The Hundred Line -Last Defense Academy- (Video Game)

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/VideoGame/TheHundredLineLastDefenseAcademy

Decide Your Destiny.^note

"Prepare to spend another day enduring the unendurable and suffering the insufferable to pave the way for humanity's future greatness! Be ready to give your lives to protect our beloved school from the vile and barbaric enemy!"

— Sirei's morning PA announcement

The Hundred Line -Last Defense Academy- (Japanese: HUNDRED LINE -最終防衛学園-, HUNDRED LINE -Saishuu Bouei Gakuen-) is an Adventure Visual Novel and Strategy RPG developed by Too Kyo Games and Media.Vision Inc and published by Aniplex. It was released on April 24, 2025 for the Nintendo Switch and PC (via Steam). A PC demo covering the first seven days of the story was released on February 18th of the same year.

The game follows Takumi Sumino, an Ordinary High-School Student whose peaceful life is shattered when monsters invade the Tokyo Residential Complex where he lives. Amidst the wreckage, he is found by Sirei, a ghost-shaped robot who tells him to stab himself with a strange knife to awaken "Hemoanima" powers inside him. When he proves capable, Sirei recruits him and nine other teenagers into the "Last Defense Academy", a mysterious military academy constantly under attack from "school invaders" — the same monsters that destroyed the TRC. If the Academy's students can Hold the Line there for 100 days, humanity will be saved... but who are the school invaders? Why can the Special Defense Unit suddenly use hemoanima? And how much blood will be shed to win the fight?

As a collaborative work between Danganronpa creator Kazutaka Kodaka and Kotaro Uchikoshi of Zero Escape fame, the game was highly anticipated — only compounded when the duo announced that the game has one hundred different endings. As such, it's highly recommended to complete the game at least once before reading further.

Up and at 'em, tropers! Time to rise and shine!

