I hate Hundred Line. Thinking back over my life, I don't think I've really ever had a "least favorite" game, or really even thought that much about having one. The concept didn't mean much to me and perhaps I just never felt that strongly about something. But the more of Hundred Line I played, the more I developed a kind of intense, deep loathing that over time I concluded could only be satisfied by proclaiming Hundred Line my least favorite game. After living all the decades of my life, I finally have a game I will reflexively think of if someone ever asks what my least favorite game is. That's a bit of a dramatic intro, but it's also the bulk of what I want to convey. From this point on I'm going to seethe and try to analyze why this game failed for me on every single level, but this is mostly an intellectual exercise for fun and understanding. The real point is just that I hate this game, and what follows here is the rocket fueled by that hate. This will contain by default minor meta structural spoilers as to the route system, but I'll avoid spoiling the story in general until the story section. When I get there I'll give another spoiler warning. I will also mention Danganronpa a few times when making key points; you will want to have played V3 before reading the story section (I have a big warning there about that). 1) Not 100 Endings ----------------------------------------------------------- The thing I want to make clear first just so it doesn't get lost in the sauce is that this game does not in fact have 100 real endings. That was just whatever you want to call it: a flat-out lie, a marketing trick, an accidental deception, whatever. I know it feels bad to feel tricked or lied to by popular figures, and for reviewers to have either not completed the game or used deceptive language to hide this fact, but that's how the cookie crumbles. The game has 100 endings, but a good lot of them are as fake as they are in any game, making the accomplishment hollow. To be clear, the game still has impressive scope and a staggering amount of story content. The meta structure is that there is a strictly linear common route covering 100 individual days, then you begin at the start of the common route to do those 100 days over. You have choices that lead to different endings, resulting in a massive flowchart that eventually ends up with 100 ending nodes. There's a ton of text and a ton of content. The problem is just that not nearly every ending is particularly long or significant. There are multiple ways to view this depending on how we define "ending." The most common example reviewers mentioned was Fate Stay Night, where they distinguished the 3 main routes with the 40 bad endings. The problem I found is that a huge number of endings in HL can be viewed as equivalently to F/SN bad ends. This ranges to a bit where you are in a bad end with a 3 choice branch which each lead to three separate Bad Ends in a matter of minutes, to several instances where you make the wrong call in a combat situation and die instantly. Not kidding: I have footage of an ending lasting 3 lines, though unfortunately it's a major spoiler. Therefore I think there is a gradient to understanding here. If one wants to know how many endings there are after a Full, Legitimate Route, then I think it would be best to go into the game expecting 25-some Real Endings. If one just wants to know how many endings have at least like 30 minutes to 2 hours of story before them, then I may say go in expecting 50 endings. It only reaches 100 endings when you accept extremely short, meme "bad ends" like those in Fate Stay Night, which reviewers and the developers stated the game would not have. This puts the game in a tricky spot because the marketing, developers, and conceptual appeal of the game will all be pushing people to say there are 100 endings despite the fact there are not that many (hence the reviews actively disguising reality). So I foresee years of people arguing over this, with fans of the game saying it has 100 endings because they want it to be true, and others (sometimes other fans) having to correct them. How one interprets this is up to the individual. My personal take is that I don't really care that much, since any experienced gamer can go into a game knowing 100 endings is either a lie or a disaster. The actual quality of the game is separate from what the marketing and reviewers said, and I really don't mind short bad endings. They exist for a reason, and there's not a single time I got a 3 line bad ending and was upset or angry. This a problem that only exists due to deceptive marketing, and the only thing I dislike is the deceptive marketing, not that the game couldn't live up to an idea that's kind of terrible regardless. And at the end of the day, the scope of the game mostly lives up to the idea anyway. They just should have said there's 50 real endings or something. 2) SRPG Gameplay ----------------------------------------------------------- I'm putting off the story for a bit. Firstly, I must begin the SRPG Gameplay Section by saying that it's actually pretty good. It is well-made, fluid, has many original ideas, has many creative scenarios, and overall I anticipate the vast majority of players having a positive impression on it at the start. This includes myself, and while there are some problems it faces as I will get into soon, it must be noted that the game starts fairly strong (and to some the positives of the system will last until the end). There is genuinely tons of fun to be had at the start which you're getting new characters constantly, the maps are introducing gimmicks, and everything is new. It's good stuff. The first major problem is it's too easy, and I don't say that lightly from a position as a God Gamer. Almost everyone who plays the game will - past the start, as one unlocks options and characters - view the game on a range from Trivial to Almost Trivial, but never anything past that. This is such a severe problem that even pure casuals will often feel babied, and the only way to cope with this is to start doing personal challenges like beating every fight on turn 1 without taking any damage, which itself is really not hard. This is a problem twofold. One, this is a long game and trivial gameplay can only last so long; eventually, it just means you'll be taking the same simple actions every map. Two, it contrasts incredibly hard with the story of the game. The story is that this is humanity's desperate last defense against monstrous invaders, yet one will view them as punching bags and anything /but/ a threat. The lack of ludonarrative harmony is something I'll mention again, but this is seriously the type of game that /needed/ some kind of difficulty (or at least a broadly encompassing difficulty slider) for the story to work. As it stands, not only is it difficult to ever buy into the mood or threat of the game (it must be done by totally ignoring what you're actually doing), some of the writers of the routes even become self-aware of this and the characters start mostly ignoring the invaders or suggesting they aren't threatening. That can be devastating to immersion or taking the story seriously. To make matters worse, to talk a bit more about story/gameplay integration, the game makes innumerable compromises on the rare occasion when it wants to directly combine the two with a story boss or sequence. The most common form of this is a Super Deadly Boss having HP locked so it can't fall below 1, meaning you'll trivially win on turn 1 but then be forced to end turn several times without taking actions so the cutscene where the boss beats you can play. Then there may be a sequence where instead of having 10 duders you only have 2, meaning you can only defend 1 side of the school instead of all 4... fortunately for you, the enemy will choose to only attack from the angle you can defend, because otherwise you would just lose? There's just a lot of silliness where gameplay and story integration was done poorly. The amount of times you're stopped from one-turn killing a boss by a cutscene of the characters losing their mind over how they have no hope of winning is staggering. As some quick