The Hundred Line -Last Defense Academy- sees players hold the line and save humanity from mysterious invaders! Read our review to see what it did well, what it didn't do well, and if it's worth buying

The Hundred Line -Last Defense Academy- Review Overview

What is The Hundred Line -Last Defense Academy-?

From the creators of Danganronpa and Zero Escape comes The Hundred Line -Last Defense Academy-, a strategic RPG adventure for Nintendo Switch and PC, developed by Too Kyo Games and Media.Vision Inc., and published by Aniplex Inc.

The story follows Takumi Sumino, an ordinary teenager living in the Tokyo Residential Complex, where life is predictable and uneventful—until grotesque monsters suddenly attack, throwing the city into chaos.

Now, alongside 15 other students, Takumi must defend their academy for 100 days while uncovering the truth behind the invasion. Gameplay blends turn-based strategy combat on a grid-based system, where each character wields unique skills, with a Visual Novel social aspect that allows players to explore, build relationships, and make impactful choices—shaping the game’s outcome through decisions that carry lasting consequences.

The Hundred Line -Last Defense Academy- features:
　⚫︎　Narrative Developed by the Creators of the Danganronpa and Zero Escape series
　⚫︎　Tactical RPG Battles
　⚫︎　Has 100 Endings
　⚫︎　15 Characters with Unique Abilities

For more gameplay details, read everything we know about The Hundred Line -Last Defense Academy-’s gameplay and story.

Digital Storefront
Steam			Switch
$59.99

The Hundred Line -Last Defense Academy- Pros & Cons

Pros	Cons
100 Endings, Over 100 Hours of Playtime Eccentric and Likeable Cast of Characters Twists and Turns You Won’t See Coming Visuals That Pop Off the Screen	Persuasion Minigames Are Meh? Lack of Voice Acting for Moments That Could Benefit From It

The Hundred Line -Last Defense Academy- Overall Score - 90/100

The Hundred Line -Last Defense Academy- turns Kodaka’s flair for over-the-top personalities and Uchikoshi’s head-scratching timelines into a kaleidoscope of 100 endings that practically beg for late-night theory-crafting. Battles are quick, stylish, and deep enough to reward those who can fully make use of its mechanics, and Komatsuzuki’s art splashes every scene with his distinct visual flair that brings the characters to life. It isn’t flawless; it can get repetitive and some aspects of the gameplay are often… just there, but its combat and magnetic cast keep the momentum crackling until the last siren sounds.

The Hundred Line -Last Defense Academy- Story - 9/10

From the minds behind Danganronpa and Zero Escape comes a game that fuses many of the best elements of those two series. Freed from Kodaka’s killing-game leash, the cast flourishes into one of the developers’ most endearing ensembles. Though they can sometimes be insufferable, especially when they're all together and seem compelled to offer page-padding commentary, the game’s branching routes, likely influenced by Uchikoshi, leave you craving to discover more and play through all one-hundred endings.

The Hundred Line -Last Defense Academy- Gameplay - 8/10

The Hundred Line’s combat presents a risk-reward loop that incentivizes being aggressive and embracing death. The variety of character abilities and the Voltage meter creates exciting and fast-paced battles that feel as impactful as they are satisfying. It may not be the deepest strategy RPG out there, but the game’s clever systems and escalating challenges keep encounters fun and feel like bite-sized puzzles.

The Hundred Line -Last Defense Academy- Visuals - 10/10

Visuals in The Hundred Line strike a balance between style and substance, with fluid animations and character art that make every Voltage attack feel like a spectacle. The cutscenes, too, deliver high-impact moments that are as visually engaging as the characters themselves. Rui Komatsuzaki gave each student a memorable look that reflects their personality with a touch of eccentricity. It’s genuinely hard to tear your eyes away when a cutscene starts or when blood starts pouring out everywhere.

The Hundred Line -Last Defense Academy- Audio - 9/10

Masafumi Takada's music is exceptional, a quality matched by the superb voice acting in The Hundred Line. From Darumi's manic and comical performance to Takemaru's outbursts, the voice cast imbues their characters with remarkable intensity. Joseph May also manages to create a surprisingly deep character in Sirei, despite his visual similarity to Danganronpa’s Monokuma. However, a weakness lies in the group interactions, which often feel less dynamic due to many of them lacking voice acting. Characters groan, grunt, sure, but adding more could have significantly improved the experience.

