Wrapped up my Hundred Line playthrough: finished most of the Big Routes, watched the rest on YouTube. Trying to wrap my mind around the fact it’s less of a story and more of a monstrous system generating plots and meanings and all types of pure Content prechewed for fans’ convenience. A daily school life structure with three segments per day, the “survive 100 days” setup, a repetitive transformation cutscene delivered in many variants, a rather predictable sequence of invaders’ attacks, paperthin characters that are more like cartoon figures every writer can bend to their will however they want (one strong Danganronpa-like gimmick and a semblance of a character arc), the visual novel asset structure is generally perfect for constant text-based divergences in a setting grounded by strong limitations.
Voila: the Danganronpa guy can explore all of his low-brow eroge obsessions, the Zero Escape writer can write out a story planned across multiple timelines Primer-style, the Persona 5 spinoff guy can deliver a route where everyone powers up using friendship before kicking the last villain’s ass, the Boruto guy can be responsible for the most boring path through the game, and it all mostly coheres. And even if you don’t care for any of these folks’ writing, you can just hunt for character designs you like, you can find the kind of dubious CG artworks you like, or you can find the route focused solely on pleasant SRPG combat (too basic, but I really appreciate how it understands the genre demands as few button presses as humanly possible, and how it is almost squarely focused on covering as much ground as possible using Tetris-shaped attack ranges, rewarding constant turn optimization).
Feels like Hiroki Azuma’s Database Animal is key to understanding what kind of thing this is, especially that Azuma pointed at YU-NO as the ultimate postmodern database work, and Hundred Line pushes a lot of the same ideas further, reality mapped out as an endlessly branching, endlessly contradictory flowchart. And an all-you-can-eat otaku signifier buffet: here’s the dude with Shinji Ikari’s voice, here’s an ojou-sama with a stupid but memorable mask gimmick, here’s a cute mascot with murderous tendencies, here’s menhera girl who loves the same eroge as you do, here’s a completely perfunctiory Social Link system, and so on and so on. For better and worse, the game has everything you’d expect it to have in some form. The worldbuilding exists mostly to reveal itself as a complete sham, an endlessly layered fiction that’s mostly justifications for murder (and/or fun). Nothing exists except what you choose to believe in, except the parts of the database that personally interest you. There’s not even a true ending which surprised me, the game really wants to be whatever you want to be.
13 Sentinels is the most obvious point of reference here, the writers want to deliver their own ur-sci-fi narrative by mashing up all of the nerdy influences that made them, but wherever Sentinels aimed for classy wistful nostalgia, this goes for as loud and low as possible. It’s often basically an eroge without ero, as explicitly sexual as it can get without actually depicting sex, with the same pornographic sentimentality. There are all the expected fanservice scenes, swimming pool and so on. There’s a route with bee-like insects that suck people dry of their essence, grabbing hot anime girls and sticking a long phallic object into them. There’s a cynical harem route parody where you brainwash everyone in your team to be in love with you, and it ends with them turning you into a paralyzed sex object, the last image in the storyline being two nude bishonens in heat. It’s all very savvy, both in how the game is very queer-friendly and how it uses the narration to suggest the images are revolting even though they’re obviously meant to also be titillating, the devs know how to have their cake and eat it, let the sex-negative zoomers and gooner zoomers argue about it on social media.
The game is really a lot (the longest script in gaming history, I think five Bibles long?), but it also feels like nothing. One thing that stuck out to me is how proud the devs are about this being possibly the last game of its kind that was made without any assistance from AI. And it is admirable but also, despite the unique sensibilities of each notable dev, on some level this is already such an algorithmical piece of entertainment, so where do you go from here?
P.S. Masafumi Takada’s score feels mostly like rejected Danganronpa themes, but this vocal track that plays in specific boss fights always gets me, feels like some Maximum the Hormone cover band trying to create their own version of Welcome To The Black Parade.