analysis on this, I found that it was something that bothered me GREATLY, but it's something that I think some will not be bothered by at all. Some won't get the boss to 1 hp in the first place before the cutscene, and others will be interpreting the story on such a way the gameplay is wholly irrelevant (i.e. they would not be more immersed if the gameplay matched the tone / presentation of the story). So one's mileage will vary here. For me, I have found that I view violating gameplay principles for story telling as a huge compromise that goes against what I would imagine to be the ideal of a Video Game having as much harmony between what you're doing and what's happening as possible. The moment the boss can't go below 1 hp for unexplained reasons, you're taken out of the world and see the developer's hand wagging its finger. Anyway. To scoot back a bit, I will do some analysis on /why/ the gameplay is so easy, and why some problems arise. First, you have limited actions, but killing enemies gives you more actions, creating a cycle where if you play well the enemy will just never move. That's kind of fine on its surface, but the puzzle of figuring out how to not give the enemy a turn tends to be pretty simple for reasons I will get into shortly, so in the end the enemy only gets a turn if you let them (or more likely perhaps: they get a turn but after you've decimated 90% of their forces). I think that something games should likely try to avoid at all costs is creating a situation where the player is so powerful the enemy never moves, because you only get so many opportunities to make systems that engage/challenge the player, and removing the entire enemy side from the equation is going to make that a lot harder. Second, you quickly get absurdly powerful options that feed into themselves. There's a system where your low-hp units can sacrifice themselves to do an ult, but they're revived in short order, and the ults are so obscenely powerful if you do even a couple of them the enemy will be almost obliterated, which is kind of an obvious contradiction. The danger of sacrificing a unit should be that you don't get to use them anymore, but as it stands sacrificing them means all the enemies are dead anyway, so the lost unit immediately get revived...? For this to work there needed to be far more enemies and/or ults needed to be far weaker. Third, the enemies don't evolve. Once you've done the common route, you've /basically/ seen everything the game has to offer save a couple of minor gimmicks and a couple of new units (which I myself barely used beyond the minimum since I already had incredibly powerful units capable of trivially decimating each map). There are basically no new maps, no new enemy types, no new bosses, no new gimmicks, no new anything. I would say this is a game with 10-15 hours of gameplay stretched over like 150 hours, though to be fair many of those hours are reading. Anyway, to wrap this up, the core systems are great, but they're so easy even very casual players are at risk of feeling unengaged, the gameplay doesn't evolve past the beginning, and there's immense ludonarrative disharmony. I think even with all this said the core systems could be said to be strong enough to carry the experience for many players, but there is an upward hill to climb here. 3) School Free Time / 100 Day Cycle / "Externalization" of the Invaders ----------------------------------------------------------- Ok, approaching the story more here. The next problems I found with the game is the 100 day cycle and how free time is implemented. Basically, the game covers 100 days, and aside from times where the MC is unconscious or when a minor timeskip happens, by god you're going to be going through each of those 100 days. I think this has pernicious impacts on the game in a ton of ways, and this will dig more into the story than the previous sections. The first problem is that each day begins and ends with a pre-scheduled announcement from the mascot character. This is used to good dramatic effect in certain instances, but the announcement is very slow, has a lengthy "bell ringing" animation once can't skip, and due to length of the game/routes, you will be seeing this literally 1,000-some times. One steam review I saw had a guy going insane and begging not to have to hear the bells anymore. Your mileage will vary on this, but I just had to get this out of the way first. The second problem, and more pernicious, is how the story develops into a predictable template where you go through an arc of inter-character drama and then you have an invader attack and then you go through inter-character drama. It's not entirely unlike the Danganronpa cycle of free time leading into a murder leading into a class trial leading into free time, but that cycle itself had thoroughly worn its welcome by the third game, and the Hundred Cycles line is significantly worse simply because the invaders are completely internalized. There was a bit of tension doing free time in Danganronpa since anyone you were talking to could be the next victim or culprit. Not so here, where the drama is essentially white noise - we are talking about a very extensive arc about a person eating someone else's curry and making them mad. The drama over this lasts for 10 in-game days or so. Then, once the drama resolves, like clockwork, the alarm bells ring and it's an invasion. You fight, probably get a new character related to the drama, and then it's back to free time. It's hard to completely explain why this works less well. I think in general it's very dangerous for stories to fall into very predictable templates/patterns; they're easiest to write, but once a player notices the pattern it becomes much harder to feel tension or surprise. The characters are shocked when the alarm bells ring - we aren't, because a drama arc just ended and new units are primed to join us. Furthermore, while Danganronpa is literally ALL about the death game, and the cycle itself is basically ALL about the death game (trying to prevent a murder -> investigating the murder -> finding the culprit), the cycle in Hundred Line is all over the place. It's (doing nothing -> dealing with an interpersonal drama spat -> fighting invaders). There's no harmony. I'll talk about this more later, but the fundamental issue is that this is barely a story about the monster invaders or defending against their attacks at all. You could cut the monster invasions and the school defense concept entirely yet still have a PRETTY similar game. This is because the bulk of time is about interpersonal drama, and the invaders have little real involvement in any story arcs or sequences. It would be trivial to cut them and just have the story be called Stuck In A School In Some Kind of Ruins and many things will play out very similarly. I'm kind of going all over the place here, but these factors are all connected. The games goes through 100 days, but since invaders only attack on certain days (let's say once every 10 days), that means most days aren't about the monster invasion. Which means there's a lot of dead time to fill. Which means there has to be a lot of personal drama unrelated to the overall plot. Which creates a template/pattern to the storytelling where we go from drama to invasion. Which doesn't work well since the invaders have little relevance to the day-to-day of the game due to ending quickly and so rarely inflicting any lasting damage on the characters or school. Imagine Danganronpa strictly only having killing games on Saturdays, and then no deaths happening most of the time anyway. The last thing to mention on this is the free time activities itself. It seems to me that there is little good about them. It's very Danganronpa-esque, of course, with the other characters placed about and a bunch of rooms to visit, but it feels tacked on. You need to raise your social stats to improve skills, but the social system is barebones and implemented poorly. There's optional battles you can do for extra money, but they're just as trivial as the main game and the last thing you want is to make yourself more powerful. There's the FUCKING tansaku option, but that needs its own section. So