This is an incomplete list of 13 “Sentinels” you will encounter: Talking Cats. Time travel. Time travel, but that’s not the case. Android clone. Android clone. Amnestics. It looks like a Wall-E robot. UFO underground. Oh, this is of course the story of 13 high school students entering the giant mecha to fight monsters.
In order to figure out how they ended up in trouble and where the monsters they were fighting came from, you can track each protagonist separately. Each storyline unfolds with the other 12 storylines in a chronological manner, so you will soon feel like you are putting together the puzzles of the story to form a larger whole. Juro was an ordinary teenager in 1985. He began to wonder why he continued to have a dream of surrealism, and this dream seemed to be unfolding in the way of his favorite science fiction movie. Shu Amiguchi is chatting with famous pop singers on TV. Natsuno Minami travels through time and space with the help of the aforementioned Wall-E to save him from the men in black. Takatoshi Hijiyama is a young soldier. He accidentally traveled from 1945 to 1985 when he was investigating a spy who was dressed in a dress and said more than I did. At the same time, the separate 30-layer “destruction” mode includes real-time tower defense battles against sea monsters, depicting a large-scale battle at the end of the story in chronological order.
Although the horizontal scrolling mechanism and cute 2D art style in the story section make it instantly recognizable as a Vanillaware game, 13 Sentinels’ story focuses more than any of its previous versions. The combat part is a great way to improve your feeling, otherwise it feels like a very static game, but you need to invest in the characters and the many mysteries surrounding them to really enjoy yourself. Initially, it was just a series of technical terms and names and randomly revealed information, and slowly and surely-in fact, it doesn’t matter, you can learn everyone’s name, but the finer details remain the same, a wild idea The jungle is deliberately trying to keep up.
13 Sentinels usually feels like a visual novel, because you can use a system called “Cloud Sync” to confuse the story by tapping and tapping the menus in the adventure game to inspire various keywords and events. The cloud is a literal thought bubble that contains every important information that the character collects, which you can then use in conversations. Sometimes in order for the story to develop, you need to access a piece of information and then listen to the character’s thinking or mention it. It will never tell you what the next step is. Unfortunately, this may cause you to move on a certain screen for a while or browse through all keywords again in the hope of encountering something new. Each character spends most of his time doing the same thing over and over again-for example, in Juro’s story, every day always starts in his classroom at the end of the course, and before you trigger a keyword, you do Many conversations are slightly off. Whenever the excitement happens, then it becomes worthwhile to wait.
There are some narrative shortcomings worth mentioning. 13 Sentinels basically have nothing to say-it’s all world construction. Characters often make monologues through numerous exhibitions. Plot loopholes are usually solved through a role-playing, just a handy thing, which is especially frustrating when certain elements only make the whole story more complicated. Like many Japanese games with a war background, it does not shrink from romantic patriotism. According to the unwritten quirky story narration rules in popular media, a gay relationship in this game must be a tragic relationship, and it proposes that gender bending is the only option for a truly successful romantic love. If there are 13 sentinels, I will feel It’s more troublesome. Like all romance novels of Vanillaware, this is not a story. In this story, the characters will meet each other once before they are determined forever.
Real-time battles are full of monsters of all shapes and sizes, all represented by tiny icons, filling the screen until the frame rate is packed up and the next train is taken home. You can choose to directly control the formation of six frontline fighters, while the rest are on standby at any time using defensive skills and enhanced effects. From melee to flying support mechas, the Sentinels are divided into four different classes, each of which brings different skills. The goal is always the same-travel through waves of enemies and protect the Aegis portal. If the enemy touches the portal or the pilot is killed, the game is over. For most of these battles, any attack you can use is enough to kill more monsters at a time. Using the Vanillaware (typical) method with normal difficulty, S rank is not so much a performance technique as a performance technique. It is acting skills. expect. Later, when you have to make real tactical decisions and invest money to distinguish different monsters to develop strategies, the game will reach its absolute best. The battle I almost lost was definitely the best, filled with the hoarseness of laser cannons, and the pilots rattled in the pod and yelled at each other.
Although I am still trying to explain the game too much, but in a good way, YouTuber Patrick (H) Willems recorded a video called “Modern Gonzo Blockbuster”. He described the Gonzo blockbuster as “a movie full of ruthless imagination”, “not afraid of being stupid, weird or old-fashioned”, and perhaps most importantly, the film “wants to show us many spectacular new worlds and sights, suitable characters.” Another important feature of such movies is that they tend to make you say things like “wait, bear” and “this is not just what happened.” For example, he used movies such as “Aquaman” and “Jupiter Rising”. 13 Sentinels is definitely a Gonzo. The game finally caught up with the movie. Congratulations, we can retire.
If you accept the basic ridiculousness of anything you encounter, 13 Sentinels will still feel coherent and cohesive, most likely because many of the ingredients it uses are familiar. The whole thing has undeniable 80s ambitions, which may be due to its inspiration from the animations and movies of the 80s. These inspirations also inspired most of Huanqi science fiction (“Pacific Rim”), I dare say. The Japanese voice actors (the DLC will provide English dubbing on the first day) convey everything with great enthusiasm, and Hitoshi Sakimoto and his team’s excellent soundtrack in Basiscape highlights this, and everyone is working hard. You are forbearance Can’t help being fascinated.
Except for the most basic premise of the game, there is nothing that cannot be described, which is what makes it so great. However, writer and director George Kamitani (George Kamitani) took great care to ensure that players can track events-in fact, most of the stories happened in a high school in 1985, which helps the whole experience, even if not Knowing the origin, players around the world may be familiar with the science fiction used (this is also a global attraction that led Atlus to localize the game in the first place). In addition, there is Vanillaware’s patented event log, as well as a large vocabulary, in which you can re-read any information collected, from the way the phaser works to the localizer’s notes about the Japanese anti-counterfeiting talks in the 1980s. There are narrative reasoning behind everything you see on the screen. I used to think of Hideo Kojima in details.
I think this kind of absurd entertainment is absolutely necessary, especially in games, because madness is driven by the desire to go all out. Movies and games have reached the technical limit, and it is difficult to surprise the audience on a technical level. Therefore, the surprise lies in the unattended and pleasant enthusiasm. This is why the 13 sentinels are so important to me. As a passion project of Kamitani, two games were completed in a game with only 29 players, which reminded me of the effort made to make the game. Before we as players tend to automatically compare what we play with the biggest thing that already exists, it’s easy to forget the mystery of where developers and publishers are covering the whole process. This way of thinking is difficult to enjoy the feat of originality displayed. “Sentinel” slowly squeezed onto the screen, which filled me with the sense of awe in a stunning movie, because he knew that Vanillaware programmers didn’t know how to design such sequences, but they were essential to the vision of the game, so they spent It took years to figure it out. This is a good reminder that even the most experienced team takes a lot of time to take risks and try new things. The tremendous effort to create a combination of familiar games and new games has made it Vanillaware’s best game to date, and one of my favorite games of the year.