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#-D

13 Is Unlucky: The big war between the humans and the invaders is the thirteenth great war in Futuran history, according to Kamyuhn, and depending on Takumi's choices it can spell the complete destruction of their race.
Aborted Arc: The Romance route splits off from the S.F. route when Takumi tries to kiss Hiruko only for the two to accidentally fall to their deaths. Due to the Revive-O-Matic being damaged previously, the two come back with no memories past Day 3, meaning the parallel universe plot thread that was previously being developed is unceremoniously dropped with no resolution.
Accidental Hand-Hold: In the Romance Route of the game while working in the garage together, Takumi and Tsubasa decide to break for tea. They both reach for the handle of a tea kettle at the same time and end up holding hands. They were too embarrassed to make tea at that point and they both just continued working on their projects.
Adam and Eve Plot: Ending 2 has both humanity and the Futurans go extinct in two side-by-side genocides, with the SDU being the only members of either species still alive. When they come to in the Last Defense Academy, their memories of their journey wiped, Sirei instructs them to rebuild society and create offspring as their mission for humanity's future.
Adaptational Alternate Ending: Downplayed; while the "BOY MEETS BOY" stageplay adaptation of the Goodbye Eito route still ends with Eito being overwhelmed by the Invaders and detonating the Undying Flames bomb he's carrying, the ending includes Takumi arriving to help Eito due to his feelings of responsibility and guilt over kicking him out of the SDU, resulting in them dying together.
The Alibi:
- At the start of the Killing Game/Mystery routes, Gaku is discovered murdered in a classroom and everyone present gives their own accounts of where they were the night before, with Takumi ending up as the prime suspect due to his alibi of being knocked out by someone getting deemed uncredible. The Steady-Fundamental route would reveal that Takumi really was the one who did kill Gaku as a result of remnants of a G'ie parasite possessing his body.
- In the Mystery route, after Kako's murder, everyone gives their alibis on what they were doing shortly before it happened. Takumi exposes Shouma as the culprit upon discovering he deliberately wounded himself to fool the others with a fake alibi.
All for Nothing:
- In Route 0, the students learn all their bickering and paranoia over being sacrificed for humanity's survival that led to the failure of the mission including Ima's and Nozomi's deaths turns out to have been pointless because the school does have an emergency pod to bring them to the Artificial Satellite, which only activates on Day 100.
- Most of the students' backstories and civilian relatives are Fake Memories, the reveal of which makes the students- and the player- less motivated to fight for victory. They manage to build meaning out of their relationships with each other, but it's still a heavy blow.
- The Conspiracy Route sees Takumi admit this in order to get his companions on board with ditching Last Defense Academy. Being wishy washy about it just convinces the Unit that they need to see their fight through.
- One of the main reasons why the Truth and Reset Routes see the Special Defense Unit commit to the genocide of the Futurans is that they think reconciliation and coexistence is impossible with them after so much bloodshed. As far as they're concerned, abandoning humanity means their death, and once V'ehxness realizes that that they're committed to their course of action with full knowledge, she destroys the Artificial Satellite in retaliation. The Rebellion route, almost as if to laugh at them for using it to justify mass murder, completely undercuts this excuse by showing that all they had to do to gain Futuran allies was reach out at all. As it turns out, V'exhness is wildly unpopular, and being opposed by a Futuran rebellion who are more than willing to welcome the SDU into their ranks with no strings attached.
- In the S.F Route, where Takumi and Hiruko regain their memories of all the past timelines such as the Murder Mystery, the Slasher, the Zombie, and every other timeline's route. When comparing memories, they realize in horror that they're trapped in a time loop as neither has any memory of any day past 100, and the last memory they had was getting on board the escape pod. This makes them realize that even if they survive some of the routes to day 100 and make it to the Artificial Satellite, time will just reset, forcing them to start once again. The main focus of the S.F route is to find a way to break the time loop.
- Zigzagged with the Livor Mortis codes. The true nature of them being to instantly destroy the academy rather than being an early escape in the event of an unwinnable situation as explained renders the efforts made by Takumi, Hiruko, and Kako-G to acquire them moot, but they still ultimately come in useful for different reasons as a means to prevent the school's weapons system from firing even once fully charged.
All Just a Dream:
- Discussed and directly referenced. At one point Takumi wakes up at a hospital bed and is told that he has been in a coma for a week and has only imagined his terrible situation. He is absolutely overjoyed, but then he wakes up and bitterly remarks: "The 'It was all a dream' trope, huh..."
- With the 2nd Scenario route it's revealed that, minus Nozomi, all of the students' lives and families in the Tokyo Residential Complex were a dream while they were grown in pods at the Kamukura Central Hospital.
- The Casual route where nothing bad happens and Takumi mostly wastes time is revealed to have been a dream all along caused by him getting brainwashed. In reality, he's been sleepwalking, making him a liability to the SDU, resulting in the mission's failure at the end of the route.
- Invoked in several endings of the Comedy Route. After Sirei decides to skip several weeks of the story and go for an "explosion ending," Takumi decides that the plotline is all a dream, and that the ending doesn't matter. After the missiles go off and explode anyway, Hiruko concedes that an "It was all a dream" ending would have been better.
Ambiguous Situation:
- Darumi's talk of "killing games" is clearly a reference to Danganronpa, but because nearly all of her memories are fabricated, the question of whether Danganronpa is real in-universe or not is even more ambiguous than it was the last time it was brought up. Furthermore, it's not stated to be among the games or television shows she consumes during her time at the Academy, and she never references specific characters from it aside from occasionally using Monokuma catchphrases — though Moko talks about an old rivalry she had with a female martial artist nicknamed "Ogre", complicating things further.
- The fine details of how the war started and how desperate humanity is are unclear. According to Sirei (an A.I. hard-coded to support the Exodus Project) humans arrived on Futurum and opened with peace talks in hopes of coexistence, but negotiations broke down and war broke out, and now humanity only has about two generations left before they run out of resources. According to Gotoh (an A.I. hard-coded to oppose the Exodus Project) humans came to Futurum looking for a fight and immediately started a genocidal campaign against the natives, and the war was unnecessary because Artificial Satellite can actually sustain itself for another two centuries. Both of them will lie, withold information, or physically harm the SDU to get them to go along with their agendas, and Sirei will even brainwash them. Neither can be fully trusted^note and we only have what they say to go off of since we never see the Artificial Satellite.
- In the Multiple Eitos route, who was who while Takumi was trying to find the fake Eito is left unknown, beyond the implication that the one waiting in Eito's room whom Takumi killed first was Nozomi.
- After the heroes learn the truth in the Second Scenario, they wonder how Darumi, Kyoshika, and Kurara (all of whom are dead) would have reacted. They guess that Darumi would have been too detached from reality to care, Kyoshika wouldn't be willing to partake in an unjust war of conquest, and Kurara would have wanted humanity to win so she could build the Oosuzuki clan herself.
Ambiguous Time Period: It’s a tad vague on when exactly the game is set other than the fact it is seemingly in the future. It could be anywhere from 20 Minutes into the Future to half a century later.
And the Adventure Continues: A few of the games’ endings make it clear that even with the Big Bad defeated and main focus of the route resolved, the SDU has a lot more to do yet. Several Rebellion and Box of Blessings endings involve the cast’s continued fight to achieve peace between humans and Futurans, and the Coming of Age route’s best ending especially ends with nearly 40 days left, Eito, the Commanders, and FB dead, and a strong sense of more for the group to face together. The S.F. route pops into the later days of that timeline a few times, where it’s clear strange things are going on, but not at all clear what or why.
Anti-Climax: In the "Eat Meat" branch of the Comedy Route, Darumi considers it one that Gaku was the one blackmailing Takumi and not an Invader Commander.
Darumi: So, that's really the end of this case, huh? Kind of a weaksauce climax, isn't it?
And Now for Someone Completely Different:
- Happens briefly in the Second Scenario on Day 47 when Takumi is incapacitated by the hallucination music; the perspective switches to the Defense Room baby, who can briefly be controlled in dialogue as he searches for Takumi to snap him out of it.
- Happens a few times with Nozomi:
  - She's the POV character after becoming the Sole Survivor by the end of the 2nd Scenario Route.
  - If Takumi saves her over Kamyuhn in the Rebellion route, Nozomi's POV will be used briefly at the end of Ending 005: My War.
  - If Takumi chooses to speak with Nozomi instead of Hiruko on the Slasher route, he eventually is killed, and the two potential endings are from Nozomi's perspective, with her even having to make the Last-Second Ending Choice.
- If Takumi decides to not let Eito back on the team in Day 82 in the 2nd Scenario, this triggers another route called Goodbye Eito, where it switches to Eito's perspective as he leaves Last Defense Academy and encounters Futuran children, with the screen even being mostly black to showcase Eito's newfound blindness.
- If Takumi chooses not to join the final fight in the S.F. route, he'll die from the leap-damage that he had sustained. After this, it switches to Hiruko's perspective for a short moment as she leads the surviving SDU members to the Mystery timeline.
Anti-Frustration Features:
- If a character's special move is at maximum power and you attempt to have them absorb a Commander, the game will warn you that they won't power up from doing this, saving you from wasting the kill on somebody who doesn't need it.
- The game allows most battles to be skipped so long as the player has already cleared a similar version at least once.
- All routes have assigned numbers in the flowchart, which also serves the purpose of allowing fans to discuss them online without saying their names and potentially spoiling other people. For example, Route 0 is Second Scenario, Route 5 is Multiple Eitos, Route 15A is Killing Game, and so it goes.
Arc Number: 100. The students of the Special Defense Unit have to defend the school for 100 days, and the game has 100 possible endings.
Arc Words:
- "Press forward and trust in your decision."
- The Golden Ending has its own that appears multiple times near the end, which is also, appropriately enough, the name of the ending: "All 17 of us".
Art Shift: When the SDU get trapped in Turamtammi's illusion, the art style changes to have more saturated colors and bigger, shinier eyes akin to a 90's Dating Sim.
Autobots, Rock Out!: The game starts blasting "RUMBLE feat. Masato from coldrain / Paledusk" during the Final Boss fight of the first playthrough, and on subsequent playthroughs the same song starts playing whenever you fight that particular character again.
Back from the Dead:
- The Retsnom route centers around the titular creature, who can produce a Ruby Tear, a crystallized form of cryptoglobin that can revive the dead. Takumi and Darumi seek it out to revive the fallen members of the Second-to-Last Defense Academy, and in Ending 50 Darumi, fused with the Retsnom, produces the Ruby Tear in her final moments, leading to their revivals. Alternatively, she can assimilate the entire SDU and resurrect them as a part of herself.
- Endings 25 and 27 of the Box of Blessings route have Darumi and Kyoshika be brought back to life after someone makes a wish with the boxes; Takumi wishing for everyone to live to see the 100th day in the former and Gaku interrupting Eito's wish by wishing for the life of a harem romcom protagonist in the latter.
The Bad Guy Wins: Happens in a few endings.
- Ending 8: Takumi and Eva abandon the Last Defense Academy to its fate, and V'ehxness defeats the SDU and conquers Futurum.
- Ending 11: After being tricked into murdering two of his friends by Eito, Takumi fully embraces the hatred and madness budding inside him and massacres the rest of the SDU. The final CG shows him killing Sirei and entering the Defense Room, preparing to absorb the Ghost Boy's cryptoglobin, with his eyes ominously resembling Eito's Creepy Blue Eyes.
- Ending 28: V'ehxness is defeated, but Eito gets away with the Boxes of Blessings and Calamity. What he wants to use them for isn't stated, but it can't be anything good.
- Ending 43: V'ehxness defeats Takumi in one-on-one combat after singlehandedly killing the rest of the SDU, allowing her to enter the Defense Room unopposed and harness Shion's power.
- Ending 74: The G'ie successfully zombify the entire SDU, who then board the Escape Pod to unleash a Zombie Apocalypse on the Artificial Satellite.
Bait-and-Switch:
- The third character trailer had Takumi rushing to grab what appear to be the hands of his Childhood Friend Karua…only for her to be an Identical Stranger named Nozomi Kirifuji. It's later revealed that Karua doesn't exist due to Fake Memories, but is based on Takumi's vague recollections of Nozomi herself.
- During some routes, we learn that some routes are actually Stealth Sequels to previous routes. And nowhere is this most clear than in the bad ending of the S.F route, where Takumi and Hiruko travel to other timelines in order to right the wrongs and try to find the Golden Ending. When they came to the timeline where his alternate self had been taken over by the G'ie and turned into a serial killer, realizing that it was too late to save him, as too much time had passed for the restorative program to work, Takumi realizes that he has no choice but to kill his other half. So he changes into the leap suit and equips a power saw. He interrupts himself and the Nozomi from their timeline and chases him down, but because he hesitates in delivering the killing blow, this allows G'ie Takumi to fight back, take the power saw, and kill him. This leads to the revelation that the corpse of the Takumi that Nozomi and everyone else saw in the serial killer branch of the Slasher route was actually the dead body of the S.F route Takumi, and that the G'ie Takumi had gone into hiding in order to continue his killing spree.
Barrier Bypass: Dahl'xia can just walk through the wall of undying flames that surround the school. He doesn't even register that it's meant to be a barrier. Therefore, he doesn't trigger the alarm that normally sounds when someone forces entry.
Beach Episode: Takumi, Eito, Gaku, Nozomi, Kyoshika, Kurara, Moko and Shion/FB have one in the Coming-of-Age route, however it quickly turns into a Training from Hell part of Moko's side.
Bee Afraid: In the Killing Game Route, the Sponsor controls a swarm of hemoanima-empowered bees. They use them to enforce the rules of the killing game, executing students who place in last or violate the rules by absorbing their hemoanima.
Better to Die than Be Killed: Used as a gameplay mechanic. A student getting taken out by a School Invader causes the enemy to evolve into a much more dangerous form that can be difficult to take down. In contrast, killing your own units by using a Last Resort will not only prevent any enemies from transforming, it also provides a large boost to the Voltage meter and grants a "Nice! kill" bonus after the battle. The unit also immediately comes back in the next wave, so the player is encouraged to take that route if the option presents itself.
Big Bad Ensemble: While the Invaders, led by V'ehxness are the main external threat, they're actually fighting against a genocidal colonizer — Project Exodus, the leaders of the Artificial Satellite. The students are unknowingly helping humanity exterminate a native civilization for colonization. In addition, Eito is a traitor to humanity, and depending on the route can range from a minor threat to a valuable ally to another member of the ensemble; he's outright the final boss in the first playthrough and the Coming of Age Route, for one. Later branches reveal another threat — the G’ie, a race of malicious parasites that the Futurans have been fighting off for decades.
Big Damn Reunion: Painfully subverted when Takumi meets Nozomi for the first time. He initially mistakes her for his Childhood Friend Karua and happily grabs her hands, only for her to pull away from him and reveal she is actually an Identical Stranger, leaving Takumi upset and dumbfounded. Ultimately played with as Karua is Nozomi, or rather, an Imaginary Friend based on Nozomi.
Big First Choice: From the second playthrough onward, you have to decide between killing Eito, knowing the threat he will eventually pose to everyone in the future, or letting him live in the hopes he can be reformed almost immediately. This greatly influences the way events play out.
Bittersweet Ending: Many endings, but in particular:
- The Truth Ending. V'ehxness is killed off for good on the 99th day, but not before successfully exterminating humanity as revenge for the entire war. The remaining students decide there's been enough bloodshed and decide to stop the detonation of the missiles that would wipe out the Futurans, the Final Solution of the now-destroyed Exodus Project. To do so, they're forced to kill Shion, who defends the device against his will. Almost all the students are killed in the battle, except Nozomi, who's barred from fighting due to her health. Takumi absorbs his dead friends' powers and successfully destroys the device at the cost of his life, dying in Nozomi's arms. Nozomi, the last survivor of the Last Defense Academy and the last living human, carries on Takumi and the students' hopes for peace as she walks across Futurum's ruins and is last seen reaching her hand out to a group of Futuran children scared of her in a gesture of peace, crying when they reciprocate as she remembers Takumi. The sun rises, representing a new future for Futurum as a whole.
- The Rebellion Endings after you accept Kamyuhn's offer. V'ehxness is successfully defeated by the combined forces of the rebelling Futurans and the students, but by that time, Darumi, Kyoshika, Kurara and Eva have already died. She pulls a Taking You with Me by exploding her body, fatally wounding both Nozomi and Kamyuhn, who can't be revived with the Revive-O-Matic. Both of them ask to give their cryptoglobin to the other party so that the other party may live, forcing Takumi to choose between saving Kamyuhn, who would later unify the Futurans against the Earth Forces and force a surrender from them, or Nozomi, who is Takumi's love interest in this route. If Kamyuhn is saved, the war is finally put to an end 15 years later but Takumi still carries the guilt of killing Nozomi, and if Nozomi is saved the war continues to rage on but Nozomi carries hope that the students at her school could put an end to it where she couldn't.
- Ending 47 from the Coming-Of-Age Route is literally called "Bittersweet Youth". The SDU inadvertently saves both the Earth Forces and Futurans, as most of the antagonists kill each other and the day 100 missile launch can't occur due to Shion sacrificing his life to save Nozomi, plus Takumi manages to win Nozomi's heart. Darumi, Eva, Shouma and Eito die however, and the cast learns absolutely nothing about the nature of the conflict they spent the entire route fighting.
- Both of the branches for the last choice of the Retsnom route.
  - If Takumi accepts Darumi's offer, Retsnom assimilates all of the SDU into itself, with plans to also assimilate everyone on the Artificial Satellite. However, this also brings back everyone who had died up to this point, with their original personalities more or less intact.
  - If Takumi refuses Darumi's offer, the Second-to-Last Defense Academy squad is still brought back to life, as themselves and not part of Retsnom, but it comes at the cost of Takumi Mercy Killing Darumi (which kills him as well, but he also gets revived). As the survivors get ready to leave the planet, Takumi vows to never forget Darumi and everything she had done for him.
Bizarre Human Biology: The students' battle forms look basically the same as their normal bodies, but the injury they used to transform reveals swirling white light, not flesh. Said injuries don't require bandaging or impede their mobility at all.
Black-and-Grey Morality: Or more accurately, Grey-and-Gray Morality with the leaders being morally Black. The Special Defense Unit are actually a group of genetically-engineered Futurans (and one human) unwittingly defending a Doomsday Device designed to destroy an entire civilization in 100 days, misled by a colonial regime of humanity into thinking they're defending Earth from an invasion. The "Invader" (or rather, Futuran) side are actually native to the planet (Futurum) they are on, defending it from colonizers, but led by a selfish tyrant who intends to gain power for herself and is willing to kill anyone for it, even her own people.
Blade Reflection: A promotional image◊ shows Takumi raising his sword against Nozomi (or someone who looks like Nozomi), whose tearful eyes are reflected in the blade.