it is that I very quickly wanted to just spend my free time spamming sleep because the social interactions were insignificant and the gameplay options were extraneous. (There is a library which you can spend time reading books in, and this is the one thing I'd say is actually good. There are 10 books which all give cool insight/lore long before it's relevant in the story. But you only spend 20 free time slots in the library and you will be done soon.) Elaboration on the social system: the poor implementation will take more words to describe than its worth, but for completion's sake I'll go through it anyway. ***BORING SECTION TO FOLLOW***. The social system works like this; you have 5 main stats consisting of 2 substats (for a total of 10 stats). Example: You have the Math stat consisting of Calculation and Analysis. Level up both Calculation and Analysis to level up Math. There are 15 characters you can socialize with in the game (roughly). There's 3 per stat, one for each substat, and one that levels up both substats of the main stat. Example: Character A gives 6 points to Calculation, Character B gives 6 points to Analysis, and Character C gives 3 points to both Calculation and Analysis. The problem to this system is that you don't have access to all 15 characters at all times, and this results in a complete imbalance in what stats you can raise. In fact, for the common route, you won't have access to like 3 characters EVER, which means that the stats they're dedicated to are a struggle to raise. For example, let's say you never get access to the Calculation character, but you have the Analysis and Double character. This means that you're going to max out your Analysis, and then to raise calculation, since you don't have the calculation character, you have to spam the double character to get half points on Calculation. The natural result to this - which has happened to everyone I've asked / seen the stats to - is that you will max out the right side of your substats in the mid/late part of the common route, then have nothing to do in your days but spam the doubler characters (which you do have mostly easy access to) in order to raise the left side of your substats. For a visual, this is what it looks like: link .This is a pretty minor part of the game, and not worth the 3 paragraphs, but you know, completions sake. It's a poorly thought out system implemented in a kind of broken way, but also it barely matters because the systems it relates to (character/item upgrades) are so wholly irrelevant. It's just another factor as to why the free time sections in this game are not very good. 3.5) FUCKING Tansaku ----------------------------------------------------------- But nothing can compare to the Tansaku option in free time. Tansaku is an exploration mode where you go outside the school into the ruins and play a sugoroku board game to "explore." It is a struggle to explain just how boring and poorly designed this system is since it's so multifaceted. I've read a bunch of reviews and hating tansaku is one of the more unanimous complaints outside of press reviews that felt the need to dress this mode up or not mention it. First and foremost, the basic fundamental of tansaku mode is that you get 2 cards of 1 to 6 and they represent how far you can move. You can't have two of the same card. After playing one you draw a new one. This means you leave the 1 card sitting and spam the other card just to move faster. Tiles on the board will either be nothing, a checkpoint, a monster fight, or a random event which will give resources. I don't even know where to begin with Tansaku mode problems so I'm just going to state them as they come to me. First, it's so easy and non-threatening (outside of certain random events that can full-wipe you) that it's pretty plausible to just walk the entire board and do every event to get as many resources as possible. You have an inventory limit of 9, but by hitting more threatening spaces you can get improved resources, so there's an element of optimizing your inventory. If you do this you will waste hours of your life for nothing, so a player is forced to play suboptimally just to save time. A common threat is a monster fight on the board or in an event, and the idea is that you get worn down in threatening situations, but as mentioned its trivially easy to clear monster waves on turn 1 (or 2 at worst) and Tansaku is no exception. Therefore, there is little real attrition. There CAN be really fucked up events that full wipe you with guaranteed damage if you select the wrong option, but they are the exception not the norm. Second, it's just so fucking slow. You draw the card, see yourself hop to a tile, mash through event text, pray to fucking god you don't get a battle, then repeat. You have to do a LOT of tansaku in the story and if you, god forbid, are actually trying to get resources for upgrades, and there is just not enough gameplay to match the time spent. The game, in my opinion, would be flatly removed if this entire mode were cut. Third, the maps mostly look the same (some minor variation) and there are no discoveries to be had. There's a precious few interesting-looking places you can see, but you will have to wait for the story to take you there if ever. Most of your time will spent circling the same initial featureless map - from the start to the end of the game. To make matters worse, tansaku also is a common source of problems in the story. It's supposed to be extremely dangerous outside of the school, and early on it's common for someone to go out alone only to end up near dead. Therefore, the fact that going out is so non-threatening to the player is problematic enough, but it also becomes a source of contradiction later when characters so readily go out in groups of 1 or 2 despite all the times that has ended in disaster, especially in cases when it would be very simple to bring more people. We're talking about 1 person sneaking out to get a surprise birthday gift, 1 person sneaking out to hunt for some resources they want because they dont want to bother anyone else with it, and in the most absurd of all cases, two people going out so they can talk about some innocuous topic without anyone interrupting them. This is like in a zombie apocalypse going outside of your safehouse to discuss the weather in the middle of a city street. Tansaku is without question the worst part of the gameplay and a total drag on everything it touches, including the story. I know multiple people who busted out cheat engine - including one who has *never used cheat engine before in their life* - just to get their resources to 999999 so they could stop doing tansaku. Maybe reviewers did the same and that's why they didnt mention it. 4) Overarching Story ----------------------------------------------------------- Okay, I guess it's time for the big one. I'm not going to go out of my way to summarize the plot here, but I will casually reference spoilers and in general say many things that will destroy any sense of mystery, so this should not be read by anyone who intends to play the game. Meta-structural spoiler time is over, FULL SPOILERS AHEAD. *** FULL SPOILERS AHEAD *** FULL SPOILERS AHEAD *** FULL SPOILERS AHEAD *** FULL SPOILERS AHEAD *** FULL SPOILERS AHEAD *** FULL SPOILERS AHEAD *** FULL SPOILERS AHEAD *** FULL SPOILERS AHEAD *** FULL SPOILERS AHEAD *** FULL SPOILERS AHEAD *** *** ALSO SPOILERS FOR DANGANRONPA 1-V3 *** ALSO SPOILERS FOR DANGANRONPA 1-V3 *** ALSO SPOILERS FOR DANGANRONPA 1-V3 *** ALSO SPOILERS FOR DANGANRONPA 1-V3 *** ALSO SPOILERS FOR DANGANRONPA 1-V3 *** ALSO SPOILERS FOR DANGANRONPA 1-V3 *** ALSO SPOILERS FOR DANGANRONPA 1-V3 *** ALSO SPOILERS FOR DANGANRONPA 1-V3 *** ALSO SPOILERS FOR DANGANRONPA 1-V3 *** ALSO SPOILERS FOR DANGANRONPA 1-V3 *** ALSO SPOILERS FOR DANGANRONPA 1-V3 *** ALSO SPOILERS FOR DANGANRONPA 1-V3 *** ALSO SPOILERS FOR DANGANRONPA 1-V3 *** ALSO SPOILERS FOR DANGANRONPA 1-V3 *** ALSO SPOILERS FOR DANGANRONPA 1-V3 *** ALSO SPOILERS FOR DANGANRONPA 1-V3 *** ALSO SPOILERS FOR DANGANRONPA 1-V3 *** *** FULL SPOILERS AHEAD *** FULL SPOILERS AHEAD *** FULL SPOILERS AHEAD *** FULL SPOILERS AHEAD *** FULL SPOILERS AHEAD *** FULL