I've had a couple of friends who played through 13 Sentinels and have had nothing but praise for the title, but I didn't get the chance to try it out myself for a little while, since I never owned a PS4. Finally, I took the chance and got myself a PS5, and this was one of the big reasons; it seemed like a great opportunity to catch up on some titles I never got the chance to experience. So, I decided to finally dip my toes into the game this Monday, thinking I'm just going to play this on and off on the side as a visual novel to keep me company on rainy days.

Well, that definitely didn't happen. I ended up binging the game through the entirety of Tuesday and Wednesday, staying up til 3 AM both days just to see this thriller to its end. I don't think I've felt this enthralled about such a complex, weaving narrative since my time with Virtue's Last Reward.

As the title might imply, you've got 13 protagonists to run through; 13 teenagers that somehow got caught up in this extraordinary war between mankind and kaiju. And every narrative tries to do something at least slightly different; one's a Groundhog day time loop, another one has you play as a troubled girl on the verge of a mental collapse, still another one discusses the romp of a young man wandering around an unfamiliar campus scrounging up change for yakisoba pan, and then you've also got another story where an amnesiac wakes up right beside the body of a dead woman wondering if he pulled the trigger. Each story plays out in its own unique way and you as the player often need to piece together the puzzle to progress, in a way that's thought provoking but not abstruse like early adventure games. And that's just 4 out of the 13 different threads that this game spins in its complex yarn of a tale; think of it as 13 different non linear tunnels intersecting one another at different junctions across a sprawling underground, eventually culminating at a center hollow. You don't have to experience each one individually at a time and in fact you can't do that, because this story hinges upon the interactions of these character's backstories and struggles and understanding one character's backstory is crucial to understanding not just other character backstories, but the overall picture as it is painted on the canvas. Somehow, Vanillaware ran us through 13 different stories with different structures, and somehow, all 13 stories are executed with so much care and with fairly distinct and personable protagonists. It's like if 428: Shibuya Scramble were a sci-fi flick alongside its central thriller narrative.

Oh, and there are a lot of twists and turns that will keep you on your toes. They're executed and explained so damn well despite all the jargon that inevitably comes with a sci-fi setting, and I honestly couldn't think of any major plotholes that come to mind. It's genuinely some of the best writing that I've seen in a video game yet manages to pull this off in a way that only a video game can execute. In other words, it makes some of the other games advertised with "strong writing" look like fanfiction.net; I really haven't been this impressed by video game narratives in a long time.

There's a real time tactical RPG side to 13 Sentinels too, with tons of customizable options and varied enemies. It's pretty easy to cheese at normal difficulty (sentry guns go brrrrr) but it's definitely entertaining enough to hold your attention as the tying down point of the whole game, with some good banter between your sentinel pilots to remind you that the characters are very much alive and well. Not ground breaking by any means but it gets the job done.

Regardless, 13 Sentinels was absolute crack in video game form and I have not been this enraptured by the medium ever since playing Shadow of the Colossus last Christmas Eve. I've been meaning to explore some of the classics of the late 1990s and 2000s to improve my overall literacy of the old gaming staples, but it's always good to know that gaming remains in good hands in the modern era with titles like 13 Sentinels, a genuine breath of fresh air despite being a love letter to so many video game and narrative tropes I know and love. I eagerly await Vanillaware's next work if this is the level of quality I can expect in the future, and I'll make another mental jot to get to Odin Sphere this year after having my mind constantly blown by this modern masterpiece.

Moment-to-moment I was enjoying the process of 13 Sentinels - reveling in its aesthetics, peeling back the layers of its scenario, bouncing around between characters' stories and finding answers to questions raised in one character's story in another's. About halfway through, as the reveals piled up and lead to ever more mysteries, I started to get the sneaking suspicion that all of this wouldn't amount to much. By the last couple hours where the game decides that, by the way, this whole thing is a Matrix situation, I was just about ready to tap out.

There's something to the maximist way that 13 Sentinels works. There's a thrill in seeing Vanillaware throw every sci-fi trope into one big pot - mechs, obviously, but also time travel, parallel dimensions, aliens, space colonization, evil AI, and....nanomachines. There's even a late-game meta move that exposes the fact that the video game you're playing is a load-bearing part of the whole story (I called this one at the start of the game btw). At first it's thrilling to see them stack all the parts and see how they all interact with each other, but there's diminishing returns. When you keep revealing twists, each individual one becomes less impactful, and the main road is lost.

This problem extends to the characters too, and I was shocked that for a game with 13 protagonists (actually 15, though two of them aren't playable) there isn't any character development or even much in the way of relationships. Characters are well-worn anime tropes that serve more as delivery devices for twists than anything resembling human beings. This is a game with a long, troubled dev cycle, one of the casualties of which was apparently taking out scenes that show the characters hanging out with each other. You can feel the absence - there are precious few moments of characters connecting with each other in any way other than pairing up into (often random and sometimes dubious) romances, and it makes every storytelling move of the game's last few hours fall flat.

I haven't even talked about the game-y part of it which even this game's hardest stans admit is half-baked at best. It's unfortunate because you can see the mechanical bones of something that could've been really neat - Sentinels fall under 4 broad categories but each one within the category has unique skills, buoyed by pilots that have unique passives that give them bonuses when they're paired with other characters, or not close to any other characters, or on as small a team as possible. On top of all that there's a whole scoring system, and a push your luck thing where your pilots get knocked out from being used too often and you can reset them but lose a bonus for doing so. Cool ideas, but none of it ends up mattering because the game is too easy, and the tactical decisions aren't "felt". You can see why Vanillaware followed this up with Unicorn Overlord, a game that really focuses on tactical density, because they clearly have some skilled strategy game designers who didn't have a chance to make good on their concepts.

That's how I feel about 13 Sentinels in general - it's the product of a talented (if stretched to their limit) team, and I respect the craft, but it all feels like missed possibility.