I found out about 13 Sentinels from one of the "games that were overlooked" videos on the internet. I'm always looking for a cheap game to pick up for multiple reasons: first, it's good to broaden my horizons and second, it's good to save money.
So with very little knowledge about what I was getting into, beyond the game studio being known for a great visual aesthetic, I was able to pick it up.
While I played through the entire game, I say this with all sincerity: what the hell was that?
There are three areas of importance in 13 Sentinels. First; the Story mode, where you click through dialog. There aren't even dialog trees, and at no point do you get to make a choice that matters: it's all just reading/listening to this story. Plus, there were multiple times when I was expected to engage in a task or activate a prompt and I had no idea what that thing was, so I wandered around just pressing X a lot.
That's the bulk of 13 Sentinels and it's boring. That isn't a game, it's a visual novel. Nothing against visual novels, but they aren't games. And I had bought something called a game.
In addition, the story was, in various parts, cringy as hell, creepy, or boring. Nobody has an arc, or nobody I can remember anyway, and the thirteen characters I have to click through don't feel like they have much substance.
However, you have to read the novel because that gives you points to spend on upgrades for the actual game: an event where you position up to six giant robots to repel a kaiju invasion. This part has a little strategy, as you pick from sentinels with different skill sets to take on different specialized kaiju. It's also very colorful, with battles that have explosions that made me feel like I was doing something cool while engaging in a fireworks display.
There's also an element of placing the right sentinel in the right place, and using special abilities appropriately to maximize your talents.
But it's incredibly short. Battles have a timer of about two minutes and while the game pauses that timer while you make decisions, the actual time spent playing is practically nothing.
In addition, the pilots have a very limited set of phrases so you hear them all the time it quickly becomes irritating and needs to be tuned out.
The final area of interaction is one where you "unlock" story points. I really didn't understand this part at all, because unlocking story points was what I did during the story element. This was just using 'special points' to unlock items from a list that were also referenced in the visual novel. Unlock all of them, and any future special points earned would go towards upgrade points for your sentinel.
All this part was, was clicking boxes, like I was taking an online quiz.
This game wasn't overlooked; there just wasn't a game to play.
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