The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy Original Soundtrack, featuring a total of 112 songs from the game, went live on all major streaming platforms on January 17. Alongside the streaming release, a physical release containing 88 hand-picked tracks by composer Masafumi Takada is scheduled to go on sale on April 24. Commemorating the announcement of the highly anticipated soundtrack, AUTOMATON sat down with Takada to talk about how it was designed, and why it sounds so strikingly familiar in some instances.
When asked about the initial pointers he got from director Kazutaka Kodaka when it comes to the overall mood of the soundtrack, Takada said that the similarity toyou know what other game was very intentional. “The very first request I got from Kodaka was to give the OST a you know what kind of vibe,” he said. Apparently, the idea behind this was to create something new while also reminding fans that The Hundred Line IP was still built upon the legacy of Too Kyo Games’ founders.
“We decided to make The Hundred Line under the assumption that Kodaka had a lot of fans from the get-go, and when we were considering how to sell the new IP as a fairly new company, we concluded that it would be best if the musical direction of the songs we made evoked a slight sense of familiarity,” Takada elaborated. He mentioned that some of the tracks were intentionally made to evoke “déjà vu,” specifically ones like Cacophony and Outgoing Hope (going キボウ). And once you listen to the soundtrack, you’ll understand that Cacophony was pretty much designed to make the player feel a certain kind of Distrust towards the composer, or as Takada said, “I thought it would be fun to make the tone quality match the players’ memories of having heard it somewhere before, and then misleading them by straying away from their expectations bit-by-bit.” On the other hand, while Takada made many big technical changes to the work that he was originally referencing when composing Outgoing Hope, the synth-heavy track still sounds like it could be playing during some kind of Underground Trial.
Of course, in terms of the creative process itself, things didn’t change much, as the Too Kyo games team has a long history of working together. “It was the same feel, the same process,” Takada noted. “Kodaka isn’t the type to ask for retakes, so I was just making the songs based on his feelings while looking at Komatsuzaki’s illustrations and the actual game screen.”
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