At the beginning of 2025, I fully believed I had grown tired of stories about multiple timelines. During the past decade, the Marvel Cinematic Universe pushed the classic comic book narrative device into the mainstream, fueling a film conglomerate with legally approved cameos, flashy visuals on the silver screen, and loose plots that, eventually, came together for one final pay-off.
While the concept of the multiverse has been explored in film and TV even before Marvel’s takeover, it quickly became the narrative foundation of choice. When done right, the potential is undeniable–works like Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse and Everything, Everywhere, All at Once are heartwrenching displays of interpersonal relationships, making characters face the reality of what-if scenarios, reconciling with their choices and what could have been if they had turned the other way instead. But you can only hear the same tune so many times before it starts to lose its original impact.
It wasn’t until The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy that my interest was reanimated. The visual novel and strategy-RPG hybrid presents itself as deceivingly linear, only to push you into a completely different story structure at the very end. It makes for a sprawling web of outcomes based on your choices, all while showcasing different perspectives on events and characters that weave absurdity and sentimentality in equal measure in a showcase of creative prowess from the development team.
It all started after an eShop sale in July encouraged me to finally catch up with the Danganronpa and AI: Somnium Files series. It was the perfect motivation to prepare myself for this behemoth of a game, in which the lead developers of both series got together for a joint project that features 100 endings.
The concept sounded exhausting–as someone who’s constantly playing games for work, I figured I’d never be able to justify the time for it, especially since I wanted to at least play the most prominent modern works from the developers first. To my surprise, I ended up adoring the messiness of Danganronpa’s cruel killing games. But it was AI: Somnium Files and its sequel, Nirvana Initiative, that led me to begin to understand The Hundred Line’s potential.
Both games kick off from linear storylines that set up a detective-style mystery. Eventually, the plot begins to branch out–depending on key decisions you make, you end up pursuing different timelines, all represented in a flow chart that you can use to jump back and forth between them, especially when routes get locked until you’ve made progress on a different timeline. There’s a true ending that, on paper, symbolizes the intended culmination of events. Yet, the process of witnessing what could have happened if I had made a different decision, experiencing the ramifications on characters and their fates and getting alternative endings, was immediately arresting.
In a way, playing through The Hundred Line is similar to the experience of getting through both of these franchises as I did. You play as Takumi Sumino, one of 15 high school students who are sent to the mysterious Last Defense Academy to protect humanity from invaders. The story is structured in 100 days, which is exactly the period of time that the students have been commanded to endure. While none of them have as many in-game days, all mainline Danganronpa games share this structure, splitting the visual novel aspect of the story with exploration and trials–in The Hundred Line, the latter takes the shape of strategy RPG battles, as well as free time to increase bonds with characters.
But getting to the final day doesn’t mean reaching the end. While there’s little reason to believe that day 100 isn’t basically the story’s culmination, it only signifies the end of a prologue. Once you get to the tantalizing date, the game radically changes and becomes similar to AI: The Somnium Files (as well as previous games led by lead developer Kotaro Uchikoshi, such as Zero Escape: Virtue’s Last Reward and Zero Time Dilemma). Your task, then, is to explore different timelines and dive into their own what-if scenarios, making decisions that lead to the aforementioned 100 endings.
Speaking to Bloomberg, Danganronpa lead designer Kazutaka Kodaka said that writers were given the freedom to take characters in wild directions, from a comedy route to one where they all turn into zombies. The further you plunge into the flow chart, the more this becomes apparent, with characters adopting different personalities, or the game itself changing drastically in comparison to the calendar schedule of the original 100 days.
Normally, choice-driven stories fix you to certain paths depending on what you pick, and they have you carrying those choices from that moment on. Games like this year’s Dispatch, for example, brought back the Telltale Games formula into the zeitgeist, as former developers of the studio led the project. There are plenty of “this character will remember that” messages on screen, and while some of your decisions do carry some weight toward the end, the main story is structured largely the same. Despite the player’s input, the bigger outcomes have already been decided.
In The Hundred Line, experiencing different outcomes is akin to opening a treasure trove that will seemingly never run out of surprises. It embodies the curiosity of a whiteboard filled with ideas that the developers had, and the rare chance of actually being able to see them manifested. What would have happened if this character hadn’t died? What ramifications could a seemingly small decision have in the lives of your fellow students? The answers to these questions are all laid bare for you to pick and experience for yourself. There is a true ending that you can pursue to uncover the overarching mysteries introduced during the prologue. But there’s also the precious opportunity of witnessing completely different stories.
At its core, The Hundred Line makes a singular case of how the interactive nature of video games fits stories about multiple timelines like a glove. It’s not often that we’re able to witness the developers’ creativity on such a big scale, either. Yet, it was that exact display that gave me a reappreciation of this narrative device, and left me ruminating about my own choices in life. 2025 marked the tenth anniversary of my first published article. It was the result of responding to a call for writers from someone in a Facebook group I barely knew who was starting her own blog. Had I done differently, that day would have been as any other. I would have continued studying graphic design, perhaps. I would have met completely different people in the years that followed, while video games would have been nothing but a mere hobby. It was only a short message that, at the time, seemed innocuous. I had no idea how much it’d completely change my life.
The more end-of-the-year discussions I get to be a part of, the more I realize I’ll simply not be able to get to everything I want to see, do, and play in this lifetime. The time commitment of a story with 100 endings is daunting, to put it mildly. But I don’t regret spending months preparing for it, as well as the dozens of ongoing hours dissecting its every route. It’s a bold showcase of ambition and years of accumulated knowledge paying off, time and time again, in a way that only video games can muster. And it’s also a constant showcase of how much our lives can change on a whim without us realizing.