Playlog: Hundred Lines Last Defense Academy

Playlog #2

After about a year of playing on and off, I’ve finally finished all 100 (and 1, counting the first one). In total it took roughly 105 hours or so.

Core Mechanics

• This is basically a visual novel, there’s very little fun to be had if you are a “cutscene skipper”. If you enjoyed Kodaka’s other works like Danganronpa then you’ll be right at home.
• There’s a bunch of smaller “minigames” but are mostly a one-off thing, they feel mostly like an afterthought (+25)

Structure

• There’s 2 main parts of the game, the battling and the story itself
• The battling itself has a decent amount of strategy to it, and you can in fact easily lose if you’re not careful for some of them
• In my opinion though given how little variety there is it kinda gets old fast, luckily the 2nd half of the game lets you skip battles you’ve already done
• As far as the story goes, its standard visual novel stuff but with a Kodaka twist. Each ending belongs to a particular “route” which is centered around a particular storyline, each one is also explicitly named in the game’s flowchart. (+20)

Content

• The story itself is quite good, but not all the routes are really worth doing if you just want what I consider to be the “core” of the plot. Some of them basically lead to nothing and are there just for fun.
• Everyone has to play through Last Defense Academy 1 which basically acts as a very long prologue for the actual game
• Not Necessary: Serial Battles Route (PLEASE skip this one, the game forces you to play unskippable battles and it forshadows literately the tiniest thing), Box of Blessings, Conspiracy (does nothing but is very quick to do), Romance, Comedy, V’ehxness Route (mainly character building), Reset Route
• I would recommend playing through the prologue, then explicitly following a guide for the Last Defense Academy 2nd Scenario, then if you still want more start the S.F Route and follow a guide to unlock the pre-requisite routes while you progress through that. Everything else is largely optional IMO and is just for world-building. (12)

Technical Execution

Its fine overall. You can def. tell they didn’t have as big of a budget as Danganronpa to work with. There were some issues with leaving the game in suspense for too long on Switch but no major performance issues (+15)

Presentation

Was good since I’m a Danganronpa fan. I would’ve liked to see a few more tracks or at least variations in boss fights. It does get a bit repetitive after 100 times… Still a surprising number of lines were voiced so props to them! (+14)

(86/100)