no, it’s true. Leifthrasir’s combat was really enjoyable in the way Muramasa’s was, at the least. fights never felt dull or tedious, to me.
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Tbh, I am here for a director who is super horny for high-fives.
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I am convinced that every animator is automatically in the top 5% of horny people on the planet.
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but I’m not an animator
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One need not animate to be an animator at heart.
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it never really gels, asking statically lit objects to do way too much in an active space
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at a certain point at 17-BIT the director had to ask the animator to stop doodling songs on our meeting paper during standup because execs were going to be arriving and we wanted them to give us money
that boy ran on sugar like a hummingbird and I loved him dearly
every day for three years
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Learning to draw to a professional level requires endless study and understanding of nudes and anatomy so it’s hard not to at least think the occasional horny thought.
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incoming shitpost:
of course I have these at the ready, what kind of half-assed charlatan do you take me for
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kinda think this is often enough true, but I don’t think it’s universally applicable. I’ve been around so many artists. there’s variety
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Many artists spend no or very little time depicting humans, in the first place
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First impressions of 13 Sentinels from the first couple of hours.
This game is such a PSVita game it’s crazy. The gameplay, story, interface all feel very designed for Vita. It could be a visual novel with a basic battle minigame but is slightly more involved than this. The actual combat is not tower defense but basically an abstract unit-based SRPG. There’s no grid or field, you can only move along roads (these mechs are huge) so the playspace is mostly linear paths around the lines of the grid rather than the spaces the lines create. You pick a unit choose an action and watch it happen. However, it is extremely abstract visually and looks more like a twinstick shooter in action. Actual mech animations only play when you hover over an ability in the menu, not when you actually perform the action.
No major spoilers but for those who might want to play.
The game is attempting to tell 13 character narratives weaved around a time travel plot and some of the characters have two names to make things even more fun. The beginning in mediases you in the res hard. The conceit so far is that all the combat takes place during the ‘final battle’ whilst all the character stuff takes place in various time periods before and after. The characters are given enough traits to be distinct from each other and are fairly likable as far as highschoolers go. It will likely do what Odin Sphere and Muramasa did before it and leave the untangling of the spaghetti timeline to you the player.
Unsurprisingly the game has a lot of cheesecake but the art direction and general presentation is nice (although backgrounds are dull but well-painted). I’ve yet to see if the story will pay off but it’s holding my interest pretty well so far, as you jump perspectives quite a lot.
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okay
but what’s the ass-to-content ratio look like so far
Probably a 1:7. There’s a lot of indirect discussion of body as well as explicit showing so it decimates the total proportion a little. I am not counting mech ass (but I am counting asses in mechs).
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picked this up yesterday and poured like 5 - 7 hours into it, and here are my thoughts:
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definitely has that particular brand of Vanillaware horniness
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the combat is less like an RTS and more of an…ATB-S? it’s cool and i like it. so far nothing has been super challenging on the Normal difficulty, but i can put it on Intense difficulty any time i want, so
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i’m a bit of a sucker for the sort of melancholy romance that envelops most of the VW games i’ve played, and they do it here, too. additionally, the structure of the storyline maybe very-vaguely reminds me of Lynch/Twin Peaks in that every new episode gives you a little bit more information that helps you understand the last episode, but also introduces a plethora of new information that is now more important than whatever previous mystery was happening in the story
overall, i really like it. it’s a lot more fun than i thought it might be, and i’m glad a game like this exists. it’s got some real PS2 energy (some said Vita, which i think also applies), but in a good way.
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Yeah I’m finding the difficulty is pretty lax and I’ve S-ranked everything so far without much effort. I’m guessing later stages simply increase number to the point where attention is so split. The fact that you can pause time during character action makes sense but I often end a lot of missions with 1:30 to go and I wonder if I’ve hit on some crazy strat.
Twin Peaks S3 is a good comparison point since more and more questions get raised but the pace is also very comfy and relaxed apart from the occasionally horrific high concept scene. The amount of doppelgangers and bodyswapping is getting to ludicrous levels but I love it. The cheesecake is also ludicrous but feels very unnecessary Morimura’s catsuit is just stupid given that no-one else dresses in that uniform
I’m enjoying it way more than I thought I would and I think Atlus has done a horrible job of marketing it.
The time period stuff is fun and leads to a lot of fish outta water stuff. If there is a scifi theme here it mostly relates to how people use history to understand the present. It’s interesting to see wartime teens take situations very seriously and its neat how often they mention ideology. There’s some nice scenes with a character travelling to 1985 Japan and immediately assuming they’ve been kidnapped and taken to the US because of the skyscrapers and Roman characters on signs, and are unsettled by fashion, gender presentation, and technology. The slow dawning of the situation is well done and puts certain historical perspectives into light. Conversely characters from the future (2025 or further) show a reductive way of understanding the past and often talk about the absence of things like smartphones or how something old in their time is just newer in the past. Same with the response to the game’s enemies. Wartime characters assume they are American weapons, characters from the 80s assume they are UFOs, others don’t even react because they already know what they are and it doesn’t really matter.
The HG Wells influence feels stronger than the kaiju one since the spectacle of kaiju is largely absent and it’s not really metaphorical of anything in the same way something like Godzilla was. The focus seems to be on understanding national history and your personal location within it.
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Hype levels upgraded to medium, I guess
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really into this after a couple of hours
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Started it yesterday and I was right into it from the moment I pressed a button on the title screen because that little soundtrack trick is just too good.
Rather than Twin PEaks S3 I’d compare it to Netflix’s Dark with which it shares a number of structural twists and possibly plot devices (darn, I should go gush about Dark in the TV topic if I can pull myself away from this game). It’s kinda the same feeling as with Higurashi and Siren, which share enough structural and thematic elements than you’d think the creators of one read/watched the other but that can’t be because they were made in the same timeframes.
That being said the real mystery is how incompetent Atlus was in explaining that it’s really a visual novel with active time battle tactical fights. In many ways it’s a sci-fi Grim Grimoire with streamlined fights and, uh, un-streamlined narrative parts.
EDIT: oh, one thing I find super weird is that the japanese dialogue clearly names HG Wells a number of times but in the english version it’s all “a certain author”, I don’t get it.
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yeah! i also noticed this; i don’t get it, either. HG Wells’ work is technically in the public domain now, but maybe there are some like, weird laws with using his name because of the estate or something?
and also agreeing with the Atlus marketing stuff. i feel like the only Vanillaware game that was ever properly marketed (and thusly also the main receiver of criticism, perhaps) was Dragon’s Crown, perhaps because it was so easily recognizable, genre wise. but especially so with 13 Sentinels, i have never felt so clueless about what a game is in a very, very long time.
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