• Price: $59.99 USD (digital & physical)
  • Digital Deluxe Edition: $69.99
• Developers: Too Kyo Games, Media.Vision
• Publishers: XSEED Games (Marvelous), Aniplex Inc.
• Release Date: April 24, 2025

A review code was kindly provided by ONE PR Studio on behalf of Too Kyo Games, Media.Vision, XSEED Games, & Aniplex. We thank them for allowing us to cover something they’ve worked so hard on.

Content warning: Rated M; a TON of blood, death, “self harm” (stabbing self to unlock abilities), gagging/vomiting sounds, body horror, occasional sexual humor

Kazutaka Kodaka (Danganronpa series) and Kotaro Uchikoshi (Zero Escape series) have teamed up to create a new tactical RPG that tells a story of survival and despair. With such a strong team behind The Hundred Line -Last Defense Academy-, I was really excited to play it.

The game opens with main character Takumi’s internal monologue about how ordinary his life is; nothing exciting ever happens in the Tokyo Residential Complex, and everything stays the same. Of course, all this talk of normalcy and days “filled with peace and tranquility” has to trigger an event that changes that.

One day, monsters appear and brutalize the residents of the complex. A strange creature named Sirei offers Takumi the chance to save his childhood friend by presenting him with a dagger that grants him power when he stabs himself in the chest. It sounds crazy, but Takumi uses the dagger out of desperation; thankfully Sirei wasn’t lying, and he’s able to defeat the monsters.

He passes out after that battle, and wakes up in an unfamiliar classroom with people he doesn’t know. Sirei explains that they’ve been selected to defend the Last Defense Academy for 100 days using their newly discovered “Hemoanima” abilities. The individuals on this newly established “team” vary in their willingness to fight, but there’s no escape – and their defense of the school may be the only thing preventing the annihilation of humanity. 😱

As the story progresses, the enemy will invade the academy grounds and you’ll have to defeat them in turn-based tactical battles. Players can choose between 2 difficulty levels: Last Defense Academy mode lets you “enjoy the best of what the game’s combat system has to offer.” Safety Mode, however, restores party members’ HP and heals status effects at the beginning of every turn. You can switch modes whenever you want, with no impact on the story.

The tactical combat is pretty interesting; you get to decide on the actions for the entire team every turn based on the amount of AP you have. Once your team’s AP hit zero, you cannot have them use regular abilities anymore for that turn. You may end up not using every character in one turn as a result.

There are ways to gain additional AP in a turn, though. Defeating certain enemy units gives you another action, and using that AP to defeat another enemy could give you another (depending on the enemy).

Your actions add to the Voltage meter, which at 100% or higher enables you to either Boost Hemoanima abilities or to use a character’s Special Attack, which doesn’t cost AP. Each unit’s Special Attack differs in range and cool animations, but they can all hit multiple enemies at once. This means that even if you have 0 AP left in a turn, you can use a Special Attack to wipe out enemies that provide additional AP, further extending your turn!

Even better, if you’re strategic enough you can get your Voltage meter up to 300% and use several Special Attacks in one turn. When a character dies, that adds 100% to the meter. Usually it’s not great to have a character die, but in this game it can be a good thing! If they get below a certain HP threshold, you can choose to deliberately sacrifice a unit by having them use their Last Resort technique to kill a bunch of enemies.

I had a lot of fun manipulating the AP system. The game mechanics do slow you down a bit by inflicting Fatigue on characters who have used regular skills, which prevents them from moving more than one space again in that turn. Those units can still attack again, but they’re just limited to enemies in their general vicinity. Additionally, characters who use their Special Attacks are Stunned and unable to act again until the end of the next turn.

Battles can be fairly challenging because you eventually have to protect the school from enemies on all sides. They place a few units on each side of the school on the map to protect the barrier generators; if even one of them loses all of their HP you lose. You really have to consider which enemies you can defeat on all sides in a single turn to minimize damage to the generators and your units.

Another defeat condition would be losing all of your units. There are a few abilities here and there that allow the user to absorb enemy HP. But for the most part, there aren’t any healing items, and you don’t gain access to a healer until later on.

The good news is that everyone is revived in the next wave/phase of battle. If you are defeated, you can choose to restart the entire battle or just that wave, and you can also use the retry bonus that starts you off with a full Voltage Meter at 300% if you want.

