Earlier than Too Kyo Video games launched The Hundred Line: Final Protection Academy, the tactical RPG/visible novel hybrid that’s, in my view, secretly one of many darkish horses for 2025 Recreation of the 12 months, co-creative director Kazutaka Kodaka had been fairly candid in saying that the studio wanted the sport to achieve success, lest it go bankrupt because of the quantity of loans it took to get the undertaking out the door. After two-and-a-half months and a number of optimistic phrase of mouth, it appears like the sport could have pulled the corporate out of the crimson. In truth, it’s doing so nicely that the studio is planning so as to add extra routes to its already intensive branching timeline.
In an interview with Bloomberg, Kodaka mentioned that The Hundred Line’s prolonged improvement threatened to finish the short-lived studio. Too Kyo Video games was based in 2017 after Kodaka and co-founder Kotaro Uchikoshi left Spike Chunsoft following the success of the Danganronpa and Zero Escape franchises. Within the years since, Too Kyo Video games has launched a number of initiatives that captured the person leads’ inventive types, however The Hundred Line definitely looks like extra of a melding of the minds than the rest the corporate has put out. It has Danganronpa’s signature faculty life social sim parts, after which its second half reveals an elaborate, multi-route branching storyline that may result in certainly one of 100 endings like a power-boosted Zero Escape. For such a small group, it was a wildly formidable undertaking, and that’s why it took 5 lengthy years of improvement and a few monetary favors to complete. Now, Kodaka says that the sport is promoting “fairly nicely,” and he doesn’t see chapter “as a severe future” for the corporate.
So now what? Too Kyo Video games has put out its dream sport and it’s doing nicely. By no means one to draw back from his ambitions, Kodaka says he desires to increase The Hundred Line’s life for one more decade by including new storylines with patches and expansions, nearly like a live-service sport.
“I attempted to intention this sport to be like Cyberpunk 2077 or Grand Theft Auto On-line,” Kodaka instructed Bloomberg. “I would like it to be the open world of ‘state of affairs’ video games.”
The Hundred Line begins out with a reasonably commonplace visible novel construction. You play as a squad of highschool college students pressured to defend an academy from alien invaders in an effort to guard a weapon hidden inside its partitions—the important thing to humanity’s survival—for 100 days. After these three months and alter are up, another stuff we received’t spoil goes down that places the sport on wildly divergent paths, with every route helmed by totally different writers. Because of this, each path is markedly totally different than the others, although there’s one route that unveils the sport’s complete fact if you know the way to search out it. Every of those routes has a number of endings, a few of that are clearly “conclusions” whereas others learn like “dangerous ends.” Given the buck-wild instructions a few of these routes go, it doesn’t seem to be a lot is off-limits by way of style and tone for The Hundred Line. So if the studio pulls from a rotating steady of writers, I can see the sport staying contemporary for a number of years. Now that Too Kyo Video games is in a greater place to help its newest launch, it feels protected to hope for the sport’s future, in addition to the studio’s.
