The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy isn’t Danganronpa 4, but it embraces beloved familiar themes.

By happy coincidence, I finished playing Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony for the first time earlier this month – meaning that I’ve finally conquered the full main story of a massive multimedia franchise that’s had a chokehold on my attention ever since I got swept up by its mini-renaissance during the pandemic lockdowns of 2020. More to the point, though, it also means that I went into the demo for The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy at this month’s Steam Next Fest with the ending to co-creator Kazutaka Kodaka’s most famous body of work about as fresh in my memory as it gets.

Kodaka and several other notable ex-Spike Chunsoft employees founded their independent studio Too Kyo Games around the time of V3’s launch in 2017, and since then several of the games they’ve released have been enthusiastically picked up on as potentially being Danganronpa 4 in spirit if not in name. This led fans to minor disappointment in the case of both World’s End Club in 2020 and Master Detective Archives: Rain Code in 2023, both of which clearly share a lot of DNA with Danganronpa but diverge on some crucial component (no killing game in World’s End Club; no school life in Rain Code).

Now, naturally, The Hundred Line is getting the same treatment, and having played the demo, it’s definitely leaning into the comparison even harder than anything else Too Kyo have put out so far. Some musical motifs and sound cues will be so familiar to Danganronpa fans that the callbacks border on straight-up reuse; to say nothing of the art style and archetypes used to assemble a cast of characters who give the same feeling of warm and yet slightly surreal overfamiliarity you get when meeting your friends’ first cousins at a wedding.

All of this is of course only emphasised by the fact that the opening half hour of the game – which plays out in a back-to-back series of fully-animated, fully-voiced cutscenes that feel slightly uncanny if you’re used to Danganronpa’s visual novel style of delivery – plays out almost beat-for-beat like its spiritual predecessors. A painfully ordinary teenage boy and his she’s-not-my-girlfriend are interrupted on their way to a normal day at school by a series of misadventures, culminating in our protagonist waking up in an unknown classroom full of strangers and face-to-face with an effed-up looking cartoon mascot who’s running the show.

Too Kyo are so keen to tease you for thinking what they know you’re thinking at this point that there’s even a member of the group who’s extremely hyped up at the prospect that they’re all about to be forced into some sort of last-kid-standing fight to the death. Which is where the narratives diverge, of course, because The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy is a turn-based strategy in which the characters are tasked with working together to fight evil robots and freaky monsters, and thus actively avert the kind of world-ending catastrophe that usually exists in the bigger-picture background of the Dangaronpa series.

As a relatively recent convert to the delights of turn-based combat, I don’t feel quite so qualified to assess The Hundred Line’s merits as a strategy game as I do to talk about its relationship to Danganronpa. But I’m not a total novice either, and so far it’s presented me with an interesting strategic puzzle in places without doing anything I’d consider groundbreaking, which is what I’ve come to expect when an experienced team specialising in narrative-led games branch out into a whole new gameplay style. I’d take an educated guess, though, that The Hundred Line will work better as an entry-level strategy game experience for visual novel fans than the other way around.

The demo covers the first seven in-game days and ends with a cliffhanger which I won’t spoil here but which should satisfy players who’ve arrived at the game via the creators’ previous works. But that isn’t to say that I think The Hundred Line is cleverly hiding its true intention to reboot the killing game concept under the bait-and-switch cover of a completely different genre, and truly, I’d much prefer it to stay that way. After all, I literally just finished playing Kodaka’s 60-hour justification as to why he shouldn’t have to keep making Danganronpa over and over unless he decides he really wants to again; and given that Too Kyo’s relationship with the IP holders at Spike Chunsoft is by all accounts still very good, I think that Danganronpa 4, if and when it arrives, will probably be called… well, Danganronpa 4, or some variation thereon.

You probably won’t do yourself or the game any favours by going into The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy simply hoping for more Danganronpa. But nevertheless, The Hundred Line wants you to know that it understands what you liked about Danganronpa, and that Too Kyo can still deliver the weird-yet-lovable characters and wild plots you want – just without being restricted to the same style of gameplay, or the very tight (indeed, by the end, noticeably repetitive) formula that said franchise followed for its central trilogy.

So far what I’ve seen of this game has managed admirably to strike a difficult balance between brand-new venture and self-conscious nostalgia trip, and while I’m not at all sure which half will emerge victorious in the full release, it’s got me convinced to tag along for the ride. And if you think about it, there’s something very timely about a sort-of-follow-up to Danganronpa coming out in 2025 that reminds us we’re actually always better off banding together than allowing ourselves to be pitted against one another. Looked at that way, maybe it’s not so much a subversion of established tropes as a natural evolution of them.

The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy demo is available on Steam now, with the full game expected to launch on April 24th for Windows and Nintendo Switch. And there’s good news for PC players, since progress from this demo can be carried over to the full release.