The Hundred Line -Last Defense Academy- Value for Money - 9/10

The Hundred Line offers a depth of content far surpassing what you'd typically expect for its $60 price. With 100 branching endings and hours upon hours of content, the game continues to reward players long after they believe they've reached the end. Yes, it's a niche title that requires a specific taste, but those who give it a chance will undoubtedly find it worth the investment.

The Hundred Line -Last Defense Academy- Review: Danganronpa and Zero Escape’s Love Child

When Kazutaka Kodaka and Kotaro Uchikoshi joined forces to found Too Kyo Games back in 2017, the announcement carried the kind of promise only two of Japan’s most idiosyncratic storytellers could conjure. Kodaka has made his mark with Danganronpa and its sociopathic mascot, while Uchikoshi has turned heads (and twisted brains) with the metaphysical spirals of Zero Escape. Both are creators obsessed with extremes: life and death, truth and delusion, game and reality. So when they declared their intent to create games outside the bounds of convention—"a game that can only come off as insane," Kodaka mused in 2023, back when it had the working title of Limit x Despair—people took notice. And, really, it was only a matter of time before the pair’s creative DNA mutated into something wholly new and yet eerily familiar.

The Hundred Line -Last Defense Academy- feels like the culmination of that union—a love child of their greatest hits. It’s part tactical RPG, part visual novel, and entirely Too Kyo (Too Crazy). Kodaka, once again in the writer’s chair, trades in his usual high school murder mystery for something that looks, at first glance, straightforward—students defending a school from invasion. But, of course, with Uchikoshi as co-writer, it won’t always be that simple. Not when survival comes with a cost. Not when the very structure of time needs to be solved. Not when you’re replaying the same 100 days over and over just to get the best ending.

But like the Zero Escape series, it’s not the repetition that gets you. It’s how much worse (in the best way possible) events could unfold the second time around.

Stabbed Through the Heart, And Sirei’s To Blame

Takumi Sumino’s day starts like every other: eating breakfast with his mom and best friend Karua, going to school, and experiencing the low-grade peace that comes from living in a replica of Tokyo. The Tokyo Residential Complex is a megacity cut off from sunlight, designed for its occupants to live a normal life. But the illusion cracks whenever the klaxons wail. Those sirens mean Invaders—monsters that look like Dream Eaters from Kingdom Hearts 3D: Dream Drop Distance—and they’re hungry for whatever meager hope humanity still clings to.

Mid-panic, a plushie-sized mascot called Sirei—kind of like Monokuma—comes up to Takumi, offers him a knife, and tells him to stab himself in the heart if he wants both him and Karua to live. When Takumi does so, he is immediately covered in his own blood and given armor and weapons to combat the invading threat.

Victory is brief; in the next breath, reality folds, and he is blasted to the Last Defense Academy. He is not alone, however. Teenagers yanked from similarly dire moments stand shoulder to shoulder. Sirei has held them captive, and they must now survive one-hundred days of sieges and safeguard a MacGuffin buried beneath the academy if they ever hope to get back to their loved ones.

But if Kodaka and Uchikoshi have taught us anything, it’s that puppet-masters love a dangling string. Mysteries mutate by the hour, friendships bloom like bruises, and victory costs more than the last. Day by day, alliances calcify, betrayals blossom, and the question shifts from "Can we protect humanity?" to something much, much complicated.

"Killing game."—these two words cling to Kodaka’s résumé thanks to the popularity of the Danganronpa series. However, a problem arises from this structure: it doesn’t allow players to become attached to the characters. Before their stories can even unfold, they are almost always already dead or being targeted by their fellow schoolmates. So it’s a small miracle that The Hundred Line doesn’t spend its time forcing its cast to murder each other for a mascot’s amusement. Instead, Kodaka and Uchikoshi weaponize something subtler: time. One-hundred days, one ticking counter, and the promise that somewhere amid the cafeteria gossip and monster sieges lurk a truth big enough to sow uncertainty in our characters.

