[video game post] 13 Sentinels
Aug. 19th, 2022 10:25 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
queenluaI played 13 Sentinels during my summer break in one glorious multi-day binge, because once it gets going, you don't want to do anything else.
But, I'd also bounced off the game a few times previously—the first time, because I was just too sleepy to handle such a text-heavy game, and the second time, because I was like oh my God when they mean 13 Sentinels they mean *13 unique point-of-view characters* and my brain kinda short-circuited trying to keep track of them.
Once I finished the game, I stared at a blank textbox for a while trying to come up with a pithy metaphor to describe what the game was like. "Las Vegas" came to mind a couple times—because, just like that city is simultaneously deeply alluring, and also an affront to any decent human sense of "moderation" or "good taste" or "not building a monument to gambling and unfettered capitalism in the middle of a fucking desert", this game is similarly brazenly audacious when it comes to scifi tropes and homages. The game's answer to "should we do time travel? or interdimensional travel? or time loops? or aliens? or androids? or mind-body fuckery?" is "yes", as in "all of it, and then some, and also turn it all to 11."
Such a mishmash of concepts suggests a sort of sophomoric inelegance—I saw one review that compared it to Lost. But that comparison doesn't work—though I loved Lost, that show was very obviously was making it up as they went along, whereas 13 Sentinels very obviously had some Ur-Nerd who had painstakingly, lovingly raked over the entire script, had a crystal-clear vision for how all these mechanics and story threads were going to hang together, and then hecking executed on it. Like, it's not elegant, and the endless techno-fixation mutes the efficacy of some of the emotional beats, but it's all 100% intentional and 100% checksums against a Manual Of Hard Scifi Rules, which is honestly kind of impressive. (Softer scifi seems to be in vogue these days, which is fine, but sometimes I miss the assurance that some nerd thought Way Too Hard About Timeline Causality as the structuring force in a story, haha.)
So it's the Las Vegas of weird scifi-trope-mashup-story-things, except it doesn't feel quite that grand/audacious in scope? More like Reno, maybe, or, idk, Gatlinburg, Tennessee? The latter being this extremely charming vacation town in the middle of nowhere that's absolutely stuffed full of every tourist trap available—laser tag, mini golf, arcades, wax museums, tacky replicas of famous buildings, mazes, magic shows, a ski area somehow—but not in a trying-to-defy-God kinda way, just a well-this-is-where-we-decided-to-put-all-the-vacation-stuff kinda way.
...That was a lot of preamble. Here's my bullet-point impressions of the game :P
* The game is divided into combat sections and story sections, and the core gameplay for the combat sections is fantastic. Like, maybe I don't play enough RTS/tower-defense-y type things, and thus am being easily impressed, but that was really really fun RTS? The whole schtick is, you deploy ~6 of your dudes per battle to do the whole mech-fighting thing against kaiju; different mechs have different abilities (close-range brawlers vs support vs long-range and such); wipe all enemies or defend the tower until time runs out to win. It's satisfyingly fast-paced (real-time with blisteringly fast opponents, but gameplay pauses whenever one of your dudes is due to take an action so you can menu and contemplate at your leisure). And it's satisfyingly varied and challenging—e.g., I found the generation 3 mechs totally useless until a particular encounter really forced me to take advantage of them, and then had so much fun toying with their abilities thereafter. Also, I like that it does the Fire Emblem-esque thing of "all your units are named, real characters"; I absolutely favored the brawler mechs just because I loved those characters the best, haha. My only complaint is the gameplay was too easy in the beginning stretch, and then got too easy again near the end—if they did a sequel that rebalanced that, and gave us even more battles, oh my gosh I'd be on that like white on rice. (The other video game combat system I would like to eminent domain in this fashion is Final Fantasy 13. Give me like twelve games of rhythm-action-stagger-system goodness, please, a girl can dream.)
* That being said, the playtime is weighted more toward the story sections, so you shouldn't play this game just for the combat
* The story is told via an on-rails VN format that is very pretty—look up some videos of the gameplay and you'll see what I mean. Beautiful painterly textures, cool ways of moving through space, etc. You can play the 13 routes in "any" "order" (modulo some gating on certain events), and while each route follows a different character, they occasionally do very clever things with the "same event, different perspectives" thing—in a way that honestly puts, say, Fire Emblem: Three Houses to shame. Like, in Three Houses, each of the routes just felt kind of incomplete on their own, right? and like they were withholding information purely for the sake of withholding information? and retreaded a lot of samey territory? 13 Sentinels is definitely trying to do something cool each time they show you an event from a new PoV and that rules.
