The Hundred Line -Last Defense Academy-

I went into this game expecting to enjoy it less than I did with dangaronpa. DR had a lot of issues that were, for me, completely mitigated by the idea of a 5 chapter "closed-room" murder mystery. Despite the disappointing outcomes of some trials, danganronpa was the only danganronpa around. This isn't a danganronpa, but I've enjoyed this game far more than the DR and ZE trilogy. This game has good pacing, it has fun gameplay (though it doesn't last for the 170hrs I've spent on it), it has well-written characters and interactions, and most of all, discounting the (bit jarring) dump at the start, the game rarely pulls out a random plot device/point that don't make sense out of nowhere at the last minute of the story. Limiting character deaths and having multiple timelines helps a LOT to fresh out characters, which DR never got a chance to for 90% of the characters, and ZE was just okay at. Some timelines aren't really worth your time, and some of them don't meet the standards I laid out here, but there's enough content, GOOD content, in here that I think you'll find something you like. For every good scene in DR or ZE trilogies I've had to ignore an equally bad or uninteresting one, while this time I can finally take a deep breath and say: this game is good. None of this applies to Gaku btw.

Ok I've finally seen all 100 endings. This game is genius. Yes you should see all 100 endings. Candidate for game of the decade, even though the actual gameplay is among the least impressive parts of it. The story is that good.

This is a pretty lukewarm "Reccommended". Its definitely a Kodaka game, for better or worse. If you read other reviews, you'll notice something that comes up a lot as a talking point is the game's 100 endings. I've gotten 86 of them at the time of writing, which is a solid enough amount to give a verdict on what I think overall. The game itself is split up into a long linear section at the start, totalling about 30-40 hours depending on your reading speed. In this you don't have any real choices and go down a predetermined path. After this section is over, the game opens up and lets you start making choices for yourself, which will then branch off into their own individual routes that take you to one of the 100 endings advertised. While technically true that there's 100 points at which the story gives you the credits, to call each of them "endings" is something I'd call a stretch. At the tail end of a route you'll be given a choice, either choice bringing you to one of two endings within that route, though some handful of these are practically identical in their outcome or change so little that it doesn't matter much. Other times you'll just make a choice that leads to an immediate bad end that doesn't actually resolve the story, and you just go right back to pick the other option and actually continue down that route. There's about 22 distinct routes total across which these endings are distributed, and I can tell you that most of them are pretty mediocre or bad. The devs have gone on record stating that their writing process was to create one scenario from start to finish, then work backwards from there and introduce branching choices that lead you to different paths. Quite frankle, you can tell; 001 is the only ending in the game that I feel does an adequate job of playing on any sort of themes and resolving the story in a satisfying way. All the other endings leave far too many mysteries open-ended, introduce too many self-contained concepts that don't come up in other routes, or in the case of the routes Uchikoshi clearly wrote, have too many elements contained to a small collection of routes that don't actually have any impact on the narrative as a whole. A lot of these ending paths are undercooked, bloated, underdeveloped or just outright bad. I even had one branch where I noticed typo's and the writers forgetting critical components of their story, in other words, an ending path that didn't get a proper revision before being published. If you actually go through the game and try to see every path and ending, you'll get disappointed eventually- while I think some of the individual paths are compelling and well written, they just don't work on their own as a story and rely far too heavily on the game's structure- which would be fine if you actually needed every path to piece together the story, but you don't. You only need 001, and the choices to get there are heavily hinted at, so the game's pretty heavy-handed in guiding you down that path. So its honestly a good thing 001 is actually pretty good and compelling, all things considered. It has a clear vision, clear themes and unwraps the story in a way I thought was very satisfying and bittersweet. It also has the only instance of its "ending CG" being an animated cutscene instead of just a still image, which further reinforces it not only being the first ending to be written, but most likely the "True Ending" of the game despite what the devs would claim to the contrary. I think the game's worth playing just for the prologue all the way to 001. Oh yeah, and there's tactics gameplay too. Its pretty good. I don't think you're picking up a game like this for the strategy RPG element, but it does the job and outside of the one route where you do 30 fights in a row, it doesn't overstay its welcome. Pick this game up in a sale and do whatever you want with it, but my personal reccommendation is not to go for all 100 endings unless you just HAVE to know what happens down every path. Its ultimately a hollow experience and I think you'll be more satisfied just going for ending 001 and leaving it there.

Overall I would recommend it. The battle system is very fun. Its interesting and satisfying to chain party member deaths to fill your special attack meter. My main gripe with the combat is that it can be pretty easy most of the time. I rarely needed to set up defenses or use any of the power up items. The story was fun. No spoilers, but I do want to mention that its best not to get too caught up on some details. Overall I did find the story engaging for the most part, but I think its best to just enjoy the ride. It is very much a story written by the same guy that did Danganronpa. I did run into a few minor bugs. Three times during my entire playthrough all of the character sprites overlapped each other instead of being spread around the scene. I have some criticisms that I wont get into because of spoilers, but if you find the stories in Danganronpa fun you'd enjoy this too.

One of my favorite games I’ve played if you’re a fan of Dangenropa i highly recommend it

Voy a escribir en español porque tengo mucho que decir y el inglés no tiene el énfasis suficiente. Me ha encantado. Es un juego que presenta MUY buenas cosas, de buena forma, todo me parece bien, y los QoL que metieron después amenizan mucho más el tener que repetir lo mismo veinte veces. Ahora bien, no estoy satisfecho con como acaba el juego. No el final en sí, si no el como acaba. La forma de organizar los endings en su presentación de cara a acabar el juego. Esto en parte es culpa mía por mi orden en la toma de decisiones, pero a la vez, no debería serlo. No puedo decir más sin entrar en spoilers, pero fuera de eso me ha gustado mucho. Todos los personajes me parece que podrían tener más protagonismo, algunos más que otros, pero todos me gustan de una forma u otra. 9/10 Si tienes 200 horas de tu vida que no sabes donde ponerlas, este es un buen sitio.

♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ love this omg

瑕不掩瑜

虽然有些莫名其妙的end，但抛开好的部分以外的内容来看，总体上还算是一部良作。。。吧。。。吗？

If you're reading this, I highly recommend playing with Japanese voices on, as that dub is LEAGUES better than the English one and makes all the characters much more endearing. Trust me on this one. I've played this game to 100% completion. It is bizarre in the most complimentary sense of the word, as usual for a Kodaka game, not to mention massive. There are routes with incredible scenarios that I'll be thinking about for ages, and there are routes that just kind of suck, but there were more that entertained me than not. If you haven't already played a Kodaka title, there's an initial hump of getting used to the day-to-day pacing and weirdness of the characters that you might need to get over, but if you finish your first playthrough and are intrigued, you'll probably like the rest of the game too. I can say that by the end, I've gotten thoroughly attached to every single character, even the ones intended to be the most unlikeable. The combat is snappy, and eventually getting good at stringing together combos to clear entire waves of enemies in one turn is pretty rewarding. Being allowed and encouraged to let units die as part of an attack is a nice touch that supports the themes of the writing. It's also nice to be able to skip battles you've already done on another route, so they don't overstay their welcome.