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Spoke a little too early last week when I said I would stop listening to weebs. Obviously, if, for example, I was sitting next to a weeb on a long flight and accidentally slipped that I used to watch Pokémon as a child, then I would have no choice but to listen to a weeb, continuously, to the next four or five hours. And it’s because I listened to some weebs this week that I tried 13 Sentinels: Anus Rim. I mean Aegis Rim. Oh god, I swear people are trying to make it easy for me now. A visual anime novel interspersed with tactical fighting games that is a few years old, but which has only just been transferred to the switch, which is probably the best place for it, because it makes it much easier to hurry to hide under the bed , when you hear your mother come in. But to my own surprise, I got a little into it. And it was not as it was with Persona, where it attached to me an intriguing original premise, before gradually evolving into the standard plan “teens use the power of friendship to kill God”. 13 Sentinels’ premise is as dazzlingly standard as anime goes, it sounds like a joke. It centers on a bunch of high school students who have to pilot giant robots. And the method they use to summon their giant robots is to wander up into their miniskirts and flash their juicy thighs like desperate hitchhikers.
Like I said: it sounds like a joke. I did not even mention that there is a talking cat in it. Or the part where teens can only control their giant robots by dressing completely naked and rubbing on the equipment. Why is it, games? Oh, because clothes can disrupt the cyberneural control interface or something. So why are some of the characters still wearing glasses and hair ornaments? Oh who cares. Come and watch this anime teenage girl, take off all her clothes, strap on a robotic vault horse and bend her back like a cat being stepped on. So what did I like about this game? Oh just calm down Yahtzee you have made it very clear – SHUT UP, YOU. Believe me, this is not my kind of porn. And even if it was, there are plenty of places I could go to get it that would not be so annoyingly boring with the camera angles. My interest was aroused on three fronts: First, the high school visual novel share that coexisted with giant robot battles triggered, the same as Persona did, my enjoyment of normal life put together with the bizarre as a theme. Second, this is one of the more unique ways I’ve ever seen a video game story come across. Third, that story is completely fucking barmy.
I mean, we start with a nice straightforward opening premise with thirteen high school kids having to pilot giant robots to fight an alien invasion, and within a few hours it’s turned out that some of them are time travelers from the future, and some of them are time travelers from the past, and some of them are secret robots, and one of them is secretly a man. It’s not even getting into the talking cat. You also get to see all the events in the plot essentially in random order, which brings us back to the unique way the story is brought across. How it works is that you first go through some quick prologue chapters and introductory battles that introduce us to all thirteen main characters and tutorialize the basics of the battle, and then when it’s over, the game basically makes a big vomit in your face. . BLERG! Here are all the character’s plot lines. BLERG! Here are all the combat missions. BLERG! Here is the archive library that acts as the cork board and the ball of red string you will need to find out this amount of old scoundrels. Off. What, so it’s up to me to decide what order I should do everything in? I can not handle that responsibility! I once went to an impromptu jazz club and woke up in an alley with the neck of a double bass stuck in my ass.
But I randomly chose a character, and the next chapter in their story went on to gather yet another blob of confused testicles on my already filled plate. The story chapters consist of a fairly typical visual novel experience, where you walk around a puppet theater of paper and click on things until either the dialogue begins to repeat itself or we trigger the next plot flag. And in general, one can rely on that flag to make something completely barmy happen, which is part of what kept me interested, because somehow it was always something new and boastful. Oh, I guess I better deliver these papers to the staff room. Tum te tum – oh no, I’m being squeezed by a giant robot that holds my future self with impractically large breasts, cliffhanger fades to black. But if we then click on that character again, we’re back in the staff room, and they think “Boy, that was definitely hard to get away from my big plaster, adult I. At least on those papers.” And now we need to find the second plot flag that can also be triggered in this space. Oh, it turns out I can go to the vending machines now that a hired killer from another dimension is holding me hostage with a phaser gun. Perhaps this is my opportunity to confess my immortal love for him.
Over time, I found that there is a kind of linear order in things – some chapters do not unlock until you do certain other chapters, or complete the combat missions up to a certain point, or stick a banana in your ear and drop a lesbian. – and just for fun, I decided to see how far I could get in the story before I had no choice but to do a combat mission. And I meant “just for fun” quite literally, because the combat missions are definitely not fun. They consist of staring at a radar screen, where some glowing dots represent our team of mini-skirts-carrying giant robots, and then some more glowing dots appear, representing the evil ones, we tell the one closest to that fire some ballistic luminous dots, and then the evil luminous dots disappear. Phwoar, it was definitely an epic apocalyptic conflict that we just hinted happened, yet trick back into the mission preparation screen and spend ten tedious minutes picking up your upgrades. Which is always a struggle, because I can only decide what I need to upgrade, knowing what my shortcomings are. And I do not seem to have any. Evils appear, I react, the evils disappear, I was 5-star S ranked every mission on my first trip without effort. Any amount of upgrading feels like mounting a nuclear reactor turbine on my bike to help me turn the handlebars.
And this was on medium difficulty. Christ knows what “easy” is. I imagine you could accidentally get 5-star S-rank easy mode by knocking the controller to the floor while the system is off. But because I had postponed the combat missions for as long as I could, I found that I was unable to continue the plot before I in turn cleared about twelve of the shit. It’s a devastatingly boring ball, you can push it away as hard as you want, but it has to swing back and cover you sooner or later. Christ knows I made an effort. Just a few more of these missions that are about as exciting as working on a shift in a supermarket checkout that for some reason has five marginally different barcode scanners, I said to myself, and we can return to very close on finding teenage girls skirts. But I just could not do it. Eight missions in I officially stopped worrying about the impossibly large breasts of the future lady and gave up doing something else. See, 13 Sentinels should have realized that war in the future is not the interesting part of Terminator 2. The interesting part is when the T800 finally learns what it is to cry. And then it goes haywire for a few seconds and turns into a Shredded Wheat commercial from the 90s. Although it might just be in the version I was recording.
