HUNDRED LINE -最終防衛学園- Steam Charts & Stats

Saw all the endings. Truly a forever game. Innovative and slick, mechanically and in narrative. Feels like a movie saga in game format. Super gratifying no matter how you slice it, though, combat and pacing may grate on some.

I wanted to love this game, as I love the games that its main writers are known for (the Danganeonpa and Zero Escape series). The game has some good bits: some interesting characters and routes, and mysteries that have a good payoff. This game's main problems are its length and ambition: the game has more than 15 routes, each with many branching paths. These were written by many writers, and their quality varies greatly, and I unfortunately think the average quality is not very good. I also think the order in which you play them affects your overall enjoyment, and there is no way to know which routes are the best if you go in blind (like I did). The battle and exploration systems can be fun at first, but after a while they become so mind-numbingly repetitive the game added options to skip them. It is just too long for its own good, and it left me underwhelmed and a little disappointed.

I still want to find out how the story unfolds (and I probably will) but this game suffers both from some terrible side routes (that you won't realize you've stumbled into until you're already well into them) and absolutely atrocious gameplay segments, both this mindless mario-party-esque exploration segment and another mode which is basically xcom at toddler difficulty. Both have "skip" options but they still play out all of the animations of spawning the units and such that take an unfortunate amount of unnecesary time. Sometimes gameplay segments come back to back and it gets really tiresome because of how boring it is. Had to force myself to keep playing on several occasions. Overall wouldn't recommend this one. If you're still interested, I would say it's probably best to look up a guide so that you don't accidentally do any of the many bad routes.

I agree with almost all negative reviews that I've read. Ambitious ideas, poor execution. It's a really bloated mess of a game. Even with guides it takes a lot of time reading through the shitty stories to get to the good stuff. Even after completeing the game 100% there still were unanswered questions, and IMO some good ideas thrown down the toilet (Conspiracy routes for example). In almost 130 hours of my playthrough i saw one great plot advance ([spoiler]cointoss in S.F. Route[/spoiler]) and one good gag ([spoiler]Kurara's canned tuna head in Comedy routes[/spoiler]), half of everything else was pretty mediocre, other half was either above average of fucking atrocious. The "horrible truth" is just disappointing, just as Kodaka's routes overall. Uchikoshi at least tried to craft an interesting narrative, his routes are "the good stuff". Can't say much about gameplay. Not too long ago they've patched an ability to skip exploration and more battles, so it says at least about its repetativness (Glad I've started serial battles route after that patch, ffs). If I were to recommend this game: buy it only on sale, play it using guides, get to the S.F. Routes ASAP. P.S. in the first days of release there was a reviewer that forgave Uchikoshi for ZTD and Kodaka for DRV3. I can't find it now, so I hope OP just deleted it after playing it for a longer time. Because in 2016-2017 we, Kodaka and Uchikoshi fans, were eating good in comparison to this.

[h1] This Game Chooses Quantity Over Quality [/h1] It's remarkable that a game can have so much content and yet still feel so incomplete. Overall, I felt incredibly underwhelmed by this game. I believe it's not worth its price and that there are better alternatives in the genre. I'll start with the good: there are definitely likable parts of this game. Everyone will have their favorite routes and characters - I especially enjoyed the Retsnom and Killing Game Routes - and there are certainly many, many hours of gameplay. No one can deny that this is an incredibly ambitious project that a lot of hard work went into it. I just wish that the finished product of that work were more polished and concise. My biggest problem with this game is how clunky it felt. For one, it takes approximately 30 hours of gameplay to even reach the main game, which is a lot to trudge through, especially when your character actions are fairly limited for that timeframe - social links aren't unlocked yet, zero branching narratives, several of the (imho best) characters are unavailable for most, if not all of that time, but at least the battles are okay. I was excited to be done with that segment of the game so I could finally play what I thought I had signed up for - a narrative-heavy decision-based game - only for the main game to be, imo, even worse than route 0. Narratively, there's just a lot going on, but so much of it is either redundant, i.e. repeating word-for-word the exact same battles and encounters you've already had, or irrelevant, whether it's just a joke with no bearing on the game or touches on a potentially interesting aspect that will suddenly get dropped and never mentioned again. Having played through every route in the game, I still can't answer several important questions about the worldbuilding and plot that were hinted at and then seemingly forgotten. Sure, there are 100 routes, but so few of them actually add anything new or compelling to the story. I might be able to excuse that massive amount of filler if at least the main story were well-executed, but even the central plotlines were unsatisfying and the ending left the game feeling unfinished. Alternatives: If you're interested in the mystery/decision part of the game, I'd recommend Steins;Gate, Zero Escape, and/or 428: Shibuya Scramble instead. If you're interested in the battle/social links part, Persona or Fire Emblem is the way to go. This game tries to do both, but fails to effectively do either, churning out one-note characters and completely mindless battles with no strategy needed. Your money is better spent elsewhere.