Blood Magic: The SDU have special blood called cryptoglobin that allow them to use hemoanima, which they can access by stabbing themselves with their Infusers, manifesting custom weapons in their transformed states. Their blood also allows them to be resurrected by the Revive-O-Matic if they die, and they can absorb the blood of the Commanders to gain more power. The Commanders can also use hemoanima to transform, and it's revealed that cryptoglobin is a natural, yet random, biological trait for Futurans.
Body Sushi: In the Cult of Takumi route, Eva rewards Takumi by stripping naked and covering herself with strawberry cake. She refuses to leave until he eats it all. She later does it again in Ending 41.
Bolivian Army Ending: Ending 23 of the Casual route has Takumi choose to awaken from his brainwashing-induced dream. He gains awareness in the middle of a battlefield, holding a dead Nozomi in his arms and surrounded by Invaders, uncertain of his own chance of survival.
Boss Rush: The Serial Battles route in a nutshell, where V’ehxness finds a way to bring copies of Commanders (including herself) into her timeline and throws them at the SDU one after another.
Breaking Old Trends: In Kazutaka Kodaka's previous games, the cast would usually contain at least one Advertised Extra who appeared very often in advertising, was postured to be a key character in the story, and/or was voiced by a high-profile voice actor, only to be killed very early on. Hundred Line goes in the inverse, with the first few days only having a handful of the full cast available as units and the rest of the students, who have been openly featured in trailers and promotional material, coming in afterwards. While no student dies early on, instead it's Sirei, the mascot character, who's found dead on the seventh day.
Breather Episode: Compared to the other routes of the game which are either intense, scary and/or tragic, the Romance and Comedy routes are lighthearted romps where the SDU goof off and have fun instead of facing traumatic events and painful, violent deaths.
Brother–Sister Incest: Subverted, Ima has a bit of Incest Subtext with Kako (to the point where he could come off as an Incest-ant Admirer), but Kako is clearly embarrassed by it, and their character arc in Route 0 involves Ima learning to back off a little and let Kako make her own decisions.
But Thou Must!:
- In the prologue, when Sirei asks Takumi to fight the weird monsters, you are given the option of refusing. Doing so causes Sirei to throw a fit, and you get an immediate game over. You are then made to choose again.
- Early on, Sirei will ask if Takumi wants to hear a speech about the nature of hemoanima. Whether you say "Yes" or "No," Sirei will give the speech anyway.
  Sirei: Look, you can skip the dialogue if you want, but at least pretend to listen.
- One scene in the game proper has Ima do this to Takumi twice in one conversation. He first asks if Takumi is hiding anything from him, then asks if the terms of his deal to actually join the fight, on the condition that Kako is convinced to stay out of it, are acceptable. If Takumi says "no" either time, Ima will repeat the question until he says "yes".
- At the end of the first playthrough on Day 100, Takumi has to decide whether he'll re-do the past or stay in the unhappy ending. If you say no, Takumi can't talk himself out of it, and the choice repeats until you say yes. Happens again almost immediately after, with Takemaru asking Takumi if he'll really go back in time. If you say no, then once again, Takumi's not able to find a reason to stay and the choice repeats.
Cap: You can have a maximum of 15 AP at once during battle.
Captive Enemy as Ally: In most routes, Eva gets captured by the SDU, and she eventually helps them out in fighting the school invaders. However, with the exception of the Mystery route, she's only helping them because Sirei brainwashed her to do so instead of genuinely wanting to help them.
Cardboard Prison: Eva is able to escape her cell under everyone’s noses and even leave with Ima on route 0. While it’s vaguely implied that the traitor had something to do with it, Box of Calamity reveals something even simpler: her cell, and hers specifically, had a tunnel out hidden under a floor panel.
Cast Full of Gay: Downplayed — while a decent portion of the cast is attracted to the opposite sex, there's still a lot of queer representation and coding scattered throughout: Yugamu is openly interested in both men and women, Darumi can have either a heartfelt relationship with Takumi or a very sexually charged Heterosexual Life-Partners dynamic with Hiruko depending on the route, Eito gives a Dying Declaration of Love to Takumi in the Truth route, and Hiruko herself outright states that she wouldn't mind being in a polycule in one late FTE.
Circle of Friendship: In Ending 47 of the Coming-of-Age route, Takumi recalls from the ghost boy how hemoanima can be bolstered by The Power of Friendship, so the SDU hold hands in a circle to power themselves up and fight Eito, who's boosted his own power by absorbing V'exhness' cryptoglobin.
Closed Circle: Played with. The Undying Flames seem like they'd keep the students trapped, but Sirei initially seems to defy this by providing fire extinguishers that can open it up to allow the SDU to explore beyond it. Then he immediately gives a double subversion by insisting that the ruins outside the school are so desolate and dangerous they'd be foolish to actually choose to leave, changing it from a type 1 to a type 4. It's partially to prevent them from finding out the truth of the world they're in, starting with the fact that it's not Earth.
Come with Me If You Want to Live: Takumi was recruited by Sirei after a bridge collapse left him and Karua easy prey for monsters with little way to refuse his orders to fight.
Compressed Vice: On the Box of Blessings route, everyone becomes fixated on their power, especially V’ehxness, and they become focal to the motivations of the war itself to an abrupt and route-exclusive degree. The Nozomi route even has Hiruko lampshade this, and in both of its endings, the students actively choose to leave well enough alone and forget about them in part because of this.
Conveniently Cellmates: In Ending 45 for the Coming-of-Age Route, after the others discover they have been deceived, it ends with Takumi imprisoned in the courtyard cage next to Eito, who welcomes Takumi as his new neighbor.
Conveniently Timed Distraction: On the Retsnom route, events like the Garage getting trashed will happen right as it seems like Takumi will have to reveal what's going on with Darumi and how she revived Retsnom inside of her. These all turn out to have been caused by Eito, who was doing it all to protect Darumi (who by this point is so taken over by Retsnom that she overrides his cognitive disorder and looks beautiful to him).
Cosmic Motifs: The moon is depicted quite prominently in the game's Japanese cover art. Naturally, Eito's surname translates to "blue moon", and he's one of the most plot-relevant characters in the game (to the point where the main Point of Divergence in the Second Scenario is whether you choose to kill or spare Eito after jumping back in time to Day 1).
Coup de Grâce Cutscene: The Finishing Blow performed on the enemy commander once it is defeated. Justified, as at this point the commander has used up all its power, and detransformed from its big monster form back to its humanoid form.
CrEePy AlTeRnAtInG cApItAl LeTtErS: When Zen'ta's disguise as lovable wrestler Moko Mojiro begins to slip during the first playthrough, her sentences begin randomly adding capital letters, and her voice becomes a distorted Voice of the Legion. The Japanese version of the game accomplishes a similar effect by having her switch between hiragana and katakana.
Crippling Overspecialization: The jumpsuit used to hop between worlds and timelines is immune to all hemoanima attacks, but like any specialized gear, it's only good for protecting the wearer against one specific thing. It's completely worthless at blocking mundane weaponry like a normal crossbow bolt.
Critical Status Support: Ima's Specialist Skill has him get +2 attack if Kako is at low health.
Cult of Personality: The titularly named "Cult of Takumi" route revolves around the SDU becoming a cult due to Takumi consuming pills that makes him produce powerful pheromones.
Culture Chop Suey: The Last Defense Academy combines Japanese fusuma walls with Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphs, modern blast doors, and neon signs in both Japanese and English.
Damn You, Muscle Memory!: Unlike most turn-based tactics games, units are not limited to individual turns, and are allowed to move and attack as many times as needed during the player phase as long as you have the AP, albeit at one tile at a time after their initial movement for the former. Those used to the usual conventions of games such as Fire Emblem may find themselves moving each unit once then ending their turn without capitalizing on the freedom provided or possibility of chaining off kills for more and more AP.
Darker and Edgier: While Danganronpa was never a walk in the park, much of its violence was very comical and camp, thanks to the executions, complicated murder methods, and the pink blood. Hundred Line forgoes the over-the-topness in favor of much more realistic warfare, with the prologue involving a scene of Takumi and Karua running through the burning streets and seeing people being crushed and torn apart, complete with a brief shot of the monsters grabbing and pulling a man apart by his limbs. That's to say nothing of the actual deaths involved later, with the first playthrough having the unavoidable moments of discovering Hiruko's charred corpse, Ima-in-Sirei's-body having his scalp crushed and his brain bursting, and Nozomi being impaled and lifted into the air to slide further onto the Supreme Commander's sword. The content of the actual Routes don't hold back at all either, diving into the topic of genocide, human extinction, colonialism, and on the Cult of Takumi route, sexual coercion and manipulation; one bad ending culminates in the main character being raped.
A Day in the Limelight: A few of the routes serve as one for various members of the cast:
- Oddly for a prologue, Route 0 basically serves as one of these for Ima and Kako. They’re two of the most focused on characters in the route with Ima’s overprotectiveness and Kako’s embarrassment over it. They never again get quite as much attention or sympathy as they do in Route 0.
- The Eva and V'ehxness Routes serve as ones for the titular characters. Addamaque also notably receives more sceentime and characterization in the latter.
- The Multiple Eitos and Goodbye Eito Routes give central focus to the titular character, highlighting his sinister and sympathetic traits respectively.
- Depending on the branch, the Box of Blessings Route can be this for Gaku, who receives more focus in the path leading to Endings 27 and 28. Shouma, meanwhile, is the center of the path leading to Endings 29 and 30.
- One branch of Box of Calamity also focuses on Gaku and Takumi bonding, one explores Hiruko's awareness of multiversal travel and time loops, as well as the motivations of the G'ie, while another sees Eva's ghost interact quite a bit with Takumi and co, exposing a lot about her as a person.
- The Coming of Age route sees the ghost baby integrate with the rest of the cast much earlier and more deeply than in other routes, bonding with and spending time with them, and though he sacrifices himself to save Nozomi, even posthumously, he's able to help in its best ending through the pins he gives the cast. Eito also gets focus very consistently throughout it, with it being the only ending besides Route 0 to see him become the Final Boss and legitimate main antagonist.
- The Retsnom route is almost entirely focused on Darumi. To hammer this home, choosing not to do this route results in her death and subsequent absence for the majority of the routes on the Spare Eito side of the flowchart.
- While Darumi naturally also matters quite a bit to the Killing Game route, she spends a lot of its second act in a Heroic BSoD after Hiruko's relatively early death, while Yugamu and Tsubasa take up extremely important roles as Takumi's primary allies.
- The Romance Route is one for Kurara and especially Kyoshika, who receive much more focus there than in most other routes of the game.
- The S.F. Route is one centered around Hiruko, as she and Takumi team up to end the time loop.
Deadly Game: Darumi initially believes she's been brought into a Danganronpa-esque Killing Game but is displeased to find out she isn't. Eventually, played straight in the Killing Game route, where as the name dictates, the students are forced into a deadly game where they have to hunt numerous invaders to score points otherwise the person in last place gets fatally executed.
Death Is Cheap:
- The Revive-O-Matic machine uses hemoanima to bring the students back from the dead if they are killed in battle with the invaders. This allows the students to recklessly throw their lives away against their enemies. However, it does have limits; the Corpse Recovery Drones can't reach them outside of the Last Defense Academy, and the Revive-O-Matic only works if the individual in question was killed recently. Also, the Revive-O-Matic can't be used repeatedly without risk, as continuously using it without rest can cause it to breakdown from over usage as shown in Ending 86, where the students are forced to make a Last Stand against the Supreme Commander. They constantly throw themselves at her with no regard for their own lives, eventually succeeding in a Mutual Kill. The students were no longer able to be revived thanks to the Revive-O-Matic being burnt out from over usage.
- The Revive-O-Matic also won't work if the body was either drained of hemoanima during their death or destroyed, as Darumi's and Kyoshika's deaths in the Truth Ending route prove.
- This is the reason why Eito was successful in killing Sirei in Ending 0. He launched a sneak attack on him during what was supposed to be a sparring session and succeeded in a One-Hit Kill, but the Explosive Leash that was supposed to deter the students from attacking him activated and killed him in the process...but due to the suddenness of Sirei's death, he hadn't deactivated the Revive-O-Matic, causing it to automatically restore Eito afterwards, though Eito indicates that was an unexpected outcome for him as well.
- A similar situation ups the stakes behind the Final Battle of the Truth Ending, as this time, Sirei did have time to deactivate the Revive-O-Matic, along with depowering the students of their battle abilities once they've successfully defeated the Supreme Commander...at the cost of her successfully destroying Project Exodus and all of the humans aboard the artificial satellite. Despite this, Sirei's programming cannot comprehend an outcome wherein humanity doesn't exist anymore, kicking off the final battle against the defence system of the Last Defence Academy itself to stop the Doomsday Device within from causing a pointless genocide...but with All Deaths Final in play for the students now.
Deconstruction:
- The game is a rather harsh deconstruction of time travel in general. Despite various attempts at a perfect ending, it is made brutally clear that trying to change the past will result in deviations that makes knowledge from the future a moot point. While the endings may vary on how bittersweet it is, the true golden ending takes over a hundred attempts from Takumi and Hiruko to reach, and even then it’s not perfect as it necessitated a timeline where Eva is brainwashed to ensure her and Eito both survived. While there are other Deconstructions, this is the most obvious one as it goes on.
- If Takumi reveals his time-traveling secret to the SDU, the consequences of time travel force themselves to stare him in the face. Despite seemingly having knowledge about the future, it soon becomes evident that things will not go as he had hoped with the Invaders not only becoming more powerful but also changing up their tactics. This results in both academies being attacked at the same time on a day that didn't have attacks at all in the previous timeline and forces Takumi to make a choice about who to save first. If he chooses to save the Last Defense Academy, he lies to Nozomi in order to get her to prioritize her own safety. This results in the other Second to Last Defense Academy students dying for good and causing some of the students like Ima and Gaku to lose their trust in him due to his proven ability to lie to them to manipulate them for his own ends. Nozomi comes to resent him for pushing his feelings about another version of herself on to her; from her point of view, Takumi was still a stranger. Trying to rescue Second to Last Defense Academy results in those five students' lives continuing onward, but this comes at the cost of Darumi's life, as the newly-powered V'ehxness is now strong enough to grab her and steal her cryptoglobin. Despite Takumi's attempts to save everybody, time travel is not enough for him to solve the problem perfectly.
- Last Defense Academy also deconstructs the conceit from some of Uchikoshi's other games of the Golden Ending only being available after the cast has obtained as much context and revealed as many secrets as possible. Instead, all of the routes where the SDU learns key information about the nature of the conflict between the Earth Forces and Futurans involve the deaths of several named characters and endings which are bittersweet at best, with the route where the full truth comes out terminating in either the deaths of the entire main cast or absolutely everyone except the surviving remnants of the SDU. By contrast, the Everyone Lives ending has the SDU (sans potentially Hiruko) still largely ignorant about the who, where, and why of the central conflict.
Deflector Shields: The Last Defense Academy is protected by an energy barrier that encompasses it, but it can't withstand attacks from the invaders for long, hence the students having to Hold the Line and fight off waves of enemies that try to overwhelm the barrier.
Depending on the Writer: The game is anthologistic in nature, with different writers taking a shared set of characters in different directions (or "routes"). How consistent a given route is with the others is a matter of fandom debate. Takumi's feelings towards Karua, and therefore Nozomi, are especially mutable. Is he capable of properly loving the latter? Does he see Karua as someone he wants to date or an object of chivalrous devotion? Can he fall in love with someone else — and if not, why? The Romance route in particular allows for multiple answers to each of these questions.
Depraved Bisexual: Yugamu flirts with both men and women, and massively creeps them out while doing so, with his flirtations revolving around torture and sadomasochism in general. Darumi is similar with her manic and depressive attitude, but is quick to imprint herself on both men and women if they try to connect with her, causing her to be more overtly flirtatious with them.
Developer's Foresight: In the final battle of the 2nd Scenario, Hiruko is normally the one who tells Takumi to absorb the cryptoglobin of his fallen allies. However, if she's the first to die, Eito is the one who delivers that speech instead.
Disaster Dominoes: A couple of innocent decisions during Sadistic Choices in the 2nd Scenario can spell doom for humanity:
- Sacrificing Takemaru to save the group on Day 15 leads to Yugamu giving Takumi charisma enhancing drugs so he can regain his confidence, which accidentally brainwashes the SDU into a psychotic harem cult. Takumi ends up becoming either their helpless puppet or an Evil Overlord little better than V'ehxness.
- Sacrificing Gaku to save Kurara on Day 33 leads to Sirei mocking him the next day, which causes an enraged Takemaru to attack him. Nigou is damaged in the ensuing fight, which awakens a dormant AI within him called Gotoh who promptly sabotages the mission by either murdering Takumi or convincing him to lead the SDU in a mass desertion.
Distant Finale: Ending 6 jumps forward 15 years in the future, describing humanity and the Futurans finally making a peace treaty and ending the war.
Does This Remind You of Anything?: On the Retsnom route Darumi becomes the host for the titular creature. While it's growing inside her, she develops intense food cravings, and is put in excruciating pain that leaves her bedridden. The whole thing could be read as an allegory for teen pregnancy. It's even lampshaded.
Darumi: After all, I'm eating for two now.
Domed Hometown: The Tokyo Residential Area (which isn't the Tokyo you're familiar with) is covered by a shutter-style dome. By contrast, the Academy scenes depict a much brighter sky with realistic clouds.
Doomsday Device: Behind the doors to the Defense Room is a chamber containing a Futuran infant whose Undying Flames are siphoned to fuel rockets that, on the 100th day, will fire all over Futurum and kill everyone on the planet.
Driven to Suicide: World Death is described as Earth itself getting fed up with humanity's abuses of the planet and themselves and deciding to kill itself.
Dueling Player Characters: There are a couple of circumstances where the SDU descends into infighting:
- In the first playthrough, Eito betrays you at the end of the game and serves as the Final Boss. He becomes a recurrent antagonist on all subsequent playthroughs.
- In the Second Scenario, Yugamu uses some drugs to drive Gaku, Moko, and Takemaru berserk as a distraction while he interrogates Sirei, forcing you to subdue them by force.
- On the Coming of Age route, Eito tricks Yugamu, Kyoshika, Takemaru, the twins, and Hiruko into thinking Takumi has betrayed the SDU, and you fight them as the first stage of the four part final battle.
- On the Killing Game route:
  - Tensions between Takumi and Takemaru explode into open violence when Takemaru tries to kill Eva for points, leading to a fight against him and the twins.
  - Darumi is heartbroken by Hiruko's death and attacks Takumi twice in an attempt to commit Suicide by Cop and get him and his party a ton of points.

