This review contains spoilers
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.
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.
spacetreasured
16 days ago
fair review, good read