• Hey everyone, staff have documented a list of banned content and subject matter that we feel are not consistent with site values, and don't make sense to host discussion of on Famiboards. This list (and the relevant reasoning per item) is viewable here.
  • Do you have audio editing experience and want to help out with the Famiboards Discussion Club Podcast? If so, we're looking for help and would love to have you on the team! Just let us know in the Podcast Thread if you are interested!

StarTopic 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim |ST| The time machine is inside your desk drawer

karmitt said:
I'm so bad at remembering Japanese names :(

I'm gonna have to spend some time memorizing to fully enjoy the experience - I'm only at about 6? character introductions so far and I'm already lost in the web of names.
Click to expand...
Yeah, I’ve been having the same issue remembering everyone’s names since I’m not very familiar with most of them. I will say though that the more I’ve played the less of an issue this has been as I become more familiar with the characters.

I’m very much enjoying this so far - it’s not the type of game I usually play, but it’s drawing me in much like a good book!
 
I’m 28% through remembrance and 40% through destruction. Definitely having some assumptions challenged but here is where I’m at now in terms of theories.

The most recent big reveal I’ve seen is that the Kaiju are apparently heavy machinery created by the big company. Given space colonies and whatnot, they’re intended to terraform planets and what they are actually doing is trying to terraform rather than kill. Still not sure why they can time travel.

Other thoughts
-Everyone is from the future somehow.
-Some/most/all of everyone is actually an android
-NANOMACHINES SON done fucked up the future and that’s why the Kaiju are pissed off.
-this is all according to keikaku for Tsukasa Okino, who is the ultimate villain, who is probably bringing his nanomachines technology increasingly back in time, which is why the Kaiju keep appearing earlier and earlier. Though some being in WWII, which shouldn’t happen yet, probably means there are multiple timelines than one increasingly retreating one.
-contrary to my earlier theory, Fluffy and Shiba are still the same person, but are now actually good, and the witches are people infected with whatever is spreading from Miura, which is what Fluffy is trying to cure. Fluffy may also be the shady government guy handling Yuki.
-Iori/1945 Chihiro/Morimura are all alternate versions of the same person, perhaps from different timelines.
 
WestEgg said:
I’m 28% through remembrance and 40% through destruction. Definitely having some assumptions challenged but here is where I’m at now in terms of theories.

The most recent big reveal I’ve seen is that the Kaiju are apparently heavy machinery created by the big company. Given space colonies and whatnot, they’re intended to terraform planets and what they are actually doing is trying to terraform rather than kill. Still not sure why they can time travel.

Other thoughts
-Everyone is from the future somehow.
-Some/most/all of everyone is actually an android
-NANOMACHINES SON done fucked up the future and that’s why the Kaiju are pissed off.
-this is all according to keikaku for Tsukasa Okino, who is the ultimate villain, who is probably bringing his nanomachines technology increasingly back in time, which is why the Kaiju keep appearing earlier and earlier. Though some being in WWII, which shouldn’t happen yet, probably means there are multiple timelines than one increasingly retreating one.
-contrary to my earlier theory, Fluffy and Shiba are still the same person, but are now actually good, and the witches are people infected with whatever is spreading from Miura, which is what Fluffy is trying to cure. Fluffy may also be the shady government guy handling Yuki.
-Iori/1945 Chihiro/Morimura are all alternate versions of the same person, perhaps from different timelines.
Click to expand...

You're on the right track for some stuff and way off for others. Which theories are correct? I'll never tell. 🥸

I look forward to future posts from you after the next handful of revelations that you encounter on your playthrough.
 
The localization on this is really good, the dialogue feels natural and different characters have their own vocabularies and style of speaking, it's very well done.

I also just have to admire the sheer ambition of this game, to tackle a complex multithreaded story of time travel with 13 protagonists, numerous more non-playable characters, spanning from WW2 to the far future, and without the sort of budget you'd expect such a project to have. Taking on such a project must have been an incredibly difficult undertaking, yet so far they're pulling it off magnificently.
 
Last edited:
curl-6 said:
The localization on this is really good, the dialogue feels natural and different characters have their vocabularies and style of speaking, it's very well done.

