The Hundred Line May Have Saved Its Company From Going Under

Earlier than Too Kyo Video games launched The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy, the tactical RPG/visible novel hybrid that’s, for my part, secretly one of many dark horses for 2025 Game of the Year, co-creative director Kazutaka Kodaka had been fairly candid in saying that the studio wanted the sport to achieve success, lest it go bankrupt because of the quantity of loans it took to get the venture out the door. After two-and-a-half months and a whole lot of constructive phrase of mouth, it appears like the sport might have pulled the corporate out of the crimson. The truth is, it’s doing so properly that the studio is planning so as to add extra routes to its already intensive branching timeline.

In an interview with Bloomberg, Kodaka mentioned that The Hundred Line’s prolonged improvement threatened to finish the short-lived studio. Too Kyo Video games was based in 2017 after Kodaka and co-founder Kotaro Uchikoshi left Spike Chunsoft following the success of the Danganronpa and Zero Escape franchises. Within the years since, Too Kyo Video games has launched a number of initiatives that captured the person leads’ inventive kinds, however The Hundred Line actually looks like extra of a melding of the minds than the rest the corporate has put out. It has Danganronpa’s signature faculty life social sim parts, after which its second half reveals an elaborate, multi-route branching storyline that may result in considered one of 100 endings like a power-boosted Zero Escape. For such a small staff, it was a wildly bold venture, and that’s why it took 5 lengthy years of improvement and a few monetary favors to complete. Now, Kodaka says that the sport is promoting “fairly properly,” and he doesn’t see chapter “as a severe future” for the corporate.

So now what? Too Kyo Video games has put out its dream recreation and it’s doing properly. By no means one to draw back from his ambitions, Kodaka says he desires to increase The Hundred Line’s life for an additional decade by including new storylines with patches and expansions, nearly like a live-service recreation.

“I attempted to purpose this recreation to be like Cyberpunk 2077 or Grand Theft Auto On-line,” Kodaka informed Bloomberg. “I would like it to be the open world of ‘situation’ video games.”

The Hundred Line begins out with a fairly normal visible novel construction. You play as a squad of highschool college students pressured to defend an academy from alien invaders in an effort to guard a weapon hidden inside its partitions—the important thing to humanity’s survival—for 100 days. After these three months and alter are up, another stuff we gained’t spoil goes down that places the sport on wildly divergent paths, with every route helmed by completely different writers. Consequently, each path is markedly completely different than the others, although there may be one route that unveils the sport’s complete fact if you know the way to search out it. Every of those routes has a number of endings, a few of that are clearly “conclusions” whereas others learn like “unhealthy ends.” Given the buck-wild instructions a few of these routes go, it doesn’t seem to be a lot is off-limits when it comes to style and tone for The Hundred Line. So if the studio pulls from a rotating steady of writers, I can see the sport staying recent for a number of years. Now that Too Kyo Video games is in a greater place to assist its newest launch, it feels secure to hope for the sport’s future, in addition to the studio’s.