Every so often, a game feels like it will be the breakout hit in a niche part of the video game space. Persona 5 revitalized a long-running RPG franchise and generally helped make unabashedly Japanese games feel cool again. Fire Emblem Awakening took a struggling strategy game franchise and reimagined it so successfully that Fire Emblem is now a marquee franchise for Nintendo. While The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy is a new game not part of a long-running series, it’s the culmination of the work of two niche yet beloved game developers.
Developer Kazutaka Kodaka is known for his work on the Danganronpa games; meanwhile, Kotaro Uchikoshi is known for directing the Zero Escape and AI: The Sominum Files series. Both of these developers’ works have respectable fanbases but haven’t gone mainstream in the same way something like Persona or Fire Emblem have. Now, the two are working together on a title for the first time at Too Kyo Games, and after speaking to them at GDC 2025 and playing the game for myself, this visual novel/tactics hybrid is shaping up to be a can’t miss experience.
“Do you like Persona?”
Like Persona, The Hundred Line is about a ragtag group of high school students who must band together to fight off otherwordly forces. The students in The Hundred Line have to do it against their will, though. They all live in a domed city called the Tokyo Residential Complex but are transported to a mysterious school outside of the complex, but are transported to the titular school and tasked with defending it for 100 days with the special powers they get by stabbing themselves in the chest with a magical sword.
It’s as weird as you’d expect from a game from the minds behind Danganronpa and Zero Escape, but it also shares those games’ strengths. Within moments of meeting each student trapped at the complex, they all felt instantly iconic and memorable. My favorites are Darumi, a deranged student who initially thinks the students have been summoned to the school for a Danganronpa-like killing game, and Shouma, a constantly self-deprecating kid with a frog hat who turns into a Gundam during a battle.
Most of these story moments play out in the visual novel half of The Hundred Line, which is where this game connects to the developers’ previous works the most. At GDC 2025, Kodaka and Uchikoshi boasted about how the game features lots of animated cutscenes, 100 expressive portraits for each student, and 100 endings that can result from the player’s choices.
Generally, they want The Hundred Line to offer a little something for everyone. From some, the story may play out in a very serious way. For others, The Hundred Line may become more of a comedy. Regardless of how the story shapes up for you, you’ll still have to fight off monsters in turn-based strategy battles.
While most strategy games deal with single units, this game focuses on having players take on larger groups of enemies with attacks that hit multiple tiles. Players use AP to utilize attacks from each student. Killing enemies builds up a Voltage meter, and once that passes 100% powerful special attacks can be used to deal even more damage.
Players will eventually also be able to use powerful attacks to sacrifice units in battles; don’t worry, though, The Hundred Line does not feature permadeath for unit combat. While The Hundred Line isn’t revolutionary for the strategy game genre, I enjoyed the larger scale of its battles. It’s approachable yet distinct enough within the RPG space that I think the game could both attract strategy game fans who don’t typically play visual novels to this game and give visual novel fans another reason to keep playing outside of the story.
If the game strikes that balance, it could become a surprise hit. As my appointment for The Hundred Line at GDC 2025 wrapped up, I had a humorous conversation that stuck with me. “Do you like Persona?” Kodaka asked. “Yes,” I responded. “Everyone who loves Persona will love this game too, so I want this game to sell the same as Persona. Please tell your friends.”
Joking or not, Kodaka clearly thinks The Hundred Line has the potential to break out in the same way the Persona games did. The more I play it, the more I’m starting to believe that there’s a chance of that really happening.
The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy will be released for PC and Nintendo Switch on April 24.
