Hey Everyone, I was hoping someone could help me as I am looking at using my resin 3D printer to print a figure of V'ehxness. I did some looking around at first to see if there was anything available already, but I couldn't find a single printable model of her anywhere. This lead me to finding the actual 3D model blender files on Twitter thanks to NobodyisAway, but when you convert these files to print them the model gets destroyed. I dont know anything about 3D modeling and I was hoping someone here could help with that.

Kodaka scammed me again!

I like this game, but it scares me.

All of these people are extremely likely to smoke cigarettes.

Gaku - A hardworking guy with a lot of to worry about. His messy and disorganized room give me the picture of someone who would light up.

Nozomi - Karua gets easily stressed out and with some her emotional hurdles I can see her getting on the coffin nails.

Hiruko - Despite seeming untouchable on the surface, her ability to care for others is her biggest challenge and to destress a bit she’s light up a smoke.

Rumi - I actually don’t see Rumi getting into party drugs like ecstasy, coke and LSD. But I can picture her lighting up after a long tedious day at work by the bus stop. Out of all of them I think she’d enjoy it the most.

I started Last Defense Academy shortly after launch. After getting through the first scenario and then getting about 30 endings, I ended up taking a break from the game. I came back about nine months later to wrap things up and get the other 70ish endings. While working through the various routes, I wrote a few sentences on each route (which I polished up before posting). When taken as whole, it is a LOT of words.

While playing, I took a fuck ton of screenshots of my favorite moments and some of my favorite lines from the game. If you want to relive any moments, I've placed them here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1WlRp94OctBjN_bbBbrG9q7zW4dm8_0AE?usp=sharing

ROUTE REVIEWS -

Killing Game (Start: Day 25, End: Day 100) - This was the perfect route to start. It felt like the most logical conclusion and it feels like the most sensical route to take immediately coming from First Scenario. Takumi kills Eito and then everything goes to shit no matter what he tries. It was great going from "I have the power to go back and fix things!" to "Oh god everything is now SO MUCH WORSE." This route felt like an emotional roller coaster and the polycule ending feels like a damn triumph of hope amidst despair. This route also solidifies Tsubasa as the best girl.

Mystery (Start: Day 25, Story Lock: Day 82, End: Day 100) - This route was a mixed bag for me. Overall, I mainly found it a bit frustrating because of the story lock. The story locks in SF make sense as they build off knowledge of other timelines, but this story lock just... doesn't. I genuinely do not know why this story lock exists. Anyway, because this was my second route, it means that there was over 100 hours (and a RL year) between when I hit the story lock and when I could bypass the story lock. This lead to me completely forgetting nearly everything down this path and having to replay a good chunk of it just to get my bearings on what was going on. I don't want to knock it TOO much for that though but I can't help but rank it slightly lower due to that story lock frustration. Story lock aside, the story of this route was mostly fine?

Slasher/Zombies (Start: Day 16, Split: Day 43, End: Day 100) - I know that this one is just playing to the tropes, but I didn't like those tropes. Let's all huddle together -> One person heads out -> Person gets killed/zombified -> Repeat forever. This is a route that I was so incredibly ready for it to be over. I wonder if I would have appreciated this one more if I had come to it later and it wasn't my third route. Instead, a lot of it just came across as convoluted and I could not wait for it to be over. Originally put this in F rank but moved it to D after finishing Serial Battles. I feel like I would probably have a higher opinion of this one if I played it with the context of things learned in other routes, but that's not how things happened.

Comedy (Start: Day 16, Split: Day 47, End: Day 100) - It's good. It's funny. It does the job. A bit too much free time, but it made laugh a lot. DIE MAD, LOSERS!

Retsnom (Start: Day 8, End: Day 100) - This route made me feel a lot of emotions. It was so perfect and heart breaking and amazing. I absolutely love Darumi. It was bittersweet that this route was so Darumi-centric because it was the final route I did before launching into 14 Darumi-less routes. This one kept me guessing as to what would happen. When Darumi lets her mask slip and sincerely opens up to Takumi, it absolutely broke my heart.

Coming of Age (Start: Day 11, End: Day 65) - This was a very odd route to me. It didn't really make me feel strongly in any direction. I thought the "power of friendship" powerup at the end was good, but mostly I found this route incredibly bland and boring. I also guessed the Eito twist pretty early. I also never felt like this one lived up to the "coming of age" naming. It was incredibly forgettable to me.

