13 sentinels is a daring exercise that asks us the question "what if the season 1 finale to twin peaks was the prologue to a visual novel?". and while the result is, ironically enough, novel at first, it stops being funny around the time you get to the talking cat. i find this to be a microcosm of 13 sentinels' most pronounced flaw: it is trying to do too much, too quickly, not paced nearly well enough for its own good, with characters i am not invested enough in.

let's start smaller. 13 sentinels is about an RTS meets Visual Novel mashup (if you've never played the game, work with me). you have, funnily enough, 13 main characters who each have distinct stories that bleed over rashomon style while all having their own independent throughlines for what we should care about. and every now and again, you'll hit various locks that force you to either advance a certain character's story to a certain point or do some of the RTS gameplay to a certain point. all of this sounds fine on paper, and it's certainly one of the more creative pitches i've heard for a game.

unfortunately, execution, much like for the french monarchy, is its doom. as mentioned, the prologue slams you through several characters at once and immediately thrusts you into their dilemmas before you've even gotten a grasp to understand who they are. for characters like ei and hijiyama, this works well in a "the audience is learning with the character" way that introduces the setting and conflict, but it's far more miss than hit. i can only dance around it for so long: this game is called 13 sentinels when it would really benefit largely from downsizing to maybe 7 or 8 sentinels. why? well let's go through each character individually to illustrate my point.

juro kurabe: what an absolute nothingburger of a character. his plotline is one of three amnesiac plotlines in the game, and while it's arguably the most important to understanding the plot, he's easily the most dull character. he has tame and meager reactions to the events that unfold in the story, his identity conflict fails to resonate when he's such a dullard, and overall he fails to evoke any pathos.

iori fuyusaka: another nothingburger character. she primarily exists to do anime tropey things like be late for class and run with toast in her mouth, crash into a cute boy and think it's love at first sight, and then trip and give the viewer a gratuitous panty shot (high school girl btw). there are interesting things about her, but much like juro, i would struggle to describe her with adjectives, which is usually a very bad thing for characterization. it's actually very impressive to me that her romance with ei does not take the cake for being the worst one in the game, considering how little the two interact and how one-sided said interactions are.

ei sekigahara: honestly i'm at a weird point with this guy because he was almost unquestionably one of my favorite characters, but he's also not that compelling once you get past his external conflict. i think he benefits largely from having one of the most interesting and compelling visual novel sections in the game, so i give him a lot more wiggle room despite most of his character being "stoic badass guy who is always frowning".

keitaro miura: at the risk of being harsh, he's completely unremarkable. sure, he has a fish out of water story, but hijiyama does as well, and he's 10x the character that keitaro is both in definition and compelling story. despite having played most of this game within the week, i can barely recall what even happens in keitaro's story. he ends up feeling like a side character to most other stories. he is the most "oh, right, that guy's in this game" character.

megumi yakushiji: i want to thank 13 sentinels for giving me a new character to greatly dislike in my life with this one. i think the hardest i laughed in my entire playthrough was when yuki was going through the list of sentinel pilots, got to megumi, and just briefly said "she's pretty dull" and quickly moved on. megumi is the most nothing of nothingburgers, and when we do get scraps of characterization, they make her seem not only unnecessarily cruel, but also foolish. her storyline is that she's trying to save her beloved (old juro) by listening to an evil (or at least british) cat by shooting witches. you do not have to be an anime scholar to see the PMMM reference, and while i don't watch anime, any bitch worth their salt knows you don't make a homura character have the most insultingly dull hetero romance of all time. megumi is a lifeless character because she is utterly incurious to the curious circumstance she finds herself is, is dutifully gullible, and is willing to sacrifice everything for an equally dull character. i think the greatest failing about this story is that we're never given a chance to see megumi/old juro as a romance until it's already dead. i think coming in on the tail end of a relationship and then seeing a character mourn it can definitely work (see: the ambiguous nature of shadow of the colossus), but this game works in the explicit and the intense details. having both of them be as fascinating as wallpaper tanks any interest i could have in their individual stories as well as when their stories intersect. at least make one of them interesting. throw me a fucken bone.

