My first Vanillaware game here, and I enjoyed it way more than I thought I would. Honestly, the story was not particularly interesting for all the praises I've heard about "13 Sentinels" ; yet after finishing the game, I already miss watching my little characters doing their little battles.
Because it's the art that really got me hooked on. The game looks fantastic, I was baffled throughout the whole thing. Gorgeous landscapes, tons of great designs, and very VERY impressive spritework ; I'm a bit fascinated by 2D character sprites and how to make them compact yet readable, and the way the artists here played wih shapes and postures, and how detailed these sprites are YET they're fully animated, it's crazy to me.

Tactical-wise, as someone who's only ever played Fire Emblem, the non-turnbased battles and the 2-to-5 characters units felt fresh and new ; all the while still getting some good FE Awakening vibes from the visuals and musics (especially in Cornia/Drakenhold).
I somehow had fun completely reforming my units every ~20 hours, and kinda making my own stories out of these compositions.
Because yeah, most characters don't really have anything to say appart for little gimmicks presented as the uninteresting anecdotes that they are, in cutscenes with no voice and not even using the characters full sprites. Yet I somehow ended up getting attached to them, purely based on their design and because I like watching them move and fight. Their kinda like toys, or maybe insects or fishes in a tank ...

I do think the game was a bit too easy, and I got a better challenge once I passed to Expert difficulty (although even then I rarely struggled, despite not being a very good strategist).
Also I think the game would be perfect if it had just a bit more (and more specific) condition options for making tactics. Would make the game a bit easier but getting the satisfaction of seeing your plan get perfectly executed would be worth it imo.

Awesome plateformer and very decent metroidvania, with bits of Souls and Hollow Knight and Celeste and Automata and surely more and that's how you make good games. (Lots of good inspirations in the ost too)

The character is an absolute joy to control and it gets more and more fun as you complete your moveset. I was really pleased by the overall difficulty and the even harder challenges to get cool outfits. And this huge castle is a blast to explore, I even did some sequence-break without realizing it.

I do think it's a bit sad that there's only 2 boss fights, the simple animation-based combat is really how I like my combat ; but also the game being pretty much a pure plateformer, it's weird to have such a hard boss to beat as the final test of the tutorial when there's really no such challenge in the game after that.
The ending was also a bit abrupt, I was shocked by the absence of credits. You were like, 3 people to work on this, just put your name everywhere, get some recognition !!

Crazy to me that I have not heard of this game before ; Thanks for everything, weirdly sexy goat-bunny woman.

Weird and fun game, it's kinda like a story mode for a single WarioWare minigame, but with like 20 levels of difficulty instead of 3.

I wouldn't mind if the game was a few more hours long ; the base idea is solid and they had a lot of ideas for stupid stuff to cook with new mechanics everytime. I knew the game through Twitter and I was really pleasantly surprised to see that, behind the funny gifs, the game is actually that well designed.

A bit sad you can't really cook the chicken like on the artwork tho