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jinjojess · 2 days ago

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So, what routes in Hundora have you done by now?

I've gotten 10 endings so far, which is what, 10% of the endings? I don't know how many different routes there are, but I've done three (arguably four) so far.

More details with spoiler talk below.

I don't know what this says about me, but the series of choices I was naturally making during the second run-through has mostly kept me on what I assume is the Prime Timeline (my basis for thinking this is that this timeline has included all the extra fluff the first runthrough had, like free time etc, and the chapter select screen refers to it as "Chapter 00").

The first actual route deviation happened to me on Day 33, because while I was okay to bite the bullet and sacrifice Magadori to detonate the bomb earlier on (it felt like the right decision thematically, and it would provide some delicious Jess Place pathos for me to savor), given the choice between Maruko, the character I care about the least and has the least utility to me in battles, and Kurara, a character I like a lot and who is key to my playstyle, it seemed laughably obvious to secure the latter.

So I went into the Chapter 7 offshoot verse, and got all the weird little endings there. Gotta say that they're a touch disappointing, because many of them are just slight variations of the same basic premise, and the only ending with any interesting implications (#022 Donna Donna) fades out without addressing anything juicy because to do so would spoil later reveals in the Prime Timeline. (Presumably.)

I did find the entire concept of having to make Sumino redpill himself very funny, and even funnier is how on Day 34 before any of that even comes up, the game itself just kinda shrugs and is like "yeah, makes sense why you'd sacrifice Maruko, huh. Was anybody even especially attached to that guy?"

Telling my girlfriend about this prompted her to suggest that Maruko living might be less thematically important than destabilizing Nozomi with grief, and based on where I am in the Prime Timeline now (Day 41), I kind of agree.

Yes, please haunt the narrative, Kurara-chan!

Not sure what to think about Gotoh, and the idea that there's a sect of humanity that thinks everyone should make peace with the fact that they fucked up and go quietly into eternity. Well, I kinda do, actually. Interestingly, the Anti-Human Relocation Camp feels very similar in ethos to the religion from niche PS2 SRPG Stella Deus, which makes me wonder if the devs of Hundred Line were at all inspired by it. It's pretty different on the gameplay mechanic front, but in a broader sense there's some underlying themes and style conventions that line up in a way that makes me wonder if any of them were Hoshigami series fans, ya know?

(Now thinking about Hundora gameplay with the RAP system... )

As always, I'm a sucker for representing the Will of Man not as a monolith but as a series of competing opinions, so I like that the Anti-Relocation side exists, but I feel the whole route was half-baked. I can only hope it's addressed in a more satisfying way later on, but there isn't any indication either way so uh... In particular, the turnaround between Gotoh telling the player that everyone's motivation to fight has been twisted to better manufacture consent and the reveal that they made all of that up was way too quick to feel effective.

Actually. Who wrote this route? Because the way it sets up a fascinating premise that challenges the characters' perception of themselves while also potentially challenging how the player sees them, only to just giggle and shrug and go "I made it up lol" feels like a pointed critique of Kodaka trying to Lady and the Tiger the fiction twist in V3.

Hm.

Final thing of note for this route is that I have a very pushy coworker named Gotoh and when I sent a screenshot of ending #015 (I think?) to a friend at his request, to show him what happens if you bluepill yourself, he responded that Nigou is pretty accurate to how he imagines the devil on her shoulder.

After exhausting the 8 endings in that offshoot and having it not take very long, I decided that before parting ways with Kurara in the Prime Timeline, I'd go find out what happens if you try to stop Shizuhara from breaking Nigou. "This'll probably be a quick diversion," I thought, like an idiot. "She got stopped anyway when I just stood idly by, so it can't be that big of a difference."

So yeah. I've also done Chapter 8, aka まったり編 (which I'm choosing to call the Living to the Fullest route).

This one feels more like a proper alternate story path, given that it's far longer and only contains one choice at the very end. I kind of like how it's carved into a handful of major chunks, where you're wandering around and dealing with trivial bullshit, though again I'm not fully convinced that 100 days were necessary. Regardless, juxtaposing stuff like The Mystery of the Potentially Bisexual Sock Thief with actual enemy sieges was pretty effective at getting to the heart of the ultimate route dilemma: do you stick with comfort, knowing it's fake, or do you face reality, knowing it sucks? Hardly groundbreaking or anything, but if the delusion ending is the only true Golden Route in the game, I will be satisfied with that.