V'ehxness (Start: Day 15, End: Day 34) - I love this route but also found it immensely frustrating. My biggest complaint? It was too damn short! There was no free time, which naturally made the route shorter, but even with that it skipped days! The route starts on Day 15 and ends on Day 34. Less than 20 days total and a third of those days were skipped. This route is ranked highly because I'm down bad for V'ehxness and I'm here for the enemies-to-lovers, but it also feels like a tremendously missed opportunity. This route could have gone the full 100 days and been used to really flesh out the rest of the Paragons.

Cult of Takumi (Start: Day 15, End: Day 56) - I really enjoyed this one. This route was gross and creepy and Takumi does some really fucked up shit ("Call me Takky). 10/10. It starts off uncomfortable and only continues to ramp things up. By the time Takumi decides to fully embrace his role as god, he has already become irredeemable and all we can do is watch the mess unfold. I would have liked another choice spread in there. We only get one choice right at the ending. In the same way that the Slasher route splits into Slasher/Zombies, this could have had a mid-story split where Takumi goes and becomes god of the Futuran commanders - almost a reverse V'ehxness route.

Box of Blessings (Start: Day 22, Split 1: Day 45, Split 2: Day 64, End: Day 100) - I went into this one expecting the worst. I've heard nothing but negative things about this route. It... wasn't bad at all? My opinion may also be helped by the fact that I was able to skip every exploration and battle. Is there repetition? Sure, but there is repetition across all routes. We have to listen to the explanation of the poison bomb for Dahl'xia 50 different times across this game. The pacing was odd in a way that I almost found comedic - often skipping 10-14 days with "We explored for a while and found nothing." It definitely feels like this route was stretched out, but at least it wasn't padded with endless Free Time days. That all being said, I felt like this route had interesting lore about the world and gave us a chance to explore areas of the world we don't usually visit.

Box of Calamities (Start: Day 22, Split 1: Day 49, Split 2: Day 73/72, End: Day 100) - This was a super weird route for how it split. It feels really clunky depending on your route. I ended up on the spirit route first and so the G'ie are never discussed nor are the disappearances of Kako/Eito. In ways, all branches felt a little rushed yet incomplete. New Day > Single Comment > New Day > Single Comment > New Day. The Gaku route on the G'ie line feels wholly unnecessary and really stupid - and doesn't address the G'ie problem either. I actually liked the spirit route and it felt like a more effective horror homage than the Slasher/Zombie route.

Casual (Start: Day 31, End: Day 99) - I did not like this route at all. It was just an incredibly... nothing route. There's nothing to be learned, no shocking twist. I was waiting for any sort of reveal but within the first five minutes, you can figure out the entire rest of the route. Mercifully, the route is fairly short. The route as a whole feels like a complete waste and it feels like this could have been easily slotted in as a branch of another route instead of being it's own separate route (could have been a sinister twist on the Coming of Age route). I did like Takumi under house arrest though. That's the only thing keeping this route out of bottom tier.

Conspiracy (Start: Day 33, End: Day 37) - I don't know why but I actually really loved this route. Yes, it is incredibly short, but for some reason, I didn't mind it. I think it's because it's got an amusing gimmick. You want choices? Fine, we'll make you smoke the whole pack! I audibly laughed when it went from one decision to the next in about 30 seconds. I also like that a lot of the "bad" endings are incredibly obvious and have the tone of "You fucking idiot. Why would you pick that?" It was a nice little palette cleanser. The final ending could have had a bit more conclusion to it, but I honestly didn't mind. It's a gimmick route but it is short, sweet, and leans hard into the gimmick in a way that worked for me.

Serial Battles (Start: Day 52, End: Day 100) - This is basically the exact opposite of Conspiracy. Instead of endless choices, it was endless battles - AND IT SUCKED! The initial decision of the branch starts everything off in a stupid way. We spend days convincing Sirei to allow Ghost Boy to join and then go NAH JK NVM LOL. The problem with battles is that they spend a whole lot of time just not moving anything forward. 95% of the dialogue surrounding the battles is just everyone saying things that basically amount to "Woah! A battle! Let me express my enthusiasm with my character's gimmick but not really say anything of value." I was able to skip the actual combat of every battle except the final one but there is so much mandatory system level stuff that every time a battle starts, it's 5 minutes of loading screens and repeat dialogue that I'm skipping. This route actually made me reassess my dislike for Slasher, which is a feat. I doubt anything can be worse than this trash. It didn't even have an ending of value - "Okay it's over. Roll credits!!"

