Release Date: 22/09/2020
Played On: PS4
Available On: PS4
Time Played: 29h 36m
Progress: Completed
Developer: Vanillaware
Publisher: Atlus / Sega
Sometimes I find myself as far from my comfort zone as I've ever been before, and it usually means I’m playing something close to a JRPG and the like. In fact, I doubt I would have ever really given this game a fair shot if it hadn't been for some friends emphatically recommending 13 Sentinels to me, repeatedly, and without hesitation.
Not to say that I was completely unaware of this title when I eventually picked it up, as I had already seen it and passed before hearing any word of mouth. Vanillaware have a reputation that I feel is well known for the wrong reasons, as there was a lot of moral panic in the west when Dragon's Crown was released and featured some "enhanced" body parts on many of the main characters. For what it's worth, I never had a problem with the big butts and boobs, as the male characters also feature unrealistic proportions that give their bodies distorted and unattainable silhouettes. Rather than being a depiction of reality, it was clear that the makers of that game were happy to lean into their style and inject it into every facet of their game.
However, despite the infamous reputation of Dragon's Crown that encouraged me to give it a go, I never ended up finishing the game, despite a number of attempts. The simple fact was that I didn't enjoy the moment-to-moment gameplay, which felt boring and grindy from the start and unfortunately outweighed the excellent art that sold the game to me in the first place. Hence why when I heard that Vanillaware had released this game called 13 Sentinels, it never even occurred to me to play it myself, and I ended up watching a bunch on Twitch.tv instead.
Once again it was clear that this was a company with some super talented artists, but this game looked boring in its fairly generic anime styled depiction of high school students, especially when compared to the super stylised design of Dragon's Crown. Nevertheless, the game looked beautiful, but nothing about the gameplay itself really stood out, so I continued to ignore its existence.
Which leads me to the power of word-of-mouth and a solid recommendation, even when they're potentially misguided and unsuitable for everybody. I mean, just because one person loves one particular game, it doesn't mean that every person they recommend it to will have the same reaction. I don't think I need to highlight that the best recommendations are the ones that come from people who know you well and know what you're into, as it becomes less about how much they enjoyed themselves, and more about whether it's something you'd really enjoy playing yourself.
Then again, sometimes a recommendation comes along that leaves me feeling like I should at least give something a try, even if I'm unsure about how I might feel about it. At least then I'll be able to make up my own mind and either share in the love of a certain experience, or have an interesting discussion about our difference of opinion. When you're an enthusiast about something, there's value in experiencing "the hotness" just for the sake of it, and so it was with this game when I finally fired it up and had a go.
I want to start by noting that I don't think 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim is the kind of game that everyone should play. In fact, I feel like there are loads of people who would actively hate everything about the game from front to back. Meanwhile, I can certainly see why my friend went ape-shit over it and why others would really get excited about a game like this, as it has a lot to offer and some interesting ideas along the way. Part of me now wishes I sat on either end of the scales, but ultimately I ended up landing somewhere in between.
First off though, there's actually a fair bit to get stuck into. Mostly because the game's content is delivered in three distinctly different sections. So much so, that the main menu is a selection between each of the three modes, which are somewhat connected and progressing through each one will unlock more of the others along the way. This fragmentation of the game felt a little weird at first, as I wondered how it would all tie together in the end, but it turns out that my concerns were just a natural result of the way the game is delivered overall.
Essentially the three sections can be broken down into a Visual Novel, Combat, and Knowledgebase. The first two are where the meat of the game and its story are played, while the latter section contains all the detailed back-story that's been discovered for just about everything you'll encounter throughout the course of the game. This last section is really only there if you want to delve deeper into some of the more confusing aspects of the story, so I don't really have a lot to say about it, other than the fact that it's presented as a third of the entire scope of the game.
Similarly, the combat layer of 13 Sentinels is just about as flat as it is wide, which is to say that it lacks a certain amount of depth to keep things interesting. In fact, I'm not sure I would have bothered with some of the nuances in combat if it weren't for a relatively easy to obtain platinum trophy that requires beating each encounter with a S rank and completing all bonus objectives.
The combat itself is some form of an active turn-based battle system. The active part meaning that everyone moves and performs actions while the clock is ticking, and the only time any of it gets paused is when each unit's turn is ready and you're required to give them orders and decide what to do. In this way the combat feels a bit more kinetic than traditional JRPG turn-based combat where all you're doing is selecting abilities from menus. Although, you're still kind of selecting abilities from menus, but something about the way you move units around and attack the enemy feels a little more real-time.