SPOILERS AHEAD *** FULL SPOILERS AHEAD *** FULL SPOILERS AHEAD *** FULL SPOILERS AHEAD *** FULL SPOILERS AHEAD *** I've already went through a major problem with the overarching story in a previous segment: the template nature of the days and how things follow a repetitive path in which the main concept of the story (defending the school from invaders) is often an irrelevant or forgotten part. The other major problem is that this is a game with two plot points and three twists stretched over like 150 hours of runtime. The core concept of the plot, as mentioned, is that you have to defend this academy from monstrous invaders for 100 days. The initial setup of this is so bizarre as to invite immediate suspicion: the Tokyo dome is attacked, you transform to defend your qt gf, you get whisked away by a portal, you wake up in a school with other weirds who can transform. You're now in some barren ruins you don't recognize and have to defend it from the monsters for 100 days. I think the story almost dooms itself from the start with this setup. For the ENTIRE story, you are the defenders sitting in place waiting for attacks to happen (which is what invites the afore-mentioned template pattern of drama while waiting for an assault). It is just really hard to tell a good war story when the characters are stuck in place and don't really go out doing things. You need incredible psychological depth and extremely compelling characters for a story to be good purely on the merits of what happens when they exist next to each other, and that's hard as fuck. Not impossible - just hard, and I think some key mistakes were made in following through. A major mistake is how shallow the monsters are. In the common route, they just do one-sided attacks with little nuance - the most exciting part is when one with cloning abilities clones a missing ally to sneak inside. Then the Big Boss comes and reveals herself to be (through a translator) an incredibly arrogant, violent, and shallow person who is not just thrilled at the chance to eradicate humanity but makes sure to talk about becoming a god enough to know she is a Bad Person. So obviously we just kill her and that's that. Spoiler incoming - in the common route they speak some alien language you don't understand, but in the process of entering the second part you learn their language through magic and now can understand them. The mind should go awash with possibilities here as to how this will change both how the characters interact with the invaders and how much we're going to learn about both the world and the villains. Sadly, the answer is nil. The characters have negative curiosity and negative energy for doing anything but minor squabbles, so even after having the opportunity to speak with an invader they still nigh unanimously agree to just murder the invader anyway. The language barrier never posed a problem for murdering them or not. And while we get glimpses into the personality of the invader commanders, which are cool (like the first one revealed to be a nervous but courageous young soldier), that's IT - we ONLY, EVER, get glimpses. Aside from one exception (a cute girl) and the big boss lady (a hot woman), we continue to just one-sidedly murder the commanders while they have a few lines before dying or leaving forever. We learn almost nothing about them, their society, etc, because the characters just don't care or try. There's a big "exception" as it were in a couple of the side routes devoted to the cute girl invader and the hot woman invader, but it's seriously minor. This is a "war" story, about two sides: humans and invaders. But 99.99% of the story is about the humans, and 0.01% is about the invaders. That's why you could cut them and it would mostly be the same with some surface level rewrites. Everything that matters is just inter-personal drama. In one route, there is a character with knowledge of all routes; MC asks about the invaders, and she says not to worry, in almost every route they're incompetent and the humans always win no matter how bad things get, and then they never think or talk about them again. It's just sad. If I may be a bit fanfictiony here, I personally think the story would have been vastly better if the Super Evil Super Stupid Supreme Commander of the aliens was a good person instead of a megalomaniac. The tension and drama from that would have been excellent, and much story could have been about wrangling with this story instead of drama about curry to fill in days. Imagine each commander having their own arc, personality, extensive scenes, development, relationships... Instead, the story about the invaders is very minimal and one-note. Speaking about minimal and one-note...! Many are going into this game expecting brick-shitting twists from Kodaka, but I have to imagine they will be sorely disappointed. This is the kind of game that has such blatant foreshadowing for such simple concepts that you will predict the precious few actual twists 100 hours before they are revealed. A big problem is that most of the "twists" or "deep lore" is as simple as a binary question. For example, something that most will think to question within the first few hours of the game is: "is this planet actually earth, yes/no." The problem with this is that you, subsequently, can't have an epic twist, because the "twist" is already in the player's mind. You've already lost. The planet is earth? Oh, ok. The planet isn't earth? Oh, well I kinda figured. the end. A "brick shitting twist" is one so shocking and unexpected that it was literally not in the player's mind at all before it happened: something so full of creativity it knocks someone off their feet because it was beyond their imagination. There is NOTHING close to this in the story proper. The story is just not that complex, and things are not that hidden. And worst of all, one of the biggest twists - potentially what could have been the coolest twist - is ripped STRAIGHT from Danganropna V3, but done worse. I'm going to explain it now because it is important - I don't really care to explain twists specifically, but I really feel this STORY element is done poorly. Basically, *DANGANRONPA SPOILERS AND MAJOR HL SPOILERS AHEAD*, just like in V3, the main case of HL were implanted fake memories / backstories to motivate their actions. Now, I won't immediately say this is bad because it mirrors something in V3 - I do think literally any fan of Kodaka's should be disappointed by this repetition (in such quick succession too), but more importantly, the way it's done here is just so significantly worse and more shallow that the comparison needs to be made to show how flat it falls here. First, in V3 the twist played into the broader idea of lies and fiction - the characters learn their entire lives are a lie, and then realize that they are being put through hell for the sake of fiction. It's an interrogation of the death game concept where wacky characters are thought up then put through miserable fighting for the sake of drama and catharsis. It's a clever response to those who criticized Danganronpa characters for being over the top or unrealistic - of course they are, they're made up. The characters tackle with this very seriously and find "truth" in their fiction - their lives may be made up, but their struggles are still real, which can be a taken as a message where we should view characters as "real" even while knowing they're "fictional" - seeing truth in the lies, or making lies into truth, basically. It's a very nuanced, interesting situation that plays into the themes of the game and goes beyond just being a surprising twist. But in Hundred Lines...? I mean, first of all, anyone who played V3 will see it coming for like 100 hours ahead of time before reaching it, but even that aside, it just has no thematic significance here. Humanity wanted soldiers to fight for them. They gave soldiers fake backstories so they would feel motivated to fight. The soldiers do fight. Then they learn the backstories were fake. This makes them feel bad but then they decide to fight anyway, but this time for the right reasons. Uuuh....... ok. That's it. Hundred Line as a game doesn't really have