when the song for the final boss was an overstimulating mess of a metal song that clashed with every other theme or vibe this game was putting off. Then, I went through my second route just choosing the decisions I felt were the best, and received nearly no new lore or interesting developments to the questions that were raised in the latter half of the first ending. I wondered if I just had missed something, and went back to the last decision on that route to see if I had just picked the wrong final choice. That is when I realized that there weren't even a hundred endings in this game. Most of the routes split out pretty early into your second cycle, and you get locked into a story around day 30. From that point on, any decisions you make will steer the story in just a slightly different direction, categorizing the endings into A or B routes, then AA, AB, BA, or BB routes from there. When all is said and done, there are only about 20 endings, with a few variations on each. The developers seemed to prioritize quantity over quality here, as these endings are also not written very well, despite the team of 10 writers. At this point, I gave up on trying to find things organically, and just looked up how to find some of the routes that I was most interested in. I ran into a locked route that provided more questions and stupid answers to questions I didn't remember having, then turned to what I thought would be a fun, silly route. Maybe I had just been taking the game at face value too seriously, and just needed to have fun with it. So, I went down the Cult of Takumi route in order to find the infamous screenshot that leaked before the game's release. I regretted that choice pretty quickly. Long story short, this ending made me swear off the game. I had witnessed the Kumasutra events in V3, so I thought that I was ready for what I had signed up for. I was not. //Content warning for sexual content and p3dophilia. Every character received an illustration of some sort of weird sexual activity with the main character. In V3, all of these goofy events were just described, not pictured, and it was played off as a dream. I was still uncomfortable with a lot of those scenes, don't get me wrong, but these ones are much, much worse. Not only are the characters coerced into these sexual activities through the use of a "pheromone enhancing drug," Several characters are shown nude, several are barely censored, and nearly all of them are supposed to be underaged high schoolers. Unfortunately, this also included the underaged middle school members of the cast. They were weird and incestuous throughout the entire game, but coercing them into receiving a sexual "reward" from the protagonist is extremely predatory, and should not have been present in this game, much less illustrated and given its own scene. Due to this scene, I stopped playing the game, uninstalled it, found out the answers to the questions that still somewhat piqued my interest through some wiki diving, was disappointed in the results of my findings, and started writing this review. Before I did this route, I was determined to give the other main endings a shot, and see why people enjoyed this game as much as they did. Having experienced it though, and realizing that just by making a few decisions earlier in the game that have nothing to do with the content of it, that anyone could stumble into that god awful route, I swore off the game entirely and will likely never be supporting Tookyo Games' future efforts. I regret supporting them by buying and playing this game for as long as I did, but I figure that going through it as much as I did just strengthens my argument for why I hate this game as much as I do. Games should not leave me feeling angry and upset, and regretting the hours of my life I spent playing it.