The basic loop is that you have a number of Sentinels (mechs) to command in order to protect the core at the centre of each city arena. Each Sentinel has a different loadout of weapons and abilities, such as being able to fly, or focusing more on melee attacks instead of long-range. It's only by strategically commanding these Sentinels that you are able to defeat the Deimos, who are the enemy mechs and kaiju that appear on the map with the goal of destroying each city's core.
At first I thought there was a lot going on with the combat, and I had a lot of fun forming my tactics and exploiting enemy weaknesses with the right attacks at the right time, but that soon fizzled out. Perhaps I should have bumped up the difficulty at some point, but it didn't take long to realise that a solid tactic for just about every encounter involved spam-deploying sentry turrets that automatically killed everything with zero input from my end. It got so bad that when selecting my Sentinels for each battle, I'd always take a couple that could deploy sentries, and the rest barely even mattered.
Over time, the Sentinels all had their abilities upgraded, which essentially meant that I quickly got to a point where I could deploy two high-level sentry-turrets on every turn. This meant that by about the fourth turn in the battle, I could just sit back and wait for my turrets to kill every enemy on the board. Even large groups of small enemies, or singular giant hulks, would be demolished by my passively-firing sentry guns.
Sadly this meant that even though I enjoyed the combat in the first part of the game, I quickly got bored of each encounter and found myself going through the motions with little enthusiasm. For the process. What's more, each combat mission is presented as a map full of wire-frame representations of mechs and kaiju, which could have been made more interesting if there were cool animations and designs to show off instead of the boring portraits for each Sentinel pilot that felt uninspired and generic.
In fact, one of the things that actually excited me about 13 Sentinels before I started playing, was how beautiful and mouth-watering the graphics and art design could be. After all this is the same studio that did the gorgeously stylish Dragon's Crown, so I was keen to dive into the thick palette of their visuals, only to end up playing a very good looking anime visual novel.
Most of the story is delivered in what I ended up calling the visual novel layer, as it's only a few steps away from the genre and the kind of systems you can expect. However, I must point out that as you play through each character's story, you do get to walk around locations and explore for information and people to talk to, so it's not strictly a visual novel that shoots you down a single path.
Instead, the story is doled out in non-linear portions that focus on characters instead of the overall narrative. It's actually one of the things I really enjoyed about 13 Sentinels overall, as I love how non-linear story-telling can keep you on your toes and create a real sense of mystery and an discovery. Thankfully this is one of the strongest systems on show in this game, and working through each character's story to uncover different perspectives and key pieces of information is satisfying and extremely addictive.
It helps that each character's branching narrative has a literal flow chart available to be viewed at any time, revealing paths and decisions that you have yet to take and lean where they lead. This is especially strong in a few scenarios in particular where certain characters experience the same scene over and over again, until they have made enough changes to escape the loop. Some of these sections really fired on all cylinders and there were many revelations along the way that put a smile on my face and made me exclaim with excitement about having finally teased out a little bit more of the meta-narrative.
Of course, I'll try to avoid spoilers, but this is an early warning for some minor spoilers that I'm going to hint at later on in this post. The story itself is fairly interesting, albeit confusing and often misleading in the information it chooses to share with you along the way. I mentioned that it's told in a non-linear fashion, which adds to the confusion, but I like that trope either way. You essentially get to play one character at a time, who will interact with other characters and unfold their own part in the main story the more you play, and the more branches on the flow-chart you explore. It doesn't take long to realise that we're dealing with a bunch of characters who are spread out across time and space, each of whom are to end up as Sentinel pilots in the coming war. The story flips between time periods when the pilots are in high school, and when they are fighting the Deimos mechs in the future.
This is perhaps where the game lost me the most, as it seemed quite arbitrary to make most of the protagonists high school students, even though they were fighting kaiju and potentially travelling through time and uncovering super-secret mysteries along the way. Of course, this isn't really that strange for a Japanese game, but I don't play a lot of JRPG type games, so stuff like this is what really disconnected me from 13 Sentinels every now and then. I found it hard to get on board with the obviously "cute and innocent" character who was always worrying about the boy she had a crush on, and I rolled my eyes at the hunky rich boy who seemed like a jerk, but was actually a nice guy all along. Maybe I'm just too old for that stuff these days, but it left me wishing for a different setting and a change of pace.
