When it comes to game studios that thrive on the personalities who founded and lead them, none are quite as exciting to me as Too Kyo Games. Founded in 2017, it’s a team that has spent the last seven years producing games and even anime based on the combined creative visions of three incredible figures of the industry – Zero Escape series director Kotaro Uchikoshi, Danganronpa director Kazutaka Kodaka and series character designer Rui Komatsuzaki. Since their careers skyrocketed off the cult success of the death-game focused visual novel thrillers all three spent years working on, they’ve developed a variety of other projects that have either been exciting advancements of the ideas from their prior works or entirely new visions altogether. None of these have been a major breakout hit on the scale of Danganronpa or Zero Escape, though. That fact and the common tone of detective death-game mystery that runs through them all has made it hard not to see a game like The Hundred Line – Last Defense Academy, sporting familiarly zany character designs by Rui Komatsuzaki, and assume it’s just another one of those. After spending time with its demo, though, it’s clear this game is so much more than that.
For one thing, this isn’t another game about a bunch of amnesiacs locked inside a school. Our protagonist Takumi Sumino is a regular red-haired anime teenager living in the totally normal Tokyo Residential Complex – which is a place separated from the rest of the world by a giant overhead dome but don’t even worry about that. You also shouldn’t worry about the daily siren alerts indicating nearby monster activity – except one day, those monsters actually break through the giant dome, and amidst the chaos and bloodshed, a weird little mascot character approaches Takumi and hands him a knife – instructing him to transform and fight off the invaders by stabbing himself in the chest with said knife.
Soon after, Takumi wakes up inside a mysterious classroom with no idea how he got there (okay so I lied there’s a little bit of amnesiacs locked inside school in this one), and no idea why he’s surrounded by a bunch of other people. It turns out, the stab-yourself-to-transform deal was pitched to a bunch of other people, and they’re now all tasked with living inside this school and fending off any invading monsters for 100 days in order to save humanity. It’s a pitch that leaves far more questions than answers – both for the player and the characters wrapped up in it. This is the kind of mystery and intrigue that made the very first Danganronpa game so iconic – the story could go anywhere with how layered the mysteries of the game world are, and even after wrapping the demo up I could so the full release going in any direction.
Thankfully, the demo does paint a pretty clear picture of what you’ll be doing for each of those 100 days – and it’s a refreshing blend of tactical RPG combat, life-simulation hangout events, and environmental exploration that will hit hard for fans of Persona 5 or Fire Emblem: Three Houses. Tactics battles are pretty standard grid-based encounters, where each of your characters has a different shaped grid for their attacks – one character might strike in a straight line, while another hits in a wider cluster of grid squares. Each turn you’ve got a set amount of Action Points to spend to bust out your actions, but there’s a couple other options mixed in that keep things a little fresh. A Voltage gauge fills up as you attack, letting you spend a bar from it to either give a student an additional move or let them perform a special technique.
On top of that, though, characters can bust out an extremely powerful attack that comes at the cost of their own life – just for the battle, though. They’ll come back after the fight, and you even get additional level-up points from that sacrifice, encouraging a risk-reward balance where you’re tempted to axe your characters in every fight to grind out as much upgrade currency without losing so many characters that you can’t actually win the battle. I was surprised by how much this one mechanic improved the excitement of every battle for me – basic RPG bouts suddenly became resource management mania and I was addicted to min-maxing every encounter I could.
The demo for The Hundred Line – Last Defense Academy is an extremely small slice of the full cake, but it’s already promising to be a more feature-rich and varied experience than prior titles from the creators involved. I’m excited to see just how far this game goes when the full release arrives in April.