Vanillaware’s 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim splits itself in two and refuses to pick a favorite. One half is a side-scrolling adventure through a fictionalized 1985 Japan. The other is a real-time strategy battle against waves of kaiju. Both halves work, and the seam between them is smoother than it has any right to be.
Trailer, via IGN.
Thirteen Students, One War
The game hands you thirteen high school protagonists, each with a separate arc, and tells their stories out of order. Juro Kurabe has strange dreams. Iori Fuyusaka has the same ones. Ei Sekigahara has no memory and a mysterious organization on his tail. Keitaro Miura and Takatoshi Hijiyama arrive from the last years of World War II.
The story jumps between 1945, 1985, 2025, 2065 and 2105. Sakura High School recurs across the eras. The Deimos, mechanical kaiju, arrive in 1985 to wipe out humanity, and each protagonist’s arc ends with summoning a Sentinel — a mecha that fights the Deimos and travels through time.
Keywords and the Thought Cloud
In Remembrance, you explore 2D environments and gather keywords. Those keywords enter a Thought Cloud database and unlock new dialogue, new internal monologues, new routes. Carry a keyword into an earlier scene and the story opens differently.
A flowchart tracks every character, and you can jump between scenes to try another approach. Make a wrong choice and the game rewinds to the start of the day. Already-seen events fast forward.
The Terminal Holds
Destruction mode is the payoff. Up to six characters pilot Sentinels and defend a terminal against kaiju waves. The terminal’s health depends on which units you place. Lose them all and the hub falls.
| Era | Setting | Status |
|---|---|---|
| 1945 | Final days of World War II | Besieged |
| 1985 | Shōwa-period Japan | Final stand |
| 2025 | Near future | Besieged |
| 2065 | Mid future | Besieged |
| 2105 | Distant future | Besieged |
A Slow Start That Earns Its Ending
The nonlinear structure is the point, not a gimmick. Thirteen arcs could easily collapse into noise; Kamitani’s script holds them together because the story routes keep circling back on each other.
The English localization, handled by Atlus West during the COVID-19 pandemic, proved challenging. Sales started slow in Japan before exceeding Atlus’s expectations. That tracks with the game itself: it asks for patience.
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