55 hours into Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy, also a visual novel turn-based strategy game from Q Games, I encountered a particularly touching scene. The two characters, who had just learned something particularly shocking a few days earlier—one of several moments in the game that reshapes the entire experience—quickly dress up and end up watching the sun rise together. It’s a small moment of peace, two people bond over natural beauty in the middle of a particularly special string of days, and it lands beautifully. It felt like the game was tapping into something a little darker, a little more melancholic, than anything I’d seen before.
According to online estimates of the game’s total length, at the point I watched this scene, I had another 90-120 hours until I could truly say I would “finish” the game depending on my pace and patience. The name refers to the last defense academy students have to defend their school as waves of attackers force them to strategize from time to time. But the name actually has another meaning that you first uncover after 100 days, about 30 hours into the game: There are 100 unsolved endings in the game, and to get the full picture, you’ll want to see them all.
The promise of 100 endings feels like the kind of marketing that pops up in a press release to play up how much the game is your choice. A game that claims 12 endings may actually mean four endings, each with some minor possible variations. And yes, some of the endings in So Line are like cheats, or too similar to each other—not all endings are created equal. But there are really 100 of them, including 21 different “paths” that can end at a variety of different points.
At the point that these two characters took in Sunrise, I had seen eight endings. I was still good for five hours from getting my ninth (although the 10-12 ends were unlocked within an hour after that). Finding these endings revealed new information about the game world: the paths leading to these endings showed the characters in a new light, and many of them set new corners of the game world or revealed new temptations. They were goofy, sad, a little creepy, and alternately funny and tragic. Different characters died each time, and the emotions I felt were different on each one. As I wrapped up this path, which I believe is the closest thing to a “canon” ending to the game, I knew I would keep going, and knowing everything I learned at the end would deepen my understanding and appreciation of the many paths I still had to take.
Hundred Line: The Last Defense Academy is co-directed by Kazutaka Kodaka and Kotaro Ichikoshi, best known for the Danganronpa and Zero Escape games respectively: two series known for their big twists, hyperactive narration, and penchant for killing off cast members. This new game has it all, too, and throws in a pretty decent Fire Emblem-style battle system on top. That’s not to mention bonding stats for each individual student, a board game-like “exploration” mode, or RPG-style character stats and loadouts that you can gradually adapt as the game progresses.
In general, in games that promise a story through your choices, a big appeal is the concept of reaching the end and experiencing the end of a story you’ve co-authored with the game’s writers and designers, finding a conclusion that represents the path you’ve taken through the experience. Maybe you’ll play again and make different choices to experience some different scenes. More likely you’ll just take it as a given if you whatnext time the story will be a little different.
So Line takes a different approach: it’s your own adventure story, but with the need to hold a finger back to the page where you made your last choice if it doesn’t cause you to make your last choice, you have a clean timeline that lets you revisit every choice in the game.
The most empowering thing about this game is that your own choices don’t matter, because the best way to play the game is to make them all and see each outcome. Sure there are some paths that give you more information or a deeper story, endings that feel “good” or “bad” or some shade, but there’s no sense of punishment, or some story beat is denied because of your choices.
There’s a rare, exciting feeling that I don’t often experience with games of this scale: the feeling that the developers managed to push their exact vision to the end. So Line is the kind of game that no business strategist or market expert advises a company to make and release in 2025. It’s a huge game, with no extras, no clue on storytelling, a $60 price tag and a lot of weird themes: it could be a potential recipe for disaster, especially when it relies on 3D models for its strategy and co-op systems. It’s a game that a lot of media and influencers are going to be a little intimidated to touch, because it’s so long and text-heavy.
So Line took more than five years to develop, and the script—which had to be something in the ballpark of a million words—would make localization extraordinarily expensive, especially when you factor in the voice acting. In a pre-release interview with Nintendo lifeKodka admitted that if the game didn’t sell well, the studio “could be done” after taking out loans to fund development. A week after the game came out, Blusky, in response to a fan on Kokoda described that the company was “still on the verge of going under.”
And yet, the Soline has been a success. By July, three months after launch, the game was selling enough that Kodka told Bloomberg, “I don’t see bankruptcy as a serious future.” Exact sales figures haven’t been released, but it looks like Q Games also put a lot of time and effort into this risk paying off.
Part of this, I think, is that Kodaka and Ichikoshi have built up a good will with their previous series: Danganronpa and the Zero Escape series amassed a global fan base over a long period of time. So Line is also unsettling in a way that’s undeniable and extraordinary: the sheer size of the thing is intriguing, far more so than a game that offers, say, 30 different endings. It also helps that the tactical battles are quite enjoyable, with enough depth and originality that it never hurts to go into battle.
Beyond all that, though, the story-telling in Hundred Lines is—boiling a lot of work into one simple emotion—great, great character dialogue, fantastic voice acting, and lots of “ifs” if you could explore, lots of “whats.” The characters are all interesting, developing and deepening over time, and seeing how they change and adapt to the different storylines you can explore and it’s interesting how the game manages to maintain consistency across different paths is impressive.
As reports of developers tightening their belts continue as the industry moves toward more conservative, proven tactics to turn a profit, it’s heartening to see a company take a huge risk to create something huge and unusual, and then pay off. Even without that context, though, So Line will still be my favorite game of 2025. It’s an amazing feat of narrative design, a truly wild example of how much you can do with player choice, and one of the most ambitious visual novels ever created.
