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Latest project from Vanillawareafter a complex pregnancy – not to say complicated – which lasted seven years, 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim made a big splash when it was released on playstation4, winning multiple awards and endorsements from big names in the gaming scene. A little less than a year later, it’s up to the players Switch to be able to find out. A console that seems perfectly adapted to the format because, if you have read our previewthis new game moves away from the studio’s usual action-RPGs to offer us what is basically a mixture of visual novel and RTS. A mixture not necessarily happy on paper, and which may lose some at the start of the game. Mechs, a cat, time travel, robots… hard to know where to turn. But hold on a little, because beneath this layer of complexity lies one of the greatest games to ever land on Nintendo’s console.





Vanillaware: These guys are stronger than you

In 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rimyou embody Juro, a young fan of kaiju movies. No, wait, actually you’re playing Yori, a high school student suffering from indescribable chronic fatigue. At the time for me, you’re actually in the role of Keitaro, a soldier of the Second World War. I could go on for a while, but you’ll understand where I’m coming from: as the name suggests, the title of Vanillaware offers you to embody thirteen protagonists, each with its own arc that will end up interweaving in a story that it would be very inappropriate to spoil you. It may seem dizzying at first glance. How to manage to follow all this, especially since the title places very few limits in the way you choose to advance in its story: it’s up to you to play a chapter of each character, or even to advance maximum in the history of each of them. Like a puzzle, you have the pieces and it’s up to you in which order to fit them together. And if we can be lost, the high quality of writing means that all the wagons will eventually fit together: encounter after encounter, plot twist after plot twist, the ramifications of each chapter will gradually unveil the dizzying landscape of a great sci-fi storywhich draws on multiple references to better divert them and manage to tell its own story.

Far from being a gimmickthis original way of telling a story allows Vanillaware to reveal all the facets of each character. Juro seems very likeable to you when you play him? Wait a while to play the story of such a student, in which he behaves like the last of the morons. I say Juro, but it is valid for each of the members of this choral cast. Far from being Manichaean, 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim understood that no one is perfect and that the common interest sometimes gets in the way of our personal interests. Resulting a story of unsuspected richness and quality, which will often make you doubt yourself. A story that handles the big issues as well as teenage love affairs, a period when desire often turns into fervor. Rage will take hold of you, tears will come to your eyes and, as a good book that is hard to put down, you will invest yourself as rarely in this adventure which has the good taste to end with a final as satisfying as it is moving, which will resonate with you long after the extinction of your console. Note in passing the very high quality of the Japanese dubbing and the French translation that accompanies it, which allow you to really immerse yourself in a universe that is not easy to access.

Digibeau

In order not to lose the player in this choral casting, Vanillaware appealed to all his knowledge of character designplacing each character in a box without ever locking them there: the hoodlum, the sportswoman, the binoclarde… So many archetypes underlined by the visual aspect, a little trick allowing you not to have to remember each of the names, which are a fortiori quite complicated. No, the clothes don’t make the monk, here no more than elsewhere, but the studio has nevertheless understood that the way we dress or move around still represents the reflection of a certain part of our soul. And if that’s not enough for you, 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim has an awesome codex, arguably the best I’ve seen in a work of its kind : unlocking as you progress in the story, it allows you to always have multiple references at hand that should serve you to underline or remind you of information that may have sometimes been given to you at the bend of ‘a sentence. Because yes, even a visual novel can and should make efforts in terms of accessibility.

If I talk about visual novel because of its focus on dialogue, 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim actually comes a little closer in its gameplay to point and click 2D. If, here, speaking with characters will not add items to your inventory, new words will be added to the flowchart your thoughts: interacting with them or confronting them with your interlocutors will allow you to unlock new ones or advance in the story. Very easy to access, the system does not fall into the pitfalls of so many others and will not lose you (nearly) never : we always see where the developers want to take us and how to get there. Trial and error is even rewarded with little sketches of “everyday life” allowing you to learn more about the characters. This adventure aspect also has another advantage: that of allowing you, more than in other productions Vanillawareto take advantage of sublime decorations created by the studio, mixing hand drawings and a work on the lights which borders on perfection and gives the title a real character, with a nostalgic aspect which fits perfectly with the subject. As pointed out in the previewwe very often have the impression of seeing works of art come alive before our eyes to imprint their melancholy on our retinas.

Between tradition and modernity

Beyond this work on the sets and the staging, the animations of the characters are also to match, with the impression of entering an interactive anime – and again, it’s not every day that you see an anime as well…animated as 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim is. When to the music composed by Hitoshi Sakimoto (Final Fantasy XII, Valkyria Chronicles…), she knows how to be discreet, but when she hits, she hits hard and where it should be, with a retro-futuristic side that fits perfectly with the subject of the game: retro, for the adventure phases, and futuristic for the RTS part, which makes you embody the mechas piloted by your characters in epic battles against dozens of enemies. The graphic aspect of these differs greatly from the part digico and offers something far more figurative, giving off a heady feeling of being a general directing a battle via his self-controlled tower. Your characters are stripped down to the bare essentials, while enemies will be represented by voxels exploding into hundreds of pixels – something that will resonate strongly with one of the endgame twists that I won’t spoil for you. Note in passing thata real optimization work has been done on this Switch version : without losing the “fireworks” side of these multiple effects, the console no longer seems to suffer as much as its big sister the PS4and the framerate remains stable in all circumstances.

Well separated from the main adventure, but far from being optional, the fights mix real-time strategy and tower defensesince each time you will have to defend a specific point on the map for a given time (or defeat all enemies before, if you can). Between Sentinels state-of-the-art flying cars and old mechs having to navigate the streets on foot, each of the characters will have their specificity, their strengths and weaknesses, and you will quickly learn to balance your team according to needs : if the large swarms of enemies are particularly sensitive to area attacks, some “tanks” will require more aggressive characters who hit hard. It is up to you, therefore, to choose the right elements each time, but also to improve the attacks such as the mechas of your characters via a menu which is, it must be admitted, a bit loaded (an automatic optimization button would not have been refused). And if, in normal mode, the battles are not very difficult, do not worry: it is through its narration that 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim will make you suffer.