The Hundred Line: Final Protection Academy begins off by asking a easy query: what occurs while you pluck a handful of colourful youngsters from their properties, plop them in a state-of-the-art faculty full of each comfort, then drive them to battle for his or her lives? Your information as you navigate this query is an unsettling and creepy-cute mascot that is aware of greater than it’s let on, and there’s an overarching thriller to the world you can’t fairly put your finger on.
In case you, like I, answered “Danganronpa!” — as this premise sounds very very like the plot of the quirky and irreverent murder-mystery collection from Spike Chunsoft — then congratulations! We’re each completely flawed! And after 45 in-game days with LDA, I nonetheless don’t know what’s occurring, and I like it.
I’m going to be light with myself and also you for pondering LDA is one other entry within the style of excessive school-themed killing video games. In any case, it was developed by Kazutaka Kodaka, creator and author of the Danganronpa franchise, in collaboration with Kotaro Uchikoshi, identified for his work on the adventure-puzzle sport collection Zero Escape. And although LDA oozes with the DNA from each collection, it stands so fully aside mechanically and narratively that whereas I can get a grasp on the previous, I’m misplaced with the latter.
The premise is straightforward sufficient. You play as Takumi Sumino, who will get whisked away to the Final Protection Academy, the place he and a gaggle of others use their newly woke up powers to defend the varsity from monster assaults for 100 days. Ought to they fail, the invaders will destroy the varsity and thereby… due to plot… all of humanity. Often previous a sure level, I can work out a sport’s core gameplay loop and tough narrative thrust. When the primary physique dropped in Danganronpa, I instantly understood that I’d be spending the remainder of the sport fixing my classmates’ murders. However I haven’t been in a position to determine LDA.
LDA fills the gaping gap Fire Emblem Engage created and the Advance Wars remakes couldn’t repair
I perceive the gameplay loop simply sufficient: it’s a tactical RPG with visible novel-like relationship-building components. Fight takes place on a gridded battlefield with every combatant in a position to assault in a distinct configuration, just like chess. One among Takumi’s talents assaults enemies in a straight line. My ally, Gaku, assaults in an oblong sample. Every of my allies’ assaults contributes to a voltage meter that permits us to make use of our particular talents when full. And if considered one of my allies ought to fall, they’ll be revived earlier than the subsequent wave of enemies.
I like how the tactical fight isn’t like Hearth Emblem or Triangle Technique. LDA is exclusive, as you’re not attempting to handle the advanced rock-paper-scissors components of what weapons are robust or weak towards one another. As an alternative, life is the engine that drives fight. Actions you are taking are decided by what number of motion factors, or AP, you have got, and killing sure enemies grants you extra AP. On the flip facet, allies who’re close to dying can unleash massive particular assaults that may clear total battlefields at the price of dropping them for the remainder of the wave.
Fight then turns into a operate of enjoying with life totals — my enemies and mine. I’ll organize my assaults in such a means that each time I act, I kill an enemy and achieve extra AP so I can simply preserve going, denying my enemies the possibility to battle again. Then, once I’m out of AP, I can unleash a killing blow that ends the spherical. My allies get revived the subsequent spherical, and I can begin the method once more. I’ve been left so unhappy by the crop of tactical RPGs currently, and LDA fills the gaping gap Fire Emblem Engage created and the Advance Wars remakes couldn’t repair.
However whereas I’ve obtained a deal with on the fight, I nonetheless haven’t the faintest clue of the story it’s attempting to inform. My confusion is so thorough that as I’m going by every new day, my experiences begin sounding like wartime letters from the entrance traces.
It’s day 33. Our self-proclaimed chief, Hiruko, continues to be lacking. We’re beginning to suspect she’ll by no means return. In the meantime, the enemy retains hurling themselves at our defenses. To this point, we’ve been in a position to maintain them off. Gaku just lately developed his energy, revealing himself to be a peerless ranged fighter. However our forces are nowhere close to full energy, since Ima, Kako, and Shouma refuse to battle. And alas! Our foodstores have wiped out and I concern we’ll starve quickly. Conflict is grim, however I battle figuring out the nearer I get to the one centesimal day is a day I’m nearer to returning dwelling… or so I hope.
LDA’s narrative is so not like something I’ve ever skilled that not figuring out what’s taking place subsequent is a part of the enjoyable. I like getting dragged alongside for the journey, discovering new developments alongside the characters, who’re themselves a delight. As other outlets have pointed out, Darumi Amemiya is the bodily manifestation of the irony-poisoned and terminally on-line dirtbag edgel(ady), and I like her even when her characterization will get uncomfortably acquainted generally.
I additionally actually get pleasure from how the characters are over-the-top caricatures themselves — Darumi’s the creepy murder-obsessed emo woman, Takemaru’s the everyday fighting-obsessed delinquent — however make selections like regular folks. I usually battle to get into “transported to a different world” tales as a result of not one of the selections made in them have ever made sense to me, a lady who can’t flip off her overly logical and reason-obsessed mind in an effort to simply flow. So it’s extremely refreshing to see these characters push again on the circumstances they’ve been dropped in.
As an alternative of simply accepting that they’ve been taken from all the things they’ve ever identified and compelled to battle and die (even when that dying is momentary), a few of my allies keep a wholesome degree of skepticism, query all the things, and refuse to battle. I do know I’d! And even higher, different characters within the sport perceive and acknowledge that as an affordable place. There’s no rah-rah speech of “You could battle!” that convinces them to take up arms. The reluctant characters are given the house to come back round on their very own time and for their very own causes.
That will sound boring. In any case, in an isekai-like narrative, the characters are normally compelled to get on board shortly in any other case there wouldn’t be a plot. So seeing a sport take its time with the reluctant characters, letting them work by their hangups in a pure and unforced means, was pleasing to my mind.
Within the virtually 50 days I’ve spent with LDA, I do have some working theories as to the place the general story will go. The way it will get there, although, I’ve no clue, however I’m excited to see what twists the sport will take alongside the way in which.
The Hundred Line: Final Protection Academy is out now on Swap and PC.