55 hours into The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy, Too Kyo Games’ visual novel turn-based strategy game, I encountered a particularly touching scene. Two characters, who a few days earlier learned something particularly shocking–one of several moments in the game that recontextualizes the whole experience–get up early and end up watching the sun rise together. It’s a little moment of tranquility, of two people bonding over natural beauty amid a particularly rough string of days, and it landed beautifully. It felt like the game was tapping into something a little deeper, a little more melancholic, than what I’d seen before.
According to online estimates of the game’s total length, at the point I saw this scene, I had another 90-120 hours to go until I could really say that I’d “finished” the game, depending on my speed and patience. The name The Hundred Line refers to the number of days the students of Last Defense Academy have to defend their school for as waves of invaders periodically force them into tactical combat. But the name actually has another meaning that you uncover once those 100 days pass for the first time, about 30 hours into the game: This game has 100 unlockable endings, and to get the full picture, you’ll want to see all of them.
Now Playing: The Hundred Line -Last Defense Academy-: Official Launch Trailer
The promise of 100 endings feels like the sort of marketing mistruth that pops up in a press release to play up how much the game is shaped by your choices. A game that claims to have 12 endings might actually mean four endings, each with a few minor potential variations. And yes, some of the endings in The Hundred Line are kind of cheating, or are very similar to each other–not every ending is created equal. But there really are 100 of them, consisting of 21 different “routes” that can all end at various different points.
At the point that these two characters took in the sunrise, I had seen eight endings; I was still a good five hours from getting my ninth (although endings 10-12 were all unlocked within an hour after that). Seeking out these endings had revealed new information about the game world: The paths leading to those endings had shown characters in a new light, and several of them had poked at new corners of this game world or revealed new lore. They’d been silly, sad, a little scary, and alternately funny and tragic. Different characters died each time, and the emotions I felt over each one were different. As I wrapped up the pathway that, I believe, is the closest thing the game has to a “canon” ending, I knew that I’d keep going, and that knowing everything I’d learned on my way to that ending would only deepen my understanding and appreciation of the many paths I still had to take.
The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy is co-directed by Kazutaka Kodaka and Kotaro Uchikoshi, best known, respectively, for the Danganronpa and Zero Escape games: two series known for their huge twists, hyperactive narratives, and penchant for killing off cast members. This new game has all of that too, and it throws in a pretty competent Fire Emblem-style combat system on top. That’s not to mention the bonding stats with each individual student, the board-game-like “exploration” mode, or the RPG-style character stats and loadouts you can gradually tweak as the game progresses.
Usually, in games that promise a story shaped by the choices you’ve made, a major appeal is the notion of getting to the end and experiencing the conclusion of the story that you have co-authored with the game’s writers and designers, finding the conclusion that represents the pathway you forged through the experience. Maybe you’ll play again and make different choices to experience some different scenes; more likely you’ll simply take it as a given that if you did, the story would be a little different next time.
The Hundred Line takes a different approach: It’s a choose-your-own adventure story, but instead of needing to keep one finger back on the page where you made your last choice in case it doesn’t pan out, you have a neat timeline that lets you revisit every single choice in the game.
The most empowering thing about this game is that your own choices don’t really matter, because the best way to play the game is to make all of them and see every outcome. There are certainly some pathways that give you more information or a deeper story, endings that feel “good” or “bad” or some shade between, but there’s no sense of punishment, or of being denied certain story beats because of your choices.
There’s a rare, exciting feeling that I don’t experience often with games of this scale: the sense that the developers were able to pursue their exact vision through to the end. The Hundred Line is the kind of game that no business strategist or market expert would advise a company to make and release in 2025. A game this huge, with no additional monetization, with a pointed focus on storytelling, with a $60 price tag and a lot of strange and challenging themes: It could be a potential recipe for disaster, especially when it relies on 3D models for its tactical combat system and numerous cutscenes. It’s a game that many media and influencers are going to be a little scared to touch, too, since it’s so lengthy and text-heavy.
The Hundred Line took over five years to develop, and the script–which must contain something in the ballpark of one million words–would have made localization extraordinarily expensive, especially when you factor in voice acting. In a pre-release interview with Nintendo Life, Kodaka admitted that if the game did not sell well, the studio “may be done” after taking out loans to fund development. A week after the game came out, in response to a fan on Bluesky, Kokoda stated that the company was “still on the brink of going under.”
And yet, The Hundred Line has been a success. By July, three months after launch, the game was selling well enough that Kodaka told Bloomberg, “I don’t see bankruptcy as a serious future.” Exact sales figures have not been released, but it seems that the risk Too Kyo Games took in spending so much time and effort on developing this behemoth paid off.
Part of it, I think, is that Kodaka and Uchikoshi have built up good will with their previous series: the Danganronpa and Zero Escape series amassed global fanbases over a long period. The Hundred Line is also audacious in a way that is undeniable and uncommon: the sheer size of the thing is exciting, more so than a game that offered, say, 30 different endings. It also helps that the tactical battles are quite enjoyable, with just enough depth and originality so that going into battle never feels tedious.
Beyond all of that, though, the storytelling in The Hundred Line is–to boil down an immense quantity of work into a simplistic sentiment–very good, with excellent character dialogue, fantastic voice acting, and a great many “what if” scenarios you can explore. The characters are all interesting, developing and deepening over time, and seeing how they change and adapt to the vastly different stories you can explore is fascinating–it’s impressive to see the game maintain consistency across different paths.
As reports continue to come in of developers tightening their belts as the industry shifts towards more conservative, proven tactics to turn a profit, seeing a company taking a huge risk to make something both enormous and unusual, and having it pay off, is heartening. Even without that context, though, The Hundred Line would still be my favorite game of 2025. It’s a breathtaking achievement in narrative design, a truly wild example of just how much you can do with player choice, and one of the most ambitious visual novels ever made.
