13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim
Developer Vanillaware
Publisher Sega
Format PS4
Release Out now
There may be no more accurate summary of Vanillaware’s ambitious sci-fi saga than Benoit Blanc’s oft-quoted reflection on the whodunnit in Rian Johnson’s Knives Out: “It makes no damn sense. Compels me, though.” Both are absolutely true here: this visual novel/strategy hybrid has a plot that regularly sprints headlong down narrative cul-de-sacs only to manoeuvre its way out of them with a handy deus ex machina. Occasionally it goes off at tangents that at the time seem peripheral to the main plot, but later gain greater significance. It indulges in pointless but memorable character quirks, frequently repeats itself and asks characters to deliver great screeds of exposition that can only be there for the player’s benefit. It’s the kind of tale where one scene takes place in 2024, before a ‘six months later’ caption pops up and the next moment we emerge in 1985. Such temporal tomfoolery is not only par for the course, but a relatively minor element of a confounding, corkscrewing narrative.
No explanation of the plot – at least not without taking up the entirety of the Play section – could adequately cover what happens here. Suffice to say it involves a group of teenaged students from Tokyo’s Sakura High School, each of whom is brought into a war against a kaiju invasion in the far-flung future. As the title suggests, there are 13 in all, and you get to play through their individual stories, which intertwine. To preserve the biggest surprises and to ensure some measure of narrative coherence, several plotlines are locked off until you’ve progressed a certain way in another character’s story, or in the battles that make up the other half of the game. More on those shortly.