The game wears its Danganronpa and Zero Escape influences proudly: lurid color pops, bite-sized chapter breaks, and a rogues' gallery of hyperbolic archetypes. Rui Komatsuzaki’s (character designer for Danganronpa and Tribe Nine) art screams here, and the script wastes no time letting personalities ricochet. Takumaru flexes his muscles and looks intimidating but has the kindest heart of all 15 students; Darumi brings to mind the psychopathic characters of Danganronpa; Kurara waltzes in with a tomato mask and an aristocratic sneer. They're all characters you'll grow to like over the course of the game, even if they won't stick out at first.

Admittedly, I found these characters to be insufferable at the start, especially because the game frequently has, almost always, each one comment on every unfolding event. But their personalities bounce off each other so well that you can’t help but want to hear what they have to say, however brief they may be. Kodaka’s hallmark exaggeration is here, but these students get more room to breathe, bicker, and bond. In fact, the absence of the routine corpse-discovery sequences of the Danganronpa series makes their character moments land harder.

The End is Never the End is Never the End is Never—

But this is also, of course, a story written by Uchikoshi. The initial ending is only actually the beginning. Branching choices start carving parallel timelines, flashbacks twist to reveal vague answers to earlier questions, and things begin to look like they’re straight out of Zero Escape or AI: The Somnium Files, flow-chart and all. The deeper you dig, the harder Uchikoshi’s mind-bending insanity comes to fruition. And just when you think you’ve got a handle of the core mystery, Uchikoshi pulls the rug from under you yet again! They’re the kind of twists that make you want to dive into forums and build theories upon theories with other players.

When the developers said that there are a hundred endings in this game, they weren’t kidding. All of them, even those that lead to an immediate bad ending, carry their own weight and feel as though they serve a purpose, as like Zero Escape and AI: The Somnium Files before it, one ending can provide you with the necessary information to unlock events in another route. Each route reframes earlier scenes and layers heartbreak or catharsis where once there was comic relief.

This is what makes The Hundred Line so fun to play: you almost always have something new to unlock, discover, or obsess over at 3:00 in the morning. Having reached only twelve endings so far, my playtime already clocked in at almost a hundred hours, and unlocking more could very well double that time.

Barebones Social Links and Social Stats

This isn’t all the visual novel elements that The Hundred Line has to offer, though. Certain days usher in "Free Time," a concept familiar to devotees of the Danganronpa series. Yet, these interludes resonate more akin to the Social Links of the Persona series. Here, you are given plenty to do for the day. You can dive into a VR combat simulator to rack up Battle Points (BP), which you can use to upgrade your characters’ abilities, go outside and scavenge materials, or wander the school halls and socialize.

Don’t expect Persona-levels of soul-searching, though. Chats here are simpler: you swap anecdotes and unlock an "interest" keyword for that character. You can then use these keywords to make something in the Gift-O-Matic, an anything printer that accepts raw materials from the outside world and spits out presents tailored to each student’s eccentricities.

Materials come from your expeditions outside school grounds. This plays like a bite-sized board-game, where Takumi and three other characters hop across a grid. Movement is governed by a hand of numbered cards, and with each node triggered, your inventory swells. These treasures are then brought back to fuel the Gift-O-Matic’s processes. As your bonds with classmates deepen, so too rises your "Grade," a metric akin to Persona’s Social Stats.

Yet, not every facet of the game’s visual novel elements gleams. Intermittently, the narrative introduces "Persuasion" minigames. Though they’re charming at first, these encounters vanish entirely in the latter half of the game. These segments have the vibes of Danganronpa’s class trial minigames, but they lack the intellectual rigor and challenge. They’re not offensively bad, but they’re not as compelling as the other parts of the game either, especially given the immediate opportunity for retries upon failure.

Despite this, however, these Persuasion segments illuminate aspects of the characters you seek to sway and give you glimpses into their motivations and personalities.

Be Acquainted With Death

Unlike Danganronpa and the Zero Escape series, however, The Hundred Line also incorporates tactical RPG elements that, while familiar to the genre, possess its own distinct feel. Every turn grants a modest pool of Action Points, but everything depends on how you splurge them. Characters can defend, dash to a point outside their movement range, or attack enemies with their class-specific abilities.

