When I first listened to 1989, I was greatly underwhelmed. I was on a pop high after discovering E•MO•TION (Carly Rae Jepsen’s third studio album) and Dedicated (Carly Rae Jepsen’s fourth studio album) and was looking for another pop album to obsessively listen to. 1989 is decidedly not as good as those albums, so I moved on and never really looked back. Even after listening to the rest of Taylor Swift’s discography, 1989 remains as one of my least favorite albums of hers. Yes, it is the Taylor Swift album, the album that propelled her stratospheric rise to stardom, but it also feels like her album that doesn’t have an identity of its own, an awkward transition between her country roots and Billboard Top 100 pop. This isn’t to say 1989 is a bad album, far from it. It’s a remarkably consistent album (at least if we pretend “Bad Blood” doesn’t exist) and has an all time great in “New Romantics”, but it doesn’t stand up against the slow, therapeutic ballads of Folklore, the pure emotional catharsis of Red, or the authentic self expressive portrait of Speak Now, at least in my mind. 

Yet, I thoroughly enjoyed 1989 (Taylor’s Version). Through all of the calamitous, radical changes in my life, knowing that the same album that underwhelmed me two years ago still underwhelms me now is oddly comforting. There’s a sort of serenity and calmness running through the album, depicting a more mature Taylor Swift. Where the original album art shows a postcard with an obscured Swift on it wearing a shirt with seagulls, the new one shows her happy, outside, hair blowing in the wind, seagulls flying above her. Taylor Swift has found peace within herself, finally content with her lifetime of achievement (including, apparently, going for the world record of carbon emissions), and this energy runs through the album for better or worse. 

On one hand, the resentment that shines through in the originals is missing – the new mixes are fine, but when Swift says lines like “Why’d you have to go and lock me out when I let you in?” in the original, she truly, genuinely means it. On the other hand, it’s this calmness that allows her to pull the ballsy move of making a song called “Slut!” a mild, placid love song – a strange dichotomy, but it makes lines like “And if they call me a slut/You know it might be worth it for once” feel like the most romantic thing an artist whose entire oeuvre is filled with sappy love songs has ever said . 1989 (Taylor’s Version) is a bold reimagining of her iconic album, trading in the kinetic energy of the original for something more meditative – time will tell whether this move holds up in the future, but for now, it’s a move from an industry juggernaut that seems to be paying off commercially and critically. 

The mecha genre – science fiction works generally involving massive robots – has been a cornerstone of Japanese culture ever since its conception. Yet, there’s a large problem with mecha: Watching massive machines battle with each other gets stale after a while. Earlier works such as Mobile Suit Gundam used political intrigue to solve this issue, but director Hideaki Anno figured out a better solution – mecha is a perfect vehicle to explore the human condition. This might seem to be a strange combination, but really, a mech is a culmination of all human advancement and thus works as a symbol for the enormity of what it means to be human. And this gambit paid off – Anno’s anime Neon Genesis Evangelion became massively popular and revitalized the regressing mecha genre. 

Try as they did, no animation studio could recreate the lightning in a bottle that was Neon Genesis Evangelion. Even Anno’s remake of his own show fell well short of the original. For over 20 years, no mecha anime managed to blend action and philosophical musings quite as well as Evangelion, and it seemed like nothing ever would. Then, in 2019, 13 Sentinels Aegis Rim came out. 

You probably don’t know about game development studio Vanillaware. They have certainly made beloved games, but they never really managed to have a mainstream presence. If you do know one thing about Vanillaware, it’s the gorgeous oil painting artstyle their games all use. While this aspect of their games was certainly impressive, 13 Sentinels Aegis Rim elevates this through its transcendent lighting. Any single screenshot you take of the game is wallpaper worthy because of how perfectly every area is enveloped with light and how effectively the said lighting is used to reflect the emotions of the characters. 

But obviously, being visually stunning does not instantly make a game a masterpiece. Hell, there are so many photorealistic games now that the visual aspect merely places 13 Sentinels at the starting line. What elevates the game to hall of fame status is how effectively 13 Sentinels creates a Neon Genesis Evangelion for the new generation while never feeling like a plagiarization of the seminal anime series. 

13 Sentinels takes place in multiple timelines and follows 13 protagonists, each living in different times with only one thing connecting them – they all have the ability to summon a “Sentinel”, a mech designed to fight “Deimos”, monsters capable of travelling through time. This is where the gameplay comes in – the player controls these sentinels in a hybrid real time/turn based RPG system (time stops while giving commands). While the gameplay never manages to be as enthralling as the story, it nevertheless is quite fun and synergizes well with its narrative half as you truly get to control the outcomes of the battles that the characters experience.  Back to the story – it’s really, really confusing when you first start playing. 13 Sentinels follows in an achronological order of the player’s decision, as they are mostly free to play through the protagonists’ stories in whatever order they wish. This sounds convoluted, but it works because the game prevents players from seeing major events without proper context, requires every single event to be seen before the climactic battle, and provides a useful archive of events, characters, and any important items that can be viewed at any time. The result of this bold choice? 13 Sentinels manages to be just as riveting, as emotionally evocative, and as compulsively bingeable as the best of television. If you still have doubts about video games as an artform, games like 13 Sentinels prove not only that video games are art, but that the merits of video games can create stories impossible to tell in any other way.