13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim (2019)

I greatly appreciate Vanillaware offering VO language options off the bat before the game starts. Too many games make you sit through intros with English VO before they let you Switch it up in the settings. VO language choice was the first thing I was prompted with. Kudos Vanillaware.

On the flip side, the weird fetishization of teenage girls in Japanese games continues 😬

Everything I read and heard about this game made me think it was exactly my kind of thing. That's why I bought a physical copy for Switch at full price, something I don't usually do anymore.

Four hours in, I'm still not hooked. The story is kinda intriguing and the art is wonderful, but I'm still not "in" and is hard for me to find motivation to keep playing it. Its not bad at all and I kinda want to know what's gonna happen with the characters, but... I'm not caring enough to play it regularly. Also, the turn-strategy gameplay is kinda bad.

This is going to be one of those games for me... played for legitimately half of the day today lol. Digging deeper into this reminds me a lot of the feeling of unraveling the complex nonlinear stories in recent favorites The House in Fata Morgana and Immortality, as well as older favorites like the Zero Escape series. This particularly feels similar to what I remember Virtue's Last Reward feeling like, though admittedly I haven't played that in a decade and this is probably better. Anyway, the further in I get, the more I think this is an incredibly unsurprising thing for me to like.

On a tangential note, I'm really glad I swapped over to the Japanese voiceover early on. People hyped up the English as being really good, but I can't sit through English voices saying things like "-kun", "-chan" and "senpai" in every sentence... The Japanese is perfectly enjoyable and what I'd personally recommend.

Not sure what to make of this yet. I definitely don’t really like the combat, but the story is interesting. The long prologue is just very hard to sink into, being a bit all over the place and a bit of information overload up front. Maybe I just needed another cup of coffee today before playing this.

edit: All right, all right, it's got me now. There's definitely an initial hump to get over with this one, but once it "opens up" a bit it's a lot easier to get a grip on. I expect the way the story is gated by combat will annoy me over time but at least I set it on Casual mode so it shouldn't take too long.

I feel like a jerk for even critiquing this game. Most players and critics are vibing with 13 Sentinels. I can't vibe with it though.

I'm not dumb. I know all stories are hacked together from other stories. But 13 Sentinels is a hacked-together homage so blatant it infuriates me. Terminator, Looper, Darling and the Franxx, Source Code, Alien, ET, even Puella Magi Madoka Magica! It's as if the writers thought cramming enough sci-fi cliche's into the sprawling plot, would create something unique.

Unlike its influences, the characters in 13 Sentinels never surprised me. And despite the looming threat of an alien invasion and time-traveling criminals, the stakes never seem high. Moments of intimacy rarely feel genuine and it's clear the voice actors were never in the same room by the way all line readings seem to exist in an emotionless vacuum.

The only thing interesting about the plot is the way it's structured. Being able to explore the story in a nonlinear fashion, and using the in-game currency to unlock exposition are two very inspired choices. The art direction of Vanillaware also continues to be a fascinating mash-up of watercolor art and paper puppetry.

Crafting a compelling story has been an issue for Vanillaware since their debut. GrimGrimoire was a bizarre retelling of the first Harry Potter book. Odin Sphere was a tedious exercise in boring stoic fairytales. And Dragon's Crown asked the daring question, 'what if a witch had boobs?' It feels strange to me that a studio so obsessed with narrative seems unable or unwilling to craft a decent one of their own.

Disclaimer: This is less of a review and more of brain dump of my final impressions.

It's a decent VN and if you enjoy sci-fi you'll probably enjoy this.

I keep hearing about how this is one of the best stories people have heard in a while, but the sci-fi falls flat for me. It introduces a lot of interesting ideas and threads but they tug on them for too long and they don't lead anywhere particularly interesting. There was a lot of good potential here, but no meaningful resolution or climax here.

It feels like a hot pot of sci-fi ideas. I wish they spent more time really focusing on a few ideas and really fleshing it out. On that note, a lot of the character endings felt really rushed and jarring. There were a few good ones there, but maybe half of them felt unfulfilled. A lot of the romances felt shoehorned as well.

I like to imagine that the writers came up with the story and split it among the 13 protagonists, but then found that it turned out to be quite short. So they added a bit of Fluff to pad out the gameplay. The core ideas are neat but the VN portion overstays its welcome. I actually think that they could have told a better story by either telling it linearly or more thoughtful gating of storylines behind certain events. I appreciate the freedom in unraveling the story but it took too long to get anywhere.

ITALIAN REVIEW

La prima volta in cui ho tenuto in mano un gamepad risale all’incirca al 1998/1999 quando avevo solo tra i tre e i quattro anni. La mia grande passione per i videogiochi è partita da Yoshi’s Island su SNES, se la memoria non inganna. All’epoca non conoscevo il genere o la categoria a cui questo titolo apparteneva, solo qualche anno dopo scoprì il nome: platform o videogioco a piattaforme per rimanere in terra nostrana. Col tempo mi sono approcciata a diversi generi, tra cui quello degli RPG che ad oggi rimane il mio preferito, e ho provato diversi titoli ibridi difficili da collocare in una determinata tipologia di videogiochi. Lo so, probabilmente vi starete chiedendo che cosa c’entri 13 Sentinels con una premessa del genere. C’entra eccome perché un videogioco unico nel suo genere, un ibrido tra Visual Novel e RPG strategico, come 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim non lo avevo ancora visto.

🔖 Continua sul sito del Pick a Quest: https://pickaquest.net/2020/10/18/13-sentinels-aegis-rim-seaside-vacation/

Trying to decide if I should go ahead and pick this up now. I'm in the middle of a bunch of other games at the moment*, but this is a title I've been keeping an eye on for years now. Have been really impressed by all the extremely positive reviews for it. And of course, it looks absolutely amazing, even for a Vanillaware game. I'll probably go for it next paycheck.

• but when am I not, right?