It has a bit of the "origin story" problem—each storyline is basically a variation on "how [Character] learned to get in the fucking robot," and while they do some impressive variations on that theme, there's still only... so many variations... you can do on that theme :D;;;
That being said, sure let's rank all the routes based on my arbitrary preferences:
-> Takatoshi Hijiyama: GREAT. His whole schtick is "1944 Very Serious WWII Soldier gets time-warped into 1984; is confused as hell to see Japan lost the war; becomes a street punk to survive; also he gets the most screentime with Okino who is the biggest fucking troll and also a hacker and thus Best Character." His route is a delight. I skimmed on GameFAQs thread about the game and learned they do not appreciate this route??? Something about "wah it's boring to have him constantly flustered by Okino" and "wah it's boring that he's so obsessed with yakisoba pan" and they are WRONG. I had forgotten how incredibly wrong GameFAQs could be! Remember when getting mad on those message boards was a thing? Nostalgic sigh.
-> Nenji Ogata: a timeloop plot done right; also he's a greaser-y type with a heart of gold; loved this kid
-> Ei Sekigahara: great, though i'm predisposed to love edgy amnesia guys with a ruthless self-depreciation streak, so...
-> Shu Amiguchi: great, though i'm predisposed to love rich kid fuckbois, so...
-> Yuki Takamiya: great, though i'm predisposed to love swear-y brawl-y women, so...
-> Natsuno Minami: extremely loving homage to E.T. et al, which is not really my particular flavor of nostalgia, but it was so well-done and earnest that it wound up charming enough. i think hers easily had the most narrative coherence
-> Juro Kurabe: sorta meh overall (sorry! his character just felt flat to me!!), though the twist in his route was really effectively done and satisfyingly eerie
-> Keitaro Miura: is a total sweetheart of a character, who unfortunately had most of his interesting emotional beats in other people's stories, which leaves me in a weird position for evaluating him on his own?
-> Iori Fuyusaka: was kind of a bore through the first part of her route, until she decides just implicitly 100% trusting the sketchy dude from her dreams & hopping onto his motorcycle into the sunset is a good life plan, which RULES, you GO Iori, may she and Ei have much joy and ridiculous amnesia adventures
-> which leaves all the ones that just didn't quite land for me (Ryoko Shinonome, Renya Gouto, Tomi Kisaragi, Megumi Yakushiji). some of these had cool elements—in particular, Ryoko's route hinted at some really fantastic brainfuck stuff of the "trusting someone when you have no physical alternative but also shit's mad sketchy" variety, and the talking cat character in Megumi's route is totally great, but the core story behind her deal was a huge "meh" for me.
* Not to be all The Person Who Makes Everything About Information Security, but... dear Okino: tsk tsk, all this mess could've been avoided if you'd followed best practices for software supply chain security, way toleft-pad kaiju-attack all your bros for like thousands and thousands of years :P
* (...I mean I do have infosec questions tho. Lots of them. Like, the whole "I just borrowed some code from a video game for our extremely important simulation" thing aside, the fact that things went so badly for so long seems like a massive oversight! Are we really that bad at designing software in the year 2188—okay, okay, fine, I get it, but waaaaah)
* I do badly wish we'd been able to see more of the 2188 colony members. Ei as an honest-for-real assassin in his o.g. incarnation is fascinating and dark! and strange. (Space for the descendants to reflect on the gulf between them and their predecessors is full of juicy possibilities—not just for Ei, for everyone.) And there was something so serene about those moments where the 2188 gang was planning their little project together, contrasted against the total chaotic mess their poor successors hae to deal with. I wanted those moments to linger; wanted to just hang out up in space a bit.
* In general I kind of wanted more "lingering" time. While I appreciate in a technical-marvel way that they managed to knit so much shit together, I don't think it gave them room to breathe. Like, there's bits where they're really drilling into the implications of some of the mind-body fuckery they have going on (the bit where Tetsuya Ida's downloading Izumi into an android repeatedly to torture him is horrifying; the slow revelation of the true nature of the sectors from the various points of views is delicious, etc), and I just wanted more of that, yaknow? (The only other scifi person I know who can cram so much stuff into a story is Philip K. Dick, but Dick gets away with it because, even though his mechanics are everything-and-the-kitchen-sink, his choice of theme is always one keen hyperfixation that he's shouting about for the entire narrative).