natsuno minami: fun character in that she is dumb as all shit and the game wants you to laugh at her constantly. still, she's curious and inquisitive, and even if her conclusions have a 30% batting average, it's at least fun to see a character attempt to do some level of problem-solving. i do hate how the game basically slaps her in panties for the entire game and acts like it's normal, not to mention how her story starts off with her almost immediately showing off her boobs (high schooler btw). but whatever. she passes the adjective test and i like how she plays off of a couple of characters, so at least she has that going for her. her romance with keitaro is completely token and comes out of a writer's asshole, but whatever. at least it's not juro/megumi.

nenji ogata: man, i am too easy. sure this guy is archetypal as hell but i'm a sucker for rough and tough guy with a sensitive side. it helps that nenji gets one of the better executed stories in his groundhog day loop. overall he was one of the characters who i always wanted to hear talk. he also benefits from having undoubtedly the best romance in the game with tomi because they both interact in great capacities, challenge each other, and also offer solace to each other during their respective difficulties. THIS is what the game needed more of!!

renya gouto: sure, he's a "cold-hearted and emotionless guy secretly is a good guy who has those he cares about" archetype that i've seen a thousand times before, and sure, he's not especially unique or well-executed compared to said thousand portrayals i've seen. but, he's kind of fun as a pseudo-antagonist in some of the stories and is a nice counter-balance for the cast. i'm not especially passionate about him, but as far as "characters as functions/devices" go, he's fine.

ryoko shinonome: sorry, even kira buckland couldn't save her from the nothingburger diagnosis. ryoko suffers from being far more interesting retroactively as the woman who causes everything to go to shit + a pseudo-antagonist in a lot of character stories. when you actually play as her? good god is it dull. amnesiac characters can still have personalities and express emotion. i get that ryoko's a sullen girl who has emotional trauma/baggage that she's repressed, but she has next to no emotional range beyond "im angry at character for wrong reason" and "im disaffected and disoriented uwaa x_x". compelling external conflict can elevate a character, sure (see: ei). but there has to be some base character to elevate in the first place.

shu amiguchi: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ifaoKZfQpdA the only positive i can say is that he's a character and therefore automatically superior to a third of the cast, but good christ is he unbearable. i get some people like the whole "playboy that's always skirt-chasing" type character, but it always falls flat for me because it usually just results in said character hounding women who are clearly not interested. shu has a somewhat interesting backstory being the clone of ida but the game doesn't do much with it and instead his story mostly serves as a vehicle to introduce the miyuki inaba subplot. i guess gun to the head i would rather take a character i dislike over a nothingburger character because at least they're making an impact.

takatoshi hijiyama: another standout character in the cast. memorable and has a down-to-earth story in a game that is trying too hard to be too much. his whole deal is coming to terms with his homosexuality on top of being a fish out of water, and while there are some cringey forced jokes (his obsession with yakisoba pan comes to mind), he has a strongly defined character with a compelling arc. my only complaint is that his romance with okino is very. . . i don't dislike it, and obviously i think there's value in showing a fleshed out gay romance. my problem lies in that there's a power dynamic in hijiyama/okino that doesn't really sit well with me. a lot of the time, okino doesn't display basic respect to hijiyama and often talks down to him or belittles him. and the scene where he completely violates hijiyama's boundaries/consent all under the guise of "well the machine says you like it when i tie you up lololol" is really. . . Bad. but whatever, most of my nitpicking comes out of resentment that i heard so much about this game having canon lgbt characters and then it has so much pedophilia pandering + general misogyny issues. but we'll get there.

tomi kisaragi: another good character, i like how she feels immediately defined from the word go. she's snarky, she's impetuous, she's rash, she's easily excitable, she's quick to judge, she's compassionate, etc. etc. probably one of my favorite characters in the game because she felt flawed in a very realistic teenager-y kind of way, and, as mentioned, her romance with nenji feels the most organic out of all of them by far.

