The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy

It’s an excellent and ambitious game, that has some pacing fumbles but the sheer quality of writing and the depth of possibilities more than makesup for it. With 100 ends each of which are rich with unique story content, the game is a real treasure that’s worth embracing for years.

The game has some interesting points, but in its current state it is too buggy to be marketable. There are major game-crashing bugs that make your save file unable to load (preventing game progress). I have the Switch version, Hong Kong region, and am stuck by one such bug that is supposed to be fixed by patch v 1.0.5, but the release of said patch here is over a month late so I cannot play the game. There are still many other bugs too. Do not buy this game, at least until a lot later when it stabilizes. I will not be buying anything first-round from this maker again. They do not know how to properly make a bug-free game or to fix the bugs promptly. Update: They eventually released the update, and the game is now stable (Switch v1.1.2). Overall, the game is mildly interesting with some good moments, but there are also plenty of routine and fillers.

The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy is a unique experience for fans of visual novels and tactical RPGs. With a deep narrative and multiple endings, the game offers an engaging journey, though its long duration and repetitiveness may be obstacles for some players.

Well, I like Weeby stuff. I guess I am moderately Weeby but this game is so far past my threshold for cringe that it is completely ruined by it. Even when I knew noone could see what was on screen, I still felt embarrassed even though I was alone. The character writing in some cases is absolutely awful. After a while some new characters got introduced and not only did the level of cringe continue, it got worse. Graphically it's nice. It's a bit paper cut out like 13 Sentinels but without the horrible clunkiness of that game. OST is alright. I remember thinking a few tracks sounded nice but none stuck in my head, or had me looking for them on youtube. Gameplay is great. Grid based battles that are simple to get to grips with and fun. The outdoors sections of the game that look like a cheap board game aren't much fun. It's like Danganronpa vs Fire Emblem but without the charm of either. It was a really dumb move from the devs to ruin this with such ridiculous characters. They even manage to make the guy from Final Fantasy 10 seem palatable, they're literally that bad. Two in particular a little round kid and a brother, if you've played, then you'll know. I'm gonna keep this spoiler free though. If you haven't played Fire Emblem Three Houses and Danganronpa, then there is absolutely zero point in getting this inferior mixture of the two. Just play those instead. Anyone with a Switch should play Three Houses anyway, it's the best Switch game. 100 Line was a potentially top grade game, ruined by idiotic writing.

I've played enough to know that the gameplay is fun and the art style (although hasn't changed much from the Danganronpa days) is still unique and stylish. The story is something I want to enjoy but in my few hours with the game, I've already noticed some localiser changes that makes me highly doubt how authentic the experience is to the original Japanese script. There are a lot of references and terms that are used that wouldn't have equivalents in Japanese. There's an art to translating scripts between languages and cultures without making large changes to the characters and plot. From what I've seen from the English version when I compared it to a stream of the original Japanese version, they've not done a good job at all. There's a lot of Gen-Z speak and current day reference terms that just aren't in the Japanese version. One line where a character said something on the lines of "you'll get pwnzored" was just Hai aka yes in the Japanese version. My advice is get the Steam version and wait for the inevitable fan translation patch that'll fix all of this. This way you'll get an accurate idea of the story and the character personalities. After all we're aren't we paying for the developers story and not some localiser who thinks they can rewrite a plot better than the original game script writers?