Plus it's never not funny to see Veshnis (Veshnith?) comporting herself like a Saturday morning cartoon villain. Yes, Queen! Give us nothing but empty threats!

This answer got way out of hand, sorry.

For those of you keeping score, here's the stats.

Routes I've Played:

Original Timeline

Chapter 00, ongoing (technically nameless, but I'm calling it the Prime Timeline)

Chapter 7 (The Route of Many Decisions)

Chapter 8 (Living to the Fullest Route)

Meanwhile, the endings I've gotten so far are (in the order I got them):

017

018

022

021

020

019

016

015

024

023

Choices I've made so far that were kind of notable:

Chapter 00, Day 015, who sacrifices themself to detonate the bomb. "I'll tell you who it's NOT gonna be. It's not gonna be Kawana, because I refuse to nuke my best flying unit equivalent for no conceivable narrative purpose."

Chapter 7, Day 34, choose to take the red pill or not. "Welp. Guess Sumino's about to become either a girl or a Joe Rogan fan."

Chapter 7, Day 35, who should be convinced first to run away. "I feel like Kurara could easily get the Dai2 group on my side, but Shizuhara could force everyone onto my side so..."

Chapter 8, Day 99, stay in the dream or face reality. "I don't respect staying in Plato's Cave but let's see it first I guess."

Finally, I've got a few other thoughts. First, I'm feeling quite vindicated about my prediction that the planet is not Earth and the shinkousei are the indigenous ones. If that's not the case, it could be that we're so displaced in time/reality that despite the planet being Earth, the shinkousei are humanity's distant relatives or convergent evolutions or something else appropriately Uchikoshi-minded.

The other main thing I'm noticing is that every single death or potential death in Round 2 is a character that survived the OG Timeline. (I don't yet know who dies instead of Amemiya if you forsake Dai2 Bouei Gakuen, in all fairness, so that might screw my theory up a bit.) This makes me wonder if the Prime Timeline will have the only survivors be everyone who died in the original run, which would be interesting, because depending on how you look at it, that's arguably a worse outcome for the main cast. Maybe not for Sumino, whose prime directive is that Nozomi makes it and everyone else is preferred but not necessary, but objectively you'd go from ten characters surviving to like, five, depending on how things go with Eva and Aotsuki.

The interesting question for me at this point is: does this problem extend to Sumino himself, or does he have protag plot armor? I'd gone into the redo timeline assuming he was insulated from the same kind of consequences as the other characters because he's the only one with time travel powers, but looking at it again after seeing how the endings are handled... Sumino doesn't diagetically time leap when things go south like the Ashton Kutcher movie Butterfly Effect; whatever ending he gets is the end of the line for that version of him, with only the player getting to hop around afterward.

A fun detail, because it implies a couple of things. First is that after the original timeline, Sumino is coasting on quantum immortality instead of literally avoiding bad outcomes using time travel. The Sumino in any given route is as unaware of all his grim fates as a fresh Mario is of all the versions of himself who perished in bottomless pits. (Curious to see how Little Runmo this can get.)

The second fun implication is that the narrative is not locked to Sumino specifically, and he could "canonically" die without inviting a game over state. We've seen this before, of course. [Clair De Lune starts playing.] That said, it'd still be a very ballsy move to have the Prime Timeline end with the player character dying after tens of hours as the audience's stand-in. Ballsy, but thematically appropriate for a story about the sacrifices one is willing to make to protect what's important to them.

(We've also seen this thematic self-sacrifice cheated by this very same creative lead before, twice even, so I remain wary. Maybe Sumino will mysteriously be protected by the will of humanity like V3's stupid epilogue, or maybe he'll rock up looking confused and mumble "pretty sure I died" to himself. We shall see.)

So yeah, that's my extremely long and detailed thoughts so far. When I'm not just having a laugh about some silly detail, I have a lot to say regarding this game, apparently.

#Hundred Line #Hundred Line spoilers #ask #anon #long post #I should just make more posts to blab about theories and thoughts more often #so I don't dump all of this on what was ostensibly a pretty straightforward ask

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jinjojess · 18 days ago

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Jess's Post-First Scenario Hundred Line Thoughts

Okay, I’ve beaten the first scenario, so let’s talk about Hundred Line.

The tl;dr is that I think the game is good overall, and if you can get past some of the weaker bits and Kodaka Being Kodaka (in the annoying sense), then I’d recommend trying it out.

