~This reviewer's headcanon of how this game was conceived~

Japan, late at night. Kōtarō Uchikoshi and Kazutaka Kodaka—the creative masterminds behind the Zero Escape series and Danganronpa respectively, among plenty of other fantastic games—are having one of their regularly scheduled slumber parties. Like a billionaire CEO begrudging having to pay his employees an extra $0.50 an hour, the darkness reluctantly cedes only a minimal few square inches to what their TV screen can illuminate. In this faint glow, one can see the outlines of a motley group of items strewn across the floor: gorilla glue, Playstation Vitas, and—it looks like someone was unsuccessfully trying to jam a baguette into a toaster?

At the heart of the mess sits the two figures, wearing jammies themed to each other's most popular game series, sharing a blanket and a game controller. They've just beaten 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim, and are staring—transfixed at the screen, mouths slightly agape and eyes dry from not blinking enough (lest they risk missing even a fraction of a moment of the game)—watching the credits roll. Several minutes pass in this liminal state before one of them is finally able to scrape words out of their throat.

“Bro,” says Uchikoshi in a full-body tremble, “We could totally make a game like this, bro.”

“Bro,” Kodaka responds with tears welling up in his eyes, “We totally could, bro.”

~Fade to black, cut to the actual review~

As ANN reported, it's been no secret that Tookyo Games—Kodaka and Uchikoshi's game studio—has been struggling financially, and that they're gambling a lot on the success of The Hundred Line -Last Defense Academy- (henceforth LDA). Combine that with the dedication and zealousness of fans of the pair's games, and previous discourse about the underselling of Zero Escape in particular, and you have a surefire recipe for getting people's attention—including, interestingly, the attention of Smash Bros director Masahiro Sakurai. What I'm getting at here is that the stakes are pretty high for this game, and just about everyone who's been paying attention to it knows that. But over the years, Uchikoshi and Kodaka have both delivered hit after cult hit—so the expectations for this game arguably reaches those same heights.

The game opens up in the Tokyo Residential Complex. It seems to be an ordinary day for high schooler Takumi Sumino and his childhood friend Karua, until an attack seems to be launched. As he tries to protect her, he's soon approached by some kind of weird ghost with a brain, who tries to get him to stab himself to unlock a power. He does, and he's able to defeat their attackers. The next thing he knows, Takumi is whisked away to an isolated school, located in the midst of what can only be described as total dystopia. The school is called Last Defense Academy, and it's here Takumi learns that he and his fellow students (who seemingly have been sent there under similar circumstances) have to protect the academy—or more accurately, what's inside it—for 100 days, and all of humanity is counting on them. Thus begins Takumi's new daily life fighting alongside his classmates, and trying to learn what he can about the strange situation he's been thrust into.

As far as gameplay goes, there's three main aspects: battles, daily life, and decisions. Starting with the battles, they're about as bare bones turn-based tower defense as you can possibly get. There's just enough variety in the playstyles of each student to be interesting, but you can't decide which units go where at the beginning of the matches, there's not a lot of variety in the types of enemies you'll face, and upgrading your combat is less about unlocking new moves as much as it is powering them up.

So basically, you're fighting on mostly just the same map, against mostly the same enemies, with mostly the same skills, and you can't even try to mix things up for yourself by readily trying new character combinations and experimenting with synergy. The battle gameplay is incredibly monotonous. It's not so much something you get to do, as much as it is something you have to do to get to the rest of the game. The only silver lining is that as you get (much) later in playthrough, you can automatically skip a lot of the battles—but at the risk of spoiling anything, I'll leave it at that.

But while battles are a regular enough occurrence, they're far from being an everyday thing—and speaking of days, Takumi has to get through 100 of them. So during your free time, you're generally either spending time with your classmates or otherwise finding a way to get chummier with them (or facilitating your ability to do so). Think, spending time with them, making gifts for them, or exploring the surrounding area for materials so you can make gifts for them—social links lite, if you will. And this was all fine; the stat-raising felt a bit more on the simple side, doesn't seem like it's as involved as it should be in other aspects of the game, and can be maxed out fairly quickly if you play your cards right. But the cast of characters we've been given is likable enough, especially if you like the kind of over-the-top character writing that Kodaka, especially, likes to use. And I had fun finding out which gifts everyone likes, and learning why they like the less obvious ones. I only wish that the scenes you get with them were more fleshed out, as they're generally on the short and sweet side of things.