* I got the vague sense that the game was throwing out a bunch of references to classic 80s scifi movies that I was picking up on, so I looked into it, and... holy shit, what a potpourri. I guess I need to watch Total Recall at minimum, since it seems like that was the inspo for my fave story thread, but also, damn! so much stuff!
but yeah, fun damn time! I think NEO TWEWY is still more my flavor of barely-coherent game but this was solid~~
But, I'd also bounced off the game a few times previously—the first time, because I was just too sleepy to handle such a text-heavy game, and the second time, because I was like oh my God when they mean 13 Sentinels they mean *13 unique point-of-view characters* and my brain kinda short-circuited trying to keep track of them.
Once I finished the game, I stared at a blank textbox for a while trying to come up with a pithy metaphor to describe what the game was like. "Las Vegas" came to mind a couple times—because, just like that city is simultaneously deeply alluring, and also an affront to any decent human sense of "moderation" or "good taste" or "not building a monument to gambling and unfettered capitalism in the middle of a fucking desert", this game is similarly brazenly audacious when it comes to scifi tropes and homages. The game's answer to "should we do time travel? or interdimensional travel? or time loops? or aliens? or androids? or mind-body fuckery?" is "yes", as in "all of it, and then some, and also turn it all to 11."
Such a mishmash of concepts suggests a sort of sophomoric inelegance—I saw one review that compared it to Lost. But that comparison doesn't work—though I loved Lost, that show was very obviously was making it up as they went along, whereas 13 Sentinels very obviously had some Ur-Nerd who had painstakingly, lovingly raked over the entire script, had a crystal-clear vision for how all these mechanics and story threads were going to hang together, and then hecking executed on it. Like, it's not elegant, and the endless techno-fixation mutes the efficacy of some of the emotional beats, but it's all 100% intentional and 100% checksums against a Manual Of Hard Scifi Rules, which is honestly kind of impressive. (Softer scifi seems to be in vogue these days, which is fine, but sometimes I miss the assurance that some nerd thought Way Too Hard About Timeline Causality as the structuring force in a story, haha.)
So it's the Las Vegas of weird scifi-trope-mashup-story-things, except it doesn't feel quite that grand/audacious in scope? More like Reno, maybe, or, idk, Gatlinburg, Tennessee? The latter being this extremely charming vacation town in the middle of nowhere that's absolutely stuffed full of every tourist trap available—laser tag, mini golf, arcades, wax museums, tacky replicas of famous buildings, mazes, magic shows, a ski area somehow—but not in a trying-to-defy-God kinda way, just a well-this-is-where-we-decided-to-put-all-the-vacation-stuff kinda way.
...That was a lot of preamble. Here's my bullet-point impressions of the game :P
* The game is divided into combat sections and story sections, and the core gameplay for the combat sections is fantastic. Like, maybe I don't play enough RTS/tower-defense-y type things, and thus am being easily impressed, but that was really really fun RTS? The whole schtick is, you deploy ~6 of your dudes per battle to do the whole mech-fighting thing against kaiju; different mechs have different abilities (close-range brawlers vs support vs long-range and such); wipe all enemies or defend the tower until time runs out to win. It's satisfyingly fast-paced (real-time with blisteringly fast opponents, but gameplay pauses whenever one of your dudes is due to take an action so you can menu and contemplate at your leisure). And it's satisfyingly varied and challenging—e.g., I found the generation 3 mechs totally useless until a particular encounter really forced me to take advantage of them, and then had so much fun toying with their abilities thereafter. Also, I like that it does the Fire Emblem-esque thing of "all your units are named, real characters"; I absolutely favored the brawler mechs just because I loved those characters the best, haha. My only complaint is the gameplay was too easy in the beginning stretch, and then got too easy again near the end—if they did a sequel that rebalanced that, and gave us even more battles, oh my gosh I'd be on that like white on rice. (The other video game combat system I would like to eminent domain in this fashion is Final Fantasy 13. Give me like twelve games of rhythm-action-stagger-system goodness, please, a girl can dream.)
* That being said, the playtime is weighted more toward the story sections, so you shouldn't play this game just for the combat
* The story is told via an on-rails VN format that is very pretty—look up some videos of the gameplay and you'll see what I mean. Beautiful painterly textures, cool ways of moving through space, etc. You can play the 13 routes in "any" "order" (modulo some gating on certain events), and while each route follows a different character, they occasionally do very clever things with the "same event, different perspectives" thing—in a way that honestly puts, say, Fire Emblem: Three Houses to shame. Like, in Three Houses, each of the routes just felt kind of incomplete on their own, right? and like they were withholding information purely for the sake of withholding information? and retreaded a lot of samey territory? 13 Sentinels is definitely trying to do something cool each time they show you an event from a new PoV and that rules.