The big caveat is that it’s a demanding time commitment, so if you are not someone who enjoys DanRon, or if you are burnt out on DanRon, you might not have a great time.

Also since I’ve only seen a portion of the game so far it’s hard to give a full-on critique of the entire thing, so I reserve the right to revise my opinion in the future.

Anyway, continue below for in-depth, spoiler-laden talk.

Let’s get a couple things out of the way before we start.

First, I am playing the game in Japanese. This means that certain details might differ from the localized versions and it also means I don’t know what the hell anything is called in the loc. I debated looking it up, but I don’t really want to spoil myself accidentally, so we’re all just going to have to do the best we can to understand each other. (It’s thematic!)

Second, as frustrated as I get about the hallmarks of Kodaka’s style that annoy the shit out of me, I am not rooting for him to fail. In fact, I have bought every single TooKyo game either when it came out or shortly after it came out, at full price. The only properties of TooKyo’s I haven’t experienced at this point are Akudama Drive (because Tsutaya is being systemically eradicated over here meaning I would have to commit to buying a blu-ray to watch it instead of being able to rent), and Tribe Nine, because I just haven’t had time to check it out (plus it’s again an anime on YouTube and a FTP gatcha, so I feel like "support" in this case is more incidental).

Hundred Line is a lot more DanRon than the other games I’ve played so far from the studio. Rain Code was overwhelmingly Fine in my opinion; there were some ideas and elements there that I thought were cool or interesting, but overall it felt very run-of-the-mill, 6/10 type fare. Aside from Harara, I didn’t really care about most of the characters, and while I sometimes enjoyed solving mysteries in the moment-to-moment gameplay (especially in the first couple chapters), my resounding feeling on it was just “meh”. Not bad, but not great.

Compared to that, I’m way more invested in Hundora (I’m going to use the Japanese naming convention going forward because it’s shorter and rolls off the tongue). I don’t know if I can clearly articulate why I feel that way, but I have suspicions, one of which is that I’ve had enough of a break to no longer be burnt out by my disgust at DR3’s ending and V3’s epilogue. Hundora manages to capture a lot of the same feel of a DanRon, but without a lot of the inherent setbacks of a DanRon, which I’ll outline a bit later. It’s structured differently, and has different pacing and focus, and I think that works to its benefit by making it at once both familiar and novel.

Now, this could obviously change as the game goes on; if somewhere in there is an ultimate ending similar to V3’s cop-out epilogue–the best part (and only part I unabashedly respect) of V3 is the fiction twist and the characters’ decision on how to ultimately resolve the conflict, so undoing the latter part of it in the final moments of the game is just something I will never get over. Sorry.

(I’d also be less mad about the Akamatsu thing if we actually got a go-getter, highly motivated girl as a protag somewhere else, but I’m beginning to just accept the fact that Kodaka does not have it in him to do that. Ah well.)

But let’s stop this aimless musing and be a bit more organized, shall we?

Presentation:

In a vacuum, Hundred Line is not that impressive graphically. I think it looks fine, but I also see people pointing to what I think are fairly decent graphics and calling them shit, so I don’t know if I’m the best benchmark to judge that type of thing for anyone else. It’s not difficult to notice things like sprites hovering off the ground, some artifacting here and there, and the models aren’t blazing any trails in terms of detail or animation, but I’ve always been a champion of art direction over fidelity to realism, so I actually think the look works well.

There’s an intention to using the 2.5D style of 2D sprites in a 3D rendered environment (chief among the intentions being invoking DanRon’s aesthetics), and the “cheapness” feels less like a budget limitation and more like a choice. I’m also genuinely the type of person who wants shorter games with worse graphics by well-paid devs, and I am happy to put my money where my mouth is on that. While Hundred Line obviously isn’t a shorter game by any means, it’s very obvious that the budget went into the variety of art assets and into the script, and I think that’s great! I’m happy to have games that prioritize other aspects over just how it looks.

Similar to DanRon, the 2.5D approach makes everything feel like you’re in a little diorama, which has a way of evoking claustrophobia even as you spend a lot of this game outside and even away from the school for sections. I suspect this is intended as a purposeful juxtaposition to further the themes.

Music:

The music in this game is kind of unnerving in a way. It’s so resoundingly DanRon bgm that you just kind of settle into it, but then they’ll throw something at you like the Aotsuki boss fight song, Rumble, and you’re left stunned.