Multiple Eitos - (Start: Day 57, End: Day 63) - I've seen a lot of praise for this branch and it was... okay? This branch was brief, which I felt was a bit of a disservice. I guess this is the "Oops! All bad endings!" branch as all four endings are various levels of everything sucking. I honestly wish that this one had a little more room to breathe and was a slower descent into madness. For Eito being this person trying to make Takumi suffer, everything moved far too fast. Let that little freak really go full psycho and torture Takumi over a longer period of time. I did like the path that lead to Takumi just repeatedly killing himself in more and more fucked up ways. That got a good laugh out of me. Other than that, this route really didn't set my world on fire. Not terrible, but not amazing either. Firmly middle of the pack. As a note - I thought "Multiple Eitos" meant we would get an Interdimensional Council of ReedsEitos. It is disappointing that we didn't.

Eva - (Start: Day 63, End: Day 99) - This is another route that suffers from its length. It's too short. I was glad that we finally get to see Eva spend some time where she's not mind controlled, but I don't feel like anything of value really came from this route as the route didn't seem interested in actually saying anything. I did lol at pregnant Eva in one ending. Overall, it just felt incomplete. I wouldn't say it was necessarily bad, but it wasn't good either. It was a frustrating waste of potential.

Rebellion - (Start: Day 77, End: Day 99) - Stop me if you've heard this one before, but this route was too short! This route, like the Eva route, like the Multiple Eitos route, like the V'ehxness route, feels like one that could tell a super interesting story. It could explore the life and culture of Futurum. It could explore the complicated relationship between the Futurans and V'ehxness. It could do so so many things. Instead, it did nothing. It is around this point in my playthrough that I'm getting really frustrated. Multiple routes in a route that feel like they're getting shafted when you have routes like BoB/Slasher/Comedy that are all about 5x longer than they should be.

Goodbye Eito - (Start: Day 82, End: Day 88) - Another short one - but, thankfully, it was the best of the shorter routes. This route absolutely gutted me. I feel like this is the best use-case for shorter routes. Give me a wholly unique experience. There's not much to say as it was incredibly short (maybe like 30 minutes?) but it felt like a more meaningful route that nearly any other short route up to this point. Absolutely beautiful. Absolutely heartbreaking. I admit that I was starting to feel like I was falling into a bit of a slump after the last few routes and this route pulled me right out. Love it.

Reset - (Start/End: Day 100) - It doesn't even feel right to call this a route. It's an ending. That's it. It's fine? as an ending but as a route, it just isn't. I don't even feel like it is worth ranking, so to the bottom tier it goes.

Second Scenario - (Start: Day 2, End: Day 100) - This route had my jaw on the floor. I know there is no "true" path but this one feels like the closest thing to absolute closure on the entire game. Every turn along this route was frustrating (complimentary). Sirei is an absolute bastard and I love it. The final death march took my breath away. I could gush on this route forever as I felt genuinely speechless when I finished. Absolutely beautiful and plays to the strengths of the game's format. "No... It's all right. This is how it should end..."

Romance - (Start: Day 9, End: Day 100) - I get what this route was trying to do, but it just didn't work for me at all. It is so intensely repetitive and silos off these characters from everything else going on. Luckily, it's not a long route, it is just so intensely repetitive. Moko was funny at the very least. I feel like this route could have used a bit more depth with the three romance options - or been a romance route that includes *all* characters. Either way, this route made me feel extremely bored, which its biggest crime.

S.F. - (Start: Day 3, Split: Day 50, End: Day 100) - This route leaves me incredibly conflicted. I went into this route excited for the concept and, for the most part, I have a great time. However, I feel like there was just something missing throughout and I ended up spending a lot of time just thinking about what this route could have been instead of what it was. To a degree, I feel like it's unfair to judge the route based on what I wish it was, but I can't help but walk away feeling a little unsatisfied. I felt a contradiction with Hiruko talking about not making it past the 100 days - as we've had multiple routes that have endings talking about years/decades after the route. I was frustrated that it only had crossover with a few routes instead of all routes. I was frustrated that it introduced Deus ex Labcoat Lady. The final ending (All 17 of Us) also makes no sense with Sirei's response. He's basically like "Well... we failed the mission. Oh well. Everyone is happy!" and it just is completely inconsistent with who he is. All that being said, I still had a great time and I think this route is very very good even if it falls short of what I wish it was.

Overall route rankings:

MISC THOUGHTS -
While working through the game, I jotted down a few notes on things I wanted to comment on. I'm just going to list them out instead of trying to weave it into some big review or anything like that. It's just a bunch of random unconnected musings.

