13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim
PS4
There may be no more accurate summary of Vanillaware’s ambitious sci-fi saga than Benoit Blanc’s oft-quoted reflection on the whodunnit in Rian Johnson’s Knives Out: “It makes no damn sense. Compels me, though.” Both are absolutely true here: this visual novel/strategy hybrid has a plot that regularly sprints headlong down narrative cul-de-sacs only to manoeuvre its way out of them with a handy deus ex machina. Occasionally it goes off at tangents that at the time seem peripheral to the main plot, but later gain greater significance. It indulges in pointless but memorable character quirks, frequently repeats itself and asks characters to deliver great screeds of exposition that can only be there for the player’s benefit. It’s the kind of tale where one scene takes place in 2024, before a ‘six months later’ caption pops up and the next moment we emerge in 1985. Such temporal tomfoolery is not only par for the course, but a relatively minor element of a confounding, corkscrewing narrative.
No explanation of the plot – at least not without taking up the entirety of the Play section – could adequately cover what happens here. Suffice to say it involves a group of teenaged students from Tokyo’s Sakura High School, each of whom is brought into a war against a kaiju invasion in the far-flung future. As the title suggests, there are 13 in all, and you get to play through their individual stories, which intertwine. To preserve the biggest surprises and to ensure some measure of narrative coherence, several plotlines are locked off until you’ve progressed a certain way in another character’s story, or in the battles that make up the other half of the game. More on those shortly.
A quick scroll through its timeline – although it’s hardly quick if you follow it all the way from end to end – should be enough to convince you that it’s too convoluted for its own good; by his own account, it was a real headache for writer/director George Kamitani. Unpicking all his character arcs, plots and subplots is akin to assembling the world’s most difficult jigsaw puzzle, where the pieces are handed to you one by one in a seemingly arbitrary order. For the first few hours, you’ll probably be baffled at the barrage of unfamiliar names and terminology. That said, Kamitani’s ideas are by no means new: the time loops, multiple identities, mind hacks and more amount to an unholy amalgam of just about every major sci-fi movie of the last five decades (and some of the minor ones, too, with one thread clearly indebted to Duncan Jones’s Source Code). Terminator, ET and Star Wars are key touchstones, while one late ’90s film in particular is an obvious inspiration for arguably the biggest of the game’s twists.
For a while, it’s hard to work out not so much where you are, but when – and then it transpires you were asking the right question in the first place. So while the
EMOTIONS THIRTEEN
The predominantly teenage heroes often seem wise beyond their years. They’re certainly capable of taking life-changing revelations in their stride – and talking cats, for that matter – though they’re less experienced in matters of the heart. Exchanges between male and female characters often result in red-cheeked embarrassment, and while the order in which we tackle the stories plays a part, during one session we witness no fewer than three spluttering declarations of love from the male cast. Sometimes these seem to come out of nowhere, but a few are obvious pairings from the off. Pompadoursporting hard man Nenji Ogata and sarcastic Tomi Kisaragi have that Bogart/Bacall dynamic, their bickering clearly belying a strong attraction on both sides. cast spend a lot of time describing events to one another, we’re often grateful for the explanations, because we’d be lost otherwise. But even at its most confusing, 13 Sentinels is never dull: it regularly throws in sudden surprises and cliffhangers to lure you into starting the next chapter (or fulfilling the conditions to unlock it) while making you feel like an active part of the story, as you put the pieces together in your head. And, in fact, in the characters’ heads: conversations prompt key words to appear in thought clouds, which can then be selected for further rumination, or used as a line of enquiry.
It helps, too, that you don’t merely tap to advance the text, but control each character directly. True, this leads to a few moments where you trot left and right, looking for the specific person or object you need to interact with to trigger the next critical dialogue. But if most visual novels tend to focus on the second part of the equation, 13 Sentinels seems determined to be the most beautiful game of its kind. Its characters are attractively drawn (if occasionally over-sexualised in their design) and brought to life through a truly mindboggling number of bespoke animations. Its painterly environments are gorgeously lit and full of incidental detail: from cars passing a busy junction to schoolmates chatting away in corners of classrooms, it creates a sense of place we rarely see in the genre. It’s self-evidently a paean to Kamitani’s youth, which perhaps explains why everything seems to carry a nostalgic glow: at times it feels almost like an anime Life Is Strange, with a similar line in blushing teenage gaucheness.
And then, of course, there are the giant robots. Each character pilots one of the titular Sentinels in pausable realtime strategic battles that take place on a 3D holographic map, as the machines attempt to protect a central terminal from the rampaging kaiju. Visual novel fans without any tactical nous shouldn’t be concerned: even on Normal difficulty setting, the battles are comically easy, and there’s one particular tactic that turns even the Hard fights into a cakewalk. The aesthetic shift is incongruous and not especially attractive, but it certainly serves to communicate the preposterous scale of the conflict; likewise, the later battles where dozens of Deimos units and airborne projectiles combine to send the framerate plunging into single figures.
Still, there’s method in 13 Sentinels’ madness. In both parts of the game, you’re rarely far from a moment that leaves you shaking your head in disbelief or grinning at the audacity of Kamitani’s maverick vision. And, one month on from finishing its 30-hour story, we’ve still not quite broken free from its spell. As we return to investigate the timeline once more, yet to tease out every mystery from this near-bottomless rabbithole, we think back to Monsieur Blanc. No, it doesn’t make any damn sense. But consider us compelled.
At times it feels almost like an anime Life Is Strange, with a similar line in blushing teenage gaucheness