For like 90% of the game so far, if you like the music in DR up through V3, then you’ll probably like the music here.

Rumble read to me as a bit of a mess to start, but after listening to it a few times, I’ve come around to liking it. My girlfriend says it feels very purposefully composed, with disparate elements coming together over the course of the song and finally settling into a harmonious unity in the final minute or so. Obviously this is a pretty good metaphor for the characters in the game and the situation they find themselves in, so I applaud that.

The lyrics feel a touch…unsubtle, but to be fair, they share that with other songs that I’ve been wanting to listen to a lot lately like Packtion’s 1985, so I can forgive it. I do think it’s funny that Persona-esque English usage is so prevalent, though.

If there’s more weird stuff like that in here, I’m down for it.

Gameplay:

This is the elephant in the room, I think, when it comes to getting people on board for this game. Guys, we saw how this went for Digimon Survive; if people are coming to Hundora for the tactical gameplay, they are going to be disappointed. And then they’re going to get annoyed at all the people online who insisted this was the next Fire Emblem or Devil Survivor. (Real things I have seen people say, insanely enough.)

Is the combat fun? I mean, I guess, sometimes. It makes for a nice little break from the back-and-forth between characters, but it’s nowhere near as inventive as what DanRon was doing with the trials, and it gets stale pretty darn fast.

Nate remarked on this when he played Another Episode, and I think Hundora suffers from the same issue: it’s too easy. I didn’t notice it in Another Episode because I’m not good at 3rd person shooting games, but I am competent at tactical rpgs, and Hundora’s battles are just not it. Once you understand how the mechanics work, which doesn’t take particularly long, you can crack most fights in record time. Even quicker if you abuse certain mechanics like items. The enemy AI seems okay, often rushing to attack your squishier backline fighters, but there’s a number of ways to deal with the AI without having to think too hard about it.

The only fight that’s given me trouble so far is the final boss fight against Aotsuki, and even then I got him on the second try.

I don’t know, maybe I’m missing something? Maybe the fights ramp up later on in the game in other scenarios? Unsure.

Besides the difficulty issue, the tactics are pretty straightforward. There’s really not too much you need to juggle, and while I do like the Certain Death Finisher mechanic where when somebody’s HP gets low they can do a big attack that takes them out of the fight until the next wave, it’s lacking the depth of other strategic rpgs. You can’t choose what roles your units have by selecting some skills over others, they don’t get stat gains, there’s no equipment, terrain basically doesn’t play a role at all, you can’t do combined attacks using positioning, and you don’t get to choose who to bring or where they start on the map.

All of that is fine, because the tactics are not the main point of the game anyway, but I do not get what the people praising the gameplay are talking about. It’s a great visual novel with some light tactical combat gameplay! You don’t have to try to sell it as something it’s not!

To me, Hundora is less like a tactical rpg with all the genre conventions you might expect, and more like a grid-based combat puzzle. You have to look at the units you’ve got, what they can do, how they can cover each others’ weaknesses, etc. That is also fun, but it’s not what I was expecting when I heard “SRPG” in the description.

I also suspect some of the difficulty in the boss fights comes from not having any clue what the boss is going to do beforehand, in a similar way to how a run of a pokemon game can be challenging from not knowing the gym leaders’ teams and moves ahead of time. Is this Captain going to hop around the map? Are they going to beef up the surrounding troops? Are they going to mess with your perception so you have to pay more attention to what you’re doing? I’m interested to see how this might evolve as the game goes on and you’re already wise to the approach.

Anyway the tactical RPG segments are Fine. They’re there, they do what they need to I suppose, but they can get a bit tedious after awhile, especially when you’re out exploring the ruins or trying to grind BP at the VR machine. It’s definitely not a draw, at least for me.

I suppose the other main gameplay mechanic is the choice system, but I’m not too deep into that at this point. As always, I respect a game that will give me an ending for choosing not to play at the start, though that goodwill got a bit rescinded when the game asked me if I was going to time travel and then essentially told me I had to when I tried to say No both times.

Right now it’s kind of a wash, lol.

Characters:

Oh, you thought the last section was long? Well, buckle up.

This is mostly just going to be about how I feel about the characters and their roles in the story so far; I’ll get out a different post with stuff like their personal pronouns and how they address people, and I’ll definitely rate how dumb their names are, because HOO BOY there are some real good ones in here.