themes (maybe... war is bad? killing people without talking to them is bad?), so this twist doesn't really play into any greater ideas or goals. It is subsequently resolved pretty quickly: their past may be fake, but the past 80~ days they lived were real, so now they fight for the real things. The protagonist also learns that his fake memories were influenced by a real girl so in fact his memories weren't completely faked. Nice job dodging having a real conflict...? It's not terrible or offensive or anything. It's just... so flat and uninteresting compared to V3's. The struggle V3 characters went through and the conclusions they came to were powerful and moving; the HL characters just kind of keep on keeping on after feeling sad for a couple of days. It's foreshadowed heavily and thus unsurprising, it has few impacts on the characters or their attitudes towards life (there's essentially a regression to the norm after), and it's just... man, it's just not nearly as good as V3's. Take the twist out of V3 and the game morphs to be completely different with totally different conclusions for the characters. Take it out of HL and nothing would change. I'll keep frodoposting to a minimum, but it's also just kind of dumb here. Danganronpa WANTS ridiculous characters for its death games, so their backstories are purposefully wacky and extreme. In HL, they wanted soldiers, yet... ended up with basically the most poorly suited cast to fight imagine. One character ends up with a traumatic backstory of abuse preventing them from being able to harm anything, one gets so anxious about conflict they vomit almost constantly throughout the story, multiple characters would be fine with all of humanity perishing... Not only does it have no thematic weight, but if you actually think about it, it just gets increasingly stupid. It's like a total failure. (In V3, the more you think about it the more rewarded you are, since the game leaves it ambiguous whether it's true or not - it's implied to be a lie that the characters volunteered for the death game, it's implied this may in fact be their real selves but they can't tell for sure anymore, etc... there's lots of interesting conclusions to make here, especially in the broader context of Danganronpa. Not here in HL). I think that wraps it up for the main story. It follows a fairly strict, easily predictable template from start to finish and has few twists or mixups. Despite being a war story half of the war is given little attention (relatively) and most of the focus is on interpersonal drama from various levels of banality going from "I don't want to fight because I throw up easily" to "You ate my curry bitch prepare to die." It feels shallow across the board and, for me, Kodaka failed to deliver a single surprising or interesting twist. Despite being totally in love with the concept of a brutal and unjust defensive war driving a gang of neurotic teens into despair, I felt it was executed in the absolute worst possible and minimized all the actually cool aspects of the idea. 5) Routes / Side Plots / Flowchart Mechanics ----------------------------------------------------------- I must first make clear that I did not 100% all of the side routes and thus will not even attempt to give a broad overview of my thoughts on them. Instead I will focus on the flowchart mechanics and some light commentary. Part 2 of the game, where you're redoing the 100 days but with plentiful choices, is as psychotic as it sounds. If there is one "strength" Hundred Lines indisputably has, its in the sheer ambition and insanity of Part 2. VNs have pushed branching storytelling before, but this is a situation where two creatives really threw the full might of their company at pushing it as far as could go. And that I think is something cool in general. I agree that 100 endings across like 25 routes is really cool, ambitious idea. The problem is that the execution here feels like a total failure on both a mechanical and plot level. Mechanically, I think it fails in that actually collecting endings is kind of miserable. You have to repeat the 100 days (with some timeskips ofc) in each route, so there is a LOOOOOOOOT of "gameplay filler" wherey ou're mashing through the morning/night announcements to spam sleep. I estimate 2+ hours of someone's playtime will be trapped in the bell-ringing animation present during these. Subsequently, while there is a battle skip, at the time of writing it is half-broken and doesn't function in certain routes while at other times working but in a really slow, clunky way - skipping each wave of a fight individually with slow animations. There is one route which has 4 branches, all containing the same 4 battles - I ultimately had to skip SIXTEEN battles in a row which was mind-numbing with the slow animations. When you click on a node on the flowchart, it offers the ability to warp to right before the choice, but it actually just puts you at the start of the scene in general, which means one has to do a ton of skipping to make it back each time. The amount of endings you've cleared is locked to a save file, too, so no saving before a choice to try to save time. Overall this means that collecting endings has an enormous burden on skipping old content and skipping meaningless filler, which I think is potentially not a big deal to some, but was a pretty big mental burden for me. Story-wise I think it fails due to the inconsistency of the story, writing quality, and characterization,. There is certainly an appeal to the variety of routes that happen - the death game route, the harem route, the detective route, etc. However, while it would have been reasonable if it were a single person writing all of this and exploring all of the options, it was a team of 12 writers led by someone other than the main writer. I will provide some examples later, but I think it should just be universally understood as an objective truth that 12 writers will not be able to keep characters and the story consistent between them. It is hard enough - excruciatingly hard - for a single writer to fully grasp, explore, and represent the inner world of a character they've devised. It is impossible for 12 writers to all be on the same page and write characters the same way, to say nothing of keeping in mind story details. Pointing out inconsistencies comes with it the threat of being a "frodoposter," aka nitpicking minor details while missing the bigger picture, but the consequences in Hundred Line are extremely severe. For example, in the common route an enormous amount of time is spent convincing scared / angry / apathetic people to join the fight against the monsters at the risk of their lives. This is the source of much of the interpersonal drama, and one has to go on long arcs collecting gifts and stuff to slowly work these people out of their shells. This would be inconvenient in the loops, since nobody would want to go through that again, so almost every character immediately agrees to fight. This is enormously damaging to their characterization. For example, there are two siblings who have spent their whole lives (or fake memories I guess lol) with the elder brother protecting his little sister from harm and sheltering her to the point of abuse. In the common route, the little sister is slowly inspired by seeing everyone else fighting over the course of *over a month*, and finally decides to break free, resulting in much conflict with her elder brother - she has to slowly convince him to stop sheltering her, and it's actually a fine arc. In the loops, MC tells her that he comes from a future where she fights, she goes "wow that sounds awesome," then her elder brother has an orgasm like "yoo the thought of my little sister protecting me instead of the other way is so hot im creaming my pants," and then they're ready to fight right from the start. It reaches a point a bit beyond absurdity and is just a reflection of how the story is prioritizing other things than representing the characters accurately, and for me, it therefore became impossible to take them seriously. Another example, and this is a spoiler. There's a route that's a murder mystery. A murder happened, find out whodunit. The