Back in the 1980s, a manga called Drifting Classrooms. The story depicted a more viceral take on Lord of the Flies, the book that famously asked what if kids were forced to create their own society in the absence of one. In true manga fashion, though, Drifting Classrooms takes 1000 children and manages to kill all but about 100, with one scene where they attempt to crucify one of the kids still remaining with me all this time. When starting The Hundred Line: Last Defence Academy and making it through the prologue, this manga became the first and most obvious comparison that I could draw of children removed from society in a desolate land and forced to survive by any means.
Then I remembered that one of the writers, Kazutaka Kodaka, had explored these themes to the same degree in his previous Danganronpa games. It began to feel more like an expectation of that point, but it helps that he is so good at it. Factor in Zero Escape creator Kotaro Uchikoshi (Virtues Last Reward remaining one of the greatest experiences of my life), and you see the best of both writers shine through across a story that could easily overstay its welcome but doesn’t. The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy is a welcome addition to any Nintendo Switch library.
Ruins
The core of The Hundred Line remains what both writers are known for: a visual novel. While this isn’t a bad thing, I love the genre, it’s important to note that dialogue will outweigh the turn-based tactical combat that the game features. The player takes the role of Takumi Sumino, who comes into a blood-based power known as Hemoanima, something that allows him to transform into a superhuman soldier. This all occurs in a city called the Tokyo Residential Complex, which is some kind of artificial city. This matters because after receiving this power, he is transported to school in a real, albeit completely destroyed, city, seeing the sky for the first time, to fight a war against an onslaught of monsters. In these ruins of civilization, the narrative unfolds.
The Last Defense Academy, as it is known, consists of the kind of characters you have come to expect. An absurd cast like Shouma Ginzaki, who considers himself human trash, or the Tsukumono twins, who speak for each other often in a weird sibling relationship. Then there is Darumi Amemiya, who feels in part like the stand-in for Danganronpa‘s Toko Fukawa, and makes too many references to that series. Together, these characters will need to work together to defend the school and the secrets it holds, lest it fall and doom humanity for some reason you need to play to discover.
For its part, the school and the characters start in a place almost mirroring the Danganronpa franchise, with locked rooms, giant vaults, and a cute mascot leader. Quickly, though, the franchise decides to explore polar opposite themes. In one, it was asked if you could kill people you grow to care about, but here were asked if opposing personalities can unite for the greater good. In this regard, you can expect an engaging story filled to the brim with twists, turns, revelations, thrills, chills, and of course, kills.
There are, unfortunately, some pacing issues in The Hundred Line’s story that work against it at some points. Across the hundred days you need to protect the school, not all of them see you engage in fights. Some of them just allow you to rest and hang out with the friends you are making, or a few other extracurricular activities. Some days, though can see you start with a very long dialog scene that sometimes just sees characters rediscuss previous points made in more detail and little discovery. There is also a series of flashbacks that feel like they add very little to the narrative, that pop up and cut the narrative even on rest days. Other days go by quicker. Since this is a VN, the build into combat can be unpredictable, occurring mid-scene. If you had not taken the time to prep on your off days, you can be forced into challenging situations where you’re gonna have a bad time.
While The Hundred Line is not fully voice-acted across its hundred-plus hours, there are a lot of scenes that are, and they were very enjoyable, which I was expecting, but it’s great to see in practice. You’re dealing with absurd, larger-than-life characters, so you need big personalities to translate that, and the entire cast, at least in English, did not disappoint.
Fight, Die, Repeat
The crux of The Hundred Line is gameplay that sees you participate in large-scale tactical combat, where players move members of the Last Defense Academy along a grid to fight enemies. Most enemies can be beaten in one hit, with elite enemies taking more hits to defeat, and some strategy. For the main narrative combat, you can also expect a multitude of waves ending with a very challenging foe that needs to be beaten, along with the waves of charging monsters. Like I said above, there are limited windows to upgrade, and since there really is no way of knowing when the next fight will occur, these elements should not be neglected. Combat can be forgiving, thankfully, with even failure quickly getting you back into the fight, so there is some wiggle room here. That being said, combat can go from challenging to frustrating quickly if you’re not careful. Trust me, I made this mistake many, many times.