Sumino Takumi: Sumino is the quintessential Kodaka protagonist–a normal boy, who lives a normal life, who is a bit more chill than the average person. I’m pretty meh on him, and his protag powers are sometimes egregious (let me give Aotsuki’s blood to Kako! She’s the one who won the fight!), but he leans more Hinata than Naegi or Saihara, so I find him personally less annoying than the latter two. I guess he’s had a bit of character development over the first scenario, though his raison d'etre is still the same at this point. I can forgive that because there’s a lot of room for him to still grow in the other scenarios, and he’s doing an okay job as the audience stand-in. Not much else to say about him, really.

Aotsuki Eito: Whew, thank god the cloying togetherness stuff turned out to be a ruse. He was fine enough during the first scenario, and towards the beginning I thought it’d be interesting if he became the leader instead of the player, but I like him infinitely more as an embodiment of misanthropy. The fact that we have to still deal with him in every timeline makes for an interesting conflict point, and I’m excited to see what happens there.

me when the work meeting goes over time

Yakushiji Takemaru: This is one of those archetypes I just enjoy: the tough, buff guy with a heart of gold. Outside of his training for Ginzaki and his rivalry with Shizuhara, he isn’t super prevalent in the story as a driving force, but that’s okay. Hoping he gets to really stand out in other routes, since he’s one of the characters who shows a lot of his relationship to people outside of the player.

Amemiya Darumi: I feel like she’s intended to be annoying, but I dunno, I didn’t really have too much of an issue with her. She really stuck to her guns about going against the grain, and she’s the self-insert of the DanRon fan: a pathos-lover of questionable mental health. She injects a lot of needed levity in places, and some unneeded levity in other places, but she’s also the most genre-savvy of the group, which lets her fill the spot Monokuma normally would. (She was also integral in me beating Aotsuki at the end of scenario 1, and was a reliable unit for the entire game, so there’s that, too.) So far I feel like if you don’t enjoy her you can avoid her pretty easily.

Shizuhara Hiruko: This is my bitch, right here. I was cursing the game out when she promised to tell the truth of what’s happening the following day, because I knew that would mean she would be punted from the story. I’d be more upset about this if there weren’t more routes to play, but since there are, I dealt with it. Anyway I love a lady who’s cold, intelligent, competent, and badass, and the fact that it seems that she’s carrying a heavier weight to protect the others adds some humanity to her. Haven’t read her side story yet; will likely do so after finishing the game.

Kawana Tsubasa: I have very fond feelings for Kawana that are completely emergent from how useful she is in battle. Well, not completely. I do like that she’s got a skill that she uses often for the good of the team, and her personality is upbeat enough to offset some of the less genki folks in the cast, but she often can play the straight man well to other, goofier characters. Plus her design is adorable. I hope she gets some more chances to shine in the pathos department going forward.

Maruko Gaku: While I don’t dislike any of the characters, Maruko is probably my least favorite. You’re obviously intended to dislike him early on as he’s rude and cowardly and shallow, and he shows more of a likable side as time goes on. He’s probably the one I have the most “well, he’s nakama…” feelings about, but he can be amusing and I’m open to him having more depth in other routes.

Ginzaki Shouma: At the very start of the game I could not stand his self-deprecating schtick, but once you instill fighting spirit into him and he starts taking care of the captive, he becomes a lot more likable. By the end of the first scenario, I actually really appreciated his more gentle approach to disagreements, and I like to think about the kind of relationship he has to the other characters. Hope I get to see that side of him more going forward. As a side note, his skill of being incredibly tough is also lifted wholesale from the main character of the delinquent manga Kodaka was involved in, Guren Five.

Tsukumo Ima: The trick to getting me to like your Ogata Megumi-voiced trickster twink is to make him care about a character outside of the protagonist, apparently. (I was also humbled recently when a friend who’s playing now told me last weekend that Ima’s speech pattern of using っす “reminds her of me”.) Ima’s great; he’s less annoying than an Ouma or a Komaeda because he’s not constantly underfoot, but he’s sarcastic and cutting enough to be interesting. He’s clearly a kid who is confident but also visibly desperate, and I’m all about that.

