13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim review – a heady mix of sci-fi, passion and big ideas

Here’s an incomplete list of things you will encounter in 13 Sentinels: a talking cat. Time travel. Time travel, but also not really. Androids. Clones. Android clones. Memory-wiping drugs. A robot that looks like Wall-E. An underground UFO. Oh, and of course it’s the story of 13 highschoolers getting into giant mechs to fight monsters.

13 Sentinels reviewDeveloper: VanillawarePublisher: Atlus/SegaPlatform: Reviewed on PS4Availability: Out on September 22nd on PS4

To find out how they ended up in those mechs and where the kaiju they’re fighting come from, you follow each protagonist individually. Each storyline unfolds in an achronological fashion to the other 12, so that soon it feels like you’re piecing together a puzzle of stories to form a larger whole. There’s Juro, a normal teenager in 1985 who starts to wonder why he keeps having hyper-realistic dreams that seem to unfold just the way his favourite sci-fi films do. Shu Amiguchi, who’s talking to a famous pop star through his TV. Natsuno Minami, who travels through time with the help of the aforementioned Wall-E lookalike to save him from the Men in Black. Takatoshi Hijiyama, a young soldier who accidentally travels to 1985 from 1945 while investigating a cross-dressing spy and many more things than I have the space to mention. The separate, 30-level “Destruction” mode meanwhile consists of real-time tower defence battles against the kaiju, depicting one large-scale battle that chronologically sits at the very end of the story.

While the side-scrolling mechanics in the story section and the lovely 2D art style make it immediately recognisable as a Vanillaware game, 13 Sentinels is much more story-focused than any of its previous output. The battle sections are a good way to liven up what can otherwise feel like a very static game, but you need to be invested in the characters and the many mysteries that surround them to truly enjoy yourself. At first it’s just a barrage of technical terms and names and random revelations and slowly but surely – actually, never mind, you learn everyone’s names, but the finer detail stays that way, a jungle of wild ideas that’s deliberately a lot to keep up with.

13 Sentinels often feels a lot like a visual novel, because you puzzle the story together from various keywords and events, using a system called “Cloud Sync”, inspired by the menus in point and click adventure games. The cloud is a literal thought bubble holding every important bit of information a character gathers, which you can then use in conversations. Sometimes in order to progress with the story, you need to access a piece of information and then listen to the character think it over or mention it to someone else. You’re never told what the next step is, which unfortunately can lead to several moments where you move from screen to screen or go through all of your keywords again in the hopes of encountering something new. Each character spends most of their time doing the same things over and over – every day in Juro’s story, for example, always begins in his classroom at the end of lessons, and there are many conversations you’ll have several times before a keyword triggers a slight deviation. Whenever it does though, exciting things are bound to happen, and then the wait instantly becomes worth it.