So I finally completed 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim last night before bed and I'm finally getting a chance to detail my thoughts.
Overall I rather enjoyed it. The combat sections were enjoyable enough and I was drawn into the various storylines of the 13 characters(to one degree or another) and I just wanted to see where the fuck all of this was going, considering all the twists and turns and such they kept throwing at me. To be fair, I got a bit annoyed at some of them just being the same loop over and over again but this time you had to find a different way to end the Loop in order to trigger a different ending(Juro's was particularly egregious for this for a while. I thought I was gonna be stuck on the same afternoon forever) but I was also kinda amused by how the different characters each had their own special vibe to it. Natsuno had a whole UFO enthusiast/Sci-fi lover thing going with her little "Alien" buddy in her backpack, Megumi was playing Hitman for a talking cat(and of course, nothing weird about that) and I swear Takatoshis arc was mostly chasing a cat around to find enough loose change to get him a Yakisoba Pan.
But still, despite throwing every Sci-fi trope in the fucking book at this plot, I guess it kinda does work in the end, even if if it's one of the most convoluted fucking plots I think I've personally tried to Navigate in a video game(aside from Xenogears) and rivaling Thomas Pynchon novels in convolutedness. Not saying it doesn't have hole and such, but I was willing to just keep rolling with it for as long as it took.
Combat mission wise I can see why they went with the glorified Radar display for the UI considering how much goddamn dakka I eventually ended up dropping everywhere to hold off the Hordes coming at me from every direction. Especially when you considering that most of the missions take place in 2 minutes of "real" time or less, but since you spend a lot of time giving orders and pausing you might be playing more like 15 or 20. Considering each battlefield is a 2x2 km area that does make sense that you're able to move around so fast, though ironically when you see the Kaiju or Sentials moving in the story bits they're moving far, far slower then the combat sections seem to imply. Though I guess we can chalk that up to the animation budget, much like most of the "fights" we see(like the one in the bathroom) are entirely offscreen.
One thing that does kinda bug me, so I'm gonna put it in spoiler tags.
So 1945 is basically a simulated area, much like the rest of them, created as one of the eras for people to live in. Fair enough but exactly which people were meant to live in 1940's Japan I have to question, considering that during the 1930's and 1940's Japan was a military government that could be described as Fascist and by 1945 Japan was on the edge of Ruin, even before the Atomic bombs were dropped. So apparently there were people invovled in Project Ark who apparently liked the idea of simulating that period of Japanese History, including losing WW2, as a cool place to live, or something. Unless I missed something vital, it sounds like someone wanting to live in a Simulation of Nazi Germany during the 1940's, including the inevitable downfall of the Reich, while being smack dab in the middle of it, not a passive observer
Now, whether or not someone else would enjoy this game no doubt is based on two things:
1.) How much the story and characters are engaging them.
2.) How much you're into the strategy game aspect
Because ultimately you have to deal with both, since story bits inevitably get gated off by progress in the strategy game part and the story provides a hell of a lot of context for what the hell you're doing here. To be fair, I guess it's possible to ignore most of the story mode and just do the strategy game portion, though considering you earn a lot of free "money" needed to upgrade the sentinels by doing the story mode, you'd probably have more and more difficulty after a while keeping up with the hordes of Kaiju...and if you're skipping the story you might as well be playing other games that don't really even bother with story(like most strategy games). There's also a difficulty slider that presumably allows you to just plow through much of the strategy stuff if you place it on Easy mode, though honestly there were only like 3 or 4 missions I didn't S rank with little issue playing on normal, just by using the most effect weapons/sentinels for the mission(Sentry Guns end up being serious gamebreakers much of the time, because it's like dropping like 10 more sentinels that don't need any managing onto the field and just letting them crowd control ). Hell, during the final mission, where I was pretty much supposed to run out the clock against just wave after wave of every fucking type of Kaiju, by the time the Timer had run out and ended the mission, I'd almost completely cleared the map with barely any damage taken to my Sentinels. Though after a while it becomes very clear that some weapons are very, very OP when upgraded and used properly(Sentry guns, railguns, Missile Rain, Demolisher Blade).