culprit - chosen no doubt for the novelty / surprise value - is the boy so traumatized from child abuse that he is incapable of hurting anyone or anything. In the common route, he would rather die than fight, and when he does finally join the fighting after his own arc, he is a purely defensive character - attempting to use his one paltry default attack does almost no damage and stuns him. His entire thing isn't just nonviolence, it's a biological inability to cause violence. Yet in this route, he's the murderer. How shocking! What motivated him to be the murderer? Well, a villain threatened his life and said they'd kill him if he didn't start killing others. Amazing. So the guy who would rather die than hurt others - who is incapable of hurting others, even - is so motivated by self-preservation he starts a murder spree. And not just that, but he injects himself with a pain-numbing medicine so he can stab himself to death to avoid suspicion (using a revival machine to come back to life after). Fucking *I* wouldn't have the balls to do that, and he just does it on a whim. I'm not frodoposting. This is not, like, subjective nitpicking. It is just a fact to be considered that in these routes, characters act extremely differently according to who writes them. What leaves objective territory and starts getting more subjective is the many many many more numerous, nuanced differences in how characters speak on a moment to moment basis. For example, I might find it out of character when a character I'd expect to be bothered by something expresses they aren't bothered by it - like a character who has a tendency to vomit when stressed instead mainly expressing relief when someone other than her dies, or a character trustworthy to a fault being oddly suspicious, etc - but that is something I can acknowledge as being "unknowable." The "true" way in which the character reacts is like a black box, and there can be many opinions the more subtle and nuanced it is. However, there is a certain type of person - maybe the type to read all of this, or maybe the type who is an author themselves, or who knows what - who will undoubtedly be tormented for the entirety of the side routes as characters constantly shift positions on matters, react in strange ways, act in strange ways, and all in all can't ever be pinned down. By the end of my time with the Hundred Line I would hesitate to comfortably say it has any characters at all, because they've been wrung so through the ringer. HL doesn't start a route by saying: this is an alternate, non-canonical timeline written by XYZ and the actions of the characters within are not canonical. Instead, when the scaredy-cat, self-loathing, non-violent boy murders others and has no issue stabbing himself to literal death, we have to take it at face value. That "is" the character now. And when there are so many insane variations to the characters, for me, it became impossible to see anything but a constant blur. If I can take an aside to analyze this, I think HL will be an extremely valuable and novel case for distinguishing how individuals process characterization. This is threatening to sound like I'm patting myself on the back, but I think we can broadly agree that if there is any situation where characters will be inconsistent, it's in a visual novel with hundreds of hours of story and 12 writers. Anyway, I think an idea goes like this: in the real world, everything people do is "in character" for themselves. If they don't act according to our model, its our model that was wrong, and we need to change it. We don't accuse real people of being out of character when they do something that doesn't match our internal models. I think this kind of normal mindset, taken into fiction like HL, may lead to someone not being bothered by their model of characters being constantly contradicted as characters act bizarrely. (This is to say: I think people exist who will read all of HL without feeling any inconsistencies despite what I've said.) After all, if reality differs from your model, just update your model. However, in fiction, it's not necessarily the case that *our* models are wrong when they differ from the reality we see. Think fanfiction. Our model of Character X isn't wrong because in fanfiction Character X did something ridiculous and unlike them. It's the fanfiction depiction of Character X that's wrong, and we have to do something we almost never do in real life: we have to prioritize our model over what we see. We have to put our internal understanding over the external world. And HL is a game, I think, that really tests whether one is the type to do that or not. For better or worse. Ilse Rosenthal-Schneider: "Mr. Einstein, what would you have done if the calculations had not matched your predictions, thereby disproving the theory of relativity?" Einstein: "Then I would feel sorry for the good Lord. The theory is correct." This also extends to the worldbuilding and plot, too, not just the characters. The setting to the game isn't super complex, but there are times where established facts are contradicted between routes. There is, I will be clear, a perpetual element of uncertainty due to characters lying, the possible of some brick-shitting meta twist I didn't encounter, etc, so much of this may be invalid. (In the same way one could argue that characters acting inconsistently is an invalid criticism if there's like a brain virus in the lore that makes them act weird). One example of this is how the characters were raised in a dome without any weather, meaning the first time it rains in the game leads to a story event with the MC reacting to seeing rain for the first time, the characters discussing what it is, etc. In another route, they are entirely unbothered when seeing rain for the first time, and one character even says they like taking night walks in the rain. Another example - and this will get a bit technical - is when in one route it's said that School 2 was never meant to meet up with School 1, despite this blatantly contradicting what was established in other routes with School 2 always meaning to meet up with School 1 (hence the school bus, their mutual presence in the announcements, etc). One begins to question not just the characters, but the entire world. (This isn't a problem in like comedic side routes which are purposefully being meme or whatever - I don't think a Super Charisma drug leading to a Super Harem route destroys the sanctity of the world and characters. This is for serious routes written seriously and to be taken at face value). The world is also stretched thin by trying to tackle so many genres in a game meant to be a specific genre. There is a LITERAL revival machine that AUTOMATICALLY revives people after death, and these side routes STILL try to do shit like a death game, a serial killer murder spree, and more. The setting bends and creaks as you read 1,000 lines each route devoted to how oh the machine was sabotaged in such-and-such way that doesn't impact the gameplay but does allow people to die for drama... It just does not work. Imagine Danganronpa but there's a revival machine and each death has some new reason why the revival machine didn't work and why the person in question was killed in some way that makes revival harder or something. !!!SUPRISE BONUS SECTION!!! As a reward for reading this far, and because I am keeping this bottled up, I will go on a brief tangent on how shockingly retarded the human side is in this conflict. Full spoilers to follow. So basically, it's humans vs aliens. The humans want to take over the planet. To this end they make a bomb that will after 100 days of charging explode and kill all life on the planet. They want to defend the bomb, so they create our squad to do so. Let us see in all the ways they are retarded. Some of these may have some paltry explanation in a side route. 1) They do the insane backstory thing and make their elite squad of supersoldiers a bunch of neurotic teenagers, half of whom want humanity to die anyway even with their backstories that were supposed to be engineered to make them pro humanity. It would have been far better to do nothing considering these results. 