13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim is a game by Vanillaware, who had developed Muramasa and Dragon’s Crown. Like with their other games, it has a beautiful aesthetic and art style, it is truly a piece of art. It is drawn to be like 2D and it looks amazing. Unlike their previous games though, the key draw is the story this time. The game is split into three sections. The main section contains all the story elements, and you play through the story in each of the thirteen character’s perspectives. They all intertwine and it isn’t as tedious as you might have first thought. The story is deliberately told in a disjointed manner, chronologically jumping back and forth. Despite this, it does an admirable job of quickly explaining the premise of the game, even if none of it makes sense. It takes a while before you can start to see how one part of a character’s story connects to another.
You cannot go through all of a character’s story in one go as it will eventually get locked until you make enough progress in other parts of the game. A slight problem with this is that you might go through heavy periods of story and then heavy periods of combat, and once you go back, you forget what you were up to. The story is interesting because you immediately see that there is a threat to humanity, being the kaiju, also known in game as Deimos. To combat this threat, giant mechs were created that can only be piloted by one of the thirteen characters, known as Sentinels.
The non-linear storytelling is deliberately confusing, especially when trying to piece together the chronological order. It doesn’t help that some events seem to contradict others, while you may be playing a character for so long that you forgot what happened to another. There is an in-game “Analysis” section that helps but in a game with already this much reading, it can be very dry to read yet another wall of text. The concept and premise are interesting and there are points in the story where there are big revelations that affects how you interpret the events up until that point.
The story is not told in a typical visual novel fashion. Rather, you are plonked in a sidescrolling area and then basically you talk to as many people as you need to, in order to progress. From time to time, you gain keywords that you need to mention to progress. There are no puzzles and very limited amounts of branching paths. Helpfully, there are charts that you can pull up within each specific sections of a character’s story so that you know where you may need to do something different to open up a different path. The animation of the characters are impressive and every single character, including the minor and major supporting characters, are voiced.
That said, the way of progressing a specific section may be annoying at times. Generally, you just need to go to the left or right, talk to everyone, or go through all of the character’s thoughts. However, there are times where it is not as clear, especially locked scenarios that turns out that you are not able to get to yet, but the chart misleadingly shows that there is a path left unexplored. Sometimes the 2D environment throws you out, or that you had to wait to trigger a different path.
The other big part of the game is the combat, which is like a real-time strategy RPG. Despite the promising premise, the characters that are piloting their sentinels, and the enemies that they are fight against, are only depicted in a simplistic manner. You have an overhead aerial shot of the battlefield and you are supposed to protect the “Terminal”, which the Deimos is aiming to destroy. Each sentinel has different abilities and moves, although they are grouped in one of four generations, which are differentiated by things such as being able to travel along the ground or the air, or the types of attacks that they have. In each battle, you can only pick a maximum of six characters to participate.
During battle, there is a countdown timer that keeps counting down unless it gets to a character’s turn. A Sentinel can choose to attack, repair itself or defend. Most attacks use up EP and each attack has different powers, ranges, EP cost, as well as the types of Deimos it may be effective again. Once a Sentinel has actioned a move, there is a wait time before their turn comes up again. The UI is a bit messy and confusing and it doesn’t help that the Deimos usually comes in huge packs. They can easily clog up the screen with a lot of red. Before every battle, you can upgrade, unlock and level up the Sentinels so that they get stronger. It’s an easy system to know the basics but takes a bit of time to get used to and be proficient at it.
After you’ve played around a third of the levels, you’ll get the hang of the battle system. You’ll come to realize that it is quite a basic system, but still fun. The ability to constantly upgrade more than just a few things for each character after every battle helps in sucking you in. It introduces new Deimos every so often, although usually it just means that they are bigger damage sponges. Luckily, the game isn’t hard on normal difficult, you can usually brute force you way through. It tries to impress you or replicate some sort of hopeless moment by throwing innumerable Deimos against you, but they’re also very easy to destroy in huge groups at once. As you play through and get used to how each character has their own unique abilities and moves, you can start to play and strategize a bit more.
Ultimately though, the non-linear storytelling causes the story to be confusing from the beginning to the end. Even with the big revelations, it might not immediately click into place and you have to take the time to fully absorb and think things through. It can feel that it doesn’t really explain all the mysteries, or put into context everything that had happened, so it’s like it is missing something. Forcing you to read chunks of text to fill in some of those gaps can be annoying, and thus the ending can be somewhat anticlimactic. To complete the game including the story and combat elements, will take around 25 to 30 hours if you read at a decent speed. Once you’ve watched the ending, it unlocks some extra battles but those are still the same stuff that you have been facing, so it doesn’t capture your interest for long.
Overall, 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim has a ton of potential. It initially delivers it in spades thanks to the gorgeous art design and the intriguing story. However, the decision to tell it in a non-linear fashion and having a heavy reliance on reading additional texts, as well as middling combat, drags the game down. Even with the timeline and finishing the whole story, you can still be left confused at several elements. It is not a bad game by any means, and the positives are more than enough to make a playthrough very worthwhile, but it felt like it could have been even more.
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