E-H

Earn Your Happy Ending:
- The Steady Fundamental Route's Ending 55 is the true Everybody Lives ending, seeing the entire cast survive and escape the "Groundhog Day" Loop while saving the Futurans and ending the war. The Steady Fundamental Route is also the only one (besides Mystery, which ties into it) that requires the player to reach other endings to proceed.
- On a macro level, Endings 6, 7, and 30 all explicitly have the generations-long war finally ending in a negotiated ceasefire with neither side being genocided. For Takumi personally, it's more of a Bittersweet Ending since one of his closest comrades ends up dying in the effort (Nozomi, Eva, and Shouma respectively).
Eldritch Abomination: Retsnom, a shapeshifting creature with the ability to revive the dead...but is also a mindless starving animal if awoken in its pure form, so to control it, one needs a host able to control its hunger. Said host is also transformed into the center of a fleshy Hive Mind that either seeks to destroy itself out of horror of its own existence or seeks to assimilate every close friend of the host to ensure their survival as part of its mass. Curiously, choosing to be willingly assimilated is a Bittersweet Ending, as Darumi, the host of the Retsnom in that route, makes good on her promise to revive literally everyone as part of her superorganism, with no changes to their personality. (As far as we can tell, anyway.)
Epic Fail:
- The TRC's cloning project was intended to raise 14 warriors with hemoanima. Somehow, over half of the specimens came out suicidally opposed to fighting, and two of those had actual medical conditions that prevented them from doing so. The rest of the project was no less dysfunctional; a researcher committed suicide, the laboratory was frequently infiltrated by a preteen girl, the warriors' AI overseer developed a penchant for making sexually inappropriate remarks (among other traits that made him blatantly tyrannical and untrustworthy), a huge amount of money was poured into developing a disposable fortress, the appearance of a fifteenth child out of nowhere in the project's final stages was completely overlooked, and so was a saboteur molding one of the specimens into a fanatical serial killer. To top it all off, there is a significant chance of the clones going rogue and lending their considerable combat abilities to the TRC's enemies.
- Sirei has a penchant for shooting himself in the foot and impeding his/humanity's own mission, but he practically blows both of his feet off in the Casual route, where he brainwashes Takumi so hard that he's stuck in a Lotus-Eater Machine having what he thinks is a normal school life where nothing really happens. Meanwhile, the rest of the SDU has lost their leader and end up suffering much heavier losses than normal. By the time Sirei realizes that he made a mistake, just about everyone else has been killed by V'ehxness. The only 'choice' he can offer Takumi at that point is to die in the fake reality or die in real life as himself.
Episode of the Dead: The Zombie branch of the Slasher Route has the cast slowly get picked off and converted into zombies by the G'ie, an alien Puppeteer Parasite that invaded Futurum long before the SDU did. The parasites reproduced by Possessing a Dead Body and driving what little remains of their hosts to create more corpses for them.
Everyone Can See It: The whole SDU can see that Takumi has feelings for Nozomi, given the way he looks at her. Whether or not these feelings are romantic in nature is something Takumi himself is trying to sort out.
Evolving Title Screen: After rolling credits for the first time, the title screen changes to show the Academy under a sunrise, with the game's title changed to The Hundred Line -Last Defense Academy- 2.
"Everybody Dies" Ending: A couple.
- Ending 21: "Liar" has Takumi not be able to tell Nozomi that their fighting was worthless, and subsequently she manages to rile up the team to keep fighting. Gotoh sees this, and subsequently activates the bombs implanted in them.
- Ending 23: "Face Reality" (and probably 24: "Embrace Fantasy") has Takumi awake from his brainwashing, with the whole team dead and Nozomi in his arms. He makes a final stand against the invaders, and he's presumably killed from the invaders overwhelming him.
- Ending 26: "Cursed with Calamity" has Takumi open the wrong boxes, which causes everyone to go berserk and kill each other, including Eito killing him.
- Ending 33: "Night of Despair" has Takumi rendered comatose by Nozomi's death and wake up on Day 100, where everyone has been killed. Encountering a dying Hiruko, she says she wasn't able to defeat the killer, and Takumi's subsequently killed by a G'ie possessed Kako.
- Ending 35: "Misguided Pity" has Takumi not being able to call out the killer (Nozomi) in the group on the final day. The now "Nozomi-G" questions why, and realizes it's because of his attachment towards her and because of how the G'ie cannot help but kill. Nozomi-G then comforts him before killing him, and dies alongside him when the missles launch.
- Ending 40: "Echoes of the Dead" has Takumi tell the (G'ie) Nozomi that Eva was probably an evil spirit, and she promptly stabs him. Takumi wakes up to Dahl'xia's invasion with everyone who died previously alive somehow. He manages it as well as the subsequent V'ehxness attack with not much issue, and arrives at day 100. He then finds all his teamates dead, including himself, and Nozomi-G cackling.
- Ending 43: "Making the Impossible Possible" has Takumi attempt to kill V'ehxness when she has her back turned, and she subsequently kills everyone in the school, commander and student alike, lets him absorb all of the cryptoglobin of the corpses she left, and subsequently fights him to the death. After 4 days, V'ehxness emerges victorious and plans to absorb Shion. However, she does seem to have changed her mind on her philosophy a bit.
- Ending 51 and probably 52, "It's All Your Fault" and "Too Late for Regrets" have Takumi and Darumi try to handle the base Retsnom, only for Retsnom to either kill everyone in the school and force the two of them to kill each other as mercy, or kill them both first before being unleashed on everyone else.
- Ending 53: "Academy Destroyed" has Takumi input all of the Livor Mortis Codes into the "escape room", and is subsequently exploded alongside the school with everyone in it.
- Ending 56: "Revenge of Kako-G" has the titular character kill everyone once Takumi and Hiruko arrive back from their travel from the right coinflip guess.
- Ending 72: "Goodbye Kiss", after everyone has been killed by the killer, the G'ie data controlling Takumi, he's subsequently tied up by Hiruko. After she explains how she failed to cure him, regular Takumi asks her to leave him to die on the planet, but she refuses by kissing him just before the missiles drop.
- Ending 74: "Flight of the Living Dead" has everyone in the SDU become a zombie; they subsequently board the rocket to infect all the humans in the satellite.
- Ending 86: "So Close Yet so Far" has the rocket refuse to launch before V'ehxness arrives due to Shion's hemoanima refusing to let Takumi board it. Subsequently, the group is forced to fight V'ehxness, and both armies kill each other entirely.
- Ending 89: "Battle for Eva's Points" has Takemaru's group of Ima and Kako fight Nozomi, Takumi and Eva in order to get points for killing Eva, and due to the ensuing chaos, everyone dies.
- Ending 93: "Lost in the Darkness" has Takumi be locked up for not managing to figure out who killed Kako and stabbed Shouma. He wakes up on day 99 to find everyone dead, managing to find 11 bodies despite there being 13 people when he last checked, before being killed by a mysterious killer.
Everybody Lives:
- Ending 55 sees everybody living thanks to Tricked Out Time, and making it to the Artificial Satellite together.
- Ending 100 also sees the SDU survive to Day 100, albeit thanks to most of the cast hopping in from a different timeline. The escape pod’s been destroyed, however, so they remain at the school together.
- All of the original members of the SDU survive in the various Romance path endings, although Eva is never recruited and presumably dies during the weeks-long period Takumi is unconscious prior to the path kicking off.
Everything Fades: The non-boss enemies disintegrate completely when they are killed.
Evil Running Good: On both sides. The Special Defense Unit believe they're defending Earth from an alien invasion, except they're actually genetically-engineered aliens being manipulated by an imperialist human regime to commit genocide on a civilization. Their opposition, who are the natives to the planet the regime is invading, are just trying to actually defend their home but are being led by a bloodthirsty general who only wants power for herself and is willing to kill her own kind to get it.
Exact Words: In the Killing Game route, Takumi takes advantage of this to end the Invader Hunt early. He notes that the Sponsor said the game would end if they ever harmed one of the SDU without them doing anything to attack the Sponsor first. So, Takumi takes advantage of this by having Yugamu surgically swap the bombs in his own and Darumi's bodies. So when he later feigns an attack on the Sponsor, the Sponsor accidentally blows up Darumi instead of Takumi. Which deactivates the bees and ends the game since they technically harmed Darumi when she hadn't done anything.
Explosive Leash: When the students start thinking about attacking Sirei on Day 1, Sirei reveals he put bombs inside each of them that will detonate if they try to harm him, all so he can ensure their compliance.
Fan Disservice:
- The Cult of Takumi route, where the titular character is put through all sorts of uncomfortable sexually charged situations, from unwanted love confessions to having to eat off a woman’s naked body, being made to shower together with someone intent on touching his penis, and outright being raped in the route's Living Idol ending, to emphasize what a mistake using a Psycho Serum that makes him superhumanly charismatic for the sake of becoming a better leader, while the route's Overlord ending has his own morals wither and die as he becomes an Evil Overlord.
- The Killing Game route has a CG depicting Takumi and Darumi naked from the waist up... except both have massive, still-healing scars from Yugamu operating on them in order to switch the bombs in their bodies.
- The Mystery route has a CG with Kurara stripped down to her underwear and a camisole. The effect is far less appealing than it might sound due to the fact she's dead and has been frozen solid for a good number of days by the time she's found.
Fantastic Nuke: The Doomsday Device in the Defense Room will fire missiles filled with Undying Flames on the 100th day, killing all Futurans on the planet but otherwise leaving it intact and unharmed due to the flames only burning organic beings.
Fatigue Mechanic: After a SDU member makes a move, they'll get fatigued and can only move one tile at a time so long as there's still remaining AP. Darumi integrates this mechanic into a Stance System, while Tsubasa is outright immune. Using a Special Attack leaves a student completely tired, making them unable to do anything for the rest of the turn.
Friend-or-Idol Decision: After defeating V'exhness in the Rebellion route, she explodes, sending rocks flying which mortally wound Nozomi and Kamyuhn. The only way to save either is to sacrifice the other so their hemoanima can heal the wounds. While Kamyuhn is the leader of La Résistance and an important political figure in Futuran society, Nozomi is Takumi's cherished friend who Takumi originally came back to save and both of them beg to be sacrificed to save the other, leading to the route's Last-Second Ending Choice.
Full-Party Sequence:
- Ending 49 contains the only time where all members of the SDU are deployed and controllable on the battlefield, as Darumi-Retsnom summons them after assimilating them into herself, including those who died prior.
- The S.F. route, which has a plot focused on trying to forcibly engineer a Golden Ending, also eventually has every playable unit deployed for a more extended period of time, with the route leading to Endings 54-55 seeing this hold true until the very end.
Fun with Acronyms: On one route, Sirei has fun with the spelling of his name. (His name actually stands for "System Information Reinforcement Exalted Intelligence".)
Sirei: Stealthy, incognito, reliable, ethical, inside man... That's me.
Fusion Dance: From the second playthrough onward, Valla-Garzo and Szanshin (the Squad Eight and Nine Commanders) are fought together, and the two of them combine into one (as "Valla-Garshin") during their battle.
Gameplay and Story Integration:
- If Takumi's relationship with the other members becomes strained in certain routes, some of them will respond negatively or stay silent towards him during Free Time.
- Shion is only available as an additional Limit Break option in the battles where they've befriended the rest of the class and the situation is dire enough to require it, as otherwise it'd jeopardize their mission and Sirei would disallow it from being used.
- Characters sometimes gain unique stat boosts or penalties for some battles based on the plot events: Takumi is usually the main recipient of the former, while Nozomi can undergo both and when the entire class is zombiefied and fights V'exhness in that state, they all gain a massive boost to all their stats which turns the entire fight into a Curb-Stomp Battle.
- The final battle of 2nd Scenario Route takes heavy advantage of this, as the main goal of the fight is to getting everyone else in the class killed so that Takumi can absorb their hemoanima one by one, making him strong enough to quickly destroy the extremely durable tubes filled with Undying Flames and granting him the ability to destroy the machine protecting Shion.
Gameplay and Story Segregation:
- In some cases, you can give gifts to party members when story-wise it would make no sense for them to accept a gift from Takumi. An example of this is early on in the Retsnom route, where Nozomi is upset with Takumi and Ima and Gaku feel they can't trust him, but they will still take gifts and even have bond events play out if they meet the conditions for them.
- On Day 95 of the first playthrough, you learn that Eito killed Hiruko and the Prisoner and absorbed their Hemoanima. However, this is never reflected in gameplay, and his stats are always the same as whatever number is recorded on his Report Card, and the Report Card is not updated to include these two after the twist.
- Subverted with the death mechanics. The Revive-O-Matic provides an in-universe explanation for why fallen units heal in between waves. However, when the Revive-O-Matic isn't available (such as when you're outside campus,) any unit who reaches 0 HP simply retreats from the field, providing no explanation for how or when they heal before the next wave, let alone how they can survive their Last Resort move.
- The Sadistic Choice to save either Gaku or Kurara before they get carried off to V'ehxness takes place during a battle sequence where you must defeat one of two Elite Mooks. Though it is entirely possible to reach both of them in one turn, the battle ends as soon as one is defeated, making saving both impossible even if you theoretically could.
Gaslighting: In the Box of Calamity route, on the road to endings 37 and 38, Nozomi-G attempts to kill Takumi. After he escapes, she acts like nothing is wrong; as Takumi is already past the Despair Event Horizon and his grip on reality is fraying, he dismisses it as a hallucination.
Gasp!: Played for Drama in the prologue, Takumi gasps in horror as he sees Karua's unconscious body a few feet away from him. Even as Sirei shows up, he can only stare in horror at seeing his best friend so close to death.
Generation Ship: Tokyo Residential Complex is actually a Planet Spaceship type Generation Ship with the goal of going to the planet called Futurum and conquering it. The Artificial Satellite the TRC is on is dealing with population decline and it will eventually break down causing all the humans aboard to die unless Futurum is conquered.
Genocide Dilemma: The Reveal is that Earth is gone, and in response the remnants of humanity invaded a nearly identical planet with the intent of wiping out the native Human Aliens to claim it for themselves after generations of war following a First Contact Faux Pas made peace between the two races seem impossible. The "Artifact of Hope" the cast was assigned to guard was a Fantastic Nuke barrage designed to cleanse the world of organic life, with General Ripper Sirei obfuscating this information for obvious reasons. Many of the game's endings revolve around the cast becoming aware of this information and trying to reconcile with it, with varying degrees of success. It's ultimately subverted with The Reveal that the genocide is completely unnecessary, as the Futurans' Evil Overlord V'ehxness had a 0% Approval Rating that meant the war ends with her death, but because of the language barrier, the humans had no way of knowing this before the Time Crash combined with the fact that most of humanity's leaders were Evil Colonialists who didn't really care. The Golden Ending sees the entire unit survive after killing V'ehxness and destroying the nukes to save the Futurans, with Sirei & Nigou alive to help smooth things over with the human authorities.
Genre Shift: The story can take some dramatic shifts in tone, depending on the choices you make. It could end up turning from a war story into horror, comedy, mystery, or even romance.
The Ghost: Takumi does mention having a father, though he's never physically seen.
G-Rated Drug: Some references are made to "Happy Powder", which makes it sound like cocaine or a similar drug (especially when it's Darumi talking about it), but it's actually just sherbet powder.
Godzilla Threshold: In the Coming-of-Age Route, Sirei has FB fire off one of the missiles at V'ehxness just to drive her off, sacrificing himself, Nigou, Shouma and Eva. Another one happens a few days later where Takumi has to decide if he wants to use FB's hemoanima to cure Nozomi's rejection symptoms or not. Refusing to do so has her die, but accepting FB's offer allows Nozomi to live at the cost of FB's life. This choice also continues the story.
Golden Ending: Out of the game's 100 endings, only two qualify.
- Zig-Zagged with Ending 1. The "True" Ending is only referred to as that by fans (in-game it's the Last Defense Academy 2nd Scenario), and even then only because it's the route that reveals the Awful Truth. But it still doesn't reveal everything, only contextualizes it — and it's not remotely the best outcome for anybody involved. V'exhness outright mocks Takumi's attempt to get an Everybody Lives ending, announcing the name for her annihilation of humanity: "the Bad Ending."
- Played straight with Ending 55. The entire cast escapes the Cursed Cycle, saves the Futurans, ends the war, and leaves for the Artificial Satellite. Despite V'exhness' words, this is in fact an ending where everyone survives, but it takes a tremendous amount of work to obtain both In-Universe and out.
Good Morning, Crono: The prologue shows Takumi waking up, finding Karua and his mother in the kitchen, and having breakfast with them.
"Groundhog Day" Loop: After the initial 100 days, the main characters find themselves trapped in a time loop known as the Cursed Cycle, with only Takumi and Hiruko able to potentially become aware of it depending on the timeline. Putting a permanent end to the loop is the focus of the Steady Fundamentals Route.
Gruel and Unusual Punishment: Sirei forbids the students who refuse to fight (which includes most of them) from eating anything but dry bread, while those who do (Takumi, Takemaru, Hiruko, and Darumi) get all the fancy food they want from the Ration-O-Matic, but are forbidden from sharing with anyone who does not fight. Since normal bread doesn't have enough nutrients to replace a full diet, this would eventually kill the non-fighters. After Sirei goes missing, the students quickly agree to ignore this rule, until Hiruko tries to re-implement it by barring the non-combatants from the cafeteria entirely...and then she goes missing and the rule is ignored again, this time for good.
Guide Dang It!: Each route is patterned after a different narrative genre, but what choices will lead to what genre are pretty arbitrary. If you want to play only the serious routes, the ones that provide answers and closure, you'll have to crack open a walkthrough.
Guilt-Free Extermination War: The students believe that due to the Invaders being made from World Death, that they must be exterminated and save Earth before they kill the rest of humanity. Turns out, while V'ehxness does want to enslave/exterminate humanity, most of the rest of Futurum, the planet they're actually in, wants the war to be over.
Halfway Plot Switch: This can happen just from certain decisions, sometimes within the same route. For example, deciding to kick a masked attacker leads to the Slasher Route, but dodging him leads to the Comedy Route. Even in the Slasher route, another switch happens where jumping out the window continues the story, but dodging the attack and fighting the killer turns it into a zombie story.
Harder Than Hard: The Extreme & Despair difficulty added in Version 1.1. In this mode, special attacks and last resorts now cost 2 AP to use (in addition to the Voltage cost), and all attacks do 100 damage to anybody without an Armor buff.
Hate Plague: In Ending 26 of the Box of Blessing route, Takumi accidentally opens a Box of Calamity when he opens the odd-numbered boxes, making the SDU go mad and murder each other in the name of killing for the planet.
Heads I Win, Tails You Lose: Once you've entered the Multiple Eitos Route, no matter which choices you make, Eito will successfully override Takumi's will in some form or another. Since Eito is already inside Takumi's mind, he has accounted for every choice Takumi might make. In fact, two endings in this route are decided by a choice between "I Lose" and "You Win."
Heads or Tails?: In the Steady-Fundamental route, Hiruko asks Takumi call heads or tails upon tossing a coin. After making his answer, the two partner with their counterparts who chose the opposite to acquire the Livor Mortis Codes in other timelines.
Henshin Hero: A gruesome version. Hemoanima forms are entered through an act of pseudo-suicide that is neither painless nor inspiring, and wear black school uniforms that emphasize their grim purpose. It's actually a version of how Futuran Commanders transform.
Heroic Sacrifice: It turns out that this trope is a major part of the reason that the Futuran religion forbids cannibalism and the consumption of blood from others. Not because they were worried that their cryptoglobin-wielding Paragons would cannibalize each other for a power-up. In fact, it was the opposite. They believed that, in the heat of battle, their champions would willingly request the more powerful heroes among them to consume their cryptoglobin (thus killing them) in order to defeat greater threats when they themselves are too weak to do so.
High-Pressure Blood: Hemoanima-powered Suicide Attacks and transformations both spray a lot of blood everywhere. Anemia isn't a problem, though.
Hold the Line: Defensive battles involve the Special Defense Unit preventing the enemy from advancing toward the Academy's energy barrier.
Hollywood Exorcism: In the Box of Calamity route, the bizarre and frightening murders lead Gaku to believe that they've been cursed by the Boxes of Calamity and that he needs to exorcise the ghosts haunting them to stop the murders. If Takumi agrees with him, they spend the rest of the hundred days performing all sorts of rituals like burning incense and playing music with the Ghost Boy's help. After boarding the escape pod to the Artificial Satellite, the two plan on continuing their rituals to cleanse the curses and vengeful spirits still lurking around.
Honesty Is the Best Policy: In the Coming-of-Age route, Takumi convinces Nozomi to be honest about how she got into the SDU so that she doesn't have to fear being rejected by the others. Otherwise, choosing to lie results in Ending 45 where the lie is quickly uncovered and it results in Takumi getting locked up in the courtyard cage while the rest of the team intends to do the same to Nozomi.
Human Aliens: The Futurans are a sapient alien race native to Futurum who are nigh-identical to humans barring minor physical traits like a differently colored lock of hair on their bangs and an additional ring in their eyes as well as the natural ability to use hemoanima from their cryptoglobin. The 2nd Scenario route has the Special Defense Unit discover that they, barring Token Human Nozomi Kirifuji, are artificial Futurans cloned from the Ghost Boy's DNA.
Humans Are the Real Monsters: Humanity turns out to be the aggressors of the war, as the leaders of the surviving humans aboard the Artificial Satellite were so offended that a sapient species already inhabited an Earth-like planet that they waged war on them with the end goal of total genocide so they could colonize it. They have done many unsavory actions to achieve this goal, including abducting a Futuran infant to fuel a Doomsday Device, creating 14 Tyke Bombs from his DNA to eventually send out on the frontlines as teenage Unwitting Pawns, and one of the scientists working with them transfusing cryptoglobin into her daughter, leaving her Delicate and Sickly.
Humans by Any Other Name: The Human Alien Futurans call humans "Children of the Stars" as they're the extraterrestrials from their perspective.