2) They send them down to the battlefield without any explanation whatsoever. They are just told "there's monsters out there bro, fight and don't question it." There is immediate intense mystery and suspicion over how they arrived at the school at all, why they're there, why they were chosen to fight, etc, because nothing is explained. 3) SIREI, the AI in charge of the operation, walks around with a mechanical body and has no backup nor has a "real body" in some undisclosed location. In early routes (and the common route) he is constantly getting destroyed leaving the students completely guideless with no way to contact humanity or be contacted. 4) The planned defensive measure for protecting SIREI is putting bombs in all the students bodies that explode if they fight him (which also engenders their mistrust btw). They did this in a setting where dead people are instantly revived after death. So a dude just kills SIREI, explodes, and then is revived. That was their only measure for safety. 5) There is one means for the students to call for help. To activate the SOS device, you need 9 out of the 10 death codes belonging to the main 10 students. A death code is obtained when the student dies; it arises on their back like a tattoo. This is genuinely the most psychotic, ridiculous, and poorly thought out device I've ever seen. It was obviously engineered by Uchikoshi purely for drama. Just think of all the ways it fails: one, it incentivizes the students to murder each other so that the last living one can escape (which does happen a lot in-game). Two, if any student is like eaten, kidnapped, dragged away, etc, it becomes unusable. Three, would Earth not want the students calling for aid BEFORE the situation is so bad there's only a single student left? Four, in how many situations would it be so bad that 9 out of 10 students die but the final one still has the leeway to declothe them, look at their backs, and go to the device to input the numbers? 6) When a missile is shot at the human ship in space, they don't have any means of deflecting it, and indeed just get hit. They've been fighting a war for decades while being completely vulnerable to any kind of attack from the outside. All in all, to be frank, the plot to this game is just poorly thought out. It's stupid, and I don't say that with malice. I mean it as a descriptor. It is just genuinely stupid and falls apart to any kind of thinking whatsoever. The human side of the war is so incompetent one constantly has to question whether like all of humanity has gone extinct or whether everything is some kind of big prank of some kind because it just inconceivable that their plan could be so full of holes and engineered to guarantee its own failure. This leaves us with a war story where one side is so shockingly stupid one doubts whether a child is directing their warfront while the other side is given almost no screen time outside of an intentionally over-the-top evil caricature. This kind of silliness works well in a comedic, unrealistic setting like that in Dangarnonpa where ridiculous figures are making ridiculous death games; it doesn't work in a story that purports to be more serious and tackles a real war led by a real government. !!!SURPRISE BONUS SECTION OVER!!! Ok, off the subject of the consistency. Another issue is that this massive flowchart structure emphasizes the total irrelevance of the invaders to a nasty degree. It is a plot point that the invaders have like a "war plan" which they follow with minimal influence from what they observe happening in/around the school. They attack on basically the same days in the same way no matter what. This means that most routes will share combat sequences almost 1:1 no matter what the fuck is going on in the school. In one route there could be a zombie invasion going on with 1/2 of the cast turned into zombies; well oh shit it's day 67 and there's always an attack on day 67 so hold on one moment zombies, we need to do this fight, ok battle skip, alright back to zombies. Another route? Oh fuck it's a murder mystery, someone's been murdered, let's get together and solve this, alright the culprit is - BZZZT BAZZZT ALERT ENEMY INCOMING! OK hold on one moment lets go fight the invaders, alright, battle skip, back to the murder mystery. There is no illusion for the majority of the side routes that the invaders are relevant at all. They go off into all sorts of bizarre directions while the same templated, scheduled, unchanging invasions happen at the same points. What's especially psychotic about this is that it involves a LOT of copy/paste across routes taking place on basically opposite ends of the choice structure, meaning certain scenes will play out in exactly the same way despite vastly different circumstances, breaking immersion. What's especially bad about this is they had to write the scenes to accommodate the current "Surviving" students no matter who may be dead, which means many battles in Part 2 have almost no dialogue or engagement from most of the cast, since so many of them could be dead at any given moment. Don't even think about having engaging character moments or plot developments in the main conflict of the game - it's copy pasted stuff with only Takumi saying stuff for most of it, aside from single throwaway lines. The issue of copy-paste is particularly pernicious in this game. Subahibi fans will have my head for this, but this may be the most repetitious game I've ever played, and it even lacks - to my knowledge - an option to skip previously read text. The skip button just skips everything. I didn't want to skip any unread text, so I started getting into a kind of paranoid state where I questioned whether I had already read something or not, which is VERY difficult in this game. Due to the nature of the routes, characters canonically repeat a lot of their conversations/jokes/observations with the MC often having the thought "heheh yeah I remember hearing this before." This combined with all the copy/pasting risks quite a slog-like experience of rereading conversations and lines. I guess, with all this established, I must also put forth the opinion that the average writing quality on the routes is low. I can't substantiate this with evidence/proof, so I'll just be stating it to make my position known. Many of the writers in the routes are inexperienced and don't seem to have many other writing credits. So it is that you may read a murder mystery route where nobody sets up cameras using the Make Anything Machine, then you read another where someone makes a camera and follows a suspect around 24/7 with a camera they made. Different writers, different level of quality, different ideas. I would be surprised if anyone read all the routes without, at some point, feeling like their intelligence is being questioned or that something terribly wrong is going on with what they're reading. Ok. I think that's a good enough overview. The routes are suitably ambitious and cover an enormous amount of ground, but they are filled with inconsistent characterization, unstable setting details, repetitive text, and exacerbate the issue of the story primarily being about teenage drama instead of any war, on top of the process of acquiring them being filled with time-wasting elements and a genuinely buggy flowchart. I think it takes an extremely strong person with immense willpower to see all 100 endings in this game. The initial impression the public had was correct: a game with 100 "real" endings just doesn't work. 6) Characters ----------------------------------------------------------- This is the final section, and last only because it is the most nuanced subject of them all. My purpose with this analysis is to try to present a model of the game through description and allow for one to make their own informed judgements based on the presented information. However, for character, it's hard for me to do that, because a character is compromised of their thousands upon thousands of lines and numerous actions throughout a story from which we finally get a glimpse into their inner world. I could like list each character and give a paragraph description of them alongside my own impression of