How the hell are you supposed to write about an instrumental? Guess we’re about to find out. I’m talking about the main combat soundtrack of the crazy ass game called Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy. This is the song that plays when the invaders come and attempt to kick your shit in. Considering how often it played throughout the game you’d think I’d be tired of it, but nope. I’ve grown quite fond of this energetic and enigmatic soundtrack. Enough to write a blog post about it evidently. So if you’ve got any interest in reading about an instrumental you can follow along.

(For the record this isn’t the only blog post I’ve been working on but it’s the shorter one that can come out quicker so here we go)

For those uninitiated, Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy is a big ass visual novel and tactical RPG where high school students are forced to battle with strange alien creatures known as School Invaders. That’s about as concise a summary as I can muster, but this explanation doesn’t capture the multitudes of this story. But saying too much would risk spoilers, which I’ll reserve for designated section further down. It’s a big sprawling crazy ass game with a lot going on. If you’re familiar with Danganronpa you may have an inkling of what to expect, particularly since its got a lot of the same people working on it. But even that comparison won’t tell you the full story. Also they’re not being forced to murder each other, but an outside force instead. But some folk get murdered any way. It’s a whole thing. If you’re cool with longer narratives Last Defense Academy is well worth checking out.

By the way, I’d like to mention as a shameless plug my friends and I stream a playthrough of LDA occasionally. You can watch it here. The playthrough’s a bit scuffed audio wise and it’ll surely be a while before we cover anywhere near the full story, but I figured I’d mention it. I have fun making goofy voice acting attempts with the homies. So if you want to hear the voice behind the blog (and a certain Spartan’s voice as well) the Ians_Mind Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy playthrough might be for you!

Any ways, as I said earlier this particular song plays in LDA when the invaders pull up. It’s not the only combat soundtrack you’ll encounter but it is the default one. Video game battle soundtracks have the difficult task of keeping you hyped up knowing you’re probably going to listen to it a shit load of times. Some manage to pull that off swimmingly, like Persona 5’s “Last Surprise”, others less so. As for LDA? Well, I’d say it holds up incredibly well. I decided to upload the song on here for your reference because it might not be super easy to find this song otherwise. Gotta love when companies are so controlling about copyright that you can’t even access their music reliably. We just want to hear your good ass songs why you got to be so anal about it? Like, you can find it on YouTube but any link I can offer runs the risk of getting taken down. The Cosmia blog though? Well, I guess if some lawyer goes out of their way to send a cease and desist letter to the Cosmia blog for hosting one of their songs I’ll probably oblige, but otherwise here you go. I got this song legally off the soundtrack included in Last Defense Academy’s collector’s edition box. Shame they’ve only got 10 songs on there, but hey, they made the right choice including this one.

The song kicks off with what appears to be a distorted man’s voice. It’s difficult to make out what they’re saying. It”s clearly been processed in some sort of way to make it sound distant and alien. When I listen to it I hear “temporary, temporary, temporary, time.” Hard to say if that’s truly accurate, but it’s something to think about. Pretty much everything is temporary. Our lives, our planet, the 100 days at Last Defense Academy before everything’s wrapped up. Perhaps even time itself is temporary, a construct that only lasts until the universe dissolves. If it’s all temporary, what are we fighting so hard for? All this stuff built up just to die in the end? That’s a question that’s difficult if not impossible to answer objectively. Perhaps it’s up to all of us to find our own answer to that question. But if that’s the case, what do we make of the people who never find that answer? I got to wonder if I’ll be one of them. Reach the end of myself and never really figure out what my life was supposed to be about. I figure my blog may help bring me closer to that answer, or at least I hope so. It’s certainly not paying any bills (in fact it’s a source of additional bills to pay) so I gotta hope it’s bringing value in some other way.

