13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim (PS4)

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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Toy Review: Transformers Generations Legacy Evolution Trashmaster (Voyager)

Review:  #788

Name:  Trashmaster

Brand:  Transformers

Allegiance:  Autobot

Line:  Generations - Legacy Evolution

Year of Release:  2023

Size Class:  Voyager (Wave 4)

Mold Status:  new

VEHICLE MODE:

Trashmaster, an original character, transforms into an apocalyptic rubbish truck, which is just awesome.

The back has a giant claw, since that's the robot mode's weapon.  The two arms on either side looks good, but if you look more carefully, they're just short pieces that doesn't really resemble much.

Trashmaster is quite bulky, and so he is bigger than a typical Voyager.

There's not much play value here, only the six rolling wheels.  He is a Weaponizer, so can split into multiple parts to form armor for other toys, but the instructions don't really have a set combination.

A good vehicle mode that's unique.

TRANSFORMATION:

Despite being able to split into various places, Trashmaster can transform without detaching anything.  The back forms the legs and the arms, with half of the cab as the torso and half as a giant piece of kibble.  It's not a complex transformation at all.

ROBOT MODE:

Trashmaster's not so great elements start to come to the forefront in robot mode.  At first glance, he looks good.

Spin him around and you can see the giant piece of kibble that stick behind his waist, and it awkwardly hangs there.  It's disappointing that the designer couldn't do something about it.

The head sculpt is great and really suits the bulky look of the robot.

Since he is bulky and wide, he loses some height.

When you look from the side, you can see how far the kibble sticks out and it's on a giant piece of plastic, you can't even fold it up.

Articulation is fine, he has joints for his head, shoulders, elbows, wrists, hips, knees and ankles.

His only weapon is a claw that can open and close.

He can hold the claw weapon in either hand but there are two pegs that he can hold it with, but that means he will always hold it offset in his hand.

When not in use, the weapon can store on his back.

The other minor flaw in robot mode are the waist panels, they get in the way of his arms, so that his arms can never be flat against his body.

Despite his flaws, this is still a good enough robot mode.

OVERALL:

Trashmaster is a unique figure and that uniqueness helps you to overlook some of the his other flaws.  The vehicle mode is fine, but the kibble just awkwardly hanging off him in robot mode can feel lazy.

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Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars (PSP)

Grand Theft Auto:  Chinatown Wars was originally of the Nintendo DS.  It was ported to the PlayStation Portable a few months later.  It was the first portable Grand Theft Auto game of the DS, so the graphics and gameplay is slightly tweaked compared to what you are used to.  Due to the limitations of the original hardware, the game has a camera angle from above.  It’s not directly overhead like the original games, but more at an angle.  The PSP version removes the cel shading effect so it looks more akin to the console games.  The change in camera angles still takes a little bit to get used to though.  The controls are familiar.  Your character can run around, get weapons and use them, jack cars and drives them.  Of course, the biggest draw of the series is the open world and the huge amount of optional content.  Chinatown Wars does not disappoint in this area.  As you play the game and more and more things unlock, you’ll come to realize that this game is a true Grand Theft Auto game.  It’s the full experience but on a handheld.  This is very impressive, given that there’s so much to do, from racing, drug dealing, rampages, ambulance missions, and much much more.

However, the age of the game shows in the missions and game design.  It’s still as tedious as ever to gain weapons in a permanent manner from scratch.  Similarly for money making.  If you get busted by the police, then you’ll lose everything on you.  There are no checkpoints during missions.  If you fail at any point of the mission, no matter how far you may have progressed, you will have to restart it completely again, which can be absolutely painful.  The only saving grace is that the game is nice enough to allow you to immediately restart the mission upon reloading, and even so far as to allow you to skip some of the traveling you may have had to do.  While the missions are nowhere near as frustrating and hard as the console counterparts, there are still some annoyances every so often.  The gameplay also feels a lot more gimmicky, thanks to its origins from the DS.  Driving was never great in the Grand Theft Auto games and it is bearable here.  It can be a bit tough given that you do not control the camera angle at all, it follows you.  The best you can do is force it to face the same direction as your character.  Due to the small space / screen estate, controlling the cars can be slippery and annoying.  The overhead camera means that you can’t really see too far ahead of you.  Your activities will attract the police, which is always annoying when they try to hunt you down in the most inopportune of moments.

The story follows Huang Lee, who returns to Liberty City after his father, who was in the triad, had died.  He will end up wanting to seek revenge and in the process, climb his way up the ladder.  To do that, he starts off helping out as a lackey with various triad members (some of which are family).  The game doesn’t break any new ground, it’s still the same structure where various missions are available so you can pick and choose which ones you’d want to do first.  The mission designs are predictable.  The graphics are actually quite good and holds up even today, but the cutscenes retain the cel shaded look.  The story, like most Grand Theft Auto games, can feel disjointed because you only get cutscenes during missions.  This means that the more that you get distracted with the optional content, the longer the period of time between each story piece.  The story is mixed between the cutscenes and the in-game emails that you get.  It basically has Huang on a huge wild goose chase while he does this, then this, and then that, before he finally finds out who killed his father.  He’s basically a lackey throughout the whole game but has so much sass that the insults that he throws around in this game is extremely funny and amusing.