Despite the dark storyline, I found The Hundred Line to be a pretty forgiving game as far as the battles go. There isn’t a leveling system or equipment management; instead, you just have to deal with upgrading your characters’ weapons to unlock and strengthen their abilities. (I did wish we could increase stats though – especially Nozomi’s HP!)

You get evaluated on your battle performance based on factors such as the amount of turns taken, how many enemies killed, etc. During your free time in between story battles, you can participate in training simulations as well. The BP you earn from each battle can be used for your weapons upgrades.

On days with free time, you usually get to choose 2 activities. Besides training and weapons upgrades, you eventually unlock the ability to craft helpful items for the battles ahead. To do this, you’ll require materials.

It’s possible to leave the school grounds and explore the surrounding area, although exploration takes up a full day of free time. Exploration takes place in a board game format; each space has an icon representing a type of material, battles, special items, and events.

There are different risk levels for each color on the board. When you land on a space, you’re given a prompt with multiple choice options that can either provide you with materials, heal some HP, cause you to lose materials, or lose HP.

The materials you acquire have different values, and sadly you’re limited to only 9 items per exploration. You have to decide if it’s worth the risk to continue exploring and try to get your hands on items with higher material values. If your party’s HP hits zero, you lose half your items so it’s best to end an exploration session early if you’re running low on HP.

Exploration tip: Once the character with healing abilities became available I took them with me for every exploration. Whenever any character’s HP got low I would deliberately land on the less risky battle spaces and fully heal my party members by the end of the battle. This helps you safely explore for longer periods of time! 😎

The higher you get in weapons and crafting upgrades, the more materials you’ll require. They may also require a minimum level in one of the Grade categories, which you increase by reading or interacting with your teammates, who are each associated with one of the categories.

Not everyone will be available to hang out with you in each free time slot. I wasn’t 100% sure on how the stat increases worked because they’re each divided into 2 sub-categories. Sometimes when I spent time with someone it would only increase the sub-category stat and not the main one.

You can also craft gifts for your teammates to increase your stats. A lot of the gift preferences are pretty obvious, but for some you’ll want to wait until you’ve unlocked more key words that provide you with information on what someone likes.

I really liked most of the characters in The Hundred Line. Although the atmosphere is quite grim overall, I still found myself laughing at some messed up humor. I probably wouldn’t befriend Darumi in real life, but her insistence on this being a “killing game” was creepily hilarious in a game setting. Takemaru was my absolute favorite character, as I tend to have a soft spot for the “tough guys” with secret hearts of gold.

Unfortunately it seems like the one-on-one character interactions are limited to brief superficial scenes in the first playthrough, and we only unlock “Bonding Events” starting with the second playthrough on. I wish we could’ve had them in the first playthrough.

I think we still get enough of a glimpse into each character during the first playthrough to get invested in their story, though. It’s very much recommended that you play through the game again; there are apparently 100 endings to see, and I’m definitely intrigued enough to keep going after experiencing a handful of them already.

I really enjoyed what I’ve played of the game so far. It can lean on some classic Anime tropes at times, and some parts of the story aren’t as unique as they could be. As mentioned further above, there is a TON of blood in this game. I consider myself pretty squeamish, but was okay for the most part. (You can skip the “transformation” cutscenes with blood.)

While there are a few things I would have adjusted here and there, I thought this was a high quality game with interesting ideas, such as the Hemoanima abilities. The localization was well done, and I noticed maybe 1 or 2 typos at most in a decent sized script.

I loved the artistic direction, with appealing character designs and nice event CGs. The English voice acting really brought out the character personalities quite well, in my opinion, and I also liked the soundtrack. (Japanese audio is available as well.)

Players who have played previous works by Kodaka and Uchikoshi may notice some subtle references to IPs such as Danganronpa if they pay close enough attention to the smaller details. This game often juxtaposes its dark elements with something bright, whether it comes in the form of creepy yet colorfully cute enemies or silly references and jokes.

If you like to play tactical RPGs with school life elements and appreciate darker stories with dystopian sci-fi themes, you may want to consider playing The Hundred Line -Last Defense Academy-. Check out the demo if it appeals to you! In the meantime, I’ll be working on obtaining the rest of the endings. 😎

8.5/10