I really wanted to like this game. I really tried to. I got all of the endings, and there were moments that were good. There were concepts and themes that could have been interesting. That sometimes were interesting. But at the end of the day, it over promised and under delivered.

The hundred line promises 100 endings. There does exist 100 named endings. The majority of them are underwhelming. I heard before I got this game that it was written so that any of these 100 endings could feel like the "true" ending. This just isn't true. A lot of them are quick bad ends. There's a whole bunch that's just a joke. How well those go over will depend on your sense of humour, but there is no narrative value in those endings.

Also, there just is one ending that feels like the true one. Or at least, the one you're supposed to get first. I got a really weird route first, and it was obvious that the game didn't expect that. At first I thought, oh I'm just on (character's) weird offshoot route, that's fine. But the more I played the more obvious it became that there really was just the one main route. Some of the side stuff is more developed than others, but none as much as that main route.

There are routes where you just skip days at a time, for a handful of excuses. One of the routes I was playing towards the end the text literally said "nothing interesting happened" and like, I agreed. It was boring. Though, having these skipped days not be skipped wouldn't improve the quality of the routes much. It'd just make them take longer.

The combat started off being interesting. There was an update to allow you to skip repeat battles that appeared some time into my playthrough. It counts as the same fight regardless of your party formation. So either you skip everything and barely have any gameplay, or you don't skip and eventually have zero struggle with fights you've already won while on less people.

The characters are good. They make sense, they have interesting things to them. Some routes will focus on some characters and that's nice. They spend a lot of time being cliche, especially on routes that don't focus on them. A lot of things are left as subtext.

Speaking of things being out of focus on routes, that's one of my nitpicky things. For example, smallest of spoilers. One enemy has a sound based attack and your characters need earplugs. There are like two(?) routes where this is a major thing. Every other route it's just, you have earplugs don't ask questions. I understand that with so many endings, with wanting to give each route something to focus on, that maybe you don't need to spend a lot of time on the same thing over and over. It's weird though, if you get on of those routes where you just had earplugs first and later come across a route where it's a bigger deal. Well, the earplugs aren't that big a deal so maybe this sounds silly. The one that really bothered me though is a much bigger spoiler, and a much bigger deal. Namely, Eva and her being brainwashed and joining the party. This just is unexplained and unquestioned in any route that isn't the one where you help with the brainwashing machine. Need to do something somewhere with someone who would have a reaction to the place? No problem, they conveniently have already seen the place and had their reaction while your protagonist was busy with this route's focus. You can just do the thing you need to do without worrying about needing to include this character's reaction.

There's some things that I think were mishandled. Mostly around disabilities and such. Can't say too much without spoiling, but I'll keep them vague. We've got a couple instances of brainwashing a mentally ill character to remove their metal illness because it was making them evil. A character blinding themself to prove a point and suffering no consequences for having done so. It tries to bring up muscle emancipation a few times but doesn't know what it's doing. Any injury either puts you out of commission because you're a coward or you can power through it.

There are a lot of inconsistences and just weird stupid stuff. See: that 100 second-long running scene where everyone took turns carrying the person who couldn't run. It specified Each Person had a turn carrying them. Like. C'mon. Surely it's easier to let one of the bigger party members carry the person rather than specifying a whole bunch of people take turns for under 10 seconds each and then swap. This isn't even the worst offender it's just one I saw while grabbing the last few endings today.

I'm just disappointed. Maybe I wouldn't be if my expectations were lower going in.

Overall, this game is good for a few of its endings. If you want to play it anyway, my recommendation is to first get to day 100 the first time on your own (just so you can say your first ending is your first ending). Then use a guide to get specific endings.

In my personal opinion, the good (meaning well-written, not happy or morally good) endings are: 001, 002, 006 (personal favourite), 030, 034, 043, 049, 055, 072, 076, 087, 088. Maybe 100. There are a couple X or Y ones where either ending of a route could be fine. Like 13 or 14. The main point there is the route not the ending you get.

So yeah, that's me saying out of the 100 endings this game promises, less than 20% of them are worth seeing. That 20% did have some good moments though, so I won't say I regret having played the game. Because now I have enough context to engage in the fandom. Which I do want to do because, as I said, I did really want to like this game. I did find things interesting. It just didn't follow through.

The Two Hundred Line

eito aotsuki