I-N

Identical Stranger: Nozomi Kirifuji bears a strong resemblance to Karua Kashimiya, causing The Protagonist to mistake her for his childhood friend upon meeting her. Karua's a false memory and doesn't even exist. However, Nozomi regularly venting to a comatose Takumi while he was growing in a pod imprinted her appearance and personality onto Karua, meaning Karua was based on Nozomi.
Idiots Cannot Catch Colds: On day 25 of the 2nd Scenario route, most of the SDU fall ill with a cold after a blackout. As the academically apathetic Takumi, the hotheaded Takemaru and the dimwitted Gaku haven't fell ill, they argue if it means the "idiots can't catch colds" saying is true, though the well-read Nozomi being healthy seems to disprove that.
Impeded Messenger: At the end of Day 100, Takumi decides to travel to the past to have a chance at undoing the failure of the mission while the group that survived departs for the artificial satellite. Moments after he left, a transceiver is suddenly sent to the academy, with Tsubasa and Takemaru desperately trying to tell Takumi that something has happened on the satellite, with the signal getting abruptly cut off before they could explain what they discovered.
Infinite Illusion Ending: Ending #24 "Embrace Fantasy" of the Casual Route has Takumi chose to stay in an unending dream while he dies in reality.
Innocuously Important Episode: Ending #86, "So Close And Yet So Far", initially only seems like a bad ending for the Killing Game Route that runs short of the more fleshed out Ending #87. It is, however, crucial for the events of the #55 "All 17 Of Us" Everybody Lives ending, because it provides a spare timeline to jump to wherein the rocket is intact but the entire party is already dead.
Interface Screw:
- Fights involving Turamtammi, the Squad Eleven Commander, swap around the models of all the enemies to make them look like other ones (including bosses). Some fights additionally obfuscate the descriptions of skills and items, while also occasionally showing cut-ins of the Art Shifted illusions she creates.
- The Goodbye Eito route has most of the screen blacked out during the portion set from Eito's POV, to reflect his blindness. However, characters are still somewhat visible during scenes where he talks with others.
Interface Spoiler:
- Nigou doesn't appear throughout the first week of the story included in the demo. However, his very existence is spoiled by the very first splash screen with Aniplex and Tookyo Games' logos that appears when booting up the game.
- The Steam trading cards for the game spoil the existence of Eva, a character who does not appear until the end of the fight on Day 55.
- Looking at the map shows where everyone is, which can foreshadow a day's event like Eito going missing.
- Outside of a small set of circumstances where they're disabled for reasons acknowledged in-story, being unable to explore during a morning "free time" phase because the fire extinguishers are down for "maintenance" means a narrative event is going to happen in the afternoon.
- The credits for elements of the game that don't come into play until after the first playthrough are censored; however, any ending after that will uncensor all the credits, revealing the names of all routes as well as the fact that the Undying Flames boy is eventually given a name. The existence of several characters is also revealed regardless of if they even appeared in that route.
- There is room for fifteen people on the screen where you choose who to bring on explorations, but only fourteen members of the SDU besides Takumi. This is a hint that there are actually sixteen playable characters, with Eva being the sixteenth.
- After the first route, the Bonding Events mechanic is unlocked, allowing you to witness five unique hangout events with the students you're closest with and learn more about their backgrounds. All of them get a sixth one relating to The Reveal in the 2nd Scenario route that all of that information was fabricated by the Exodus Project scientists... except for Darumi, Kyoshika, Kurara and Eva (whose backstory is genuine), who are all dead by the time this is disclosed, something that can easily be inferred by the fact their sections in the Bonding Events gallery only have five listings.
- In the Mystery route, during decision points where you must choose a culprit, opening the Chapter Select and looking at the branching paths will spoil the answer by singling out which choice will lead to a new path.
- In most circumstances, if you get the "Battle Results" screen immediately after defeating a commander, it gives away that the SDU won't get a chance to absorb their hemoanima.
- In the S.F. Route, despite having story locks to prevent spoilers of the culprits on the Box of Calamity route, Slasher route and Mystery route, the Killing Game route, which is not required to play beforehand, often gets spoiled on a lot of its CGs, as well as the relationship of Takumi and Tsubasa.
Ironic Echo: On the V'ehxness route, Takumi attempts to comfort Tsubasa by telling her that her failed Heroic Sacrifice was the only option, in spite of that being blatantly false. If Takumi then attempts to protect V'ehxness and persuade her to stand down, Tsubasa will fatally stab both of them, saying it was the only option.
Irony:
- All of the routes of the "kill Eito" branch (except the Comedy route) are far more bleak, death-filled and traumatic for Takumi than the rest of the game, and Takumi often comes to the conclusion that the reason everything went wrong runs back to the decision to kill Eito. The truth turns out to be that all the tragedies happened because Hiruko, who's the second time-traveler, choose the opposite decision to a similar ethical dilemma (is it right to kill someone who will cause harm in the future, but didn't yet), sparing a version of Kako from the Box of Calamity route, which ended up infesting the timeline with a Serial Killer who's both way more evil and way more dangerous than Eito.
- It's mentioned that, though Futurans born with cryptoglobin are regarded as heroes by their people, it's also not uncommon for those with personalities and temperaments totally unsuited for battle can also end up carrying it. This explains the more cowardly invaders like Murvrum, Eva, and Quenzelle. The only reason they even joined the battle being they were conscripted and had no choice if they wanted to prevent their species from being wiped off the planet, and even further draws parallels with members of the SDU like Shouma, Tsubasa, Gaku, Ima, and Kako who initially either don't want to or physically can't join the fight until their backs are against the wall.
- One of Takumi's goals in traveling through time is to stop Eito from killing the Defense Room baby and ruining the mission. Right before the final battle of the Rebellion route, he actively helps Eito commit the deed.
- At one point in the Slasher route, Takumi can express a craving to swallow a whole frog for some unknown reason, and Gaku tells him that's how you contract parasites. Considering that Gaku and Darumi bringing two parasites into the school in another timeline that infested him and caused his off behavior in this timeline, the concern for his health ends up fairly laughable.
- In the Killing Game route, Takumi justifies trying to join the killing game by stating that the students can find and punish whoever killed Gaku. However, unbeknownst to Takumi, Gaku's killer turns out to be taken care of by Hiruko and thus, would have no connection to the Invader Hunt. Even more ironic is that Gaku's killer happens to be Takumi's Split Personality clone of a G'ie Queen that he gained in Ending 76.
- In the Box of Blessings route, Gaku suggests they perform an exorcism to drive away the "ghost" that is killing people. Going with his plan has Takumi and Gaku spending days chanting and burning incense. They are convinced they saved the class, while the other students are convinced they are idiots and shun them. Choosing not to perform the ritual shows they were 100% correct, and way more people die.
Invading Refugees: Humanity in general, as Earth was destroyed; the planet everyone is on is actually a planet called Futurum, with the Exodus Project deciding Futurans and Earthlings could not cooexist, dragging both species into a mutual Guilt-Free Extermination War.
It All Ends in Tears: The final cutscene of the 2nd Scenario route ends with Nozomi crying after grasping hands with a Futuran child, breaking down as she sees Takumi's final wish for peace begin to realize.
Killer Rabbit: The monstrous "School Invaders" resemble colorful plushies with Electronic Eyes. The keyword here is resemble, as the bigger ones can fly and tank hits from a charging motorcycle.
Knight of Cerebus: A strange case where an outfit is this more than a character, as it’s immediately clear these aren’t always the same person. Any time a mysterious figure in what looks like a diving suit appears, the player can take for granted that they’re on one of the game’s more horror-focused routes. Many G’ie possessed characters wind up using them to mask their identities. Though at the same time, they’re hardly the only characters who use them…
Knockout Fakeout: In Ending 69 of the Slasher route, after Nozomi throws herself and the killer out of the moving bus by force, she assumes the killer has lost consciousness and uses the opportunity to remove the mask and learn his identity. However, the killer was actually faking it and uses Nozomi's brief moment of shock upon seeing his face to stab her with a shard of glass.
Kudzu Plot: The conflict the game centers around is an incredibly complex situation, with Route 0 taking a slow burn approach to explaining the pretenses the characters are even meant to believe they’re fighting for, and a clear sense that while they’re told the truth on some things, it’s hardly ever the full truth, and often baked in with lies and uncertainty. Though certain routes tell you a lot about the broad details of the plot, even the path most centered around learning the truth leaves vital elements unrevealed. It takes a lot of different routes to slowly but surely grasp the full picture of things. Case in point, the G’ie are major enough to be secondary antagonists of the entire game, but you probably wouldn’t even suspect the game has an extremely prominent Puppeteer Parasite focused Myth Arc without diverging heavily from this path.
Language Barrier: The Special Defense Unit are unable to understand the invaders until Takumi goes back in time at the end of the first route.
Last Kiss: In Ending 72, aptly subtitled "Goodbye Kiss", Takumi and Hiruko share one last kiss right before the omni-directional attack commences as Hiruko refuses to depart in the escape pod and leave Takumi to die alone.
Last-Second Ending Choice: Several routes have choices that, either before or after the final battle, determine which ending you get.
"Last Supper" Steal: Ending 24 of the Casual Route has Takumi, whose mind and body are separated from one another, fighting a losing battle against V'ehxness as he chooses the blue pill to stay in a neverending dream. The scene is framed with Takumi in Jesus's position, and Eito in Judas's spot.
Leaning on the Fourth Wall: In the 2nd Scenario route, when V'ehxness uses a missile to destroy the artificial satellite, she calls it "The Bad Ending".
LOL, 69: Day 69 has a unique morning greeting, with Sirei speaking in a fiery, pumped up, and excited fashion and announcing that in honor of the day, rock music will be playing around the academy (a nod to the Japanese words for 6 and 9 sounding like "rock.") Sirei even starts laughing halfway through his lines! To hammer it in, there's an achievement for reaching the day for the first time.
Lotus-Eater Machine:
- On Day 87, the academy is attacked by the invaders utilizing a sound weapon that sends them into a hallucination where they're all ordinary students at school. Takumi manages to escape thanks to the Ghost Boy freeing him from the illusion.
- In the Casual Route, Sirei brainwashes Takumi into a false reality where everyone is still alive and nothing bad happens. Meanwhile, the rest of the SDU have to fight without his guidance or full presence of mind.
Love Magic's Bitter Aftertaste: The Cult of Takumi route starts with Yugamu creating pheromone-boosting pills for Takumi to make him more charismatic after Takumi's self-esteem plummets due to Takemaru's Heroic Sacrifice. Swallowing them makes Takumi's teammates become infatuated with him... which quickly escalates into creepy and invasive territories as they set up a "reward system" to be uncomfortably intimate with him, and they eventually murder those who dare to oppose them. Depending on the choices taken, Takumi either undergoes a Protagonist Journey to Villain and accepts his role as the leader of his Cult of Personality and aims to take over Futurum and the Artificial Satellite with his brainwashed harem, or he's tricked into swallowing pills that completely paralyze his body, leaving him at the mercy of his infatuated cult.
Magic Feather: The Infusers turn out to be this. A conversation with Nigou can reveal that the SDU don't actually need them in order to invoke their cryptoglobin, as it's already inside of them to begin with. Rather, anything would do as long as they could figure out a way to jumpstart it on their own with intent such as striking themselves in the chest with a normal object. Though this increases the risk, as doing it incorrectly could just result in them killing themselves.
Magic Is Rare, Health Is Cheap: Inverted. There is only one consumable that restores health, and it is the one that is the most expensive to develop and upgrade. By contrast, the characters' Charge Meter is filled by "Voltage", a stat that grows every time one of them attacks. A healer joins the party eventually, but her low HP means that health will always be rarer than Voltage.
The Magic Poker Equation: On the Casual route, Takumi gets roped into helping Takemaru beat Yugamu at poker. Only one hand shown is weaker than a straight.
Marry Them All: In Ending 67 of the Romance route, Takumi decides to date Kurara, Kyoshika, and Tsubasa all together and they agree to share him, eventually starting a family. Subverted when it's shown Takumi was actually having an Imagine Spot and got punched out by Moko.
Minimalist Cast: Downplayed, but the only characters to consistently appear in all routes are the SDU, (which comprises of 15 later 17 students.) and more sparingly the Commanders. Any other characters that pop up are often route exclusive.
Military School: Played with. Sirei likes to act as if the Last Defense Academy is a military Boarding School, but in reality it has no legitimacy or curriculum whatsoever. The "students" are just kidnapped teenagers Press-Ganged onto the frontlines. It's not even a school; it's a spaceship. The only reason it's shaped like a school at all is because Sirei thought it would be nice for Shion to have a normal-ish environment.
Mind Over Matter: Darumi's Hemoanima allows her to levitate multiple weapons.
Moment Killer: In endings 61-63, Takumi shares a kiss with his Love Interest only for the invaders to interrupt their tender moment with an attack. The fact that they don't do so if Takumi rejects the girl makes it feel like they're deliberately cockblocking him.
Monster of the Week: The commanders are individually introduced each time the academy is attacked, with them possessing a unique ability while also transforming into a larger monstrous form.
Murder Is the Best Solution: Deconstructed. At the start of the second playthrough, Takumi's Big First Choice is to kill the Evil All Along Eito believing he's too much of a threat. While it may have been justified from his perspective due to all the terrible things Eito had done in the original timeline, Shion points out Eito hadn't done anything that would warrant a death sentence. As a result of this, coupled with Eito being killed before his true nature could be seen, Takumi loses credibility with the rest of the group for taking things too far.
Mystery of the Missing Socks: In the Casual route, Kurara, Kyoshika, and Ima inform Takumi that their socks have mysteriously disappeared and ask that he helps search for them. After several days talking to the others, Takumi finds out that Eva had taken an interest in Santa Claus and had took the socks to emulate him putting gifts in stockings.
Mythology Gag:
- In his introduction, Ima refers to himself as "Pig barf" in comparison to his sister, which is the same insult that Hiyoko used to describe Mikan in Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair.
- The S.F Route is a large one to the Omega Endings present in past titles developed by Kotaro Uchikoshi. You're required to have unlocked certain endings to bypass the route's locks, and it's the one in which the mysteries regarding both the time loop encompassing the game's story and the Myth Arc are finally solved.
- Sirei has a dialogue sprite of him pulling a party popper, with a decoration of a teddy bear head split into black and white halves bursting out of it alongside the streamers and confetti. Similarly, Nozomi's room has a plush rabbit heavily resembling Usami/Monomi sat next to a teddy bear on her bedside.
- In Moko's fourth Bonding Event, she talks about her time competing in MMA and the friendship she formed with the one opponent she could never beat. Said opponent, while never named, is obviously meant to be Sakura Ogami from Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc; she's a fellow high school girl regarded as "the strongest hominid in existence", and is even nicknamed "the Ogre" like her.
- The description for the Crystal Ball gift claims that "If you've got a good arm, you could also try throwing it", alluding to the first trial of Trigger Happy Havoc where Leon activates the school's incinerator while stuck on the other side of the room by throwing Yasuhiro's crystal ball at it.
Never the Selves Shall Meet: Hiruko is loath to interact with other versions of herself using the Parallel Leap Machine, as she has been mistaken for an invader and caged for the full 100 days before. For the most part, she, Takumi, and Kako-G only do so while disguised, although there is one moment when Hiruko uses a coin toss to deliberately split the timeline so two versions of them can cooperate to get the Livor Mortis Codes.
Never Trust a Trailer: Promotional material made it seem like both Karua and Darumi died early on. It's actually possible to save both of them. Granted, Darumi did actually die and was only revived thanks to the hemoanima power while, although saved at the specific battle against Invaders in the Prologue, Karua gets separated from Takumi after he gets sent to the academy.
New Weapon Target Range: Every time a new fighter joins the defense for the first time, the enemies are in a formation that so happens to match the newcomer's Area of Effect attack.
No Fourth Wall: By the end of the Comedy Route where Takumi eats meat and then listens to Sirei, the game completely abandons any pretense of holding up the fourth wall. Sirei admits he couldn't think of a good ending to the route and blows up the entire school, which frustrates the entire cast with how lame of an ending it is. Darumi takes it a bit more in stride, saying "With this many endings not all of them are going to be good."
Non Sequitur Causality: The game generally avoids falling into this, with most of the seemingly inexplicable changes between routes that aren't the direct result of Takumi's decisions either being caused by other characters hopping between timelines or carryovers from previous cycles of a "Groundhog Day" Loop. However, the Comedy Route leans fully into this as a gag, with a major branch in the story depending on whether Takumi decides to have meat or fish at a post-battle victory party. Despite joking about the absurdity of something so small changing their fates, both decisions lead to dramatically different scenarios that have no relation to the choice of meal, with Takumi dealing with a perverted blackmailer in the former and the SDU all suddenly losing their voices due to an invader attack in the latter.
Non-Standard Game Over: After you gain access to Story Branching, some choices abruptly end the game before Day 100, either through Takumi being killed because of that choice or some bad fate falling on the SDU.
Noodle Incident: On some routes' Day 19, Sirei asks everyone during the morning announcement to come and see "Nigou's special talent", but Takumi is never able to attend for various reasons. When he shows up late after the demonstration, everyone else is awed beyond words and completely unable to explain what just happened beyond that it was the most amazing thing they'd ever seen. Nigou absolutely refuses to give repeat performances and does not allow any recordings to take place, so Takumi and the player never learn what exactly Nigou's special talent is.
Non-Standard Skill Learning: Takumi develops stats by spending time with his fellow students. For example, hanging out with Darumi increases his Creativity, and Takemaru increases his Gym.
Nothing Is the Same Anymore: After the first playthrough, Takumi begins each loop aware of Eito's true intentions, the escape pod, the identity of the Ghost Boy, the language of the invaders, the truth behind hemoanima/cryptoglobin, and Nozomi's true identity. The way each loop progresses is left up to player input.
Not Quite the Right Thing: At the beginning of the second playthrough, Takumi can make the very logical-sounding decision to summarily execute Eito for treason and attempted murder. This causes three major problems: it damages his credibility with the rest of the SDU due to them only having his and Sirei's word about Eito's true intentions, it forces him to reveal his time travel to the SDU, which leads to V'ehxness learning about it and deciding to absorb her own commanders for more power in response, and it allows the mental data from the G'ie queen that possessed him at the end of Ending 76 to awaken and cause a ton of problems.