That being said, exploration is by far my least favorite part of this game. Periodically, you have to explore the area around the school. Sometimes you do this for story reasons, other times you do it to gather resources that are mostly (although not entirely) for crafting gifts. The way it works is that the area is made to look like a giant game board in which you're moving across via randomized number rolls. The space you land on dictates what happens—usually it's either an enemy encounter or finding an item. But the problem isn't the format itself—the problem is how small the map is, and how it's not going to take nearly as long as you might think to travel across the board and collect all the special items. Sure, there're some roadblocks that prevent you from doing this right out the gate, but once you can move past those obstacles you really start to understand how small the map really is, and by extension of that, how little there is to do and how unengaging it is. Resource gathering, therefore, becomes a bigger, more sigh-inducing chore the further you get.

If I'm being perfectly honest, I'm not at all surprised that I'm not terribly impressed by LDA's battle and exploration gameplay. Anyone familiar with Uchikoshi and/or Kodaka's work knows that puzzles and choice-based gameplay is much more the sandbox that they like to play in. And because of that, for every bit I wasn't expecting much from battle gameplay, I was expecting a lot from the story and the choice-based gameplay.

It's nigh impossible to talk about the story and its branching paths with any level of depth without, once again, risking a tread into spoilery territory, because you won't encounter any choice making for a while. So suffice to say: the game reaches a turning point several—and I do mean several—hours in, after which, you start making choices fairly regularly. And in classic Uchikoshi fashion, there's tons of branching paths with an equally colossal number of possible endings. And I seriously can't emphasize the sheer volume of branching paths and endings—the gargantuan size of this game, in general, really—enough. To put things into perspective: LDA's demo encompasses the first seven days, and if online murmurings are anything to go off of, it seems to take most players somewhere in the neighborhood of five hours to finish. When asked on social media how much of the full game that demo accounts for, Kodaka responded that it's, “1%, or less than 1%.” He would soon elaborate in another post that, “the average time [of LDA] is 100 hours.”

As anyone who has played any of their games will tell you, neither Uchikoshi nor Kodaka is a stranger to experimentation and telling rich stories with twists and turns aplenty. But even by their standards, this game is exceptionally ambitious, and nowhere is that more obvious than the sheer breadth of the story. If you're looking for a game with a story that you can really sink your teeth into, look no further.

While I haven't been able to play the game to 100% completion, I've made it through multiple routes of the story so far, including a number of longer ones. I've played enough to confidently say that what I've experienced of the writing so far is great. The overarching story is really interesting, and Uchikoshi's involvement in writing it is apparent for any fellow fans of his work. My favorite aspect of the writing in this game is how, despite the sheer number of them, all the story paths that I've gone down have each felt wholly unique unto themselves. It's really easy for visual novels with so many branching story paths to inevitably have at least a few routes that feel similar to each other, or otherwise have a lot of paths that feel flimsy relative to the main one(s). But so far, all of the paths I've played have felt fully realized, which is staggering in a game with so many of them. This is to say nothing of how it makes for a really satisfying choice-based gameplay experience, as it validates just how much your choices matter.

If you've been reading all of this and thinking that LDA seems really 13 Sentinels-y to you, it's because it is. While I can see echoes of inspiration from a number of other titles, none are more apparent than 13 Sentinels (which itself takes a lot of obvious inspiration from Megazone 23). That said, as Kodaka himself noted in his earlier mentioned interview with ANN, there's a lot of (obvious) inspiration drawn from both his and Uchikoshi's previous games as well—and Detroit Become Human.

Bridging the gap between the sharp contrast in quality between the story and the gameplay, is production value with its own highs and lows. The highs being the stylish and quintessentially Rui Komatsuzaki-ian character illustrations (which, admittedly, don't look as good in 3D as they do in 2D, but still have some charm; not that it matters too much, you'll see them in 2D way more often), and a soundtrack that—while it doesn't seem terribly expansive—has some good songs in there. And the lows are the dub—the voice acting, specifically. This game isn't fully voiced—there's long stretches of dialogue in LDA where you just hear gasps and chuckles, and if you read quickly, it makes these segments sound like that montage of Randy Savage inhaling. But as for the segments that do have voice acting, well, a quick look at the cast list shows that only two members of the cast (Meaghan Jette Martin, who voices Kako, and Elsie Lovelock, who voices Kurara) have more than a small handful of roles in other voice projects (if they have any at all), so I'm hesitant to be overly critical of this dub. And to be clear, there are some solid performances within it (Sarah Pritard as Darumi springs to mind). But suffice to say, it's pretty apparent in LDA that most of this cast lacks in substantial voice acting experience.

While a significant portion of the gameplay (battles and exploration) leaves much to be desired, the meat and potatoes of this game is in its story-telling—and in that department, LDA doesn't disappoint. Quite the opposite, I've been consistently impressed at how fully realized each branching path feels, despite their vast numbers. The scope of this game is unlike anything either Kodaka or Uchikoshi have previously released. It's nothing short of a feat in interactive storytelling, and hopefully it'll allow their big gamble to pay off.