I have more to say about that voice but I’ll save that for the not-so-spoiler-free section. Any ways, the song kicks off with that voice and a light tap of percussion, building up. The strange voice repeats, the tapping continues, as they add on layers. It gets more intense and eerie, until we hear this ghostly “hoo… hoo, hoo, hoooo…” type noise to mark the transition into the main beat. I dig this intro, it amasses energy, tension, and foreboding in equal measure.

After the intro things start sounding more… video game-y for a lack of a better term. The drum machine takes on a more dubstep-y affect, the main track sounds like something you could see in an arcade. They added these laser-like pew pew pew type noises to the background that keep the tempo up but add to the artifice. It’s kind of goofy sounding, but it still has intensity to it. The Invaders look like a bunch of toys you could pick out of a crane game, but they can be brutal killers if you let them. I appreciate how this track captures both of these aspects.

Next up we have what I guess we could call the bridge of the song. I’m not sure what exactly you’d call that synth tune. It’s like the track starts swaying side to side in a trance-like dance. If Last Defense Academy were a musical this is the part where the Invaders stop to do the group dance of impending doom before they jump back into the fray.

Beyond this point the song largely takes all the aforementioned elements and plays them in different configurations. I guess there’s the part where things sound heavy and sparse before jumping back into the main beat too. Not sure if that’s really a good descriptor. Writing about a pure instrumental song is tough. Hopefully you have a decent sense of what the song is like now, perhaps you could listen to it while reading through the blog.

Now that I’ve mostly exhausted my non-spoiler commentary on the composition of this song, I must ask why I felt this song was compelling enough to write about. Why is this my most listened song in recent months? For me I usually play music as a companion to a task, when I’m up in my feelings, or just really stoned and in the mood for it. “Invasion” somehow manages to cover all 3 of those purposes pretty well.

“Invasion” is a song that inspires motion. If I’m trying to get somewhere quickly, get some food made, get shit carried, this song makes a good accompaniment. Perhaps the track’s a bit too erratic for everyone to have the same experience, but this whole song screams, “oh shit, get moving” to me. Fortunately I don’t regularly encounter situations as dangerous as an Invader attack, but I still get an energy boost from listening to it.

I think most people who listen to it can see why it’d make a good doing shit song or a good stoner song. It’s got energy, it’s got texture. I imagine it’s harder to see why I’ve got an emotional connection to the song. Some of it has to do with the song itself, and some of it has to do with the game it’s from.

Some people like to listen to happy songs to lift their spirits when they’re down. Personally, I dislike doing that. When I’m down that happy tune just feels like bullshit. Doesn’t resonate. “Invasion” isn’t a happy tune and it isn’t exactly depressing either. It’s anxious and discordant. Ideal for those times I’m feeling a bit strung out. When there’s a twinge of stress and anger in my iffy mood. It’s a track with mixed emotions and ambiguity, which certainly helps the versatility.

Last Defense Academy itself became a form of emotional comfort for me. I’m not going to get too deep into my personal dramas, but I had a falling out with a friend. A friend I had developed feelings for. We stopped talking after all that played out. I’m not going to get into the weeds with the details but it was mostly my fault. Not a very flattering story. In the fallout I had edibles and Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy to keep me company. I disengaged from the world and mostly buried myself in music and gaming for the next few days. The music was a varied selection but the gaming was all Last Defense Academy baby!

Man I fucking love this game. It’s been less than a year since it released but I don’t expect the brainworms to disappear. Especially considering how we’re probably getting DLC at some point. IDK if we’ll get anything else Hiruko focused, shit I hope so, but it’ll be more Hiruko nevertheless. More Darumi and Eito too, bet. LDA isn’t some comforting blanket of a game, shit gets too brutal for the cozy label. But when I play LDA I have a great story to be enthralled by and some great characters to spend time with. It’s a rich world to immerse yourself in. There may be pain and heartbreak in this world too, but it’s enclosed in their world. The fictional pain becomes relatable, or cathartic, or something else that doesn’t directly put my heart in a grinder for days like my real life situation did. Well, there is one part of the game that put my heart in a grinder too, but I wasn’t playing through that part at the time. Man just like it’s hard to talk about the contents of an instrumental track it’s hard to gush about LDA without spoilers. Seems I’ve reached the limits of what I can say about “Invasion” without delving into spoiler territory. So if you’re reading this without having played LDA, just know that “Invasion” is a fire ass soundtrack and Hundred Line: Last Defense Academy is great as long as you’ve got the patience for long narratives. With that, it’s spoiler section time.