Layered atop this is the Voltage meter, which is akin to the Limit Break bar from Final Fantasy VII. Every action nudges it a little bit. Max it out and you get to unleash a widescreen special move, or bank the charge for buffs that can flip the tide of battle. Hovering near death unlocks "Last Resort"—kamikaze attacks that trade the wielder’s life to immediately perform the special move. Because of these mechanics, combat encounters almost always rewards getting aggressive and sacrificing characters along the way for faster clears. Don’t worry, though, as unlike Triangle Strategy or Fire Emblem, there's no permadeath here; they get revived immediately after the fight.

The best part about these battles is that their complexity escalates without being overwhelming because new toys debut at narratively logical choke points. One chapter sees you defeating three bosses all at once; another introduces teleport-spamming snipers. Battles organically grow in length, difficulty, and overall scale, especially once you’ve gathered all the students to fight.

Given the narrative’s nature, however, some inherent drawbacks do surface. The combat encounters are undeniably fun, yes, but they can succumb to repetition—a familiar pitfall for games boasting a hundred-hour playtime.

Fortunately, when venturing down alternate routes, you can bypass the majority of these encounters, save for a few mandatory ones. This mitigates the issue to some extent, which is crucial considering the number of routes that necessitate revisiting certain scenarios repeatedly.

Is The Hundred Line -Last Defense Academy- Worth It?

Yes! Even If You’re Not a Fan of the Danganronpa or Zero Escape Series

Collaborations this audacious usually collapse under their own hype. Instead, The Hundred Line -Last Defense Academy- feels like two fever-dream auteurs pouring their heart and soul to a single game. Yes, a $60 price tag can sting for a niche game in the age of subscription smorgasbords, but I believe value here is measured in the late-night "just one more route" spirals and coffee-fueled theory threads, not just the hour count. My first clear wrapped up at around 60 hours, but I wouldn’t exactly call it "finishing the game," as there were a hundred more endings staring me in the face, and the true ending lies in going through most of them.

More impressive, though, is the studio’s gamble on this game. Too Kyo took loans to birth The Hundred Line. Instead of releasing a half-finished game, they stuck to their original vision and gave it polish. The result radiates passion; you see it in the cutscenes, the branching routes, the crack of a Voltage finisher.

For fans of Kodaka and Uchikoshi’s previous works, purchase is a foregone conclusion; this is them at their most deranged. For newcomers in the genre, I’d say you’ll still get your money’s worth here, for when the final siren echoes and the hundredth day closes, you won’t remember how many BP you spent or which dialogue branch unlocked which route—you’ll remember the feeling of a game that believed in itself so fiercely you started believing, too.

Digital Storefront
Steam			Switch
$59.99

The Hundred Line -Last Defense Academy- FAQ

Who Are The Hundred Line -Last Defense Academy- Characters?

　⚫︎　Takumi Sumino
　⚫︎　Darumi Amemiya
　⚫︎　Eito Aotsuki
　⚫︎　Hiruko Shizuhara
　⚫︎　Nozomi Kirifuji
　⚫︎　Ima Tsukumo
　⚫︎　Kako Tsukumo
　⚫︎　Kurara Oosuzuki
　⚫︎　Gaku Maruko
　⚫︎　Takemaru Yakushiji
　⚫︎　Tsubasa Kawana
　⚫︎　Shouma Ginzaki
　⚫︎　Kyoshika Magadori
　⚫︎　Yugamu Omokage
　⚫︎　Moko Mojiro

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The Hundred Line -Last Defense Academy- Product Information

Title	THE HUNDRED LINE -LAST DEFENSE ACADEMY-
Release Date	April 24, 2025
Developer	Too Kyo Games Media.Vision Inc.
Publisher	Aniplex Inc. XSEED Games
Supported Platforms	PC (via Steam) Nintendo Switch
Genre	Adventure, Visual Novel, SRPG
Number of Players	Single-Player (1)
ESRB Rating	ESRB M (Mature 17+)
Official Website	Official Website for The Hundred Line -Last Defense Academy-

L A R Opalec

Lloyd grew up bonding with his big brother over video games. While RPGs like Disco Elysium and Final Fantasy IX hold a special place in his heart, he's always up to try new genres.