I picked this game up based on reviews and recommendations without ever really knowing what I was getting myself into. I played it on Switch which is a late and slightly enhanced port of the original PS4 release. It's made by Vanillaware, a Japanese development house probably unknown to most unless you get into some of the niche-r JRPGs like Odin Sphere, Dragon's Crown, Muramasa: the demon blade etc. Vanillaware is well known for an iconic visual style by studio founder and lead designer George Kamitani. It's an almost painted sort of look that most of their titles share and it's always supremely beautiful filled with all sorts of lighting effects and gorgeous animation. Anyway, 13 Sentinels at its core is a visual novel played out from a side-scrolling perspective. I say "at its core" because there is some actual gameplay in here in the form of tower defense/RPG type sequences. You can freely choose which mode you play as they are separated but still form a cohesive narrative. And boy what a narrative it is. 13 Sentinels borrows tropes from all over science fiction, time-travel, aliens, androids, mind-hacking, interdimensional travel, and of course the titular mechs (sentinels) and plays some subtle homage to many media properties like Neon Genesis: Evangelion, Puella Magi Madoka Magika, Terminator, the Matrix etc. You play as 15 (I never figured out where the 13 in the title came from) protagonists each with their own part of the story. Each story segment is roughly 15-20 minutes long and comprises of a couple key scenes. After that you get kicked back to the character menu and can choose who you want to follow next. The story is very specifically non-linear, you jump between characters whose stories overlap but also there's a time element and so scenes might be taking place in the past or future, it's not always clear. Essentially you are given that there will be an invasion of your city (which comprise the tower defense segments) and you slowly piece together what's going on and why. The story doles out information without really respecting order so sometimes you might understand a scene better because you saw another scene which gave you hints to what's going on. Or sometimes it's just really confusing. But as you get further it's a bit like a blurry image that slowly comes into focus. You can start to contextualize some scenes, not entirely, but enough to get the gist of what happened. Still, it's very complex and even at the end I felt I only understood about 90% of it.
Story segments are sidescrolling and each scene plays out with conversations. You talk to some characters who might reveal some information. Once you have a piece of information you can either think it over or you can use it as a conversation topic. It's all very simple and guided. There's a very finite number of interactions you can take and it makes it very clear which ones you've already tried. Occasionally you'll get into looping segments where you can choose a number of different outcomes based on who you talk to. These parts I found to be a bit more interesting as you sometimes need to pay attention to certain characters who might appear in the background. There was only one part I found particularly frustrating and it's because you need to talk to a certain character in a certain looping time window otherwise the options to advance will not appear. As mentioned the art in these scenes is fantastic. Almost every scene take place at golden hour just to make it that much prettier but perhaps to add a bit of surrealism too similar to Evengelion's forever summer. Backgrounds are rich and vibrant, and remind me of some of the best fighting game backgrounds. Voice acting too is top notch. I went through using Japanese with English subtitles, though the Switch version apparently has new English audio options.
Instead of picking a new character chapter you can also pick a new mission on the battle mode. It's pretty clear that battle-mode isn't the main attraction but it's still good enough to be engaging. You get to pick a load-out of characters each mission and there's a few cooldown mechanics to make you choose different ones each time. Each mech has it's own set of weapons you can customize and upgrade using spoils you get from both story and battle-mode chapter completions. Waves of enemies will appear on the map and try to attack a central terminal that you must defend. Each mech gets a "turn" with real-time cooldown very similar to ATB Final Fantasies. Each turn you can either have the mech move to a new location or use one of its weapons. Different weapons can produce different lengths of cooldown and you need to use them strategically based on what you are fighting. For instance, G1 mechs are hand-to-hand and deal lots of damage but can't hit flying enemies so you need to use EMP weapons to bring them to the ground. It's overall pretty easy, in fact I never failed a mission though some were more sloppy than others because my load-out strategy was lowest-level characters rather than optimized for the enemy type. Later missions can be overwhelming with the amount of enemies and I'm not sure if I just needed to upgrade a bit more or if I was fundamentally missing a strategic piece. Perhaps the most interesting decision here though is the visual representation of the battles. You don't actually see enemies or mechs but rather a bunch of icons on a map. In this way battles are very abstract. This seems to be done so it can have much larger enemy hordes (literally hundreds at a time) and probably production budget as well. Instead the visuals you get to give the weapons flavor are basically animated gifs that play out when you hover over the move in the menu. However, one really good aspect here is the sound design. Attacks might just be some particle effects but the sounds pack a lot of umph and help to make it satisfying.
So in the end I played another visual novel and this might be one of the best. The narrative though complex was gripping, the production values were phenomenal for a 2D game. The battle segments where good but I think that's where I'd really have liked to see changes. I understand the trade-offs but I can't help but feel it might have been better if they focused less on enemy swarms and more on strategic gameplay. This also could have allowed them to make a less abstract visualization of the battles. I'm thinking something like Front Mission. As is, it just doesn't have enough depth even with all the RPG systems laid on top. The game comes to what I felt was a pretty satisfying conclusion, I had my doubts given how the early segments spit out crazy tropes but it does manage to reign them back in. This is a great game for anyone interested in visual novels and I highly recommend it.
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