13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim — Days of Future Past

There was little doubt that 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim would be a unique and entertaining project from the moment it was announced, given the plans for what it would be and who was making it. Vanillaware created a game that fuses the adventure and real-time strategy genres, which stands out in the software library of a developer who’s primarily worked on scrolling action games. This came from their willingness to get creative by leaving their comfort zone. Its story involves school children piloting mechs to fight invading monsters, fusing inspiration from both old school and newer anime, along with sci-fi movies and kaiju works, to create a unique setting for a video game from any region. The resulting project was bound to be interesting at least, even if the experiment didn’t pan out.

Fortunately, it does. It isn’t simply that 13 Sentinels is another quality game from Vanillaware; it’s that 13 Sentinels is one of the best they’ve made thus far, and includes one of the most well-done stories to grace an adventure game released on PlayStation 4. Even the ostensibly bizarre genre combination with RTS mech battles works well, though the prologue doesn’t provide a full impression of what the player is in for.

The prologue serves as a disjointed preview of all the game’s features, which includes interactive storytelling moments with RTS battles peppered through. The early story here is shown through vignettes showing events that occur in different times between the more distant past, a more recent past, a perilous near present, and a dilapidated future. It was impossible to tell what was actually happening in the story early on, despite being familiar with a rough synopsis before starting the game. This is intentional, and brings to mind the early starts of mind-screw-heavy mecha anime from the 1990s and 2000s such as Neon Genesis Evangelion and RahXephon. Confusing? Absolutely. But I came away intrigued enough at how the story would develop from here, so it did its job.

As the name “13 Sentinels” implies, the player ventures through the story from the perspectives of 13 different characters, many of which come from different times. The scenarios can either be available or unavailable depending on just how far the player has advanced through the story. The story and battle modes are separate, with both modes focusing solely on what’s advertised. An “issue,” if you want to call it that, I was initially confused about was whether to play through the story or do battles first. But with how the story is told, this didn’t end up mattering. I eventually had to play through battles after reaching a point in the story, so it’s not possible to do too many story segments before battling, and vice versa.

The story itself is told in the same way it was in the prologue, by jumping through characters in different timelines, and following them as they venture from one timeline to another. This doesn’t make it easy to follow precisely what’s happening and what’s motivating particular characters early on, but it all eventually comes together. The storytelling is a highlight of the game, presenting a tale that could have only been told through an interactive video game. It’s further proof that not all stories need to be told in a linear fashion to be comprehensible and worthwhile.

That said, the storytelling is better than the story itself, which contains enough head-scratching twists that they’ll render key revelations made earlier in the story pointless. But even with those, it’s still one of the best I’ve experienced in a game. Every character, from the more vanilla among them like Juro Kurabe, the meek Megumi Yakushiji, to the more complicated Ryoko Shinonome, leave lasting impressions, and I ended up liking all of them. This partly speaks to the general quality (or, let’s say, “quality”) of video game stories, but it’s good despite that.

The storytelling is helped by the excellent presentation, the kind that’s accompanied all Vanillware projects. Major and minor characters, and those that pass through the background, are all intricately hand-drawn, and the backdrops themselves are beautiful. The characters don’t have many animations and there’s heavy backdrop reuse, but that doesn’t matter when the results look so good. Vanillaware has mastered good hand-drawn aesthetics in ways that other developers have not, and perhaps cannot, even after so many years.

The other key aspect in 13 Sentinels involves battling invading Kaiju with mechs the teens pilot in the nude. These take place in the form of real-time strategy battles that pause while selecting commands or checking other battle info in menus. These had me a little nervous before I got into them, as someone with little experience with RTS titles. Fortunately, those battles, at least in the default difficulty level, are adjusted for people like me, and the tutorials are good. It’s, again, a different kind of Vanillaware game despite this this not being their first RTS, and made it one of the easier examples so as not to frustrate their fanbase.

Nonetheless, some later battles gave me trouble, and the last batch of them don’t play around. This is when the battlefield will be littered with several small enemies which can produce shields around other damage-dealing Kaiju variants, some of which can be in tough positions that will make it difficult for key characters to reach them unless they’re willing to get surrounded by kaiju and soak damage. Not to mention the enemies that can take ages to destroy thanks to having a deadly combination of high attack, high defense, and a pool of HP so deep that a snorkel is required. It’s clear the story is the real focus here, and that’s where most of the game time is spent; but I didn’t mind having to fight the battles. They’re engaging enough to prevent them from being a hindrance.

The soundtrack is always a highlight in Vanillaware games, and 13 Sentinels follows in their footsteps. The music is again from composers at Basiscape, the music company started by well-known Japanese game composer Hitoshi Sakimoto. It takes a different approach compared to previous games from the developer to fit its modern and sci-fi setting as opposed to a fantasy one, but also because Sakimoto himself didn’t compose many tracks. Though he still produced and directed the soundtrack, he only provided ten tracks and left the most of the work to younger talent, namely Mitsuhiro Kaneda, Azusa Chiba, Kazuki Higashihara, Yoshimi Kudo, Rikako Watanabe, and Yukinori Kikuchi. It’s evident they all worked together to make sure their music had a consistent sound to it, with great results.

I played the game in English voice acting, which was impressively well done considering the producers had to switch to remote recording and sound mixing midway through thanks to the pandemic. Every voice fits the characters well, even when the actors themselves were considerably older than the characters they’re playing, like Veronica Taylor as Tsukasa Okino.

13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim presents a story containing revelations and twists that you’ll be thinking about for a while after completing it. It’s been weeks since I did so as of this writing, and the late-game revelations have remained on my mind since then. It’s all wrapped in a solid presentation and helped by fun RTS gameplay, making it one of Vanillaware’s best games yet.