The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy finally completed its 100-day countdown on April 24, launching on Steam and Nintendo Switch. With its 100 different routes, the game posed a big challenge for the developers, as it took a lot of time and dedication to create content which would make each ending feel distinctive and compelling. In a barrage of interviews with Famitsu, the Too Kyo Games team talked about the workload involved in creating a game with such a massive storyline.
Rui Komatsuzaki, in charge of the character art, ended up drawing more than 2,000 different facial expressions for the characters that were used in the game, according to Kodaka. At first, they planned to have around 20 different expression patterns for each character and 300 in total – but that quickly changed due to the magnitude of the script. “Around a year before completing the final build, we had 1,368 different character expressions in total. After that we kept adding more, but I was too afraid to count them, so ultimately, I have no idea how many there actually are.”
Komatsuzaki explained that he usually drafts sketches of the characters while reading the scenario, and after thorough consideration, he picks out the ones that work best and compiles them into a list. However, the scenario for The Hundred Line never seemed to end, and the number of initial sketches just kept growing. According to Kodaka, at one point in production, they actually tried reducing the number of facial expressions for the characters – to no avail, as each of the 100 variations of the storyline required its own character expressions.
It was no different when it came to event CGs – there ended up being over 600 illustrations. The most difficult thing about the CGs, Kodaka says, was checking them for mistakes and whether they were consistent with the story. For example, a common mistake was when a character would be drawn wearing an outfit different to the one they were wearing in the previous scene. Due to the script being so long, the job was split between team members, but it still took an excruciatingly long time to check all the CGs for errors.
The music for the game was made by Masafumi Takada, Kodaka’s long-time collaborator ever since the Danganronpa series. This being their first time belonging to the same company, the shared environment combined with the never-ending need for more and more songs to be added to The Hundred Line soundtrack has naturally led to them growing closer than ever –Kodaka remarked.
Takada expressed that even he isn’t sure about how many songs he’s made for Hundred Line – according to him, there’s more than 90 songs in the in-game gallery, but if you take all the cutscene music and sound effects into consideration, the number of tracks made for the game exceeds 400. However, he says that, rather than songwriting, the biggest challenge for him was scheduling – Takada was simultaneously making music not only for The Hundred Line, but also for Master Detective Archives: Rain Code, and working as an accountant for Too Kyo Games.
The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy is out now on Steam and for the Nintendo Switch.
