YMMV / 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim

• Abandon Shipping: Those that thought Natsuno x Yuki was a cute pairing sure get a slap in the face after one of the game's huge reveals: Yuki was cloned from Natsuno's mom.
• Adorkable: Natsuno is maybe the biggest nerd in the whole game, and it's almost always portrayed in an endearing way which makes her all the more adorable.
• And You Thought It Would Fail: After the previews and first look at the RTS sections, many expected the game to crash and burn in Japan. And the first week sales were so dire George Kamitami was preemptively performing a postmortem on it. But thanks to good reviews and strong word of mouth, including the "Best Scenario" and "Best Adventure Game" awards from Famitsu and Yoko Taro and Masahiro Sakurai praising the game and recommending everyone to buy it, it had good legs and outpaced its poor opening. The game also got a nomination for "Best Narrative" from both the Game Awards and the DICE Awards, a huge accomplishment for a niche title such as this.
• Awesome Art: The game is gorgeous to look at; combining hand-drawn and animated character sprites, beautifully-detailed painted backgrounds, and a layered lighting system, every shot is a piece of art in itself.
• Awesome Music: Basiscape brought their usual musical flair to this game, proving that they can score sci-fi works just as well as Vanillaware's usual fantasy fare.
  • "Brat Overflow" is the game's main theme and serves as an excellent opener for the game as a whole from the very start with the use of instrumentation to imitate a computer system being started up.
  • "-{EDGE OF THE FUTURE}" is an appropriately dramatic final battle theme that goes through no less than three separate arrangements of the main theme, the first one is a synth-heavy electronic piece that serves as a prelude, the second phase is an intense orchestral version as a notable shift from the sci-fi synth used in the game's previous battle themes, and the final arrangement is an amped-up version of "Brat Overflow" serving as the sign that players will make it through to the end.
  • "-[DEOXYRIBOSE]-" is an amazing techno banger that plays during Area 1, wave 10. It starts with pounding synth percussion, transitions to a full choir, then quiets to a One-Woman Wail and finally drops the beat with a triumphant bridge. The second verse adds a dirty guitar accompaniment, and finally it all leads to some headbanger guitar shredding that pumps you up.
  • "Seaside Vacation" is the in-universe hit song of recently popular Miyuki Inaba. During Area 2, wave 10, the pop star sings the song herself to show she is still connected through comms. The catchy tune perfectly emulates the sound of 1980`s pop and contrasts beautifully as you mow down waves of Deimos.
• Broken Base: Okino's gender identity is much more explicitly ambiguous in the English localization than in the original Japanese, and this is controversial not only between fans of literalistic and more liberal localization philosophies, but between those who consider it pure Dub Text and Political Overcorrectness and those who consider it a potentially fair read of the evidence in both versions of the game.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: Though not a protagonist, Miwako is adored by the fandom for her cuteness and sweet personality, with plenty of art from both Vanillaware and fan-artists.
• Fan Nickname:
  • "Himbo-yama", describing Takatoshi Hijiyama's combination of niceness, simple-mindedness, and romantic/sexual naivete.
  • "Idiots in Love", referring to Nenji and Tomi's bicker-laden yet loving relationship they form through the game.
• Fanfic Fuel: Writing about what the protagonists do after leaving the simulation is a popular plot thread, given there's five years of time that need to be filled between the final battle and the epilogue.
• Heartwarming Moments:
  • How utterly happy Iori and Tomi are to see Miwako again in the ending to the point of each of them giving her The Glomp and crying tears of joy.
  • According to Gouto's analysis and her own assertions, Professor Chihiro, currently reborn in the body of a small child, is a cold hearted person who depends on logic and science to guide their actions. She believes humanity is irredeemable and does not deserve to be restored. And yet she works to help the Sentinels at the end. What exactly makes her achieve, as she puts it, 'maximum hypocrisy'? Miwako, doing her very best to protect what she believes is a small child trapped in a nightmare crisis even at the risk of her own life. Objectively and logically little Chihiro knows Miwako is nothing more than an AI of a species she has contempt for. But emotionally what she is sees is a scared human with a big heart trying to protect and reassure child in the midst of mass destruction, just like the children in the Sentinels are risking their lives to protect this false reality they live in. Much to her own consternation, she can't bring herself to watch this fake world die when confronted directly with the fear of doom and the hope of a better beginning.
    • As an aside, notice how of the three versions of Chihiro we see on screen, bad things seem to happen whenever one of them tries to make decisions logically rather than following her heart. The Professor inadvertently ended the human race. Chihiro the school teacher murdered someone she loved for what she believed was the logical good of the project. Only Iori Fuyusaka has a truly happy ending in this story, and she is the least logical of the three. She wears her heart on her sleeve, to the point of refusing to run to another timeline if it meant abandoning friends and family in to the invasion. Chihiro the little girl likewise only ultimately causes something good to happen when she abandons what she views as pure logic and does something to save humanity purely on the basis of her emotions.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: Yuki’s story has her as an Amateur Sleuth working with an AI who’s last name is Aiba, Fast forward to 2022.
