It’s been two weeks since the official release of The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy on April 24, and it’s been met with positive reception, with a Metacritic score of 85% and a Very Positive review score on Steam. We’ve already written about the insane amount of illustrations, character portraits, music and other content Too Kyo Games created in order to match the convoluted storyline and its 100 routes – however, just when you start thinking The Hundred Line can’t get any crazier, it somehow ends up surprising you with even more deranged background info from its devs.
In a special interview with Denfaminicogamer, voice actors Taihi Kimura (role of Takumi Sumino) and Tomoyo Kurosawa (roles of Nozomi Kirifuji and Kashimiya Karua), as well as The Hundred Line director Kazutaka Kodaka gathered to talk about their work on the game – including the intensely long script Kodaka wrote, most of which Kimura and Kurosawa had to perform.
When Kodaka first counted, The Hundred Line’s script was at around 5 million characters (text length in Japanese is measured by character count, not by word count). However, that quickly turned into 6 million characters – which is, as Kodaka says, the length of around 60 paperback novels. He was asked by the translators to reduce the amount of text – and even though he did succeed in doing so, at one point, new ideas kept coming, and the script ended up becoming even longer.
Kurosawa noted that she received a digital copy of the script, joking that if this had been happening back when voice actors received only analogue scripts, she would have had to deal with a mountain of papers. Kodaka then clarified that there are two versions of the script made for all the voice actors – the first version is a “full script,” including all of the lines for every character in the game, while the second version is an “excerpt script,” which only contains the lines of the voice actor’s respective character.
Taking into account the sheer volume of this script (multiplied by two for each voice actor) and the storyline itself having 100 different variations, it was apparently quite difficult for the voice actors to keep track of the story. Kurosawa mentions that before starting most of her recordings, she had to ask the directors what storyline she was acting out, which characters were dead and alive at that point, and what the relationships between the characters were in that storyline.
In The Hundred Line, each of the 100 routes eventually takes on a life of its own, having different characters survive under different circumstances, form different relationships and share different secrets about themselves – which is why it comes as no surprise that it was so difficult for the voice actors to manage such a huge convoluted script. This was especially challenging for Kimura, given that Takumi Sumino, the main character, is present through each of the 100 different story variations.
A game having 60 novels worth of text and over 100 different endings may sound overwhelming for some, but Kodaka stresses that you don’t have to play through all of them, as long as you make choices that sit right with you and are able to find an ending you’re satisfied with. What’s most important when playing games is to have fun!
The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy is out now on Steam and for the Nintendo Switch.