Amazing story. Because of the scope of this game, the story can go in many varied directions. Obviously not every route can appeal to everyone, and there were some I actively disliked, but most of them were great. In my opinion there is only one real downside to this game: If you're looking for an engaging and difficult SRPG, this is not the game for you. There is no strategy here because it is so mind numbingly easy. You only get two difficulty options to choose from, easy and normal, and it shows. I have never been at risk of losing a fight, not even close. In fact, if you decide to upgrade anything to even midway level (units, potions, defensive material) you can take out most commanders within just 1 turn. On top of it being so easy already, there is also a whole system in place that allows you to redo a turn or wave if you so please; Needless to say I haven't used this function a single time. There are just no stakes and you can use their all out attacks in basically every battle/situation, even when it narratively makes no sense for you to be able to do so. Luckily the developers did listen to the community and implemented a Battle Skip option for battles you already completed in different routes. They actually made a lot of things skippable that were unskippable before (cutscenes, the endless morning announcements). Solid move since a lot of early reviews complained about this and it could get rather tedious after a while if you decided to play for lengthy periods of time. TL;DR Amazing story, amount of content matches the price. SRPG element way too easy.

Terrible dialogue, insufferable characters and unfun gameplay mechanics completely ruin what could otherwise be an interesting story. For every single conversation, the writers thought it necessary to shoehorn each character's singular defining quirk in, no matter how irrelevant it is to the topic, and how annoying and repetitive it gets. Here's how an average conversation goes when anything slightly important happens: - Someone introduces the issue - Mentally ill girl says something about killing games or battle royales - Assassin guy gets excited about the idea of murder - Spoiled girl says something arrogant, insufferable, and out of touch with reality - Samurai girl accidentally admits to masturbating with her sword again - Guy who hates himself says something relevant but expertly weaves into it how he thinks himself to be literal garbage - Guy who screams often, screams and punches himself or something, but it's actually because he is such a good guy despite looking like a yakuza, he is just passionate, and he also helps the elderly, okay? - Girl who doesn't care about anyone makes it clear that she doesn't care about anyone (she actually does, but will never show it) - Greedy guy makes it clear that he doesn't work for free - Guy who is into his sister says something obsessive about his sister - The sister is embarrassed but later says something about eating an extremely weird food combination, because god forbid a single character is without a weird quirk - Girl who gets the urge to vomit every 2 minutes, gets the urge to vomit - Wrestler girl makes outdated wrestling references - Guy talks about friendship, but gets a headache and excuses himself - The conversation ends with the protagonist and the main love interest doing nothing because they are as interesting as a cardboard box This happens over and over again, as this is the morning conversation in the cafeteria. Remember, there are 100 days in just a single route. There are many routes and 100 endings. You will see this same conversation so many times. If you played this game, you will recognize every character I made a reference to, because this is as complex as they got after almost 40 hours. Some of them got their character arc in that time and still did not change one bit (light spoiler: [spoiler]low self-esteem guy was objectively proven to be very useful but still feels the need to constantly talk about how much of a garbage heap he is. He is so insufferable that I can't understand how they thought this would be okay.[/spoiler]) At this point, I did not even get into the gameplay. All aspects of it range from okay to completely unfun (exploration). There is simply not a single mechanic that is fun, the best parts are merely tolerable. I love turn-based strategy games, but this is not doing it for me. I could excuse that if the story was enjoyable to read, but it is simply not. Many people praise the story, but to me, it is just inexcusable how terribly the dialogue is written. The overarching setting and plot could be interesting, but it is ruined by this rabid obsession with getting every character to make some unfunny quip about their singular quirk every chance they get. I also don't get this developer's obsession with mascot-like characters and monsters. The art style and character designs are so completely inconsistent because of this. Some characters look normal, and then there's Shouma. Also, the boss enemies look actually interesting, but all the common enemy monsters look like toys. I couldn't imagine anything less threatening. I honestly tried to like this. I really did. I finished the common route and gave up somewhere in the 2nd route. There is definitely stuff hidden behind hours and hours of poor dialogue. Maybe some people don't mind repetitive, shallow dialogue, but I found it insufferable. Each person will have to decide for themselves if it's worth it to go through all that to possibly arrive at something worthwhile. For me, it's not.