Tsukumo Kako: I really didn’t like Kako for quite a while, until she started to have more of her own personality. I love that she’s trying to play detective and I love even more that she’s not especially good at it. At first she was reserved and shy, but as time goes on, she has pretty keen insights and is one of the few characters who doesn’t fall into the trap of going all in on just one possibility. Her becoming unhinged about Ima’s death was also fantastic. Kako feels a bit like she could make a compelling bid for protagonist, honestly. My turnaround on her was a real 180.

Oosuzuki Kurara: Man, I love Kurara-chan. Even when she’s starting a fight for no reason, I love her. She’s mean, funny, and absolutely integral to me getting S ranks in battles. Why does her mask emote? Who knows? Who cares? I want a recipe for her curry. Her relationship to the other 2nd School folks, Nozomi in particular, is so juicy and multi-layered. I have mixed feelings about her “real” personality being a shy crybaby, because while that adds some fun psychological elements to how she sees herself and her relationship to the responsibilities her lineage puts on her, it’s also kind of doesn’t sit super great to imply that the ideal personality for a girl is to be demure.

Omokage Yugamu: I like him a lot more than I thought I would. Even from the jump, he’s a fascinating, somewhat menacing presence, and the way he thinks feels reminiscent of Hijirihara from Killer Killer, but less masculine. I can’t hate a guy that says 殺れ殺れ in a textbox! That’s a hilarious bit! Again, like with Kawana, he’s got some real world skills that come in really clutch for the team, so there’s a fun, somewhat fraught relationship between him and the other characters.

Magadori Kyoshika: I said this on Twitter, but Magadori has that good Chabashira energy: she’s dumb, but she’s trying her best. It makes her immensely charming, and I love every time she’s on screen. One of the goofier characters, I love that she’s allowed to be so damn funny. That one cutscene where Nozomi is having a horrible realization about being mind-controlled in the foreground, and Magadori is being prevented from committing seppuku in the background had me rolling. I love her. I hope there are more routes that break her emotionally.

Kirifuji Nozomi: This is exceptionally funny to me because my girlfriend and I have a Kirigiri/Junko lovechild OC named Nozomi. But anyway, I like her. I like how she has alliances and feelings for people outside of just the player, and I am a fan of people who will stick to their principles. She’s ready and willing to throw down and sacrifice things, and she’s a woman of action, not just words. Nozomi would make an excellent protagonist, but it’d be harder to conceal key plot points from the player, so I get why they didn’t go that route. The fact that she’s out there fighting at a lower strength than everyone else, without the ability to regen, is really metal. Hell yeah, girl.

※ Will put my thoughts on Kashimiya Karua here too, I guess. I could be wrong, but I don’t actually think that Nozomi and Karua are the same person. Regardless, here’s what I think of her. I did not feel positively toward Karua at the start of the game because I do not like wilting flower, pwease pwotect me!-type damsels, but in Sumino’s memories she’s a lot more quirky and interesting. My frustration is that she just seems fated to be a motivator for the main character in that really forced Combat The Falling Birthrate way, and I can only hope that we get a Spire in the Woods-level self-awareness ending out of it.

Mojiro Moko: I liked what I saw of her? I love a big, bombastic personality, and she’s not the conventionally attractive girl archetype so that’s always nice. In a DanRon game I’d be pissed the noble buff character sacrificed herself before you even meet her, but since there’s other routes I can hope that she’ll actually get a chance to, y’know, exist. Open to more Mogojyan.

I don’t have much to say about Sirei and Nigou besides the fact that it makes me so mad that they decided to use Hepburn romanization for the latter but not the former.

In summary, the characters are all pretty good! Even the ones I was feeling more negatively toward in the beginning grew on me over time. I think this is a nicely balanced cast that blends well.

Story:

I’m not too far into my second run, but I think the premise for Hundora is really interesting and worth doing. I can’t say I enjoy the half-joking self-aggrandizement Kodaka is putting out as part of the marketing campaign, but I respect the sheer scope of the undertaking. Time will tell if it really lives up to fulfilling the promise Distrust originally made or not, but regardless I will always tip my hat at a dev team taking a maximalist approach to game design.

One thing I can say in Kodaka’s favor is that he usually does a good job of setting up a hook to get the player invested in learning more about what’s going on. Here, since Sirei gets taken out so quickly, you’re dealing with way less info than usual, and there are smaller twists that happen throughout the duration of the 100 days to keep the player guessing and pull them forward. There’s enough time between when certain concepts are introduced and when they’re answered, such as the traitor, to be less obvious. (That said, I was kind of reminded of the Sailor Moon Abridged skit where they’re like “Who do you think the MOON princess is, Sailor MOON?” what with Aotsuki’s name and the fact that he’s Nozomi’s major opposition right before the climax.) I don’t think they needed to bring up the Karua dad funeral again before the reveal of the surgery scar, though. I’d have appreciated Kodaka having a bit more faith in the audience to remember that when it came up.

