The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy is one of the best games of last year, earning numerous accolades as a result of its impressive narrative swings. But on top of being an ambitious visual novel, it’s also a strategy RPG. Games like Fire Emblem have conditioned players to be very precious about keeping their parties alive, but The Hundred Line actually has multiple mechanics tied to sacrificing characters on the battlefield, and the story of how the team at Too Kyo Games decided to build their game around that idea is pretty interesting.
In an interview with Automaton, Hundred Line gameplay director Akihiro Togawa talked about how he came in after much of the game’s storyline, about teenagers defending a school and serving as humanity’s last line of defense, had already been settled on. Given the game was being led by Danganronpa creator Kazutaka Kodaka and Zero Escape lead Kotaro Uchikoshi, Too Kyo wanted the game to be both fun and challenging enough for strategy RPG fans, but also accessible enough to the pair’s visual novel fanbase. Plus, the battles had to feel tied into the game’s overarching themes of self-sacrifice, and that led the team to the idea that sacrificing teammates during battles could be the answer to all of the above.
As I read through The Hundred Line’s script, I kept coming across words with a bleak feel to them, like despair, immortality, madness and war (laughs). And among them, the word that really clicked with me was “死守” (shishu, “to protect with one’s life”).
Essentially, The Hundred Line is a game about protecting the Last Defense Academy at all costs. If you look up “死守” in a dictionary, it means “to defend something with the resolve to die.” However, The Hundred Line has this setting where the characters fight with the resolve to die, but even if they actually die, they’re just resurrected in the infirmary. So rather than fighting with the resolve to die, they’re forced to keep defending the academy even after death. I thought that was the true thrill of the game.
Once I realized that this is a game where even if a character dies, they’re still forcibly made to protect the school, I suddenly thought, “This is the exact opposite of Fire Emblem.”
In Hundred Line, each battle is broken up into multiple waves, and your team is revived in between each. They’re also able to do more actions per turn for each enemy you defeat, and one of the ways a character can rack up value is by defeating multiple enemies in one turn, typically through either solid positioning or using their ultimate ability. One way to use a character’s ultimate is to sacrifice them, taking them off the field as a sort of all-powerful last stand called the Last Resort. It’s diametrically opposed to what a lot of SRPGs entice players to do, and it plays into the larger story of the students being “expendable” in the eyes of their superiors. Games like Fire Emblem have permadeath modes that make every incoming hit sting, whereas The Hundred Line takes the opposite stance, making death just another tool in your toolbox.
“I imagine there are many players who don’t want to let their characters die,” Togawa says. “But as they keep playing battles, the feeling of, ‘Actually, it’s easier if I let this character die’ catches up with them. I was really happy watching people play the game on streams and seeing that happen. Everyone was sacrificing their characters and turning them into tools, and I was delighted to see that.”
There are basically no downsides to sacrificing your characters like this in The Hundred Line, but Togawa says that at one point in development the team considered having some kind of karma system that would change the story as you killed off characters, with doing it more often having an increasing impact on the narrative, but doing so would have added more variables to an already branching storyline determined by player’s narrative choices, so the idea was scrapped.
“If killing characters caused the story to branch, though, it would become less about your choices and more about your skill at the game,” Togawa explains. “For less experienced gamers, there could also be situations where they accidentally let characters die and inadvertently trigger a story branch, simply because the game is designed so that you become stronger the more characters die. That would have gone against the concept. Precisely because we wanted this to be a game where the player’s own choices were what mattered, we designed the combat so that it wouldn’t affect the story.”
The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy is out on PC and Switch, and if you haven’t played it and are a big fan of elaborate, narrative-altering routes and choices, I cannot recommend it enough.
Too Kyo Games’ next project is Danganronpa 2×2, which is being made alongside the murder mystery’s original developer, Spike Chunsoft. The remake will include a new storyline with different culprits and victims, as well as a modernized retelling of the original tale.