There is a lot of mission variety as it is beyond just driving and shooting.  Although not every piece is good, at least they got the difficulty right.  Shooting isn’t great since the auto aim works most of the time but when it doesn’t, it’s annoying.  Similarly, it’s also awkward to shoot while driving.  The penultimate mission are fun and you can tell that the story was reaching its climax.  Unfortunately, the final mission was a bit of a let-down, both in terms of gameplay as well as the story.  The ending was short and quickly explains what happened with Huang’s father, and while it was expected and passable, at the same time, it highlighted how simplistic the story was.  Of course, even finishing the main story there is still so much of the optional content left.  The story missions take around seven to ten hours to complete if you focused only on them.  Overall, Grand Theft Auto:  Chinatown Wars is an impressive game, especially for the DS (not so much for the PSP given that it already had two Grand Theft Auto games).  Make no mistake, this is a fully fledged Grand Theft Auto game with everything one would want of the series:  a big open world and a ton of things to do.  The story is weak but then again, none of the games in the series had amazing stories.  However, the characters are good and the dialogue filled with all those insults added a nice dose of humor.

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SSSS.Dynazenon (2021)

SSSS.Dynazenon is a sequel to SSSS.Gridman, at 12 episodes long. The anime starts off like a typical teenage drama. Yomogi is a high school student and there is a girl at school, Yume, who was developing a reputation for asking boys out, but then not appearing at the agreed time and place. Yume then asks Yomogi to meet her after school but of course she doesn’t turn up. You’re led to believe that there must be some sort of reason for her behavior. It’s an interesting mystery in and of itself but it isn’t the focus here, since this is a mecha and kaiju anime.

Yomogi also meets Gauma, who is a self-proclaimed kaiju user. When a kaiju appears to attack the town, Gauma enlists the help of Yomogi, Yumi, as well as another person who just happened to be there. They all become pilots of Dynazenon, a giant robot that can split into four components. They take down the kaiju and afterwards, the four form a group together to figure out how to pilot Dynazenon properly. Each of the four components can function independently and has various combinations.

The anime goes for a classic mecha theme with over-the-top combination stock sequences, a lot of yelling, and rousing music. It’s not a bad thing but can sometimes feel out of place. Like SSSS.Gridman, it can feel episodic and predictable as each episode will bound to have a kaiju of the week show up and the characters eventually fighting it off. The characters seem to have no regard for collateral damage, and these are populated areas too. They destroy buildings without a care and for such a huge random mecha to show up, the public sure isn’t making a big deal of it either.

There are a few subplots going on. The major one is that we learn that kaiju are summoned by a specific group known as the Kaiju Eugenicists. Then there are the more personal subplots such as Yomogi and Yume in their quest to resolve Yume’s problems. While there is the fourth Dynazenon user, Yamanaka, who is unemployed, meeting up with someone that he knows and had feelings for back in middle school. In these aspects, the anime can feel so normal. It can be quite jarring when the end of each episode will always result in a kaiju appearing and then a big battle.

With the amount of focus placed on the characters’ normal lives, the kaiju and Dynazenon aspect feels undercooked and superficial. Seemingly they’re just there to draw in the fans of the giant mecha and kaiju genre. You might expect the anime to try to touch upon how hard it must be to juggle between normal life and fighting the kaiju, but it only has a passing mention with no hard decisions or sacrifices to be made. That said, there is a surprise appearance in the middle of the season. It’s surprising because up until this point, we’ve only seen Dynazenon and its various forms. Then again, it does appear without too much explanation though.

As the season never gave us a deep and engaging story, it doesn’t give us a satisfactory ending either. It admirably resolves most of the plot points, from the kaiju users to each of the subplots of the characters. However, it is anticlimactic with how the anime approached it. It resolved everything without too much build up or fanfare and the characters then quickly move on. At least the ending has some sweet moments and feelgood vibes.

Overall, SSSS.Dynazenon is an average anime. The first time Dynazenon appeared and transformed was awesome. Every time after that, because the anime decided to use stock footage, it can feel shoehorned in. The anime felt like it was designed to capture the nostalgia of older shows, but it carried all their weaknesses as well. It does an admirable job of being both an episodic anime that you can jump in at any time, while also carrying some deeper plots that span across the whole season. Although as it tries to do both things, it doesn’t do a great job at either and the anime is forgettable as a result.

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