I had guessed that what was in the defense room was going to be a time machine, or something more meta like a pen/keyboard, and in a way I suppose I was right? I will admit that while I did sniff out Aotsuki as the traitor, I did not anticipate him eating a baby right in front of everyone, so good job getting me there.

One of Hundora’s biggest strengths is that for all the similarities, it breaks the usual DanRon formula. While you know going in that there will be 100 days, there’s no “usual murder pattern” to give any meta hints on what might occur. Thanks to this, the turns that happen in the first scenario feel better foreshadowed than some of the things in, say, V3 or DR3, since there’s no existing template to use as a cheatsheet. It lets things unfold in a more natural way, though there are some places where you can see the invisible hand of the author guiding it (e.g., Kawana spraining her ankle the night before the big Ima rescue mission so the player can participate).

I’m not sure how I feel about the length of the game; on one hand, it’s a good way to really give the story some room to breathe instead of having everything crunched into a couple of weeks, and you can get some nice character moments and interactions in there. On the other though, I think 100 days might have been too many. Maybe two months would have been preferable? Hard to say. Obviously you don’t live through every single day in its entirety, and I am giving the benefit of the doubt here that they’re doing a Yoko Taro thing here where the player’s suffering is part of the thematic expression of the game, but still I would have liked a bit less fluff.

While it’s good that you can have your fill of putzing around doing free time activities, I started to lose steam around the 50s or so. Feels like a waste to not use the opportunity to have small chats with the characters, do the board-game excursions, make presents, or grind BP to level folks up, but at the same time I think there’s just a touch too much of it. You’ve got days that feel like they go on forever (Day 87, looking at you…) and then just long stretches of nothing in particular for several days.

I assume that since they allow you to keep your character upgrades in the new timelines (with the slightly clumsy diegetic explanation that Sumino time traveling is resonating with everyone’s weird blood), you can feel less and less obligated to fill all those hours without skipping some, but we shall see.

Another common issue with DanRon games is that you always inevitably end up with characters who get less screentime and attention, because they get removed from the story early on. Having multiple routes here means that you get a lot more chances to know the characters under various conditions and circumstances, which for me is a big plus.

The first scenario ends up landing on a place that I respect, though it’s in some ways ideologically opposed to my own outlook on life. Whereas I think the intended message was “Don’t be idle; be the change you want to be! It’s never too late!”, the material reality of the circumstances is a bit more muddied and can read as: never sit with your regrets–just go back and change them! My personal belief is in not having regrets–not because I’m ignoring anything I regret, but because I want to use what I learned for future decisions, and to grow and move on. Obviously I don’t live in a reality where I’m a conscripted child soldier with magic blood powers, so there’s obviously different issues at play, but ultimately, if you want to look more into the thematics of what the story is trying to leave the player with, I think you need to grapple with it. That perfect Golden End might not exist, and I think the story will be weaker overall if it does.

This messaging about taking action and not just accepting your role as a pawn, of course, makes a lot of sense for a Japanese audience: people who culturally are less likely to want to rock the boat for fear of what might get worse, but to be honest it feels just as targeted at any society, the U.S. included. I won’t go into a lot of detail here, but yeah. Fuck it, fuck it, fuck their friends, and such.

This kind of brings me neatly to my next point, which is more a hope for future routes than anything else. The game uses a lot of iconography and visual cues that are very Showa-era-coded, which leans into fashy aesthetics. The fact that they’re called the “Special Defense Unit”, echoing the “Special Attack Units” (i.e., kamikaze) of WWII really hit me hard when I heard it for the first time. The Eternal Flames call to mind the ruins of firebombed Tokyo. There are air raid-style emergency sirens. The key to victory is a horrific weapon that wipes out life indiscriminately. Characters must don their very gendered, extremely Japanese school uniforms, complete with geta boots for the guys, in order to conform to the Look. They’re literal teens who were conscripted (aside from Nozomi, supposedly) to fight a war with extremely high stakes, manufacturing consent by dangling the safety of loved ones in front of them and pretending there are no other choices. The blase attitude toward death because of the regen machine is thrown into sharp relief as killing your own units becomes one of the most effective tactics in a battle.

