The ability to somehow cobble together a sci-fi epic juggling multiple intertwining characters dealing with time travel, parallel universes, clones AND memory loss in a constantly timeline shifting plot that doesn't absolutely fall on its face is alone worthy of 13 Sentinels price of admission. Vanillaware's propensity to indulge on its talent for crafting some of the best 2D artwork ever realized in detriment of everything else is best served in 13 Sentinels, as it presents itself as a Visual Novel above all else, putting its genre comtemporaries to shame with gloriously drawn lived in backgrounds filled with small details and movement that give life and humanity to the game's bonkers story. Why can't all VNs be like this?
Despite its singular aesthetic and universe, 13 Sentinels is a treasure trove of sci-fi influences and homages that span the entire history of cinema, literature and anime, each character presenting a familiar premise that further complicates the stakes of the overall story and increasingly entangles its web with hard to keep up concepts and twists taken from your favorite formative fiction stories like E.T., Evangelion, War of the Worlds or Total Recall, to name a very short few. This admiration and obssession allows 13 Sentinels to muse and explore our relationship with media and how it inevitably informs our perception of the future and past, serving as both as escapism and a means of making sense of the present. Media dealing with the future always says more about the present, anyways.
Fitting that 13 Sentinels' situates itself in 1985, as it stands as a reflective stage of Japan history where art and socialeconomic outlook expressed the anguishes and aftermath of post-war through the lens of modern and futuristic optimism that rejuvenated the country to the world's eyes. Being a story of human failure, where puppetmasters endlessly obssess with revisiting and rectifying the past within the confinements of their own sins and biases, hoping they can somehow influence the fate of a future that no longer belongs to them, 13 Sentinels pits its cast of young passionate characters against an already unsalvageable world where its culprits are adamant in not passing the torch to the next generation. Waking up to a world suddenly being ravaged by giant robots might feel like a infantile analog for real world issues, but you have to wonder if having your homeland suffer nuclear bombing shouldnt be just as inconceivable.
Much has been said about 13 Sentinels' divide between story and gameplay, and while I do tend to champion videogames that seamlessly intertwine both components, 13 Sentinels manages to be successful in this endeavour by allowing the choice of how you wanna build the story of its characters and recontextualize on your own the partnership that happens in its RTS matrix. Playing on Intense difficulty let's the screen be flooded with seemingly never ending enemies that sells the desperation of the characters and decimating them all with a cathartic single attack never gets old. Where it falters is not so much on its detatchment from the story, but instead in how it positions itself as the culmination of it. One of the major setpieces that acts as a Macross homage doesn't hit as hard as it should because at that point you might not yet be sure why it should even matter. Minor issues that are swept aside by the emotion and fun of it all, and considering that 13 Sentinels' "RTS game" is a tangible thing in its world with inner logical explanation needed to understand the story, it's already going above and beyond what most games do.
13 Sentinels is a mess. It's convoluted, it's overcomplicated, and it's too self indulgent. But it's also beautiful, resonant, and totally japanese. It doesn't matter if you don't understand what the song is about, as long as it was sung well.
https://i.imgur.com/D1HkWTd.png
Despite its singular aesthetic and universe, 13 Sentinels is a treasure trove of sci-fi influences and homages that span the entire history of cinema, literature and anime, each character presenting a familiar premise that further complicates the stakes of the overall story and increasingly entangles its web with hard to keep up concepts and twists taken from your favorite formative fiction stories like E.T., Evangelion, War of the Worlds or Total Recall, to name a very short few. This admiration and obssession allows 13 Sentinels to muse and explore our relationship with media and how it inevitably informs our perception of the future and past, serving as both as escapism and a means of making sense of the present. Media dealing with the future always says more about the present, anyways.
Fitting that 13 Sentinels' situates itself in 1985, as it stands as a reflective stage of Japan history where art and socialeconomic outlook expressed the anguishes and aftermath of post-war through the lens of modern and futuristic optimism that rejuvenated the country to the world's eyes. Being a story of human failure, where puppetmasters endlessly obssess with revisiting and rectifying the past within the confinements of their own sins and biases, hoping they can somehow influence the fate of a future that no longer belongs to them, 13 Sentinels pits its cast of young passionate characters against an already unsalvageable world where its culprits are adamant in not passing the torch to the next generation. Waking up to a world suddenly being ravaged by giant robots might feel like a infantile analog for real world issues, but you have to wonder if having your homeland suffer nuclear bombing shouldnt be just as inconceivable.
Much has been said about 13 Sentinels' divide between story and gameplay, and while I do tend to champion videogames that seamlessly intertwine both components, 13 Sentinels manages to be successful in this endeavour by allowing the choice of how you wanna build the story of its characters and recontextualize on your own the partnership that happens in its RTS matrix. Playing on Intense difficulty let's the screen be flooded with seemingly never ending enemies that sells the desperation of the characters and decimating them all with a cathartic single attack never gets old. Where it falters is not so much on its detatchment from the story, but instead in how it positions itself as the culmination of it. One of the major setpieces that acts as a Macross homage doesn't hit as hard as it should because at that point you might not yet be sure why it should even matter. Minor issues that are swept aside by the emotion and fun of it all, and considering that 13 Sentinels' "RTS game" is a tangible thing in its world with inner logical explanation needed to understand the story, it's already going above and beyond what most games do.
13 Sentinels is a mess. It's convoluted, it's overcomplicated, and it's too self indulgent. But it's also beautiful, resonant, and totally japanese. It doesn't matter if you don't understand what the song is about, as long as it was sung well.
https://i.imgur.com/D1HkWTd.png
2 Comments
Coming up with this convoluted plot is a work of genius alright
SunlitSonata
1 year ago