• Iron Woobie: Ryoko is a running candidate for the compatible that's gone through the most shit of the thirteen; a shy and gentle teenager that falls victim to the manipulations of Tetsuya Ida, she dedicates herself to him out of misplaced love and he takes advantage of that to make her his dragon. Then under his command, she unwittingly uploads a virus onto the Sentinel network that infects her with a condition, DD-426, that slowly eats away at her memories like Alzheimer's. This costs her past, her bonds with her closest friends, Ei and Renya; and renders her unable to retain anything that happens in the other characters' routes. Even after the condition has run its course and there's barely any remembrance of her life left, she still chooses to follow her duty to fight back the Deimos one last time, knowing she and everyone could die together, all because her time as a Sentinel pilot is all that's left to give her an identity.
• LGBT Fanbase:
  • Many members of the gay community were very pleased with the portrayal of Takatoshi and Okino's romance. The dub not only kept them, but added a significant portion of trans and genderqueer fans due to a Dub Personality Change making is ambiguous if Okino is a cisgender homosexual young man or genderqueer.
  • Yuki has quite a few Yuri-fans who are fond of her thanks to her role as lead tomboy and having engaging, humanizing dynamics with the other girls of the cast.
• Magnificent Bastard: "Prisoner 426", otherwise known as Juro Izumi is a version of the current Juro Kurabe from two loops ago. Having learned the truth of his world and Universal Control, he wanted to free everyone from the endless cycle that everyone was trapped in, going so far as enacting mass shootings and other acts of terrorism for it. However, his crimes would eventually caught up to him, which led to him being captured, his physical body destroyed and his mind turned into an AI that was tortured for info. Still not giving up, 426 managed to escape and used this opportunity to prepare and manipulate the Sentinel pilots against the upcoming kaiju invasion under other identities such as Kyuta, Shiba and Fluffy, giving them access to the Metachips and guiding Juro Kurabe and Megumi Yakushiji. When the final battle arrives, all of 426's work pays off, allowing the Sentinel he entrusted to succeed where he had failed.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • Hiijiyama's trademark love of yakisoba pan.
  • Relatedly, Miura's love of "hemborger."
  • "Gotta put on a show for Yuki-chan..."
• Memetic Psychopath: Megumi's use of the nanomachine gun and possessive tendencies will get exaggerated by some fans into her being a John Wick-style gun nut ready to take names.
• Moe: Miwako Sawatari; with her soft visual design, unending kindness and cute voice, she's a character so adorable that it hurts.
• Most Wonderful Sound: That fireworks-like pop whenever a kaiju is destroyed in battle.
• Narm:
  • It can be rather hard to take any scene where Ms. Morimura is present in her Spy Catsuit seriously, since the player is likely to just get distracted by her gratuitous breast bounce and default Boobs-and-Butt Pose.
  • Iori's story mode reaches its conclusion with Iori declaring, boldly and in total seriousness, "I'm a schoolgirl with a Giant Robot!" It's very difficult to hear this line without laughing.
• Older Than They Think: This isn't the first time Vanillaware developed an RTS title.
• Platonic Writing, Romantic Reading: Playing through Yuki's story, it is very easy to get the impression that she's in love with her Childhood Friend Natsuno. Yuki is dedicated to finding and protecting "Nat-chan," declaring that she's the only one she cares about while constantly rebuffing Shu's advances. There's even a strong parallel to the LGBT romance of Takatoshi and Okino, with the former going through hell and back to find and support the latter in his story. Yuki seems to be the female equivalent until the player goes through Miura's story and learns that her love and protectiveness stem from the original Yuki being the mother of the original Natsuno.
• Polished Port: The Switch version, despite cutting back on some of the visual effects, reduces a lot of the slowdown that plagued the original version and added new features into the game, such as new weapons for each Sentinel.
• Portmanteau Couple Name
  • "KeiNatsu" for Keitaro and Natsuno.
  • "NenTomi" for Nenji and Tomi.
  • "SekiFuyu" for Ei Sekigahara and Iori Fuyusaka.
• Spiritual Successor: Due to the game's nature in terms of gameplay, this is the closest thing to a new Front Mission (more precisely, a new Front Mission: Alternative). It is also the best game adaptation of Megazone 23.
• Strangled by the Red String:
  • Iori and Ei's relationship is considered by many to be the weakest canon pairing among the couples in the game specifically because of how quickly and inorganically it advances compared to the others. Iori can come off as rather shallow about her crush while Ei seems too distant and focused on his own unrelated set of priorities to actually return her feelings in a believable manner. It doesn't help that Ei is physically absent from the "Where Are They Now?" Epilogue, so we don't see how their relationship has evolved afterwards.
