It feels like a no-brainer for a collaboration between the creators of the Zero Escape and Danganronpa games to just be the biggest, wildest death-game crossover imaginable. Yet, to the credit of both developers, they’ve spent the last few years instead collaborating on projects that explore refreshingly different genres and mediums while still retaining a lot of the creative charm that made their breakout works so memorable. The Hundred Line Last Defense Academy is by far the magnum opus of their collaborative game works as Too Kyo Games. Blending the wild flowchart-storytelling of Zero Escape with the bombastic and absurd mystery thriller antics of Danganronpa is incredible enough, but doing so within such a different frame of narrative and with such an addictive gameplay loop has resulted in one of the most memorable games I’ve played in ages.
The Hundred Line Last Defense Academy reminds me so vividly of what might be my favourite game, Vanillaware’s masterpiece 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim. Like that game, this is a story and dialogue-heavy game that almost borders on being a visual novel, but mixes in just enough environmental exploration and tactical combat sequences to keep you constantly engaged.You play as Takumi Sumino, a high-schooler born and raised in a domed city that, to him, is incredibly normal. When that normalcy is interrupted by a sudden monster attack, though, he’s whisked away to a mysterious school full of other high school kids, and is soon told by a strange talking blob in a fedora that they’ll need to become a team of blood-powered combatants to fend off monsters for the next 100 days.
Despite the game being set in a locked-down school full of a dozen teenagers who don’t know anything about where they are or why they’re here, this is very much not another Danganronpa. The characters, which are designed by the same artist from that series, certainly make it hard to brush that comparison away. My early favorite was Darumi Amemiya, a manic pixie emo girl who is genuinely convinced they are trapped in a death game and riles everyone up with her delusions. Her fourth-wall breaking shenanigans serve as an early and appreciated warning – the game is aware of the comparisons it’ll draw, and that self-awareness helps drive the story into a realm of true sci-fi mind-warping ridiculousness that easily eclipses almost every twist and turn from that iconic death-game franchise.
What I especially love is how smartly the story and our character’s circumstances fold into the gameplay with battles that play out in the style of Fire Emblem’s tactical grid encounters. In a lot of games like that, you’ll meet characters and almost immediately recruit them to your growing army. In The Hundred Line Last Defense Academy, though, none of these characters want to fight at all. They’re scared, confused, and one of them is about to throw up. Instead of meeting new characters and immediately recruiting them, you spend a large part of the game slowly connecting with the other characters in your crew until each of them, for their own reasons, finally feels ready to join the battle and become a playable character. It’s a great touch that blends every aspect of the game without making one feel more important than the other.
Each of your hundred days of service in The Hundred Line Last Defense Academy play out in-game, just like the days ticking by in a Persona title. Some days will be focused on big narrative bomb-shells or battles against monsters, while other days let you freely explore your school-prison and do activities like training your skills or bonding with your favorite characters. Some of these days will also present you with major choices, which will lead to several different endings – literally one hundred endings, according to the creators of the game. I was never able to explore all of those, but just the path I took through the game on my own was full of so many twists, unexpected developments, false credits, and more that I felt spoiled by the end of my time with the game for how massive, winding and satisfying the story ended up being.
The battles, though. What I love about the combat in this game is that a lot of the encounters almost feel more like puzzles rather than brute-forced tactics battles. You fight on a small field where large groups of enemies come at you in very specific patterns. Figuring out the most efficient way to clear out those patterns each turn is a blast. On top of that, the game is so smartly designed in how it encourages you to stop overthinking things and just go all-out.
When a character takes enough damage, they can do a massive attack at the cost of dying right after it, but since characters come back after each battle and they gain additional additional experience and attack meter when you trigger these abilities, you’re encouraged to lean into this ability. The game wants you to shoot first and ask questions later, and it helps make each encounter go by just fast enough that it never feels like they’re getting in the way of your next story revelation.
The Hundred Line Last Defense Academy is so ambitious, and so absurd, and I had no idea what to expect from the game up until the very end – and sometimes didn’t even know if I was truly at the very end or not. It’s an accomplishment in storytelling that doesn’t force itself to re-tread the greatest hits from the games that came before it, but still incorporates so much of the same charm, mystery, and all-star writing that will make fans of those games call this one their new favorite.