yuki takamiya: i liked yuki! she's got a point of view that you can immediately identify and observe. she's had to learn to fend for herself growing up, and you can tell with how jagged and messy her social interactions can be. she's not well-spoken, but she's sincere. she was a compelling character to watch and i think it's a crying shame that she ended up having more romantic chemistry with natsuno than either had with their respective male love interests. i will say that the "yuki is originally natsuno's mom" plot point felt very unnecessary and strangely barely touched upon? like you could delete the few lines where it's even mentioned and virtually nothing in the game would change.

so, with that over and done with, perhaps you see my point. there's a divide in this cast between characters i actually like a lot and characters who do nothing for me. the thing that makes this worse is that a lot of these character stories hit the same beats and feel redundant. oh no, all the amnesiac characters reckon with the fact that they did something bad before they lost their memories. golly gee, there's a fish out of water coming to the 80s from a different period of time. there's a lot of fat that can be trimmed here to make the story leaner and more focused, which is what this game desperately needs. playing some of these stories sections felt like i was developing ADHD for how bored i'd get. this game really was a "sit down for five minutes and then realize how interesting it would be to suddenly do [household chore] instead" experience for me. would 8 sentinels be as snappy of a name? probably not, no. but it would make for a much tighter and more focused story.

beyond that, a greater issue with the game is the amount of pedophile pandering and general misogyny that's soaked into this thing. you have to be naked to pilot the sentinel, and, of course, every time a girl pilots the sentinel, her portrait suddenly shows her in a sexy and titillating pose meant to appeal to dudes who jack off to danganronpa porn or whatever. it's so disgusting and shameless, like cool, i'm glad i'm playing a game where a 15 year old girl is naked and showing off a fucking arched back while supposedly piloting a giant robot. thanks for that vanillaware. don't even get me started on how there's a Big Booba character who inexplicably wears a skintight catsuit that is laughably out of place in every cutscene it's shown because god knows we need gamers to be aroused during these boring dialogue sections. i almost feel like vanillaware is lowballing it's own audience with this type of pandering. "you bought the big robot game because you want tits and ass, right?" no, i wanted big robots.

and even if you cut out the rampant unnecessary sexual objectification, the writing for a lot of the girls in this game leaves a lot to be desired. they often lack agency in their own stories (yuki is controlled by the SIU, iori has no equity in her relationship with ei, ryoko is constantly being monitored by chihiro and renya, megumi is commanded around by the cat, etc.) in a way that their male counterparts don't. but whatever. i spent 138 paragraphs explaining why the game didn't work for me beyond the misogyny in it, god knows i can hope some of you can operate on good faith and understand that i did try to give this game a chance in spite of all this shit.

surprisingly, the most unabashedly positive things i have to say about the game are. . . its gameplay! i sit in the minority of people who seemed to actually like the RTS gameplay of this thing. maybe it's because it was extremely brainless and it gave me the skinnerbox-y number go up syndrome, but i did have a good time. it definitely could use refinement, better UI, and overall more diversity in its presentation and challenges. but as a base, it's good. it doesn't save the game from its shortcomings, but it was genuinely something i looked forward to any time i started to get bored out of my mind by the VN sections. part of me wonders if some of the VN dev time could have been used to add more meat to the RTS sections. hell, maybe restructure the game such that the VN sections are minimal and only serve as flashbacks for important plot info, and instead focus all your attention on establishing these characters in the RTS sections through their dialogue in the before and after mission portions. who knows, it could be even worse than what we got. but i would love something different than this.

overall, i just sit on a pile of disappointment with this game. i can almost see what people really adore about this, but i feel left out. this game suffers from complexity addiction in that it tries to have too many plot twists and too many reveals, to the point where i get burnt out on them. by the end of the game, i was rolling my eyes every time some twist happened. i'd just shrug and go "okay. why should i care." and often not get a decent answer. the story was where all the attention and polish went, and it unfortunately falls flat because it tries harder to be flashy than to tell a story rooted in well-defined and compelling characters. not every narrative implicitly has to be that, but what's the point of creating 13 protagonists if that's not your ultimate goal? it's the simple story of trying too hard to do something flashy that you fuck up the basics, like trying to flambé your steak while it's still raw.