Characters, for their part, all feel unique in combat and how they ultimately participate. Most characters have as their base ability a multi-space hit, making combat more about spatial control, clearing out the abundance of weaker enemies before you move in to surround and finish the heavier ones. As you progress, though, you will get interesting twists on this formula, like a character that crafts traps, and another designed to draw and absorb damage. Characters can also unlock more abilities, though this can take some effort on the part of the player. It is worth it to do so. The best aspect of the narrative and combat is that death is baked into it. Dying on the field has the body recovered and revived for the next round, actually encouraging you to occasionally sacrifice a character for the greater good every now and again.
The Hundred Line uses AP that simply dictates turns, not who can move. To this effect, you could reasonably use the same character over and over, with there being a few times I found that to be the right choice. The game compensates for this with characters developing fatigue that severely limits mobility following a first use during a round. If you move them into a horde of enemies, this doesn’t really matter, as that character might be able to clear most over multiple uses of AP. This can make a group of enemies free to advance, though if you stuck all your characters on the opposite side of the field. Some characters can avoid this status, though, giving more depth to the strategy. Additionally, each character has power moves they can use, keeping them immobile for a full turn, forcing the player to juggle trade-offs.
Key combat moments in the story play out like epic fights for survival and make use of the entire cast of characters across a complex field with four core shield generates you are tasked with protecting. There are additional ways to participate in combat, such as training missions that use a set cast, or the City itself, which you explore through a game board. These characters are not stuck in the school; another way the initial comparisons to previous works in rebuked, with players traveling into the city for supplies and fights, should you want to or draw bad cards for that turn. You can only grab limited supplies, and the most valuable, BP, which is used to upgrade abilities, is very hard to find. It’s a fun side element, though you often never feel better off afterwards. Given that it eats up both blocks of your free days, failing it, or hitting a bad fight, or a random event that hurts your party, can force a retreat feeling like you have lost the valuable resource of time.
Free days in The Hundred Line generally feel like they aren’t enough. You get two blocks of free time a day, with the city excursions eating up both. Your character has stats in the form of a report card that allow for further upgrades to be bought, these upgrades to skills proving to be as close to a leveling system as you get. Upgrading a report card can take several nonstop days to gain one increase in stat, and there are a multitude of stats. Crafting a gift takes up one block and can grant you a higher yield of stats from your classmates, but it also might not if you give it to a person who doesn’t really care about it. Training missions yield the highest amount of BP, but even then, for higher stats, can require two or three blocks to earn one skill increase. The issue here is that skills also require certain levels of your passive states, making a constant tug and pull of what needs your attention and when. Thankfully, the game’s grinding never feels too obtrusive.
Verdict
As one would expect from two writers of the caliber that we have here, the story is the absolute best reason to play The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy. The characters deliver on the exploration of the struggle for survival in a world where you’re forced to govern yourself. This struggle plays out in two forms: the interpersonal relationship between the people in this school and those looking to destroy it. Both of these dynamics succeed.
Combat never reached the highs that the narrative achieves, but I also found that it never hit the lows that the pacing caused in the narrative either. It was safe in the middle. The characters’ varying skills on the battlefield, and how I found each one of them useful and valuable, helped every moment locked in the death struggle. There was some frustration on that front, but honestly, when you look back at the play-by-play, it’s easy to tell where you went wrong in there and where you can go right in the future.
Pacing issues prove to be the game’s occasional downfall, getting sidetracked by repetitive dialogue or heavily dialogue-heavy days that feel like they drag on forever. Free Days also prove to have some of these issues as well, with many things to do and the very easy ability to commit to an action you later realize wasn’t the best use of your time. These issues can hold the game back somewhat, but never to the point that I can’t recommend it wholeheartedly.
The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy is a great experience worth having, and a world worth getting lost in.
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Reviewed For Nintendo Switch, Also Available For PC
A code was provided by XSEED Games for the purposes of this review.
Developer: Media Vision
Publisher: XSEED Games (Nintendo Switch), Aniplex (Steam)
Release Date: April 24th, 2025
PROS:
+Great Story
+Enjoyable cast of characters and voice acting
+Engaging and Creative Tactical Combat
+Variety of things to do in between combat
CONS:
-Pacing issues
-Too little free time for the amount you need to do.
-A lot of Danganronpa references for a game not set in that universe.
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The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy
