Hundred Line is a game that is difficult to write about, in no small part because it was likely incredibly difficult for its creators to write. An all-star team with Danganronpa and Rain Code veteran Kodaka joining up with 999/VLR and Somnium veteran Uchikoshi, alongside the always talented Masafumi Takada on music and Rui's recognizable Danganronpa styled art and character design, Hundred Line is an incredibly ambitious project. A VN story told over 100 in-game days, with branching routes leading to 100 different unique endings branching across almost a dozen different genres and stories, with Kodaka's characteristic mix of insane ambition and considerable humility suggesting that any of the endings could be the preferred true ending of you, the player, not just his own route. While, obviously not all 100 of the endings on offer qualify, it is no exaggeration to say that Kodaka's ambition was truly met here and the variety of stories on offer is hard to even properly describe without a bunch of rote spoilers and lists. Romance, horror, comedy, mystery, a treasure hunt, the power of friendship, a killing game, only a madman like Kodaka would ever attempt a product this ambitious and succeed.
Again, this is still a difficult game to write about because of how much of it changes the longer you play. You are only offered that level of route selection after clearing the initial story, which will almost certainly take you somewhere around 20-30 hours. The usual Danganronpa structure is followed here: A group of students at an insane school are tasked with defending the school for 100 days against an army of vile alien invaders as humanity's last hope... probably. Don't worry about the amnesia, the mostly trustworthy commanding officer tells you, everything will be fine, just defend the school for 100 days, that's all you need to know! Why would you doubt this premise?! Anyway, like any Danganronpa game, the cast is varied across an array of neuroses and other assorted personal issues, and this initial arc has you confronting these issues, overcoming the initial mistrust, and forming a team to defend the school and humanity and uncover more truths about your peculiar mission. It is a tried and true formula, and it works, but the game's insistence on making this entire story last 100 in-game days and you, the player, having to experience every single agonizing day works against the pacing, leading to in-game weeks of wheel-spinning and stalling before bothering to advance the plot. It felt more exhausting than satisfying. And while the payoff in the second part was worth it, I feel the first story arc suffered from some of the design decisions.
This route is when you engage with the "gameplay" parts of the game most, and as with everything else, how you engage with these mechanics changes as the game goes on. Above all else, you should evaluate these as "the sort of minigames Danganronpa and Rain Code made you do to progress in the story, but less obnoxious" than games of themselves. The combat is presented in a turn-based strategy format borrowing a lot from the nu-XCOM, Metal Slug Tactics, and Into the Breach school of design of low health enemies and the decisions you make each turn typically being the area in which you make your attacks as the swarms of vile invaders march toward your defense point. You have more units than you have actions to move them, and much of your abilities are tied to a fun meter that you can sacrifice characters to use an ultimate attack and fill up, allowing for a lot of creative action chaining. The game seldom makes use of this and is content to give you more toys than you need to let you have fun with the brief break before the next story. Bosses are seldom interesting, just big fat things with 50-80hp instead of 1 so you stack enough buffs to swing for 11 damage twelve times and win in two turns. The upgrades the game offers only expand movement ranges, increase the fun meter fill rates, and at the highest level give +1 dmg, which provides some meaningful improvements without allowing you to outlevel and trivialize the combat even more than it already is. Make no mistake, the combat is fun and satisfying, but it does nothing mechanically interesting or challenging, so if you are seeking a Fire Emblem fix, you are unlikely to get it here. The other gameplay mechanic is less interesting: Exploration sends you out into the invader ravaged world ruins in a brain-dead simple board game. Either the plot makes you do this to get to a destination, or you do this in free time to seek materials. The game offers Free Time between story beats, but with the bare minimum to justify it. You can go talk to your teammates to fill an arbitrary stat meter that gates you buying combat upgrades or you can go run the Explore board game to get mats to buy those upgrades. (A savvy gamer will simply use Cheat Engine to acquire his fill of mats once he has done the Explore board game enough times to be tired of it.).
The second arc is when the true game begins, and, let me remind you, this is 30 or so hours in and after one end credits. The hundred days restarts and you are provided an enormous chapter select flowchart allowing you to select any day of either the opening route or the second one. The opening route remains entirely linear, but in the second route the story offers you a wide variety of decision points to branch the story in various directions. Save one team or the other team, kill this person, save this other person, the choices are natural and do not offer a lot of signposting except in how you might notice the narrator changing the tone after your choice. Every route leads you SOMEWHERE, so a guide is only needed if you should like to pick which route you experience, which is not a bad idea depending one what you are hungry for after the first route. Combat is all a bit harder, but once you have seen each route two fight the game starts letting you skip repeats, so you will spend 40 hours engaging with the combat and then 40 more hours skipping all of it, going back to how I explained how the game changes as you play. Much of what makes this experience interesting is seeing how many different authors provide different takes on the characters, narration, and overall experience. The comedy route, for instance, quickly starts devolving into the sorts of bits you would find in Danganronpa or Rain Code side content and the protagonist takes on a manzai straight man persona. A route where you get half your team killed early on leads to not just the protagonist falling into depression but a very gloomy story and the protagonist forming a bond with an appropriately gloomy character. There is an extended route where you simply lose to the evil aliens and the protagonist and the evil overlord debate for much of it. The players are the same but the deaths, heroines, rivals, and focused characters shuffle around the core concept of protecting the school from aliens, even to the point of ridiculousness where on multiple routes where the school itself is not safe. Most importantly of all, there are MULTIPLE fan service themed routes. Many of these stories would not work without a game so committed to acting as a vehicle for these stories, and that novelty is part of what makes them so interesting; some of these premises are goofy and unsatisfying on their own but as part of an ensemble game, the quantity and variety becomes a quality. If you ever finished one of these character ensemble VNs like Danganronpa and felt that you were still hungry for more stories with this cast of characters, maybe an alternate story letting the characters written off a bit too early a chance to shine, Hundred Line has you covered in spades. And, since each route is more focused on a specific thesis, the pacing issues of the first arc vanish almost entirely. But at the same time the skill of the writers cannot be underestimated; many of these stories offer completely diametrically opposed endings that are both perfect for the story being told. In Hundred Line, you can see the fruits of letting the writers off the leash.
Of course, letting the writers off the leash does not always work well. The first route stretched to fill 100 days, and many of these routes stretched to fit 100 endings. While several routes offer several really good endings and others have some great jokes for shitpost ends, several others are just bad choice dead ends to pad the count, and several routes are notably lesser in quality, with premises so insubstantial the writer has to skip dozens of days at a time to reach day 100 and even then it feels like he has just set up one plot arc. Still, no route goes unloved, all have unique CGs and voices, showing Kodaka's absolute disregard for the budget of any game he is working with.
Kodaka's humility has him insisting there is no true route, but that is a charming eccentricity. Both of the banner writers take their hand at a true route here that engage with the initial setup better than the other routes and establish the plot points other routes speed through. Kodaka, in his trademark fashion, provides you a twisted story that ends with a fundamental question about humanity brought about in the crucible of a horrible situation, and, in his trademark fashion, he cleans Uchikoshi's clock. Uchikoshi takes several routes to do... what Uchikoshi always does in every one of his games that all us reviewers must pretend to not understand because his trick is a spoiler of fairly serious importance to the stories he writes, but it is the SAME trick every damn time but FINE I WILL NOT SPECIFICALLY STATE IT I GUESS BECAUSE IT IS A SPOILER UNTIL YOU HAVE PLAYED TWO OF HIS DAMN GAMES AND THEN THE ONLY SPOILER IS WHEN HE WILL PULL IT. His arc spans multiple routes and is filled with multiple of his characteristic extremely precise goofy science terms, and the stark contrast between Uchikoshi's bloodless literary three card monte stunts while Kodaka's goofy but charming love of questions of humanity is extremely apparent here. Either way, Kodaka IS correct that you are doing yourself a disservice if you laser focus on these two routes and that the story offers many more satisfying routes than this.
I would be remiss if I did not mention the translation. The sheer AMOUNT of text in this game to begin with is mind-boggling, so the quantity of translation errors and intentional mistranslations is diluted by the scope of the sheer amount of content at play. Much of the game is rewritten and too often the discord-centric mindset of the translator has led to inaccurate translations where the translator has inserted himself into the work rather than translate accurately. Many of the worst examples of this are in the first few hours of play, but, beyond that, they are spread out such that you can go hours of reading and only see groan-worthy or eye-roll tier rewrites rather than horrific ones. The scope of this project is so huge that I do not think you can expect a retranslation, and the rewrites are not, to my knowledge, totally in the realm of Treehouse or 8-4's worst butcheries of games. There are no Trump jokes. There are no timely topical political grudges hashed out. I think the discerning customer can swallow what is on offer here. He, of course, should not like it or have anything but hatred for the criminals responsible, especially when Rain Code had no such problems, but I believe what is on offer fits within the realm of the tolerable.
On a related note, if you ever click the English dub, you're retarded beyond words.
Hundred Line is, if nothing else, a product of insane ambition and drive from a team of mostly talented writers and Uchikoshi. As far as I am aware, there are few VNs that have the immense narrative scope and almost certainly no VNs that have anywhere near the budgetary scope of Hundred Line. I still think Rain Code remains Kodaka's finest work, but if you have any interest in the work he does, you owe it to yourself to check out his passion project here.