The Not-So Spoiler-Free Section

If you don’t know what I mean when I say “2nd Scenario” you prob shouldn’t be reading this. Got it? Okay, let’s get into it. So once you reach a certain point in the game the Invaders will show up and you’ll start hearing stuff like, “I DON’T WANNA FIGHT” and “WHERE’S MY DAUGHTER?!” “Invasion” is still playing in the background when this happens but it’s overwhelmed by the voices. The students decide to disregard it at the time, but that’s the biggest hint to the Invader’s true nature. We were led to believe that the Invaders were simply some weird ass aliens from space trying to fuck our shit up. Then we find out that Earth has been ravaged brutally and we’re led to believe the Invaders are actually a reflection of Mother Earth’s will to end it all. Turns out none of that is true. As it turns out, the truth is more disturbing than that.

Sirei calling these enemies School Invaders is quite the clever hat trick. I mean yeah, they are indeed invading the school, but still. Calling them Invaders implies they’re some outside force infringing on your rightful territory. It’s the kind of language right wingers use to describe undocumented immigrants when they want to get real spicy with it. But nope, they aren’t aliens invading the Earth or a reflection of Earth’s will to die. After all, this story isn’t taking place on Earth at all. Turns out humans were the ones trying to colonize another planet all along. That means the Invaders aren’t an invading force so much as they are a defensive one on behalf of the native population. You could make the argument our human cast is more of an invader than the Invaders are. Woops. Also the Invaders are the result of some sort of fuckery that transmutes human prisoners of war and unwilling civilians into strange murderous creatures. Welp. This is a fucked up position our LDA students got forced into. This is something that could become a whole interesting topic on its own, perhaps I’ll save it for another blog.

So with all of that info in mind, how does this affect our interpretation of “Invasion”? I think back to that distorted distant voice that kicks the song off. The voice almost sounds human, but it’s under layers of electronic distortion. I like to think this is a reference to the true nature of the Invaders. They weren’t always these fucked up purple murder bears, they were people at one point. But they’ve been transmuted into something unrecognizable. Much like the voice in the song. I don’t know for sure if that was Masafumi Takada’s intention when he made this song, but if it was that’s more evidence to his brilliance. As if we needed more of that. Either way it certainly makes an already unsettling song more unsettling.

But hey, my girl Hiruko loves to kick their shit in and see their colorful guts exposed. And honestly can’t blame her too much, they are pretty fun to fight. In all this discussion of the dark and discordant sides to this song, we shouldn’t forget it has a playful side to it as well. I skipped the battles more often than not after a certain point, but I still decide to play them out occasionally. Usually just because I feel like listening to the battle song some more.

Perhaps some people get tired of hearing “Invasion“ after playing the game so long. That ain’t me. Perhaps some people would get tired listening to the track on repeat as much as I did during the creation of this blog post. Honestly I overplayed it so much that some listens didn’t hit like they usually do. But honestly that’s pretty natural. Even the absolute greatest songs ever can get tiring if you spam them too much. But then I give it a little break and then it’s awesome again. That’s “Invasion” for you. Thank you for being a great ass song in a great ass game that got me through some not-so-great times. It’s a bit of a miracle that this game came into existence at all. Some big crazy arguably overambitious project they had to go into debt to make happen. Somehow worked out. Impressive. Living in America in 2025 I’ll take the hopeful stories where I can get them.