Demo Play Thursday - The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy On Switch

For this week's Demo Play Thursday i played the Nintendo Switch version of The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy.

This video is longer than many of the other Demo Play Thursday videos as this demo, and most likely the game too, had a weird mechanic in that it's almost impossible to pause the game during the story telling. I say almost as the player can turn off the auto play of the story but this doesn't give the player access to any of the menus. as you'll see in this video, i was only able to access the menus at very specific points. the start of The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy is a very long story sequence with only a couple of moments where the player has control. i don't know if this will be the case going forward in the game, but as someone who's not played many visual novel style games this was the first time i've encountered such game design.

Now with that out of the way, i really enjoyed my time with the demo for The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy. i liked the music, i liked the art style, and i especially enjoyed how the game didn't bog it self down with backstory and world building. the demo starts with an apocalyptical event taking place, goes back in time to shortly before it, and then carries on from the event. i wasn't expecting some of the scenes we got or how gruesome some of them were. but it didn't take me out of the story telling either.

graphically, other than some banding i think it holds up well on Switch. but with how long some of the story sequences are, it was disappointing that the game was unable to turn off the Switch's Screen Dimming feature which other games like Loopers has done. You'll see it in this video where it catches me out a couple of times and you may also hear the analogue sticks being pressed but nothing happening on screen as this was my attempt to prevent the dimming.

As a demo, the game doesn't have a link to the eShop page on it's home screen. As a story focused game, the demo has a bigger role to play as it has to try and sell the game's story and hook into the player so that they would want to get the game to carry it on. For me, i was interested in the story enough to want to know more.  as i didn't finish the demo, i don't know if it ends on a cliffhanger. but i feel like i've seen a lot of what the game has to offer, initially at least, to want to keep playing it. i'm not just curious as to where the story will go, i'm also interested in the character interactions and the world in general.

The demo for The Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy isn't the best demo i've played, but i'm glad i've played it. i was curious about the game before i played it but it didn't really grab me. i would probably have done nothing more than Wishlist it. but now i've played the demo, i'm much more interested in it, even if it does have some quirks that could get annoying down the line. i'd recommend people giving it a go, just beware it's age rating does seem well earned.

Demo Play Thursday - Fate/Samurai Remnant On PS4

For this week's Demo Play Thursday i played the PlayStation 4 version of Fate/Samurai Remnant, tho the game itself did think it was the PS5 version at the end. This game, from Koei Tecmo, Omega Force, Kou Shibusawa, Aniplex, and Type-Moon came out last year but the demo only came out this week.

I didn't know about this game and the PlayStation Store webpage for it didn't give much information. there are no screenshots, no videos, and you have to scroll down to the bottom to find out that it's an action RPG. In the demo the action aspect of the game is very clear and mostly explained. The game uses blocks of text and a screenshot for the tutorial so it's not great, but most is done in easy fights where you can see it in action so i mostly understood what it wanted me to do.

What isn't explained at all in this demo is the RPG aspect. my character did gain levels, but it was never explained. It's most likely because this demo is less than an hour long and focuses on the beginning of the game. i would imagine that the RPG aspect is explored in the next section, that's not included in the demo.

What we do get in this demo are several videos, animated and in-game, exploring history, backstory, and what's happening. after the demo is finished there's a cool trailer for the game that makes a lot of sense as we know the rough outline of the game by this point. 

This isn't a perfect demo. as well as the game not knowing what version it was, at the beginning the game got stuck for a couple of minutes in the settings menu. i cut out of this video when nothing was happening and skipped to when it had fixed itself. there were a couple of instances where the game had framerate issues or stuttering. thankfully whilst those were noticeable, they never got in the way of gameplay. One aspect of the gameplay i wasn't keen on was how the story jumped from the present to the past and back to the present and it just felt unnecessary and that it didn't add anything to the story compared to if the story had been told linearly. 

I did come away from this demo enjoying my time with the game, so ultimately the demo did work as i know enough of the story to be interested, i understand the basic gameplay and know it's something i can do and enjoy, and that this PS4 version of the game looks great and it doesn't feel like a downgrade from what would be a better PS5 version. so i do recommend you try out the demo if you're interested.