The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy is definitely one of the year’s best but overlooked gems that fans will be screaming about come GOTY season. It’s both a mammoth visual novel with rippling decisions and a strategy RPG with around 100 endings, all rolled into one, and its creator thinks he can squeeze a few more routes into the already-massive romp.
In case you’re unaware, The Hundred Line came out earlier this year courtesy of Kazutaka Kodaka, the director of the Danganronpa series, and Kotaro Uchikoshi, the writer and lead of Zero Escape.
What makes it stand out in a crowded field packed with swell, high-school-set visual novels and sweeping strategy RPGs is all the wildly different, totally unexpected routes you can go down, which is essentially the game’s way of begging you to replay it – and it works! But despite already being packed with possibilities, it isn’t enough for Kodaka .
“We are working on bug fixes and improvements,” he responded to a fan on social media before saying, “As for me, I also want to do DLC with additional routes.”
Considering the game’s size meant “many countries declined to localize” it and the fact that it put the developer in debt, it’s pretty ballsy for Kodaka to want to go back for more.
The Hundred Line seems like the type of game that can eventually grow into a cult classic, though. On Steam, Last Defense Academy has over 4,000 user reviews, 89% of which give it a thumbs up. An eventual DLC might even give it some extra legs, fingers crossed.
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