Some characters torment you simply with their presence. Often this is because they are irritating or embarrassing. Darumi Amemiya from The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy is a masterclass in being annoying: a creature so debased and overflowing with cringe that I want to shoot her out of a cannon, yet so endearingly true that I will defend her with every fiber of my being. I loathe and love my cringe daughter.
The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy is a collaboration between Danganronpa creator Kazutaka Kodaka and Zero Escape creator Kotaro Uchikoshi. Both series are visual novel adventure games, and both games feature a labyrinthine, twisting narrative with a bunch of idiosyncratic anime characters trapped in a deadly space by a mysterious creature or person.
Kotaro Uchikoshi’s storytelling tends towards the existential. He peppers his narratives with heavy handed philosophical, sci-fi and game theory ideas while making aggressive use of branching ergodic narrative structure. Kazutaka Kodaka is far more lurid, gleefully leaning heavily into the debased, violent nature of Danganronpa’s “killing game” premise. The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy, somehow, represents the perfect synthesis of these tones, a “Dueling Banjos” of two of the most distinct narrative voices in Japanese game development that understands and anticipates the player’s expectations from these two authors.
Though still very much a visual novel, The Hundred Line is also a tactical game in the vein of Fire Emblem. Humanity has been living in some kind of protected bunker when it’s invaded by malicious creatures. After a brief fight the main character, Takumi Sukimo, wakes up in The Last Defense Academy at the behest of a strange, mascot-like entity named Sirei, who looks as if a ghost had legs, a hat, a little bow tie and a visible brain. They are told that their blood is special, compatible with a substance called “Hemoanima” that allows them to self-harm henshin Persona-style by plunging a special knife into their chest and unlocking heretofore unknown powers. They also are told they are functionally immortal on school grounds, allowed to be revived should they fall in battle. I’m still working through the game, and it’s reported that there are 100 distinct endings, although I don’t know if anybody has gotten all of them.
Each of the students in The Hundred Line is a nasty little freak in a distinct and unique way that interacts with how they behave on the battlefield. For example there’s Takemaru, the aggressive, Bōsōzoku-style biker, who becomes a cavalry unit on the battlefield that benefits from distance traveled. Tsubasa the pretty mechanic has a stress reaction that makes her vomit; Shouma is a tiny meek child who looks like a turtle; the Tsukomos can only be described as “the incest twins.” And while each cast member has their foibles, none compare to the queen: Darumi Amemiya.
When you meet Darumi, she is so aggressively off-putting you are not quite sure what to make of her. Her hair looks like if Hatsune Miku let her roots grow out for several months because she was depressed, and she’s wearing edgelord Heath Ledger Joker makeup. Her outfit looks like a car crash of ‘00s American emo culture and trashy Japanese street fashion: a striped fuku covered in punk patches and gargantuan safety pins. She is annoyingly morbid, a self-loathing Yandere goth who canonically has bipolar disorder according to co-director Akihiro Togawa.
Darumi constantly rants about doing harm to herself and others, and is obsessed with gory media and eroge. Darumi will frequently name drop her favorite erotic games, forcing your character to play them should you interact with her, often in ways that foreshadow narrative events in the game. It gives me no pleasure to admit that she has frankly fantastic taste in the genre.
Her obsession with “killing games” is by far the funniest aspect of her character. She is clearly a stand-in for the audience and is probably the most well-adjusted Danganronpa fan in history. On some level you can hear Kodaka lovingly shoving her in your face and saying “See this? This is what you guys all sound like.” If you fall into that category, it’s quite clear that he got your ass.
Even outside of the meta context of the game, it is impossible for the intended audience of the work to not experience regular bouts of mortification from everything that she says. In Japanese she is voiced by Fairouz Ai (better known as the voice of Jolyene in JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure) while Sarah Pritard voices her English. Both do a fantastic job at rendering her character in ways distinct to their context, although Pritard’s performance is particularly brutal for anybody who came of age during the aughts. Because her character is almost eternal at this point, it is hard not for me to project my own millennial context on her.
In Darumi, I see both myself and the many cringe women and gay men I knew in middle and high school. She is an emo scenester, insecure, the kind of girl who would get way too into Johnny The Homicidal Maniac and have full zip up Invader Zim GIR pajamas. She is a walking Hot Topic despite thinking herself above that, someone who I could see owning a Yaoi paddle. I knew, and on some level was, a person like this: full of self-loathing and overly effusive, swinging between the far ends of depression and uncontrollable excitement, burying myself in extreme and transgressive fiction and externalizing pain as a means of hiding it. And though the cast of The Hundred Line is initially abrasive, the game does its best to sell even the most depraved and cartoonish student, attempting and often succeeding at giving them depth and pathos. After the initial shock, it is hard not to care for Darumi like a good friend, a sibling or child.
Darumi is a walking disaster, an aggressively insistent indoor kid who continues to grow on you, and though she may be cringe, she is also a funhouse mirror into the soul of the intended audience of this game. To be annoyed with her when she pretends to be a weird puppy girl is to be annoyed with your younger self, and to embrace her is to embrace that same. Thank you Darumi; you’re one of my favorite characters in recent memory. I will defend your honor in spite of (and often because of) the fact that you simply won’t shut the fuck up.
