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PurpleShyGuy

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13 Sentinels is captivating, genius and sometimes very dumb

“Where did my clothes go?”

Heavy spoilers inbound

Intrigue is the word when it comes to 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim, a game that combines the genre of visual novel with real-time strategy. What starts as your garden variety anime plot about high schoolers fighting giant monsters with equally giant robots, starts to delve into time travel, alternate dimensions, talking cats, androids, nano-machines, entire cities contained inside space stations and virtual reality. It certainly doesn’t pull any punches when it comes to leaving the player confused amongst a bombardment of plot twists, red herrings and red herrings disguised as plot twists.

13 Sentinels is a jigsaw in game form, and you get a surprising amount of flexibility in the way you receive those puzzle pieces. As the name would suggest, you play as 13 protagonists in any order you want, though there are a few restrictions to make sure you don’t unearth the truth too quickly. Renya Gouto’s exposition assault is blocked off until the later part of the game for instance. It’s a story that embraces the interactivity of the medium, as you’re mostly free to journey through it however you want, and as such, how someone uncovers the secrets of this game can vary wildly from person to person. With 13 characters to choose from, there’s bound to be something that catches your interest, with some real standouts such as Nenji Ogata’s train station time loop conundrum, or Ryoko Shinonome’s tragic tale of her boss being a manipulative dick to her. There are weaker ones to be sure, with Iori Fuyusaka’s whole driving motivation for fighting to protect humanity being “gotta impress that cute guy.”

Trust me, it makes a warped kind of sense in the end.
Trust me, it makes a warped kind of sense in the end.

With so many plot threads crisscrossing and splitting off from each other, it’s amazing that 13 Sentinels works at all, let alone comes together as well as it does. Don’t get me wrong, the audience has to do the legwork in order to piece everything together, but the game fortunately gives you the tools to do so. At anytime you can refer to a list of previous events which you can even play through once more for a refresher, great for those who haven’t touched the game in a while and are wondering what the hell was a D-Code again. Going back can yield some great results, since you might pick up on something that you overlooked before, such as how Juro is the only one who ever responds to Kyuta, or how the different eras are referred to as sectors, not times. These small clues can give an astute player all the information they need to foresee an incoming twist, but the twists never felt tacked on or poorly done – except for when the writers went “screw it, it all took place in virtual reality!” when racking their brains on trying to explain why you have a cat calling you numbnuts.

13 Sentinels also puts the visual in visual novels, with beautiful hand-painted 2D layers placed in a way that gives depth to the scene, it must be seen in action to be truly admired. The other half of 13 Sentinels is the real-time strategy battles that are displayed as holographic images, which is understandable since animating hundreds of giant robots would be a nigh impossible task to accomplish. The battles themselves are fine enough, and they don’t require anywhere near the forward thinking of say Into the Breach does, but there is enough visual feedback to make exploding your enemies satisfying.

Making an unbalanced team to slaughter your way through is pretty easy as well, with each generation of Sentinel having at least one ability that can see you soundly through to the end. With the 1st gens it’s the insanely powerful Demolisher Blade which can obliterate large targets, the 2nd gens have turrets they can place and they can place a lot of them, the 3rd gens have Missile Rain which can wipe out groups of smaller targets along with your frame-rate, and the 4th gens have Interceptors that will absolutely swarm your foes once you amass enough of them. These battles also give you tidbits of story, so you aren’t completely out of luck if these sections don’t float your boat.

So wait, if these images are what the characters actually look like in reality and they've been growing inside pods for their entire lives, who the hell has been cutting and styling their hair?
So wait, if these images are what the characters actually look like in reality and they've been growing inside pods for their entire lives, who the hell has been cutting and styling their hair?

There are instances where the game can get a little…silly, for lack of a better word. An example would be Morimura’s catsuit which clings so tightly around her arse it looks like her butthole is going to eat it. Every time Morimura jiggled her way on to the screen I shook my head as I watched all the dramatic tension disappear between her exposed cleavage. The game also has funny ideas about how voices mature between adolescence and adulthood, because the game can say Shu Amiguchi and Tetsuya Ida are the same person all it wants, but I won’t bloody believe it. Plus, the whole “I guess this attempted rapist wasn’t so bad after all” scene at the end is a tad worrying to say the least.

These are a small handful of cringe-inducing moments in a sea of thoroughly absorbing hours, however, and overall it hooked me from start to finish. When playing through 13 Sentinels, I would go to bed thinking about it and wake up thinking about it some more, such was its power over me. 13 Sentinels concludes the same way for everyone, there are no multiple endings, yet, you feel a sense of agency over the finale because it was you who chose how to get there. For a story that could have easily been converted into a TV show, it being a game is what actually makes it so memorable in the end.

Also the music for the combat sections is fucking god damn fire:

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