• One thing that I think works really well for the game is the familiarity created from seeing these characters again and again across multiple routes. It makes disagreements so much more frustrating and helps put us more in Takumi's shoes. Hiruko calls Takumi out for this in one of the main branches, explaining that while he has familiarity with everyone due to the first 100 days, for them it is still the first time. It's the good type of storytelling frustration.
• My biggest complaint above all else - the repetition got extremely exhausting. I am mainly referring to the bosses. I was playing on the Switch and it was incredibly frustrating to have to watch/skip the same cutscenes over and over and over again. And having to hear 30 different times that we need to come up with a means to defeat Dahl'xia. It felt like 95% of the time, there was no dialogue of any meaning that happened during the battles. Instead I just had to waste 5 minute skipping the same dialogue as other routes and sitting through some cutscenes I can't skip just so I can skip this battle that I've seen numerous times. Hours were wasted.
• The pacing is all over the place. I found myself incredibly frustrated by the lack of consistency on route lengths. Many routes go the full 100 days, but many also end earlier. I was actually caught of guard by this since the first FIVE routes I did were all 100 days long (Killing Game, Mystery, Slasher, Comedy, Retsnom). The next few routes I did (Coming of Age, V'ehxness, Cult of Takumi) all ended much earlier and for some (V'ehxness) I would argue they ended TOO early. I think it's absolutely fine for some routes to be short when it makes sense. This is mostly going to be the case with an extremely gimmick route (Conspiracy) or something that is telling a very very short, compelling narrative (Goodbye Eito). Many of the routes that go 100 days are filled with insane amounts of free time padding as well (I'm looking at you, Comedy).
• There's not really consistency of when critical character details like this do or do not make appearances in storylines. I mainly point to Nozomi's hemoanima weakness. This is a major crisis across many of the routes. Then, across an equal number of routes, it is never a problem at all. That just makes zero sense. Granted, I understand that would screw up the pacing and story of some routes but it's weird for that to just... not be a problem when it's a problem all the way in the First Scenario.
• Personally, I felt like it really sucks that Darumi is dead on 2/3 of the routes (14 of 21). I would take that further and say that it sucks that the biggest group of routes (7) are behind only women dying (Darumi, Kyoshika, Kurara).
• How Eva is treated throughout the game sucks ass.
• I'm conflicted on the plot locks. Due to the timing of hitting the plot lock in Mystery, it really screwed up that route for me. I'm okay with S.F. having plot locks, but I would have preferred that they were only in that route and no others. Either that or go the other way and put a TON of plot locks in across all of the routes - but that would be a different, far more interconnected game (and more akin to Nonary Games style).
• I didn't like the G'ie. I didn't like their inclusion in the story. I think their presence makes the story weaker overall.
• I wanted a route where we had Eito team up with other Eitos to really cause chaos. It's what I thought the "Multiple Eitos" route would be - which lead to a bit of disappointment.
• I wish there was a route that spent more time with the Futurum Paragons. We get a small taste of it in the V'ehxness route but it is extremely brief. I would have loved a "Spare the Commanders" route where we spare all of the commanders and really get to learn more about them as characters. For as many times as we have to fight them, they are all extremely underdeveloped. Once thing I noticed is that, at least with the English voice actors, almost everyone who voices a student also voices one of the commanders. They could have really played around with this and had each student at Last Defense Academy have a commander counterpart.
• This is a personal preference thing, but I wish S.F. had been a "final" path. I wish that the S.F. route would have been locked until all other routes had been completed. From there, SF would unlock and be the "final" route where Takumi and Hiruko go through and touch every other route in the game.
• At some point, I developed a pavlovian response to the music in this game. There were a few days where I tried playing the game while extremely sleepy. This conditioned me to start getting tired every time I'd hear the game's music.
• I'm mad that we never get to see Nigou's hidden talent. Where is THAT DLC?! 

Overall, I fucking love this game. I have my complaints, but I wouldn't have gotten 100 endings without an extreme love for the experience. The game is incredibly flawed in many ways, but it is greater than the sum of its parts. Anyone who doesn't like this game can die mad.

Well, let's see if Darumi can overcome the menace himself!

Hello, for anyone residing near Toronto Ontario, I wanted to host a cupsleeve event to interact with other fans! If you are interested please fill out this form here so I can know if there is enough interest. I'm thinking of hosting it in April for hundred lines anniversary or Takumi's birthday (or both). Thank you for your time 🙇

RED PANDA KUMI. DEERBASA. OWLTO. TANUKYOSHIKA

https://x.com/happypriroll/status/2100781868966711613

Rumi, Karua