A game that keeps coming up as one of the best games of 2020 is 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim.
Here’s the blurb from US Gamer about it:
On its surface, 13 Sentinels can seem like bog-standard anime fare: a group of high-school students are hopping into giant robots to stop the invasion of an alien robot horde. Within a few sections of the game’s fractured spider web of story, however, it becomes much more. It’s a story of time travel, love and betrayal, constant twists and turns, and what future humanity can leave to its descendents.
What makes 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim incredible is how it weaves these threads together, through the viewpoint of 13 different protagonists and the battles they fight, told out of order and across timelines. Part of the fun is trying to piece together your own assumptions, and watch them either proven right or crumble in front of new revelations. By story’s end, 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim is a heartwarming tale of overcoming ourselves, and an absolute achievement of narrative structure and storytelling. — Eric Van Allen
It was also picked by some Qt3 players as their game of the year, so maybe they can tell us more about it. Poke @NuclearWinter.
Thanks for creating the thread. It’s on sale right now, so I’m very tempted. I have to admit I’m surprised @tomchick hasn’t weighed in on it. If memory serves, I ended up buying another Vanillaware title, Odin Sphere Leifthrasir, following his rave review of it.
I’ve never played any of these so-called visual novels, but I am a casual anime fan and do dig their pervy art style (which I’ve read has been significantly toned down in this game).
I suppose I’m most curious about the mech RTS gameplay. I’m not a particularly accomplished player of that genre, and I kinda bounced off of Into the Breach that this seems to cursorily resemble.
No. Into the Breach relies on perfect information to give a puzzly atmosphere. You know what the enemies are going to do and in what order. Your units push and pull enemies around the board, and it’s crucial to your overall strategy to do so. 13 Sentinels has, so far, none of that. It’s a lot fuzzier.
I don’t have it! I only just yesterday hooked up my PS4 after moving a few months ago.
My main reservations are that it’s basically a long Japanese visual novel with not-very-developed RTS combat. I watched a YouTube video of one of the battles, but it was in Japanese, so heck if I could tell what was going on. But it didn’t really look like the sort of thing I would be into.
That’s exactly what it is. If you aren’t interested in playing 30+ hours of visual novel, then stay away. The battles are light in challenge and only make up a small part of the game. It really does not seem like a Tom Chick game.
But if you’re one of the few forum goers who likes visual novels, then this is the game for you! The story is a sci-fi rollercoaster with unique structure: 13 protagonists whose stories jump around in time and entwine intricately with each other.
It had a lengthy development time and I’d honestly not be surprised if most of it was spent storyboarding the thing. The way you can jump around and work through each protagonist’s story as you choose (albeit with some gating) and still have them constantly come together and provide surprising reveals, is kind of impressive to see. It’s cleverly done.
Is the English voiceover in this game any good? I would definitely not say I speak Japanese, but I can understand some things some of the time, and amusingly at one point one character says she’d like to work for NASA, and in the English subtitles another responds that she’ll need better grades in science, while in Japanese the character actually says something like, “you don’t try hard enough in English”.
I find the semi-RTS battles enjoyable if not challenging (at least so far). Visually they’re not unlike Darwinia, which is clearly a deliberate choice, as you are occasionally shown a rendering of what the little icons “really” look like. Mechanically they’re not entirely unlike the new Yakuza game, with enemies moving around until you do something, although more purposefully.
Edit: it’s pretty much a tower defense game, actually, a MOBA if you controlled a whole team by macro and stopped to give orders to them every few seconds.
Yes, though you don’t really build towers, even if at least one character can sort of put them down. Just trying to capture the “one-sided moba” vibe of it in terms of other genres.
Oooh, didn’t know this had its own topic. I’m pretty sure 13 Sentinels is going to be considered one of the great visual novels for years to come.
For my part, I thought it was really cool while I was riding the plot twist roller coaster, but after seeing the ending I soured on it a bit. The stupid ending makes my head hurt.
Maybe it’s kind of beside the point, but one of the things I appreciate the most about the game is that it has zero loading times, that you can skip the starting up logos and that you can seamlessly switch between RTS and story modes. Am I weird?
I didn’t think no loading times would be that big a deal to me. Although… compared to say, Prey, which I played recently and had atrocious 60-second loading times, the absence of loading keeps you engaged at all times. It guess it bodes well that’s a selling point for this new console generation.