them, but I don't think anyone would be able to read those and determine if they themselves would like a character or not. So this will be more subjective than desired. For me, I ended up feeling that Hundred Line characters were far more one-note and shallow than even the worst of Danganronpa characters. Some of them, even after playing the game for 100 hours and reading over potentially millions of Japanese characters, I feel like may have no inner world at all. They feel like walking Twitter posts, spouting quick effortless memes, and this is coming from a genuine fan of Danganronpa's characters. I thought, upon starting the game, they would develop past their meme exterior and reveal rich character in the way Danganronpa characters more or less did; no such luck. I'll talk about a few characters I really didn't like, and maybe that will provide some insight. Let me start with Tsubasa. link This is a character I should by all means like, or at least, have immense bias for. She's got a large chest, she has gray hair, she has an exposed midriff, etc. Visually and aesthetically, I'm locked in and ready to love even the worst dialogue she may spout. But she never - EVER - in one hundred hours of playtime develops whatsoever beyond what her VNDB description says. Let me quote it here. > A young woman who knows a lot about machines and what makes them tick. She had a bright, lively personality, but isn't good with stressful situations. When she gets nervous, she gets nauseous, and then... Yep, that sums it up. You could put a gun to my head and demand I say something else about Tsubasa, and I couldn't. I would be dead where I stand. On a superficial level, I do feel a bit of revulsion at a character gimmick that is all about vomit. I think trying to convince her to fight by giving her vomit bags and air freshener is not very interesting or funny or appealing. I think that the game taking every single opportunity to cut to her holding her mouth about to vomit anytime something stressful happens is agonizing and annoying. But even beyond that, I really just don't think there's any more to say about her. She doesn't really do anything interesting or exciting in the plot. She makes some machines, she gets excited about a big robot, she... yeah, I'm coming up a blank. She never gets any depth, she never does something surprising, she never like makes some hard or interesting choice (to be fair, nothing interesting happens in the plot, so that may not be on her). She is just a bright girl with a tendency to vomit who likes machines and that's it. Let's talk about someone else. Maruko Gaku: link This guy just kind of sucks. When he first showed up I recall distinctly wondering how he will develop into a cool character because I had utter faith in that happening at that point. Instead, nothing did. He's an unhappy, pessimistic whiner who shouts and whines from the start of the game to the end. I'd say he fairs better than Tsubasa - he puts in the legwork to host school events to cheer everyone up, and the backstory of him looking after a family of like 10 other orphans is neat. But he spends the vast, vast amount of the time making pithy, shallow comments; shouting dumb things; bothering others; and just being unpleasant to read. I just did not like him. For a character that covers such issues as abandonment, crushing poverty, and youths being forced into paternal roles, he remains a total joke from start to finish. I never laughed when someone offered to pay him like 10k yen to do something terrible and he jumped at the chance. The game covers topics far beyond its depth. There are some standout characters. I don't particularly care for her, but I can understand why Darumi would be an appealing character for many with her joking about and distinct visual style. (Though I find it kind of shallow that so many people latch onto her namedropping some eroge; ever heard of jingling keys? Charles Barkley Shut Up and Jam Gaiden namedrops Kana Imouto.) My favorite character would probably be Eito, who has very unique/cool circumstances and was the only one who felt like he actually developed a relationship with the MC. Early on his lines about nakama, friendship, and so on (while retrospectively ironic of course) were like the one time I felt like any character was saying serious or interesting things. Kako and her relationship with her brother is also something of a standout. Not only does she look cute, which is helpful for forming positive impressions of a character, but her arc of stepping out of her brother's shadow is probably the realest and most interesting development in the game. Her love of detectives is also cute and goes well with the various murder mystery routes. It's unfortunate that her development is built on the back of the MC basically going insane for the arc among other issues. On the whole, though, these feel like drops in a bucket. For example, I'm praising Kako for having like an arc at all, when most characters are content to just kind of exist. The initial bit where you convince them to fight is often all you ever get, and many of the characters are just obnoxious until the end. However, as stated, I think this is the most impossible subject of all to really talk about clearly or with any measure of objectivity as it were. My impression of the characters is formed from reading 100 hours of their dialogue and seeing them act in all sorts of ways across side routes. In this time I will focus on and view them in ways someone else might not. Lines which stick out to me as bad will go unnoticed by others; developments I shrug off will mean everything to someone else. So I can offer only a pitiful amount of insight here. The only thing I can really say is that I really like Danganronpa characters, especially several from V3, and yet find Hundred Line's casts to be one of the worst I've ever read. EPILOGUE ----------------------------------------------------------- In conclusion, both holistically and viewing each part in general, I hate Hundred Line. I consider it to be a total failure with even the best of its ideas riddled with design flaws. It doesn't live up to having 100 endings, the gameplay - while fun at first - doesn't develop past the beginning while being intolerably easy even for very casual players, the fundamental design of playing out 100 days is incredibly tedious and invites formulaic storytelling, the tansaku system is inconceivably bad yet takes up an enormous amount of game time unless you actively cheat, the overarching story is overly simplistic with few twists or major developments, and the characters remain mostly obnoxious and shallow throughout. I write this, however, knowing that many of my close friends are not just enjoying the game, but even loving it. Therefore, the reader of this should be under the full disclosure that there is a decent chance they will enjoy it. Humanity is really complex and so is media analysis. I don't mean to put the nail in the coffin and seal the deal as Hundred Line is bad forever. Instead, I just felt alienated by the unending praise I was seeing for a game I loathe so much, and wanted to offer an opposing perspective with mostly neutral language. Hopefully I have provided some insight into why someone may not like this game. My 1/10 vote is not a joke. Also, as a final note, you will observe I didn't talk about Uchikoshi or mention Kodaka beyond a few times. I would like to state clearly that I think the tribalism being displayed by Uchikoshi fans shitting on Kodaka, and sometimes vice versa, is stupid and childish. It's reasonable to have a negative opinion of either creative based on past experience with their work, but this is a joint project where they both worked on it together. When I think a joke is shitty, I think the joke is shitty, I don't desperately justify it by saying the writer I hate did it while the writer I liked would never have done it. I think it's gross to like play this game "for Uchikoshi" and spend the whole time bashing Kodaka, or vice versa. They made the game together. It's a joint project. Suck it up and leave your playground resentment at the door. Anyway, that's it. 1/10 game, do not recommend.