10 Yakisoba Pans out of 10!!!
Vanillaware's greatest accomplishment by a landslide. Hyper-ambitious, utterly indulgent, and convoluted as all fuck, but miraculously never buckles under the weight of its own intricacies. 13 Sentinels pulses with a sense of delirious vitality and freewheeling passion that is so so rare in games with this level of production value and craft. 13S' disarmingly dense story construction feels a bit like the tangled web of plot complexity in the Kingdom Hearts series, but it actually uses those twists in service to its own emotionally resonant characters and conceptual intentions (instead of rendering everyone a charmless exposition machine giving you truly insane loredumps that ultimately dont impart anything that meaningful). The nonlinear, fragmented story delivery is filled with literally hundreds of galaxy-brain twists and turns and occupies dozens of genres at once; different character narratives make up an amalgam of pastiches including Evangelion, Perfect Blue, Macross, Sukeban Deka, Madoka Magica, Barefoot Gen, and more... and it all feels TOTALLY fitting in a game that's clearly a meditation on the experience of coming of age while awash in Japanese history and cultural memory--without a lens of pure nostalgia and nationalism. There's real nuance to the game's exploration of Showa Era Japan's wartime suffering/shame and its eventual globalized cultural/industrial recovery here, and I felt this deeply even from my semi-clueless outsider perspective. It's actual thought provoking stuff that the nonlinearity totally works in service to, and also happens to be an extremely well-crafted and fresh style of story delivery for its' own sake.

Much has been said about the gorgeous illustrative art within the Remembrance portion of the game, and I could gush about it for years (PLEASE MORE PUPPET JOINTED/PERSPECTIVE WARP 2D ANIMATION IN GAMES I LOVE IT) but I feel like the Destruction segments are being a tad undervalued! They're extremely snappy and fun (especially if you play on Intense, which is totally surmountable for average players like me but raises the strategizing requirements considerably). I've seen a lot of responses lamenting that Destruction doesn't share the vivid, illustrative style of the Remembrance segments and can see why people might think that from the trailers, but I totally disagree after experiencing the game. The depersonalized, infographic-style representation of truly harrowing, wide-scale mech carnage feels like a very conscious and effective creative choice to contrast with the intimate and sentimental visual novel sequences. Both visual styles absolutely work in harmony with one another, and the juxtaposition only serves to strengthen them. The combat music is some of the best shit EVER too, who needs fully illustrated mechs when the bops are this massive

Also, I was totally blindsided by the FUN AS HELL queer stuff in this game! It's definitely not "perfect", but said romance is so charming and allows its complicated, lovable characters to be confused, flirty, devious and loyal in ways that few other games do. While there IS some (funny!) humor surrounding one character's klutzy and confused queerness, same-sex attraction itself is never treated as an absurd joke, only validated: the joke is that said character is too bone-headed to admit to himself what's plainly obvious (and beautiful!!!).

anyway I lub dis gaem you should play it it's v special and a truly rare experience. Props to Vanillaware and thank you for toning down most of your skeevy fanservice to a degree where I'm not irritated by it constantly

Reviewed on Sep 29, 2020


Comments