There’s a narrative dissonance going on with what the story is trying to say and what it is depicting, and I’m enjoying it a lot. If it turns out it isn’t intentional, then well, shame on me, but for now I want to believe that this is being done purposefully. I want it to be a modern take on the black comedy Nihon Igai Zenbu Chinbotsu (a short story from 1973, which was adapted to a film I adore that released in 2006), which itself is a critique on the overly dramatic, Nihonjinron-soaked 1973 novel, Nihon Chinbotsu and its associated media (including that anime that came out in 2019). Won’t get into the weeds here, but essentially, what I am hoping for is a scathing critique of how Japan sees itself and its own history/culture.

Clearly there’s a lot more to go, and as I said before, my feelings on this may change as I progress, but for now I think there’s some good set-up here to say some interesting things. Some subversive things, even.

Other Stuff:

This is a mishmosh of other thoughts I had that didn’t fit anywhere else, really.

As I mentioned earlier, I do not think that Karua and Nozomi are the same person. That explanation is too simple and is too close to big twists we’ve had before (same reason I don’t think Nozomi is Karua’s long-lost twin). What I think is happening is that Nozomi is Karua’s daughter. Maybe she’s a clone daughter, hence the extreme similarity, but regardless I just feel like the comment about Sumino holding her the way he does when she’s dying makes me think that he was a friend of the family, or maybe even the “dad”, who knew her as a baby or young child or something. Since it kind of seems from that weird comment on Day 2 where Sumino is giving himself the mirror test that he might not be the OG person (expels a long sigh and says the line from The 6th Day), it’s possible he and the others were cloned as meat sacks for the iketsu and cryogenically frozen until they were needed, which happened to be when Nozomi was around the same age. She doesn’t remember an attack on the Tokyo Danchi, perhaps because she was coming at this from the current day and not the past. (That is, if the attack happened at all, and wasn’t a hallucination to manufacture consent in the conscripts.) She also doesn’t recognize the name Karua, so either she wasn’t as close to her mom as we were led to believe, or Karua maybe changed her name to hide her real identity.

I love the way the characters will gaslight themselves into some course of action, repeat that they can’t do anything else, or that this must be the case, only to almost immediately be proven wrong. It’s so funny every time, and it’s obviously downstream from the cultural programming they’ve all had.

Adore the scene where Sumino, who’s been running around in a hoodie with English on it this entire time, looks at Aotsuki in confusion and goes “What’s a foreign language?” (My headcanon is that the official language of humanity in this universe is a pidgin blend of mostly Japanese and some English.)

I want Nozomi and Moko-chan to make out, and then I want Kurara to be jealous about it.

Few things in this game made me laugh harder than the CG of Aotsuki lying evilly under Sumino’s bed. Just bug the room, my dude!

If one of these routes isn’t the death game Amemiya wanted, I will be very disappointed.

Sumino at the end of the first route being all “wah, I have nothing left to go back to!” when we met his mom in the opening. I guess that’s very accurate to how a 17 year old might feel in that situation, but I did roll my eyes.

Speaking of, I can’t help but notice that Sumino Mama has an ahoge…

I don’t think they’re on earth at all. I think that given the Imperial Japanese look and feel going on, the characters are colonists, and the shinkousei are the real natives to the planet.

Does the rocket coming back with the recorded message from the other characters getting got (happy space journey everyone) indicate that time travel works in a Homestuck way, where the doomed timelines will wither and disappear, or does it indicate that this is just a parallel reality that will persist but not be visitable by anyone else?

Me, fighting Aotsuki in the gym early in the second loop, watching him give himself a defense boost despite that I have an armor piercing move: Use defense curl all you want, Squirtle, I’ll win this the old fashioned way.

I’ve been referring to ghost boy as Benedetto until he gets a name. Yes, The Count of Monte Cristo is one of my favorite books.

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So yeah, that’s about it. Long-winded, but I think that’s most of what I was intending to say.

Like I mentioned, there will likely be some other posts soon about dumb names and stuff like that, but for now I’m gearing up for another week of work.

#Hundred Line #opinions #long post #review #?#in a manner of speaking I suppose #I just know I'm going to post this and then remember something I wanted to include #I am aware everyone already knows this but god damn it is difficult to get screenshots off a switch #Hundred Line spoilers

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