Bonus Level: 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim
Dec. 7, 2023
Wow wow WOW.
This was SO GOOD. It starts off as an adventure story about time travel, giant robots, and an invasion of mechanical monsters, then immediately mutates into something much weirder and much MORE. One of the twistiest and most gripping science fiction stories I've experienced in ages.
The game is basically a tactical RPG, but in a "deconstructed" format — a charcuterie board instead of the usual deli sandwich. You're given a sequence of combat missions and a carousel of thirteen storylines, and you can order them somewhat freely. If you keep progressing on a single track, you'll eventually hit a sync lock, which only releases after you progress further on some other track. Most of the locks are staggered, though, so while you're always hungry to see what happens next on some thread you're blocked on, there's always multiple exciting things you could be doing.
The audio and visuals are, similarly, SO GOOD. I bought the soundtrack and have been listening to it on the regular ever since, and I absolutely loved all the 2D character art.
God, now I just want to replay it.
A Digression on the Gameplay Genre of the Walk n Talk
You might have seen me using the non-standard term "walk n talk" lately w/r/t certain video games. This is distinct from the meaning of that term in Sorkin-formula television — I'm referring to gameplay where the primary player action is walking through an environment and talking to NPCs. 13 Sentinels was the game that provoked me to start doing this, because a bunch of reviews I saw kept referring to the story segments as having the "visual novel" or "adventure game" nature, and neither of those is correct! Really the game is just a normal tactical JRPG, but its deconstructionist separation of the modes reveals something funny.
A JRPG combines the following elements of gameplay:
- Combat (or some system of contest standing in for it).
- Some system of increasing character abilities.
- Exploration and dialogue.
What do you call it when you need to refer to the third gameplay element independently? "The rest of the RPG" doesn't really satisfy, and also I think some reviewers were thrown off by the side-scrolling view in 13 Sentinels' story sections (as opposed to the top-down or over-the-shoulder views more common in RPGs). Also, just using a non-name description like "exploration and dialogue" can feel muddy, because there are other very different gameplay elements from other genres that those words could be describing.
(Sidenote: I'm giving short shrift to "western computer RPGs" in my analysis here, because I haven't played as many of those and because they're still RPGs and share the same primary gameplay elements. Anyway, compared to a JRPG they massively ramp up the character growth systems and the combat complexity, and trade an increase of player agency in the story for a decrease in total story coherency and narrative momentum; my argument below still basically applies.)
Contrast the list above with those other genre names; adventure game gameplay is:
- Inventory-based puzzles.
- Puzzle exploration and puzzle dialogue.
By which I mean: in addition to their narrative content, the dialogue and exploration and narration of an adventure game must significantly serve the needs of the puzzle gameplay, such that even portions of dialogue or scenery that have no bearing on any specific puzzle are still approached by the player in the investigative and ruminative mode appropriate to puzzle content. The gameplay of reading and gameplay of space is palpably different from an RPG; RPG-like dialogue and exploration tend to only have very lightweight puzzle elements, and this affects the way you approach reading them.
In turn, visual novel gameplay is:
Specifically, visual novels have no exploration component, and the player is not in direct dialogue with an environment. You often have no control over your avatar's location, and when you do it's limited to selecting from a menu. However, meaningful dialogue choices and branching paths are much more common, and that affects the gameplay of reading in its own way; JRPG dialogue spends more of its time on rails. (This is the main point where primarily considering CRPGs would change the analysis, btw.)
Finally, consider the "walking simulator:"
- Exploration (and narration and cutscenes).
In other words, the player is in direct dialogue only with the environment, and your connections to other characters are indirect. In games like Tacoma and Edith Finch, the player is an archaeologist-voyeur; instead of enacting character relationships in the present time of gameplay, you examine a story in the past through the shape it has imprinted onto the environment. In Firewatch, you actually do converse and enact a relationship with another character, but she is notably separate from the environment, a fellow investigator of the environment's story.
Anyway, into the implied gap here, I hereby drop the term "walk n talk" — a style of gameplay where you explore an environment and converse with characters, seeking to reveal and experience a story but not to solve a significant mechanical puzzle (which, if it was a player goal, would distort the "gameplay of reading" enough to push it into a different gameplay genre entirely, probably that of the "adventure game"). It's notable as one of the primary gameplay threads of JRPGs, but there are also many games that only consist of walk n talk gameplay — OneShot (which is part of an even-more specific tradition of short non-combat RPGmaker games influenced by Yume Nikki), literally every game ever made with the "Bitsy" lineage of tools, Wide Ocean Big Jacket, A Night in the Woods, Kentucky Route Zero, the Anthology of the Killer games, some of the interactive episodes of Homestuck, and even weird free-jazz first-person soundscape experiences like Tales From Off-Peak City. Some of these are wildly distinct from the narrative genre conventions and concerns of the JRPG, but I assert that they all share a gameplay genre.
I have seen at least one other independent usage of this term in the wild, by a developer writing the blurb for their own WIP game. They certainly did not get the phrase from me, but they were using it to describe the exact same gameplay genre as me; I take that as a vote of confidence in the term's usefulness and clarity.
Ok, thanks for coming to my ted talk, bye.
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