O-R

Obliviously Evil: The students are revealed to have been this in the Truth route, as not only is the planet they're on not Earth, but it's a planet that mankind is trying to forcefully colonize in order to house their refugee population, and the commanders are just trying to defend their home from, in their eyes, an Alien Invasion. However, Sirei kept the truth from them and told them they were fighting to save Earth so as to motivate them to fight.
Obvious Rule Patch:
- During the Hopeless Boss Fight against V'exhness in Day 15 of the 2nd Scenario, certain characters are mysteriously unable to use their Last Resort moves, even if you drain their health with a Desperation Potion. This is because Takumi, Nozomi, Kyoshika, Takemaru and Tsubasa need to survive in order to set up a Heroic Sacrifice moment after the fight.
- In later versions, the final battle of the 2nd Scenario disables all potions and traps for no in-universe reason, just to make the fight harder and force the required story beat where everyone except Takumi dies in battle.
- An In-Universe example happens in the Killing Game route, where the second Sponsor adds a rule that forbids any of the students from ingesting poison. Given how the first Sponsor died thanks to her along with all of her back-ups absorbing Kyoshika's cryptoglobin after the samurai ingested poison in her body, this rule pretty much got made so that the second Sponsor can avoid the same fate as the first Sponsor.
Ocular Gushers: Nigou's crying sprite features him crying exaggerated streams of tears. Some of the other characters have a less exaggerated version, since they're less cartoony.
Off-into-the-Distance Ending: Ending 70 of the Slasher route has Nozomi, Kyoshika and Shouma walk away from the camera and into the ruins after Nozomi successfully kills the mysterious masked murderer.
Once More, with Clarity: Some routes have inexplicable phenomena such as people believing Takumi committed actions he has no memory of or two unitentified individuals in diving suits identical to the ones worn by the villains of the Slasher and Killing Game routes wandering around. The S.F. route explains all of this as the result of alternate timeline hopping by those versions of Takumi and Hiruko.
One-Eyed Shot: Each time the SDU changes into their battle uniforms, there's a brief shot of a single eye before the transformation begins.
One-Shot Revisionism: In most cases where Nozomi's rejection symptoms flare up, the only way to save her is to have her kill an enemy commander and absorb their cryptoglobin, but in the Killing Game route, she's able to recover by drinking enough of Eva's blood to leave her anemic, but still alive. While this works in the context of the route and both characters' arcs, it also draws attention to how no one in any other route thinks to try absorbing cryptoglobin non-lethally, even in situations where it would save them from having to sacrifice an ally or go on a risky mission.
Only the Leads Get a Happy Ending: The Reset route has the SDU finally free from the war, with Sirei ordering them to live their lives to the fullest... but they've become the last living beings on Futurum as the rest of humanity and the Futurans have been completely wiped out, with their memories of their journey wiped to relieve them of the burden of what happened.
Ordinary High-School Student: In the opening cutscene, Takumi describes himself as an ordinary high school student.
Our Zombies Are Different: Endings where you choose to dodge an attack in the Slasher route deal with students becoming zombies thanks to male G'ie possessing the corpses of fallen students. While they act like typical zombies, one major difference is that if someone were to get bit by a zombie, they do not automatically transform into a zombie, as evident with Kurara, they need to be infested with a G’ie. Unfortunately, another difference is that G’ie are anything but mindless, especially their Queens; in another route, one Queen infests Nozomi without anyone the wiser, and another that infested the Box of Calamity version of Kako is the Greater-Scope Villain for the entire Kill Eito Myth Arc.
The Outside World: The students grew up in a highly regulated dome, which they never left. When they see a real sky for the first time, they're dumbstruck; Takumi finds the infinite space terrifying and insists he'll never get used to it. He feels much more favorably about a starry sky, though.
Out-of-Clothes Experience: The first time Takumi acquires his Class Armor, his body is enveloped in a swirl of blood that briefly leaves him without clothes as his uniform manifests itself onto him.
Out of Focus:
- The Tsukumo twins have very few significant things to do after Route 0, despite playing huge roles in there.
- Moko is hit even harder with this: in Route 0 she's killed before the player gets to meet her, only appearing in the form of a commander impersonating her, and in subsequent routes she only plays minor supporting roles.
Overpopulation Crisis: The catalyst behind World Death, which necessitated humans building spaceships to leave the Earth and conquer a new planet.
Painting the Medium:
- The credits use black boxes to blur out the names of characters who haven't been met yet or haven't revealed their true names.
- In the Goodbye Eito route which takes place in Eito's perspective, the overworld graphics are heavily obscured by black squiggles to represent his blindness after having his eyes removed.
- During one of the Defensive Battles, a commander causes all the students to hallucinate an idyllic school life. To drive it home for the player too, the art style switches to a more traditional, love-dovey anime one, complete with heart-adorned dialogue boxes.
Pathetically Weak: On the battlefield, the Special Defense Unit are badasses who can defeat giant carapaced monsters. However, exploration events can involve them losing HP from the emotional damage of being seen naked, or of pulling a root too hard and falling on their butt.
Percussive Maintenance: Used to great comedic effect in the Comedy route. After Tsubasa becomes stumped at how to kick Sirei into action after reassembling him from destruction, Takumi offers to help by way of this, saying that it's what he used to do at home for malfunctioning TVs and such. Just when she's about to start yelling at him for whacking a piece of such delicate machinery, they're both shocked to see that it worked, much to Tsubasa's chagrin.
Piggyback Cute: Non-romantic example; Takumi carries Eito on his back after rescuing him from Invaders early on in Route 0.
Player Nudge: After Takumi cures the SDU of a bad cold during the Second Scenario, Kako warns him (and by extension the player) that Gaku is about to be endangered and that he must survive in order for the SDU to learn the truth. Sure enough, Gaku ends up the victim of a Sadistic Choice alongside Kurara; saving him keeps you on the path to the True Final Boss, while saving Kurara diverges to the Conspiracy route.
Playing with Syringes: The doctors working with the Exodus Project harvested the DNA from an abducted Futuran infant with powerful cryptoglobin and created 14 clones from it, with them growing in pods with the express purpose of serving as soldiers to defend the building where the baby's body is held, as his Undying Flames are used to fuel a Doomsday Device that will enact a genocide of the Futurans after a 100 days pass. The clones were fed Fake Memories of living in the TRC as ordinary humans and further experimented on to serve as ideal Child Soldiers, oblivious to their true purpose as they were further experimented on in the meantime, asleep the whole time until their deployment as teenagers. Meanwhile, one of the scientists tranfused cryptoglobin into her daughter Nozomi, leaving her able to use hemoanima but left her Delicate and Sickly from the rejection symptoms she developed.
Plot Device All Along: Takumi's Specialist Skill, Redo, initially only seems like a justification for being able to redo battles; otherwise, it has no bearing on the plot itself. Except, at the end of the initial run, Takumi is supercharged with cryptoglobin strong enough to let his Specialist Skill go back several months, acting as the catalyst for the remainder of the game's plot.
Pool Scene: In the 2nd Scenario Route, the students decide to take a breather by having a pool party at the academy together.
Precrime Arrest: After going back in time, Takumi stops Eito from killing Sirei. The boy in the Defense Room argues against summarily executing him because he may have sabotaged the group, directly murdered four people (including the boy himself), started the Disaster Dominoes that eventually got Ima killed, and directly caused the failure of the entire mission, but all of that only happened in the first playthrough. In this playthrough, he's only committed one attempted murder. Sirei himself argues the opposite, pointing out that the traitor is still the same person who is maliciously planning all of this and is way too dangerous to be spared.
Press Start to Game Over: The first choice the game gives you is whether or not to fight the murderous aliens bearing down on you. If you say no, Sirei yells at you and the camera cuts to a Game Over screen.
Prolonged Prologue: The entire first playthrough of the game can be considered this, culminating in Ending 0 and Takumi getting the ability to loop back in time. It's only after the scenario ends do the branching stories open up.
Psycho Serum: The "Cult of Takumi" route has Takumi ingest pills made by Yugamu that strengthen his pheromones and charisma to make him a better team leader. This makes all the students fall in love with him to increasingly uncomfortable degrees, and depending on the ending Takumi either goes mad with power and vows to take over both humanity and the Futurans with his romantic cult or becomes paralyzed and at the complete mercy of his obsessed followers.
Red Pill, Blue Pill: At the end of the Casual Route, Sirei appears in Takumi's mind and tells him he had brainwashed Takumi on Day 31 when his loyalty became questionable, but it worked too well, fracturing his psyche. Sirei offers two options before Takumi: the red pill to wake up and face uncertain doom, or take the blue pill and stay in an unending dream while he's killed in the real world.
Reused Character Design:
- As is visible in the page image, Takumi looks like a heroic version of Yomi Hellsmile, a character from the game Kodaka worked on just before this one. Takumi has the same red hair (albeit natural) and a similar black outfit to Yomi's.
- Eito Aotsuki inherits his fashion sense from Nagito Komaeda's beta designs.
- Tsubasa Kawana is another dark-skinned girl with white hair, along with being yet another tanned girl with big chest.
- Having similar height and almost identical facial features along with both hair and eye color, Ima Tsukumo is very similar to Kokichi Oma, with the only differences being their hairstyle and uniform.
- Kako is, as shown in the creators' discussion of her character trailer, yet another girl with long, light-purple hair who likes detective work. She also wears a school uniform heavily resembling Maki Harukawa's, much like students from Aetheria Academy in Master Detective Archives: Rain Code.
Revenge Before Reason: In the Comedy route, Moko and Nozomi are so eager to take revenge on Takumi that they jump straight to punishing him, silencing multiple attempts to tell them that he had good reasons for what he did. It turns out that Takumi was acting under duress from a third party, who almost gets away scot-free because Moko and Nozomi took the easiest path to (what they thought was) justice. Also, the worst thing they punished Takumi for didn't happen at all, which they would have known if they had talked to its alleged victim.
Nozomi: We know everything. (...) I heard a rumor that someone saw it happen.
Right for the Wrong Reasons: In the Box of Calamity route, Takumi is menaced by a Stringy-Haired Ghost Girl whom, given that she started appearing after Eva laid a Dying Curse on the SDU, he assumes is her vengeful spirit come back to haunt him. One of the branches has him attempt to communicate with her, with Shion suggesting he may be able to understand her if he bolstered his hemoanima with a commander's blood. Eva's ghost really is haunting Takumi, and taking Shion's advice does allow him to speak to her, but she's not a vengeful spirit, having already let go of her hatred towards the SDU. The ghost girl who attacked Takumi is a separate entity; a tulpa born from his own feelings of guilt.
Running Gag:
- Kyoshika being incredibly bad at math.
- Kurara accusing Kyoshika of using the Holy Jumonji Sword to masturbate, with Kyoshika's attempts to deny it only making her look more guilty.
- On the Mystery route, Takumi passing out for days on end, and Nozomi freaking out and running around the room when he suddenly awakens again.
Russian Roulette: If you take Darumi with you in Exploration Mode, one event on purple ? spaces has her find an old revolver and want to play Russian roulette, which you can pass on or agree to. Failure immediately takes out a random party member for the run unless you reload a save (though Shouma might be able to tank it). Winning gives you 30% extra resources.

