Reviews VideoGame / Thirteen Sentinels Aegis Rim

A Tragedy of High Ambitions

Let's start with the most important question: is 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim a good video game? I would say yes, mostly. The mech stuff and the adventure game stuff are both pretty fun, and their mechanics do feed into each other, with the mech stuff unlocking data files to better understand the story and the adventure game stuff offering points to upgrade the mechs. The aesthetics, while I was originally turned off by their significantly greater focus on realism over stylization, did win me over in the end, especially the capable and energetic performances from the English dub cast, and while I didn't love the ugly dots and grids of the mech mode, I did come to appreciate the well-animated portraits for various weapons systems. You can even see little hints for later story reveals in specific conditions during the mech battles, depending on the order in which you do them, like a badly-damaged Gouto mysteriously refusing to give in to a character believed to be dead.

And the adventure game segments themselves not only do an excellent job of getting across each individual character, but all play differently from one another, calling back to all sorts of different models of adventure games in the process. There are three or four lame or unintuitive puzzles I had to look up, but in an adventure game of this sprawling size those are frankly incredible numbers. Just as Odin Sphere drew on a huge variety of fantasy influences, from Wagner's operas to Grimm's fairy tales, so too does 13 Sentinels draw on a deep bench of classic science fiction, from H. G. Welles to 80's movies to more esoteric Golden Age stuff, although I could do without them outright stating their influences out loud, or worse stating an obvious stand-in for their influences. And while I'm neither Japanese nor from the 1980s, I do appreciate that it wasn't all nostalgia bait for those who were, and that the time travel plot pulls in people from other places too.

But, unfortunately, while it doesn't completely fall apart (again, the well-sketched characters handle a lot of heavy lifting), the thirteen protagonist set-up is just too ambitious for its own good. While every prior Vanillaware game liked to experiment with non-linear storytelling, here the narrative sprawl works against it, with some good stories having anticlimactic and sudden endings that could use a better denouement (Natsuno, Ryoko), great premises squandered on a "Shaggy Dog" Story (Ogata), or literally just being the character in question wandering around trading exposition for its entire duration (Gouto, easily the weakest character narrative in the entire game). Many of them are missing connective tissue previous Vanillaware titles wouldn't have lacked. Some of the characters have an unfortunate Japanese nationalist bent that I don't wanna get in the weeds on, but just look up the Values Dissonance and Politically Correct History entries. And, well, knowing the game took half a decade to make, it all reeks of a production that just bit off far more than it could chew and had to regurgitate some of it to avoid choking to death.

In the end, I guess the trust I place in Vanillaware was well-earned in one sense. There does seem to be a high quality floor for their games. But unfortunately, while it's still a good video game I mostly recommend to fans of science fiction, tactics games, and/or adventure games, it's definitely one of the weaker games I've ever played from them from a story perspective.