The Hundred Line: Final Protection Academy is not Danganronpa 4, nevertheless it’s comfortable to revisit some fan-favourite tropes

By comfortable coincidence, I completed enjoying Danganronpa V3: Killing Concord for the primary time earlier this month – which means that I’ve lastly conquered the total most important story of a large multimedia franchise that is had a chokehold on my consideration ever since I obtained swept up by its mini-renaissance throughout the pandemic lockdowns of 2020. Extra to the purpose, although, it additionally implies that I went into the demo for The Hundred Line: Final Protection Academy at this month’s Steam Subsequent Fest with the ending to co-creator Kazutaka Kodaka’s most well-known physique of labor about as contemporary in my reminiscence because it will get.

Kodaka and a number of other different notable ex-Spike Chunsoft workers based their unbiased studio Too Kyo Video games across the time of V3’s launch in 2017, and since then a number of of the video games they’ve launched have been enthusiastically picked up on as probably being Danganronpa 4 in spirit if not in title. This led followers to minor disappointment within the case of each World’s Finish Membership in 2020 and Grasp Detective Archives: Rain Code in 2023, each of which clearly share a lot of DNA with Danganronpa however diverge on some essential element (no killing sport in World’s Finish Membership; no faculty life in Rain Code).

Now, naturally, The Hundred Line is getting the identical therapy, and having performed the demo, it is positively leaning into the comparability even more durable than anything Too Kyo have put out up to now. Some musical motifs and sound cues might be so acquainted to Danganronpa followers that the callbacks border on straight-up reuse; to say nothing of the artwork type and archetypes used to assemble a forged of characters who give the identical feeling of heat and but barely surreal overfamiliarity you get when assembly your pals’ first cousins at a marriage.

All of that is in fact solely emphasised by the truth that the opening half hour of the sport – which performs out in a back-to-back sequence of fully-animated, fully-voiced cutscenes that really feel barely uncanny for those who’re used to Danganronpa’s visible novel type of supply – performs out nearly beat-for-beat like its religious predecessors. A painfully abnormal teenage boy and his she’s-not-my-girlfriend are interrupted on their technique to a standard day in school by a sequence of misadventures, culminating in our protagonist waking up in an unknown classroom stuffed with strangers and face-to-face with an effed-up trying cartoon mascot who’s working the present.

Too Kyo are so eager to tease you for pondering what they know you are pondering at this level that there is even a member of the group who’s extraordinarily puffed up on the prospect that they are all about to be compelled into some kind of last-kid-standing combat to the demise. Which is the place the narratives diverge, in fact, as a result of The Hundred Line: Final Protection Academy is a turn-based technique through which the characters are tasked with working collectively to combat evil robots and freaky monsters, and thus actively avert the form of world-ending disaster that normally exists within the bigger-picture background of the Dangaronpa sequence.

As a comparatively latest convert to the delights of turn-based fight, I do not really feel fairly so certified to evaluate The Hundred Line’s deserves as a method sport as I do to speak about its relationship to Danganronpa. However I am not a complete novice both, and up to now it is offered me with an attention-grabbing strategic puzzle in locations with out doing something I might take into account groundbreaking, which is what I’ve come to anticipate when an skilled group specialising in narrative-led video games department out into an entire new gameplay type. I might take an informed guess, although, that The Hundred Line will work higher as an entry-level technique sport expertise for visible novel followers than the opposite approach round.

The demo covers the primary seven in-game days and ends with a cliffhanger which I will not spoil right here however which ought to fulfill gamers who’ve arrived on the sport by way of the creators’ earlier works. However that is not to say that I feel The Hundred Line is cleverly hiding its true intention to reboot the killing sport idea below the bait-and-switch cowl of a totally totally different style, and actually, I might a lot want it to remain that approach. In any case, I actually simply completed enjoying Kodaka’s 60-hour justification as to why he should not should preserve making Danganronpa time and again except he decides he actually needs to once more; and provided that Too Kyo’s relationship with the IP holders at Spike Chunsoft is by all accounts nonetheless excellent, I feel that Danganronpa 4, if and when it arrives, will in all probability be referred to as… nicely, Danganronpa 4, or some variation thereon.

You in all probability will not do your self or the sport any favours by going into The Hundred Line: Final Protection Academy merely hoping for extra Danganronpa. However nonetheless, The Hundred Line needs you to know that it understands what you favored about Danganronpa, and that Too Kyo can nonetheless ship the weird-yet-lovable characters and wild plots you need – simply with out being restricted to the identical type of gameplay, or the very tight (certainly, by the top, noticeably repetitive) components that mentioned franchise adopted for its central trilogy.

To date what I’ve seen of this sport has managed admirably to strike a troublesome stability between brand-new enterprise and self-conscious nostalgia journey, and whereas I am in no way certain which half will emerge victorious within the full launch, it is obtained me satisfied to tag alongside for the trip. And if you consider it, there’s one thing very well timed a few sort-of-follow-up to Danganronpa popping out in 2025 that reminds us we’re truly at all times higher off banding collectively than permitting ourselves to be pitted towards each other. Checked out that approach, possibly it is not a lot a subversion of established tropes as a pure evolution of them.

The Hundred Line: Final Protection Academy demo is on the market on Steam now, with the total sport anticipated to launch on April twenty fourth for Home windows and Nintendo Swap. And there is excellent news for PC gamers, since progress from this demo will be carried over to the total launch.