Before Too Kyo Games released The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy, the tactical RPG/visual novel hybrid that is, in my opinion, secretly one of the dark horses for 2025 Game of the Year, co-creative director Kazutaka Kodaka had been pretty candid in saying that the studio needed the game to be successful, lest it go bankrupt due to the amount of loans it took to get the project out the door. After two-and-a-half months and a lot of positive word of mouth, it sounds like the game may have pulled the company out of the red. In fact, it’s doing so well that the studio is planning to add more routes to its already extensive branching timeline.
In an interview with Bloomberg, Kodaka said that The Hundred Line’s lengthy development threatened to end the short-lived studio. Too Kyo Games was founded in 2017 after Kodaka and co-founder Kotaro Uchikoshi left Spike Chunsoft following the success of the Danganronpa and Zero Escape franchises. In the years since, Too Kyo Games has released several projects that captured the individual leads’ creative styles, but The Hundred Line certainly feels like more of a melding of the minds than anything else the company has put out. It has Danganronpa’s signature school life social sim elements, and then its second half reveals an elaborate, multi-route branching storyline that can lead to one of 100 endings like a power-boosted Zero Escape. For such a small team, it was a wildly ambitious project, and that’s why it took five long years of development and some financial favors to finish. Now, Kodaka says that the game is selling “pretty well,” and he doesn’t see bankruptcy “as a serious future” for the company.
So now what? Too Kyo Games has put out its dream game and it’s doing well. Never one to shy away from his ambitions, Kodaka says he wants to extend The Hundred Line’s life for another decade by adding new storylines with patches and expansions, almost like a live-service game.
“I tried to aim this game to be like Cyberpunk 2077 or Grand Theft Auto Online,” Kodaka told Bloomberg. “I want it to be the open world of ‘scenario’ games.”
The Hundred Line starts out with a pretty standard visual novel structure. You play as a squad of high school students forced to defend an academy from alien invaders in an effort to protect a weapon hidden within its walls—the key to humanity’s survival—for 100 days. After those three months and change are up, some other stuff we won’t spoil goes down that puts the game on wildly divergent paths, with each route helmed by different writers. As a result, every path is markedly different than the others, though there is one route that unveils the game’s whole truth if you know how to find it. Each of these routes has multiple endings, some of which are obviously “conclusions” while others read like “bad ends.” Given the buck-wild directions some of these routes go, it doesn’t seem like much is off-limits in terms of genre and tone for The Hundred Line. So if the studio pulls from a rotating stable of writers, I can see the game staying fresh for several years. Now that Too Kyo Games is in a better position to support its latest release, it feels safe to hope for the game’s future, as well as the studio’s.