S-Y

Sacred First Kiss: In the Killing Game route, Tsubasa kisses Darumi to cheer her up from Hiruko's death and the convince her to join her and her allies. Not only does Darumi fall head over heels for Tsubasa, but Takumi gets extremely peeved about the fact that Darumi took Tsubasa's first kiss and not him given their blossoming romance in the route. In fact, the decision to have him swap the implanted bombs with Darumi is partially motivated by him wanting petty revenge on her. On Darumi's part, she wastes no effort in teasing Takumi over being the one to kiss Tsubasa first.
Sadistic Choice:
- On the main "Spare Eito" path, Takumi has to choose one of Kyoshika, Takemaru, or Tsubasa to set off the Undying Flame Bomb at the cost of their own life. V'ehxness surviving the attack makes it all the more sadistic.
- Later on the same path, V'ehxness pulls a Wounded Gazelle Gambit and has her soldiers kidnap Gaku and Kurara. There's only enough time to save one of them — the other gets killed and their power absorbed by V'ehxness.
- On the Rebellion route, V'ehxness blows herself up after being defeated, mortally wounding both Nozomi and Kamyuhn. Takumi has to save one of them by killing the other and transfusing their cryptoglobin.
Say My Name: Takumi does this in the Coming Of Age route when catapulting his severed upper half towards V’exhness and the Undying Flame shell while his lower half is getting dragged to the Revive-O-Matic so he can be revived.
Takumi: V’EXHNEEEEEEEEEEESS!!!
Schrödinger's Gun: Certain seemingly important story elements and characters seem to be complete nonfactors in routes where they don’t play an active role, such as the Boxes of Blessings. This is actively exploited and examined in the S.F. route, where it becomes a plot point that Hiruko and Takumi can only find certain vital resources in timelines where they’re relevant, such as speaking to the Old Man in the Retsnom route and finding an ultra rare undying flame-absorbing material used to help Shion safely leave his chamber in the Coming of Age route.
Screw the War, We're Partying: As most of the students start to become convinced that they're disposable pawns to be cast aside along with the invaders, they (with the exception of Takumi and Nozomi) unanimously decide to accept V'ehxness's offer to let them reach the artificial satellite, having a party the day before they meet with her.
Sealed Evil in a Can: The Gi'e, a species of hive-minded parasites which take over the bodies and corpses of the fauna of planets they land on. After a large-scale extermination and then an experimentation period upon the ones that remained, the ancient Futurans sealed the six remaining Gi'e specimens on the planet inside of the six Boxes of Calamity, and then scattered the boxes in hidden shrines around Futurum.
Self-Harm–Induced Superpower:
- The students activate their Hemoanima stabbing themselves in the chest, every time, with a particular type of knife.
- Invader Commanders transform by using their claws to slit their own throats.
Senseless Sacrifice: Downplayed if Kyoshika lays down her life to set off the Undying Flames bomb. V'ehxness survives the attack and reappears to consume Addamaque's hemoanima, showing how powerful she's become from violating the Futurans' most sacred taboo, but it does accomplish the objective of driving her off, winning the battle, and buying the SDU time to grow stronger so they can challenge her.
Sequential Boss:
- The Squad Two commander, Pakron, starts off in three identical forms that must all be defeated in the same turn, after which the three fuse into one for the second phase of her fight.
- The Squad Five Commander, Parmith, starts off with a very small battle form. After defeating them once, they get a second wind and reveal that their battle form also has massive tendrils which they use to take root and use new attacks.
- The Coming-of-Age Route has a four-phase Final Boss fight. First is a Wolfpack Boss fight against Takemaru, Hiruko, Ima, Kako, Kyoshika, and Yugamu, then you fight V'ehxness for one wave, and then Eito kills her to become the real final boss for the remaining two waves. Depending on the choice made after Eito's first phase, Eito either goes One-Winged Angel for the final wave, or it becomes a Duel Boss fight between him and Takumi.
Set Right What Once Went Wrong: This becomes Takumi's goal after achieving the first ending and going back in time. However, events start to wildly deviate from what he knows almost immediately. Depending on what route you're on, he can succeed at setting things right... or make things even worse.
Sexy Surfacing Shot: During Day 15, Takumi and Eito go to talk to Hiruko in the Leisure Lounge, only to find her having a night swim at the pool. The scene shows a gratuitous fanservice CG shot of her climbing out of the pool in her bikini to talk to them. Both boys are flustered by the sight too, and she teases them for it, mocking them for looking like Peeping Toms.
Shoo Out the Clowns: Most of the characters who die on the path towards the Second Scenario ending are on the more comedic side, with Darumi & Kyoshika being frequent comedic relief during most of their screentime, and Kurara frequently playing off other characters for it as well. This makes the Second Scenario have a consistently more serious tone than the first route for most of its runtime, and many of the routes branching off of it after Kurara's death are also more serious in nature.
Shout-Out:
- At the start of Day 2 of Route 0 (and again after going back in time), Takumi stares into his reflection in the mirror in his room and thinks "In spite of everything, I'm still me... Right?", referencing the "despite everything, it's still you" line when you interact with the mirror near the end of Undertale.
- On day 2 of Route 0, when Sirei explains hemoanima, Class Weapons and Specialist Skills, he says to not worry about the details and just "yell 'I am thou' or 'Oraoraora!' or something and just... go with it!"
- On Day 50 of Route 0, Nozomi claims that Moko once suplexed an Invader the size of a train.
- At one point during the barbecue in Route 0, Takemaru asks for a "triple bossy deluxe, animal style."
- When the ghost boy melts a door in the Defense Room door, Darumi says that "this hole was made for us".
- Darumi asks the group if they're familiar with the headless biker on a motorcycle.
- In the Comedy Route on Day 28 when Darumi is denied doing reprehensible things to Eva because she's brainwashed, Darumi says "Screw you guys, I'm going home!"
- In the Killing Game route on Day 56 while at the enemy base taunting a commander to show up, Kyoshika Magadori says "Your mother was a Tanuki and your father wears tacky eyeshadow!"
- In the Retsnom route on Day 90, Takemaru says he tried to drag Ima out of his room so that he could train with the rest of the guys, but he swapped himself with a teddy bear while Takemaru wasn't looking.
- In the Serial Battles route, Shouma says they should initiate one battle with a "brave bang bravern".
Sick Episode: On Day 25 of the 2nd Scenario route, most of the SDU catch colds. Takumi, Takemaru, Gaku and Nozomi set out on an exploration to collect materials to create a cold medicine.
Significant Double Casting:
- Karua and Nozomi share both Japanese and English voice actresses. The two look uncannily similar to the extent that the latter is mistaken for the former by Takumi. Karua is eventually revealed to be a mental construct based on Takumi's hazy memories of Nozomi.
- Exaggerated in the English dub, where around half of the enemy Commanders share voice actors with playable characters, to emphasize the similar aspects of two sides in a war who are both just trying to survive.
Sliding Scale of Unavoidable vs. Unforgivable:
- This ends up being the Central Theme of the game, the question of what has to be done to reach the truth or survival is one that weighs heavily on several routes… and can lead to the deaths of most of the cast or millions (or both).
- This ends up being the main plot behind Takumi's actions in the Killing Game Route, to wit, he and the Anti-Sponsor Alliance have to slowly start doing more and more killing and morally dubious actions in order to survive and kill the Sponsor. Takumi ends up having to lean into his murderous talents to survive the Invader Hunt, then he has to let Hiruko die, actively leave behind Moko on a Suicide Mission to Hold the Line, fully endorse making Yugamu poison Kyoshika as The Bait to kill the Sponsor, manipulate Nozomi into killing Eva (with her consent mind you), and finally is driven/coerced to murder innocent (albeit Marked For Death, though he didn’t know until later on) people to protect Tsubasa. Where Takumi falls on the scale is something that is constantly debated by himself, his team, and even the antagonists of the route.
Slumber Party: In the Coming-of-Age route, both girls and boys throw one between each other, with the player seeing how the boys' one plays out, where the guys talk about which girls they like.
Somethingitis: In the Comedy route, the cause of everyone's heads suddenly being turned into fish is said to be caused by "Terminal Mackerel-Headitis".
Sound of No Damage: In combat, SDU members or enemies that possess increased guard are given a clink sound when attacked to signify no damage.
Speaking Simlish: The enemy commanders in the English voice track actually do speak Simlish.
Stable Time Loop: Ending 76 is a bootstrap paradox. Takumi is possessed by the biological remnants of a G'ie queen that possessed him in the future, kills Sirei, and makes a bunch of decisions that ultimately lead to him being left behind by the escape pod and possessed by the G'ie queen.
Standard Bleeding Spots: Whenever a character's sprite shows them severely injured, it always depicts them with blood flowing from their heads and down their faces.
The Stations of the Canon: A canonical example. The game's many branching routes can vary wildly in story and tone, but one thing that remains mostly consistent are the Defensive Battles; from a second playthrough onwards, the same Commanders will almost always attack the school on the same days, and the battles will usually play out in similar ways (for example, Valla-Garzo and Szanshin will perform a Fusion Dance and the SDU will use the Undying Flames Bomb on Day 15, Turamtammi will attack alongside Nyewgank and feign destroying the academy with her illusion powers on Day 47, and Dahl'xia will gauge the SDU's strength in a Hopeless Boss Fight on Day 87 before returning for a true battle on Day 93). This is even a plot point in the S.F. Route, where Hiruko uses the accumulated knowledge from her "Groundhog Day" Loop to plan around the battles she knows are coming.
Stealth Sequel:
- Some routes are unknowingly sequels to a previously played out one, unresolved plot points in one route can suddenly create a sequel route. Such as, the Murder Mystery Route is revealed near the end to actually be a sequel to the Box of Calamity route. As Hiruko banishing Kako-G to their timeline in order to stop her from killing the group while in the Box of Calamity Route, caused Kako-G to then continue her killing spree there, thus kickstarting the Murder Mystery Route.
- However, the greatest one of all has to be the S.F route, where Takumi along with Hiruko, having memories of their past selves, travel to other timelines in order to right the wrongs and prevent the many tragedies. Such as when they went to the serial killer route and removed the G'ie data in that Takumi's mind in order to stop him from becoming a serial killer. Then afterwards, they went to the Mystery route in order to deal with Kako-G, and then the zombie route. In the said routes, it's revealed that some of the suited and shadowy figures that were seen in those previous routes, were actually Takumi and Hiruko who were disguising themselves in order to avoid causing a disaster by letting others see their faces. This is even highlighted when S.F Takumi remembers what Gaku said in the Box of Calamity route prior.
  Takumi: We took off running as fast as we could. Even in our panic trying to get away, a thought occurred to me.
  Gaku: I got kinda hungry, so I went to the cafeteria for some food. And when I turned around...There were two dark shadowy figures standing at the back of the room!
  Takumi: At least I knew who those shadowy figures had been now.
Stock Slasher: One of the Slasher route's branches has the students get menaced by a mysterious, powerful killer wearing a Creepy Old-Fashioned Diving Suit and wielding a power saw who gradually picks them off one by one.
Story Branch Favoritism: Of the many branching storylines you can see during a second playthrough, "Last Defense Academy 2nd Scenario" is treated as the "main" route: it appears at the very top in the list of endings, with the others numbered based on how late they diverge from it, it reveals the truth about the SDU's situation and ties up almost all of the loose plot threads from the first playthrough, the majority of the second playthrough's 3D cutscenes were made with it in mind, it's one of few routes that uses its full 100 days without skipping over any or ending early, and its final battle is a unique one that heavily ties the gameplay and story together. Even on the chapter select flowchart, the 2nd Scenario is depicted as a straight line to Day 100 after the Big First Choice, with other routes branching off from it instead of the line splitting down the middle like with most major choices.
Story Branching: Exaggerated. The game has one hundred unique endings, each one fully fleshed-out with unique art, voice acting, and so on. No branch is even remotely the same, and the story can veer in wildly different directions based on seemingly-inconsequential decisions. For example, choosing to dodge an attack leads to a low-stakes comedy romp, while kicking the attacker leads to a high-intensity cross-route murder mystery. The authors stated each route was written as if it were the "True" route, and it shows.
Story Difficulty Setting: The Safety difficulty is described as allowing the player to focus entirely on the story.
Stuff Blowing Up: Almost everyone and everything in this game has a bomb or some form of explosive attached to it. This includes all of the SDU having bombs in them, invaders randomly blowing up at certain plot points, and even Last Defense Academy having its own self destruct code.
Stunned Silence: A humorous example occurs on Day 40 of the Mystery route when Eva drops a truly atrocious pun that leaves every other member of the current party lost for words.
Eva: I guess you could say that Quenzelle has been... Quencelled...
Takumi, Tsubasa, Hiruko, Kurara, and Takemaru: ...
Suicide Attack: When reduced to very low health, a character can unleash their ultimate attack without requiring or consuming Voltage, but will drop dead immediately afterwards. Given that Death Is Cheap, you are actually encouraged to do this, as it counts as a "Nice" kill when calculating your reward at the end of a mission. It's even further encouraged after Route 0. After absorbing the Ghost Baby's hemoglobin, he gains a passive which increases his attack for each ally who dies in a wave, which means it's more than viable to have the entire SDU throw these out and have Takumi clean up whatever's left.
Suicide Mission: The final battle of the 2nd Scenario route has the SDU die in combat while they're damaging the Doomsday Device so Takumi can absorb their cryptoglobin and become powerful enough to destroy Shion's capsule to stop the omnidirectional attack from firing and wiping out the Futurans. When he succeeds, the academy explodes, mortally wounding him and leaving Nozomi the Sole Survivor of the group since she sat out of the battle.
Surprise Incest: The possible romantic entanglements that can ensue between any of the students except Nozomi are revealed to be this in the Truth route, since all the students (again, except Nozomi) were created from Shion's DNA, making them all genetically siblings. Then again, the cloning and genetic engineering process used to create the students (on top of Futurans being a different species from humans and thus possibly having different genetic inheritance mechanisms from humans) ultimately make this a Zig-zagged trope.
Switching P.O.V.:
- The Goodbye Eito route switches to Eito's perspective after he leaves the Academy.
- If you choose to speak to Nozomi instead of Hiruko during the Slasher route, the killer will successfully murder Takumi, and the perspective then switches to Nozomi's.
- The epilogue of the Truth Ending switches to Nozomi's perspective as she wanders the planet after the deaths of most of the SDU.
- The Cursed Cycle ending from the S.F. route switches to Hiruko's perspective after Takumi dies.
Talking Is a Free Action: Particularly prominent with the countdown to the omnidirectional attack, where characters can have long conversations when the countdown timer is a matter of minutes. A notable example is the conversation between Hiruko and Takumi in S.F. Route before the split between Ending 54 and 55, where their conversation is notably long despite a key point within it being Hiruko arguing that they don't have time to carry her to the escape pod and should instead leave her behind. Another example is Reset Route, most of which takes place within the countdown as the group discusses what they're meant to do next.
Tap on the Head: Takumi is knocked out by being hit in the back of the head with a pipe during a story exploration mission. He only wakes up again multiple days later, with a migraine.
