55 hours into The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy, Too Kyo Games' visual novel turn-based strategy game, I encountered a particularly touching scene. Two characters, who a few days earlier learned something particularly shocking--one of several moments in the game that recontextualizes the whole experience--get up early and end up watching the sun rise together. It's a little moment of tranquility, of two people bonding over natural beauty amid a particularly rough string of days, and it landed beautifully. It felt like the game was tapping into something a little deeper, a little more melancholic, than what I'd seen before.
According to online estimates of the game's total length, at the point I saw this scene, I had another 90-120 hours to go until I could really say that I'd "finished" the game, depending on my speed and patience. The name The Hundred Line refers to the number of days the students of Last Defense Academy have to defend their school for as waves of invaders periodically force them into tactical combat. But the name actually has another meaning that you uncover once those 100 days pass for the first time, about 30 hours into the game: This game has 100 unlockable endings, and to get the full picture, you'll want to see all of them.
The promise of 100 endings feels like the sort of marketing mistruth that pops up in a press release to play up how much the game is shaped by your choices. A game that claims to have 12 endings might actually mean four endings, each with a few minor potential variations. And yes, some of the endings in The Hundred Line are kind of cheating, or are very similar to each other--not every ending is created equal. But there really are 100 of them, consisting of 21 different "routes" that can all end at various different points.
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