The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy Demo

Play it on: PC

Goal: Ponder and pontificate

I fucking love Danganronpa creator Kazutaka Kodaka’s work.

The Danganronpa series is a foundational text for me, even as it has been turned into a distorted meme of itself in Too Online spaces. I’ve been keeping up with Kodaka’s projects since he left Spike Chunsoft, and while I enjoyed his team’s paranormal murder mystery Master Detective Archives: Rain Code and the cyberpunk anime Akudama Drive, I also started to get the unnerving sense that he might just have two ideas he likes to riff on, and that he’s maybe just been playing those hits ever since Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony’s meta commentary made a big stink about wanting to do something new. That feeling was only made more apparent when I played the demo of his upcoming game, The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy.

The tactical RPG shares an artist and composer with Danganronpa, and is somehow also about a bunch of kids getting trapped in a school and being threatened by a cartoon mascot. Though it’s not a murder mystery, it feels like a new Danganronpa game, just without all the lore necessary to prop up a death game. Despite its violent premise of imprisoned high school kids forced to fight in a war against alien invaders, it feels like comfort food from a team whose work I enjoy, even as it makes me wince when it leans into weird tropes I’m surprised that team hasn’t outgrown. I want to play at least a little bit more of the demo because its progress will carry over to the final game, but I’m mostly just curious to see if Kodaka has run out of ideas. — Kenneth Shepard