The Hundred Line has changed how I think about choice and consequences in games, and I can't put it back in the box

While some of the best story games tell a distinct tale that’s set in stone, videogames are able to elevate the format by involving you directly in the outcome of events. Committing to this as a developer is tough; do you limit the choice largely to the very end, ensuring the majority of your game is seen by everyone, or do you accept that your players might miss large chunks of what you’ve created? The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy commits to the latter in a way few games can get away with, and the result has wormed its way into my brain and wrapped itself around my very psyche.

One of last year’s most striking game stories was Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, which keeps its big choice until the final moment and delivers it masterfully, resulting in no clear right or wrong answer. But E33’s creative director Guillaume Broche was eager to not let The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy fall by unnoticed when its launch landed alongside both his own game and Bethesda’s Elder Scrolls Oblivion Remastered. Broche bemoaned the number of good games coming out at once, hailing The Hundred Line as “another great turn-based RPG made with love by an awesome team”.

The Hundred Line is almost too ambitious for its own good. I’ll try to avoid too many explicit spoilers, although some discussion of the general structure is inevitable here. It begins as a linear narrative of you defending a school from enemy attackers over the course of a hundred days, learning about your fellow soldiers along the way in a manner reminiscent of its two co-creators’ past works. If you’ve played Kazutaka Kodaka’s Danganronpa games or Kotaro Uchikoshi’s Zero Escape series, you’ll find plenty of familiarity here.

But then it all changes. You’re offered the chance to return to the very start, and play things out differently. By making choices at key inflection points, you can alter the timeline and change what happens. The Hundred Line wastes no time in emphasizing the ramifications here. By acting to save a character that died in my initial playthrough, I’m able to have them around for the rest of the campaign. While doing so, however, another member of the crew is killed (one of my favorites, as it happens), and I’m forced to accept this grim trade-off.

Simply recreating the same narrative with one character replacing another isn’t enough to be remarkable, however. Mass Effect pulled that one off through an entire trilogy nearly two decades ago. The Hundred Line doesn’t just swap out its cast; each branching choice can lead to entirely different playthroughs. Events play out that never occurred previously. Bosses you battled separately now attack together, or even merge into entirely new threats. Sometimes, this results in an entirely different outcome to the war; in others, it cuts your journey short, either in jest or with a completely straight face.

In one possible path, you’re captured by the enemy commander, a figure who you rarely get to hear more than a few words from at any other point, and find yourself locked in an extended series of one-on-one debates with her about the philosophy and morality of the war effort. In another, a particularly reluctant member of your team becomes your most ardent ally. Elsewhere, you and a confidant regularly slip away from the group to nurture a mysterious, alien being in secret. A foe you take prisoner can join the team, opening up new information about their background. In one of the less serious routes, you all leave the school you’re protecting and end up turning against each other in a battle royale-style ‘killing game’.

More importantly, every path builds on the character work that both Kodaka and Uchikoshi love to deal in. Your companions’ behavior can be dramatically different down each of the possible lines, but in every case it feels like a natural evolution of their personality based on what’s happened to them in this timeline. Some deliver major revelations about the state of the world; others are mostly comic relief. Not every route is a winner (I haven’t even seen the full complement yet), but a lot of them are – far more than I’d expected given the sheer scale of the project. The result is a cast I now enjoy more than almost any other. Only Final Fantasy 14’s Scions might have it beat, and I’ve spent over a decade of my life with them.

The Hundred Line shouldn’t work as well as it does. It brings together two creators whose work I have enjoyed in the past, and elevates their ideas to new heights. It’s ambitious to the point where developer TooKyo Games wasn’t sure it’d make its money back. Fortunately, it’s gradually grown into the success it deserves, with Kodaka recently suggesting in an interview with ‘Weeby Newz’ that he’d like to “keep expanding it into 200 lines, 300 lines, or even 400 lines”, building “a game people have never seen before” that could last for as long as ten years. Whether he actually follows through on that or not, I’ll never forget my time with The Hundred Line.

The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy is available on Steam, priced at $59.99 / £49.99. There’s also a demo you can download to get a feel for its characters and combat, although you won’t reach the point where it springs to life in quite the way I’ve described here. I don’t think everyone will get on with The Hundred Line’s grand-scale approach to storytelling, but it’s changed the way I will think about multiverse narratives and branching choices forever.