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.