Take a Third Option: In the Truth Route, this is the only time you get THREE options between who sets off the Undying Flame bomb against V'ehxness. Using Takemaru leads to the Cult of Takumi Route. Using Tsubasa leads to the V'ehxness Route, and using Kyoshika continues the game and more. In the Coming-of-Age Route, Takumi takes a FOURTH option; He has Hiruko slice him in half, Takemaru launch him at the bomb and drag the bleeding half to the Revive-O-Matic before it goes off.
Technicolor Fire: The Undying Flames, a supernatural fire that only burns organic material, are colored purple.
That's No Moon: The "moon" visible in the night sky is not actually the moon, but the Artificial Satellite holding the remnants of humanity after the apocalypse.
Three... Two... One...: On the Comedy route, Takumi is utterly flabbergasted upon seeing the academy getting attacked by invaders with scallop heads, with Darumi counting down until his audible Freak Out.
Darumi: Counting down until Takumi's massive freak out... Three, two, one... here he goes.
Takumi: WHAT ARE THOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOSE?!
Thing-O-Matic: Nearly every high-tech device in the academy is named this way, including the Revive-O-Matic, the Ration-O-Matic and the Gift-O-Matic.
Time Crash: After completing the first hundred days, Takumi gains the power of Mental Time Travel and attempts to Set Right What Once Went Wrong. Unfortunately, the very act of going back in time results in one of these and creates a "Groundhog Day" Loop that has him and Hiruko being forced to relive the hundred-day war over and over for more than 40 years while the Butterfly of Doom kills all their friends. The only reason they don't go mad from Time Loop Fatigue is because the duo lack a complete Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory, only retaining bits and pieces from each loop. The Golden Path revolves around them seeking to Earn Your Happy Ending and break the cycle.
Time Passage Card: Each day begins by showing the current day. Whenever a Time Skip occurs, several such screens are shown in succession.
Together in Death:
- In Ending 44, after Tsubasa mortally wounds Takumi and V'exhness, she takes him to a forest she used to play in during her childhood and they die together, holding hands in their last moments.
- Both Endings 59 and 72 see Hiruko giving up an opportunity to escape the omni-directional attack and staying behind with Takumi as both of them are engulfed in Undying Flames.
- The "BOY MEETS BOY" ending of Goodbye Eito's stageplay adaptation has Takumi arrive at Eito's side when he's attacked by Invaders and both of them die when the Undying Flames bomb is detonated.
Transferable Memory: The Killing Game route reveals that drinking someone else's cryptoglobin causes a mutual memory transfer to happen. As Nozomi drinks Eva's blood to counteract her rejection symptoms, they see each other's memories, with Nozomi viewing Eva (and later Kamhyun) as family, and Eva becoming enraged at Nozomi's abusive mother for treating her as a guinea pig and orphaning her via suicide.
Transformation Horror: After a person stabs themselves with an Infuser, Hemoanima enters their blood, something inside their chest starts burning (literally) and they hunch over from a throbbing migraine that makes them scream out in pain. It's even worse because most Hemoanima wielders are children.
Transformation Sequence: Every time the students stab themselves with their Infusers for a battle, a sequence plays of Takumi's Hemoanima uniform outfit manifesting on his body and the students screaming in pain right before they get deployed to the battlefield.
Twice Shy: This is Takumi and Nozomi’s general dynamic, particularly after he discovers Nozomi is his Childhood Friend Karua. They both obviously like each other, but are too nervous to confess their feelings to each other.
Two Guys and a Girl: Takumi, Eito, and Nozomi. Although unusually for this trope, one of the males in question (Eito) is revealed to have an antagonistic side.
Uncertain Doom:
- In Ending 7, while Takumi, Eito, Hiruko, and Nozomi all unambiguously survive and Darumi, Kyoshika, Kurara, Shouma, and Eva all unambiguously die, the rest of the SDU's fate remains nebulous. Takumi notes several mummified and unrecognizable corpses, while there are some more injured and buried in rubble who haven't been devoured yet, but it's not shown who's who.
- In Ending 12, Darumi, Kyoshika, Kurara, Eito, Eva, and 7 unidentified SDU members all perish before Takumi regains just enough control of himself to tell his friends to kill him. Since Takumi's perception has been sabotaged to make him see everyone as Eito, he has no idea who died by his hand and who the three survivors are other than Eito identifying his first victim as female.
Undressing the Unconscious: On Day 1, when Sirei first tells the students about how he put a bomb inside each of them, the first thing that Ima thinks about is how he must have undressed them to perform such a surgery and goes ballistic.
Ima: You touched my dear sister's naked, vulnerable body without her consent? What a novel way to commit suicide! No jury in the world would convict me for killing you now...!
Unexpected Gameplay Change: On Day 87, once the team goes through the Undying Flames, Takumi suddenly gets transported into a Slice of Life in a completely different timeline in a completely different artstyle. Then the Ghost Boy wakes him up from the psychic attack.
Unintentionally Unwinnable: In the final battle of the Truth route, the SDU has to destroy high-health missiles under a time limit while under attack from Interceptors, which one-hit-kill most of them. It's possible to block said Interceptors with fences in such a way that they can't reach the SDU, saving lives and letting the player destroy the missiles with impunity. What the game doesn't say is that the objective isn't just to destroy the missiles, but that the entire SDU has to die. If a well-meaning player stalls the Interceptors for too long, they can have too few turns left for the Interceptors to do their job, rendering the fight unwinnable. Later patches fixed this by making support items unuseable during this battle, forcing the other SDU members to get slaughtered.
Unquenchable Fire: The Last Defense Academy is surrounded by a wall of purple fire called the Undying Flames, which constantly burn throughout all 100 days. The only way to get past them is to use a highly specialized fire extinguisher or convince the Ghost Boy, who generates them, to let down his guard and lower the wall.
The Un-Reveal:
- In the Ending 0 timeline, after Takumi uses his Specialist Ability to travel back in time, we never get to find out what terror Tsubasa, Takemaru, and the other survivors witnessed in the Artificial Satellite. All that's stated is that there's something going on in the Satellite, before the feed cuts out, and that plotline never gets resolved. Based on future routes, it's likely they had learned the truth about the war and their origins, and The Exodus Project was unhappy with them failing their mission, or, alternatively, that they made contact with the Earth Forces dissident faction who were pleased that their Eito sabotage gambit paid off, explaining why the surviving members of the SDU didn't want Takumi to travel back in time.
- On some endings of the Slasher route, the identity of the mysterious masked killer is never revealed. One ending, "It Was You!", has Nozomi unmask the killer as she bleeds out, but their face is not shown and they are not named. Apparently the truth is that is the culprit is the Takumi of her world whom she thought was dead, but was in fact still alive and is the killer. The whole story is only revealed in the bad ending of the S.F route which tells the story from another perspective. The Takumi from the S.F timeline tried to kill his other self in this timeline, due to realizing that it was no longer possible to stop him from becoming a serial killer. However, upon cornering him, he hesitated in delivering the killing blow, allowing the G'ie to awaken in Takumi to steal his weapon and kill him. He then took his suit and went into hiding, so as to be able to continue his killing spree with no one the wiser.
- Played for laughs on one side of the Eat Fish branch of the Comedy Route. The SDU randomly have their heads turn into fish, though in Kurara's case, it becomes a can because of her tomato mask. None of the endings ever reveal how or why their heads turned into fish.
- Played for laughs in Ending 77 of the Comedy Route. After Takumi declares the entire ending to be All Just a Dream, Sirei breaks the fourth wall to address the player's questions about what happened before the fade out and whether or not it was all a dream... before outright refusing to answer, telling the audience to "Die mad, losers!"
- The Boxes of Calamity are explained in detail, but it’s never made clear what the Boxes of Blessings actually are, or why something as dangerous as the G’ie would be placed in a nearly identical set. Two of the eponymous route’s endings show that they work exactly as the dragon ball-analogues they’re presented to be, raising Kyoshika and Darumi from being actually dead, and it’s even claimed that cryptoglobin itself was gained through their power, but a definitive answer is never given. The closest thing to tying these together is the possibility of the Retsnom’s involvement, as it’s the only thing to display a similarly exceptional power, and the same mysterious old man tells the players about both on their respective routes, but even this isn’t certain or explicit.
- In the Steady Fundamentals Route, Takumi & Hiruko are aided multiple times by a Mysterious Backer who's never shown to the player, described only as an older woman in a lab coat. It's implied that she's the third party who invented the Parallel Leap Machine, but absolutely nothing concrete is given.
- While every other instance of running into mysterious masked people in the game is explained over the course of the S.F. Route, one such appearance during the Comedy Route goes completely unaccounted for. Similarly, toward the end of the S.F. Route Takumi and Hiruko run into alternates of themselves in the Coming of Age timeline that promptly flee without explanation.
Victory by Endurance: In Ending 009 (aptly titled "Endurance Match"), Takumi repeatedly self-harms and commits suicide in an attempt to remove Eito from his head, both trying to see who will give up first. In the end, Takumi gives out and Eito takes over his body.
Villain Protagonist: Several routes see the Special Defense Unit throw morality by the wayside and fight for their survival at any cost. This is most apparent in the Truth scenario and Reset route, where they decide to go ahead with the genocide of the Futurans. Takumi and the rest of the cast repeatedly muse upon the fact that they are doing the wrong thing, and Dahl'xia's musing about how they should give up their fight for survival and die for the greater good is recontextualized as an Armor-Piercing Response. And then, almost as if to laugh at the cast, the Rebellion Route demonstrates that compromising without getting the Futurans killed is incredibly easy, completely cutting down the justification that there was no hope for their survival without killing them. The cast themselves even remark that they're doing the right thing throughout the route in direct contrast with the main route. The one catch is that Takumi has to choose between saving Nozomi, who he cares deeply for, and Kamhyun, who will bring peace to the planet. They only reconsider this in the main route once the Artificial Satellite is destroyed and they have nothing left to fight for.
War Is Hell: And how. The routes where Takumi (or any other student for that matter) doesn’t end up with severe trauma can be counted on one hand.
Was It All a Lie?: In the Coming of Age route, Eito, seemingly brainwashed into being nice and friendly, reveals that the brainwashing failed and was pretending to be affected so he could undermine the SDU and spread tensions between them. Takumi is heartbroken by the revelation, asking him if the good times they had together throughout the route, like training at the beach and watching the fireworks, were all a lie.
Was Once a Man: All of the non-commander invaders are Futurans that were turned into bio-weapon monsters by Vehx'ness. Near the end of the 100 days she has run out of volunteers and resorts to converting civilians, which beg for mercy while they attack.
Wham Episode:
- Day 7 has Sirei found dead in a trash can outside the complex, Hiruko revealing she's fought the invaders before, and the invader commander displaying signs of intelligence and humanity.
- On Day 91 everyone learns Nozomi's ties to Kamukura Central Hospital despite Takumi never telling anyone, and due to Eito bringing up that the Defence Room must be charging a Fantastic Nuke, decide to surrender to the Invaders.
- On Day 95 the ghost boy reveals that he is the weapon everyone were protecting, before getting killed by Eito, who shows himself to be a Big Bad Friend and Omnicidal Maniac who is behind every unaccounted mystery until then. Before dying and gloating that the students have failed their mission, he mentions that World Death isn't what the School is fighting against.
Wham Line:
- On Day 46, Nozomi asks everyone if they know what "Planet Earth" is, continuing that humanity has been reduced to a few shelters after a case of Gaia's Vengeance.
- On day 94, after the Supreme Commander gets defeated by an enraged Takumi, he absorbs most of her cryptoglobin, to which causes her to utter some final words beforehand, however, unlike previously where they were spoken in a made up language...
  "Haha... Ahahah... Y-you are a truly a foolish bunch of rabble... You should've let me kill you!
- On Day 98, the ghost boy says that Takumi has time powers now, leading up to Set Right What Once Went Wrong on the final day and Multiple Endings.
Wham Shot:
- On Day 55 the invader commander takes off her helmet and reveals herself to be a foreign girl. Or at least someone who looks human enough for the students to decide to take her prisoner instead of finishing her off.
- On Day 94 after everyone takes the Supreme Commander's offer and comments on Grey-and-Gray Morality, she reveals herself to be Faux Affably Evil, traps everyone, and kills Ima and Nozomi, who can't use the Revive-o-Matic. And Nozomi is confirmed to be Karua while passing away in Takumi's arms.
- In the Killing Game route at the end of the third round, it's possible for Takumi to drive far, far away with Tsubasa to save her from execution. After escaping the bees, the two of them share a pleasant evening as love truly blooms between them for the first time, and Takumi dreams of introducing her to his family... but when the screen fades back in, the sleeping Tsubasa has been drained to a withered husk by one of the bees, Takumi still resting peacefully against her shoulder.
- In the Slasher route, Tsubasa creates a device that checks to see how many people are currently alive. When she boots up the device, it displays 15... but there's only 14 students alive at that point.
White Is Pure: Peaceful characters, such as the medic Nozomi and the conscientious objector Eito, have mostly white clothing and hair. By contrast, Hiruko wears a dress as black as her hair. Subverted for Eito, who's faking it.
Worth It: In Ending 81, Takumi doles out one final quip at the insanity surrounding him as a result of the "comedy energy", calling all of the others a bunch of clowns who came out of the same tiny car while begging them all to shut up already. That's when his "Super Smartass Syndrome" catches up to him and makes him explode. But Takumi says that he's lived a life of smartass comebacks and that he has no regrets.
Worthless Treasure Twist: The students at Second-to-Last Defense Academy have been told that whatever is in their Defense Room is something that would spell doom for humanity if it fell into the wrong hands. It turns out the room is empty; it, and the school as a whole, is a decoy meant to keep the invaders away from Last Defense Academy.
You Already Changed the Past:
- The attempts to change the events of other timelines in the S.F Route end up causing those routes to happen the way they do in the first place. From Takumi's perspective, he's not changing the timeline so much as he is reliving those same events from another perspective. This is because S.F Route Hiruko is the one responsible for these changes while S.F Route Takumi is the most recent version of Takumi reflecting them.
- Specifically, S.F Route Hiruko remembers 146 different timelines including the original Serial Killer route where she was killed by Takumi and a different timeline where she met a parallel version of herself and was captured by Last Defense Academy. These older timelines, timelines where S.F Route Hiruko and Takumi didn't or only partially intervened, and other timelines Hiruko didn't remember are inaccessible to the player because the events of the S.F Route has already blocked them off.
You Are Too Late:
- In the second scenario, by the time Takumi, Hiruko, Shouma, and Tsubasa arrive at the Second-to-Last Defense Academy, it has already been attacked by the invaders.
- On the S.F. route, by the time V'ehxness starts absorbing her commanders' cryptoglobin, it's already way too late for her to defeat the SDU.

The Hundred Line -Last Defense Academy-

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The Hundred Line -Last Defense Academy-

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