Nevertheless, I pressed on through the story as it raised a lot of potential interpretations about time travel and the nature of reality that I found interesting almost all the way through the game. This is where I'm going to talk about the ending, which might be a bit of a spoiler, so consider this your final warning. I'm not going to reveal the ending precisely, just the nature of how the story wraps up, because it left me feeling disappointed and underwhelmed.
You see, throughout 13 Sentinels you get to meet loads of different characters, visit different time zones, uncover hidden technologies, and basically find a whole bunch of stuff that hints at more going on behind the scenes. One of the earliest "reveals" is that the Deimos (your enemy) are simply a series of mechs that were built to terraform planets by humans, but they're now fighting against humans for some reason. There are loads of little twists and turns like that along the way that really had my tiny little mind bursting with ideas about what the possible reasons could be for all the bits and pieces that didn't fit my expectations for the game's reality. By the time I barrelled towards the end of the story, I felt myself getting excited to finally discover all that's been happening and for everything to finally make sense and be explained. Except, instead of completing the complex mysterious story with a complex and mysterious rationale, the game just shrugs and pulls something akin to the whole "it was a dream all along" trope, which actually pissed me off and ruined the whole story for me in the end.
It made me re-evaluate everything I had played up to that point, and highlighted just how arbitrary and meaningless many of the scenarios and decisions along the way actually were. It even managed to negate the existence of certain characters, which suddenly had no purpose or relevance to the main story, other than to act as a soundboard for other characters to explore their thoughts. There were two characters in particular, who were only unlocked in the final moments of the game, as they did nothing but dump a truckload of explanation and lore out of nowhere. One particular character was referred to by a friend as nothing more than an encyclopedia of lore, and I have to agree with her completely.
One of the coolest systems in 13 Sentinels is that as you play through each character's story, you can pull up a cloud of their thoughts at any moment in time. This was a great way to highlight the important aspects of the story and explore different paths on the flow-chart, but it ended up feeling kind of pointless in the end, as none of the crazy theories or implications held any water at all. Suddenly none of those interesting systems or mysterious story paths had any of the depth they seemed to imply they had, and I was left standing in a shallow puddle of disappointment.
I know that sounds harsh and that I really didn't enjoy myself, but that's kind of what it felt like to hit such an underwhelming resolution after hours of otherwise excellent gameplay. Right up to the final moments I had thoroughly enjoyed myself in the visual novel portion of the game. I even enjoyed the combat layer for what it's worth, despite it turning into nothing more than spam-the-sentry-guns over and over again. The fact is that the vast bulk of 13 Sentinels was an enjoyable and compelling experience that I'm glad I played. Now if only I could get back those final moments and finish the story without any resolution instead of a terrible one.
There's no doubt that 13 Sentinels is not the kind of game that catches my eye when I'm browsing the new-releases, so I'm actually really pleased to say that I gave it a go and had a good time overall. Despite the crap ending, I discovered some systems and mechanics that I wasn't too familiar with, and ended up really enjoying myself throughout. I may not have the same enthusiastic response as the friends who recommended it to me, but I don't regret picking it up and having a go, which is enough to validate their strong opinions.
It's no secret that even the games we love and adore will rarely appeal to everyone, but I always think it's wise to pay attention to a personal recommendation, even as a way to get to know each other better. I may not have loved 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim as much as those around me that consider it perfection, but I've learned a lot about what they like and how we are different, which is as joyful as any game I've ever played. After all, understanding and getting to know more of our diverse nature that is humanity will always be worth the time and effort in my opinion, and I would argue that getting to know someone has never been a waste of time.
Thus, in some way 13 Sentinels may have let me feel closer to those around me and create a superficial bond for a short time. It seems that this journey into an epic and confusing non-linear science fiction adventure, has ultimately contributed to a more enjoyable and fulfilled reality. Some might say that was the actual goal of the game, but I'd say that's a pile of bollocks. What we really have here is a game that's no doubt as divisive as it is beautiful and intriguing. The story might not have delivered the pay-off I was looking for, but I enjoyed the journey enough to counter-balance the destination.
Here's to stepping out of our comfort zones and trying things we otherwise might not have ever experienced and understood.