  • To a lesser degree, Megumi's story involves her coming to terms with the idea that "her" Juro is dead and never coming back, and that she needs to grieve and move on rather than chase his ghost forever, while Juro finds her behavior creepy and overbearing in his own story, becoming especially resentful when he realizes that she loves the "Juro Izumi" she used to know, and not the person he currently exists as. Then, when her story ends and she's started to make her peace with the world as it is and not as she'd wish it to be, Juro walks in and reveals that he's fallen in love with her, and she accepts and requites his affections. This happens entirely off screen, is never addressed on Juro's own route, and comes up in the literal last scene of hers. It's not a bad ending in a vacuum, but it does none of the legwork to get where it wants to go and comes across as a contrivance to give the pair a happy ending.
• Tainted by the Preview: When Atlus showed a preview of the combat system in July 2019, the game was revealed to be part Real-Time Strategy. This led to negative reactions from most fans of the company, who were expecting the game to be an action RPG in the same vein as Odin Sphere, Muramasa: The Demon Blade and Dragon's Crown, which are Vanillaware's most well known titles. It also includes a great deal of 3-D modeling, rather than the company’s signature, beautifully detailed sprite work throughout, and the character and art design seems to be downbeat and “realistic,“ in contrast to their usual art style.
• Tear Jerker: The game over dialogue ... all of it especially when a character calls out in despair for the unit that died.
• That One Level: Area 3, wave 10. The objective is to destroy the Hi-Quad EX, which is a very tall order, as it's the most challenging fight the main game has to offer — it has 100,000 HP, heavy armor, close-range attacks that shred Sentinels trying to use melee attacks, and long-range attacks that are about as potent. If that wasn't bad enough, there are also two tough APSOS that are protecting it with shields, as well as an infinite stream of Mooks that are capable of tanking most ranged attacks for it. And good luck if you're gunning for 100% Completion, because one of the bonus objectives requires you to clear the stage without any Sentinel hitting 0 HP.
• That One Puzzle: Iori's first event after the prologue requires you to interact with the cat, but getting too close to it will scare it away. Tomi and Miwako are also having an ongoing conversation that lasts a very long time. Because of that, it can give an impression that the cat is an optional scene and you have to follow the conversation to progress instead. The conversation, however, loops, and the cat reappears offscreen at specific point. You need to find a specific item and use the thought cloud at very precise spot, or the cat will run away and, even on fast-forward, getting to the part where you can get the item again will take a while. The best part is that the cat runs away in the following scene anyway and the player has spent 10-30 minutes just talking about food.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Many were disappointed that Tamao Kurabe didn't get a lot of screentime given that she's revealed to be another compatible. It's quite common to find fanfic featuring her, trying to expand her characterization.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Shu's constant flirting towards Yuki is often a bit much and borders on harassment for some players, given that she expresses direct disinterest multiple times.
• Vanilla Protagonist: Both Kurabe and Iori, who are nowhere near as interesting and dynamic as their past and grown-up selves or even most of the other 13 pilots. Kurabe's case is at least partly justified since his quiet, reserved personality is implanted, but Iori in particular is simply a kind, smitten, Ordinary High-School Student who brushes against a Kudzu Plot far bigger than herself.
• Values Dissonance:
  • As explained by Politically Correct History in the main page, the characters living during the World War II period are portrayed as simply decent people fighting for their country against hostile invaders. Western players are very likely to be more familiar with the multitude of war crimes committed by Japanese soldiers during that time, something that, while acknowledged by contemporary Japanese governments, tends to be frequently downplayed in real life by ultranationalist groups within the country. The issue isn't presented entirely without nuance, but the nuance is all subtext or hidden away in archive notes while the text has at least one of these soldiers literally shouting patriotic slogans and a future astronaut admiringly speak of 1945 as a great year to be alive. The Reveal is that the 1945 period in-story was just a virtual constructed reality of 1945 that doesn't extend beyond one Japanese city, which means the atrocities of World War II aren't really happening, the heroes were never part of the real war, and suggests that the history of the world taught to our protagonists is a revisionist one. That might not be okay, except that said protagonists' constructed reality is meant to preserve Earth's culture in a setting where humanity is now 100% Japanese. It would be wildly unethical to force Hijiyama and Miura to participate in war crimes, but it would be just as bad, if not worse, to pretend the war never happened. The game seems to split the difference and allows history to be pre-empted by the arrival of the Deimos, which spares our boys having to deal with how the war ended.
  • Juro frequently shows fear of getting expelled if the school finds out that Megumi is living with him. Western players would likely find such a thing an overexaggeration and not really something to be worked over (even in the more puritanical 80's), but in native Japan (especially in said puritanical 80's), it would implicate a deviant lifestyle that could potentially bring a nasty blow to an institution's reputation if discovered, as such, it gets treated as a very serious offense. Something similar happens later when Iori and her friends are caught downtown by detective Onishi and threatened with a criminal record simply for hanging out there during nighttime.

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