So I got this game primarily because I'm a huge Uchikoshi supporter & not so much a Kodaka supporter, though I do enjoy his work. I went into the game with as little information as I could and given all this, it can be easy to get a slightly skewed idea on how the game is supposed to work. This isn't an Uchikoshi game. It's a Kodaka game with input by Uchikoshi & it has a different set of rules than Zero Escape and AI Somnium. The routes do not all tie together... though some of them do (naturally, the ones written by Ushi), which can add a bit to the confusion. But aside from these select routes, Hundred Line is a VN where the decisions lead to multiverse stories which don't necessarily relate or even stay 100% consistent with each other. And unlike Uchi's games, you do not need to get all the endings to unlock a final route with a true ending. There *is* a true ending to this game, and it has no requirements. It could be the first ending you get if you make all the appropriate choices. Some may find this odd, especially if you were expecting something like Zero Escape, but this is how the game is meant to be, and once I realized this, I came to respect it and enjoy it a lot more. Yeah, it's pretty mixed. Some routes are amazing and others... not so much. Some very blatantly exist to pad the endings to 100. This is to be expected, and what matters is the strength of the characters, which I always dig in Kodaka's games... and just the overall experience, which... honestly, it may vary depending on what order you do the routes, which is ultimately a risk you take with this format. The canon route ended up being one of the last routes I came across, which gave me a pretty strong opinion on everything. But I can see how this would be different for someone who ended on, say, the Box of Blessings route... Still, on the whole, this game has some of the most tender and emotional moments I've ever seen in a Kodaka game. He's always had colorful characters, but I've never grown as attached to any of them as I had the members of the Last Defense Academy. And I can sincerely say that now that I'm done with the game... I'm really gonna miss them. ...and that's pretty cool :) The gameplay segments... the SRPG parts... are fine. They're fine. But I can't imagine anyone not deciding to skip them when they're 10% through the game. It's not like in AI Somnium of Dangan Ronpa where the gameplay segments include characterization and progress the story. In this game the SRPG just grinds everything to a halt. And the story is what the game is about. It's what people want to see. I know it was a hard decision for them to patch battle skipping into the game... but it was the correct one. It's wild. It's a huge time investment. Not everything works. But it's my favorite Kodaka game. The True Ending is up there with the final boss cutscene in Okami on videogame scenes that made me cry the most. I spent 131 with all these weird nerds, and it doesn't quite feel like enough... How can I not recommend it?

This game deserves a lot of praise. It offers dozens of wildly different scenatios with enough mystery and intrigue to keep you engaged, and the gameplay mechanics are easy to learn, but offer a lot of fun, satisfying ways to engage with. I clocked in 200 hours unlocking all routes and endings, and with each of them I had a lot of fun seeing the different ways things unfold. This isn't one of those games that grants the "illusion of choice", it really delivers. The devs took a big risk putting so much into this game that they had said they risk going bankrupt if it doesn't sell as they are a fairly small company. Trust me, if you play this game you'll understand why that would be a colassal shame when they can produce quality like this.

Talk about tripping right at the finish line and breaking your neck. I love Last Defense Academy, adore it, it was - for a brief time - my favorite Visual Novel. It's poetry is excellent, it's battle system functional and engaging - if not exactly XCOM in terms of strategy - and there are few enough games where having an encyclopedic knowledge of Eroges is critical to understanding the plot. It was made for me, and for 144 hours, I had never loved another piece of digital fiction the way I loved [i]Last Defense Academy[/i]. How could I not? And then it just stops. For a game with 100 endings, it's incredible how there's a tangible and notable lack of closure. While I respect the 'choose which one you like' approach (Killing Game, for the record), there's never the less a feeling that we're left [i]missing[/i] something. For a game so meticulously crafted, there's a lot of extremely important questions and unresolved emotional beats that are all aching for a 'Final Route' to cohesively tie the whole thing together. A big final battle, a big kiss, a twist to end all twists, and a [i]Climax[/i] that clearly denotes itself from the other 100 climaxes. Not an ending, but a [i]conclusion[/i], a closing statement. Instead, the train just peters out right in the middle of no where. One hundred endings, more questions than answers, and you being asked to make of it what you will. Any lesser game than this and I'd have turned against it so hard I'd be leaking venom through my keystrokes, but despite the sensation of having your favorite romance cut short before it's final season - call it getting 'Spice & Wolf'd' - I am left with more good memories than bad. The game's achingly sincere moments still sing to me, and likely will for a while. I somehow doubt we're getting a sequel in our lifetimes, but who knows. If [i]A.I: The Somnium Files[/i] can somehow get a continuation, maybe we'll get a [i]Two Hundred Line[/i], a final season, a closing arc. A big, stupid, bombastic finale to actually match the buildup. Weirder things have happened. I know; it's a bad habit to put anything on the future, but what can I say? I'm going to be holding out hope on that one.