3.5/5 ★ – CinephilicCynic's review of 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim.

Many have praised the story, but I'm not convinced there's so much a story as a metric ton of plot. There are many Events Happening and multiple seismic shifts to the player's understanding of those events staggered throughout the runtime, but I struggle to see the point in it all. So things are not as they appeared to be appearing when I started the game -- so what? What does this add to these events' larger meaning? What do these events illuminate about the characters? I was certainly captivated by the story, eager to see where the next twist would take me. But when all the twisted knots were finally unwound, all I had left was a plain piece of string. The twists were what kept my attention, and, without them, there wasn't much left that clung to memory, even in the immediate days after finishing it. The characters are necessarily broad in their writing and presentation so as to distinguish them from each other and give the player some sense of who they are in the brief amount of time we spend in each's shoes. One can't help but wish that the narrative gave more time to also peak under each's hood a bit more rather than treating them as board game pieces on a table it's constantly flipping. It's certainly interesting to see Vanillaware prize story so much given its history of primarily gameplay-driven games. This game is basically an inverse DRAGON'S CROWN, whose "story" was little more than flavor text. Here, the gameplay is the perfunctory element, practically stapled to the side of the box. Problem is, I remember DRAGON'S CROWN quite fondly and vividly because its gameplay left an imprint. Now, months removed from the experience of playing 13 SENTINELS, I don't find myself reflecting much on it at all.