13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim / 十三機兵防衛圏
Genre: VN + real time tactics
Summary:
A non-linear time travel mystery adventure! You follow the adventures of 13 sentinel pilots as they attempt to thwart a sudden invasion of kaiju and understand why it is happening. The core of the game is the Remembrance mode, which is a VN adventure where you can progress each different character’s story to get all the pieces of the mystery. There’s also the Destruction mode where you control the battles against the kaiju. Everything you unlock in these modes goes into the Archive, which you can use to replay or review the mystery so far.
Availability: Switch, PS4
Time to Beat: Howlongtobeat: 35.5 hours (my playthrough took 42.5 hours)
Personal Opinion:
From a Japanese learning perspective, it was one of Game Gengo’s most recommended games, and when I played it, I had a great time. It’s actually the video game story I’ve enjoyed the most in the past 5 years.
From a learning point of view It’s pretty compartmentalized into scenes that can be taken in pretty flexible chunks. I think it’d be a fun experience to go through the game and put the mystery together as a group for people who haven’t played it before. It’s also got a lot of features like the replayable audio in the log and full on replayable scenes that make it pretty good for language learning.
I know a lot of language learners are apprehensive about sci-fi. In general I’ve found there’s two types of sci-fi. There’s the one which coin a lot of new terms which are quite challenging (Railgun comes to mind) and then there’s one where the sci-fi terms are just a lot of katakana English (like タイムトラベル and ドロイド - bet you can read them!). When I played it I had a lot less Japanese skill than I had now and I found the difficulty came more from the plot than the language most of the time. One of the hardest word is from the title which is 機兵 - literally machine soldier but I think it’s sort of punning on 騎兵 (cavalry) also? Anyway, even the Japanese logo translates it to Sentinel.
Thoughts on schedules and non-linearity
One thing about doing it as a club is deciding how to deal with the non-linearity. The prologue and the ending are relatively linear but the middle 80% of the game has a lot of choice as to what you do. There’s two types that matter for the club - the first is the stuff you select from menus, like which character to play next, or when to do battles mode, while the second is that some of the scenes themselves have branching paths within them.
So the way the game itself handles it is that you do eventually have to do all the branching paths within a scene, and eventually it will lock characters behind other characters or battle mode to avoid getting too spoilery for other routes. That said, there will still absolutely be things which will either be a big reveal or “Oh, I figured that out already” depending on which order you play the characters. For me that’s part of the fun, every route contributes something to resolving the mystery. I watched an LP in English after I finished the game and the streamer picked a very different order to me, so what was for me the penultimate reveal was something they found very early on, and something that was long established for me was a late reveal for them.
My suggestion for how we handle that as a club then is:
- When a scene has branching paths, then the assignment for that week will cover all the branching paths. That way we don’t have to give spoilers by telling people which paths to do.
- While there’s multiple characters available to play, we do a poll on which routes to cover next week and basically pick like the top 3/4 each week and progress them until the game locks them out again
- Having played the game once and watched it once, my feeling is the battle mode is best left until the game starts telling you to do the battle mode in character unlock conditions
Pros
- Remembrance mode is 99% voice acted
- All lines in Destruction mode are voice acted (though sometimes the voice line is abbreviated)
- Pausable cutscenes
- 99% of the dialogue is in the text log with replayable audio (exceptions: background dialogue and combat chatter)
- You can replay any scene in the archive mode at any time
- The time travel setting lets you see multiple periods of Japan
- Supported by the Agent texthooker if you play it on an emulator
Cons
- If you saw “interactive non-linear time travel mystery” and thought, “Wow, I bet the plot is complicated”, then you would be correct.
- Normal dialogue text sort of floats on the backgrounds, which can be noisy, which might make it harder to read. You can always listen or read it on a black background in the log though.
- The font used in the real time tactics portion is both tiny and stylized
- Fanservicey elements may bother people - Natsuno’s most common outfit (as in the cover) is anime style gym bloomers and characters show a lot of skin in their in-mech dialogue portraits. It’s not a NSFW game by any stretch, but it’s probably earned its Teen rating and that’s worth mentioning.
- I think you need a Japanese e-shop copy to get Japanese text