It has a bit of the "origin story" problem—each storyline is basically a variation on "how [Character] learned to get in the fucking robot," and while they do some impressive variations on that theme, there's still only... so many variations... you can do on that theme :D;;;
That being said, sure let's rank all the routes based on my arbitrary preferences:
-> Takatoshi Hijiyama: GREAT. His whole schtick is "1944 Very Serious WWII Soldier gets time-warped into 1984; is confused as hell to see Japan lost the war; becomes a street punk to survive; also he gets the most screentime with Okino who is the biggest fucking troll and also a hacker and thus Best Character." His route is a delight. I skimmed on GameFAQs thread about the game and learned they do not appreciate this route??? Something about "wah it's boring to have him constantly flustered by Okino" and "wah it's boring that he's so obsessed with yakisoba pan" and they are WRONG. I had forgotten how incredibly wrong GameFAQs could be! Remember when getting mad on those message boards was a thing? Nostalgic sigh.
-> Nenji Ogata: a timeloop plot done right; also he's a greaser-y type with a heart of gold; loved this kid
-> Ei Sekigahara: great, though i'm predisposed to love edgy amnesia guys with a ruthless self-depreciation streak, so...
-> Shu Amiguchi: great, though i'm predisposed to love rich kid fuckbois, so...
-> Yuki Takamiya: great, though i'm predisposed to love swear-y brawl-y women, so...
-> Natsuno Minami: extremely loving homage to E.T. et al, which is not really my particular flavor of nostalgia, but it was so well-done and earnest that it wound up charming enough. i think hers easily had the most narrative coherence
-> Juro Kurabe: sorta meh overall (sorry! his character just felt flat to me!!), though the twist in his route was really effectively done and satisfyingly eerie
-> Keitaro Miura: is a total sweetheart of a character, who unfortunately had most of his interesting emotional beats in other people's stories, which leaves me in a weird position for evaluating him on his own?
-> Iori Fuyusaka: was kind of a bore through the first part of her route, until she decides just implicitly 100% trusting the sketchy dude from her dreams & hopping onto his motorcycle into the sunset is a good life plan, which RULES, you GO Iori, may she and Ei have much joy and ridiculous amnesia adventures
-> which leaves all the ones that just didn't quite land for me (Ryoko Shinonome, Renya Gouto, Tomi Kisaragi, Megumi Yakushiji). some of these had cool elements—in particular, Ryoko's route hinted at some really fantastic brainfuck stuff of the "trusting someone when you have no physical alternative but also shit's mad sketchy" variety, and the talking cat character in Megumi's route is totally great, but the core story behind her deal was a huge "meh" for me.
* Not to be all The Person Who Makes Everything About Information Security, but... dear Okino: tsk tsk, all this mess could've been avoided if you'd followed best practices for software supply chain security, way to
* (...I mean I do have infosec questions tho. Lots of them. Like, the whole "I just borrowed some code from a video game for our extremely important simulation" thing aside, the fact that things went so badly for so long seems like a massive oversight! Are we really that bad at designing software in the year 2188—okay, okay, fine, I get it, but waaaaah)
* I do badly wish we'd been able to see more of the 2188 colony members. Ei as an honest-for-real assassin in his o.g. incarnation is fascinating and dark! and strange. (Space for the descendants to reflect on the gulf between them and their predecessors is full of juicy possibilities—not just for Ei, for everyone.) And there was something so serene about those moments where the 2188 gang was planning their little project together, contrasted against the total chaotic mess their poor successors hae to deal with. I wanted those moments to linger; wanted to just hang out up in space a bit.
* In general I kind of wanted more "lingering" time. While I appreciate in a technical-marvel way that they managed to knit so much shit together, I don't think it gave them room to breathe. Like, there's bits where they're really drilling into the implications of some of the mind-body fuckery they have going on (the bit where Tetsuya Ida's downloading Izumi into an android repeatedly to torture him is horrifying; the slow revelation of the true nature of the sectors from the various points of views is delicious, etc), and I just wanted more of that, yaknow? (The only other scifi person I know who can cram so much stuff into a story is Philip K. Dick, but Dick gets away with it because, even though his mechanics are everything-and-the-kitchen-sink, his choice of theme is always one keen hyperfixation that he's shouting about for the entire narrative).
* I got the vague sense that the game was throwing out a bunch of references to classic 80s scifi movies that I was picking up on, so I looked into it, and... holy shit, what a potpourri. I guess I need to watch Total Recall at minimum, since it seems like that was the inspo for my fave story thread, but also, damn! so much stuff!
but yeah, fun damn time! I think NEO TWEWY is still more my flavor of barely-coherent game but this was solid~~