I also just have to admire the sheer ambition of this game, to tackle a complex multithreaded story of time travel with 13 protagonists, numerous more non-playable characters, spanning from WW2 to the far future, and without the sort of budget you'd expect such a project to have. Taking on such a project must have been an incredibly difficult undertaking, yet so far they're pulling it off magnificently.
Click to expand...

Yes to everything you said. Atlus did an absolutely incredible job with the localization for 13S. It's top-tier.
 
I’m really curious about sales data, when it feels like popping up. Really hope this release gets the game the wider audience that Switch releases usually do, it was on the front page of the eshop earlier. Maybe this release together with the PS4 release will finally break the million!
 
Irene said:
I’m really curious about sales data, when it feels like popping up. Really hope this release gets the game the wider audience that Switch releases usually do, it was on the front page of the eshop earlier. Maybe this release together with the PS4 release will finally break the million!
Click to expand...
If a game as good as 13S fails to clear a million sales total between two popular platforms then I'll lose all faith in humanity.

Shinonome-style.
 
0
Just played through the chapter where Keitaro is brought to the 1980s from WW2 Japan.
His reactions to this future (from his perspective) world is just so well written, from his initial assumption that this must be the industrially advanced America he's heard about, to being shocked by seeing people in shorts, noting that the language sounds like a different dialect, or later remarking how "you can hardly see the stars in this era". It's the attention to detail that really sells the story, I love it.
 
Irene said:
I’m really curious about sales data, when it feels like popping up. Really hope this release gets the game the wider audience that Switch releases usually do, it was on the front page of the eshop earlier. Maybe this release together with the PS4 release will finally break the million!
Click to expand...
Before the switch release, they were at 500k. Based on tracking data for japan, grain of salt, it should open there around the same as the ps4 launch 25-30k but some people think it will reach 100k in japan on WoM. It feels like a slow burn selling game so maybe next year, even at 750k or 800k it should become vanillawares best selling game.
 
SirArthur said:
Before the switch release, they were at 500k. Based on tracking data for japan, grain of salt, it should open there around the same as the ps4 launch 25-30k but some people think it will reach 100k in japan on WoM. It feels like a slow burn selling game so maybe next year, even at 750k or 800k it should become vanillawares best selling game.
Click to expand...

Being more successful than the current champ (dragons crown) would certainly be a good sign
 
curl-6 said:
Just played through the chapter where Keitaro is brought to the 1980s from WW2 Japan.
His reactions to this future (from his perspective) world is just so well written, from his initial assumption that this must be the industrially advanced America he's heard about, to being shocked by seeing people in shorts, noting that the language sounds like a different dialect, or later remarking how "you can hardly see the stars in this era". It's the attention to detail that really sells the story, I love it.
Click to expand...

That's one of my favorite parts of the game. (Keitaro Miura story spoiler)

When he read Amiguchi's history books and find out about the atomic bombs is such a striking scene.
 
0
It's hard to remember story bits when you play this game in short burst. Finally got to play more hours today and got a chance to get more out of the story.

Seems I got some of my speculations right.
 
0
Irene said:
I’m really curious about sales data, when it feels like popping up. Really hope this release gets the game the wider audience that Switch releases usually do, it was on the front page of the eshop earlier. Maybe this release together with the PS4 release will finally break the million!
Click to expand...
Good news, it has sold 27k physical copies in Japan which is amazing for a port.

I'm almost done with Triangle Strategy, once I'm finished I'll finally start this critically acclaimed game.
 
Ozzie said:
Good news, it has sold 27k physical copies in Japan which is amazing for a port.

I'm almost done with Triangle Strategy, once I'm finished I'll finally start this critically acclaimed game.
Click to expand...
That's crazy, it's selling just as if was released day and date with the PS4 version there.
 
Glad I waited. I never thought it would come, but having known it’s more of an adventure style visual novel with strategy elements, I just didn’t want to play it on the big screen.

Really enjoying this so far. Only hiccup i am having is that all these characters and as a Spanish person, having some issue remembering all the Japanese names. I had no issue with Persona 4 cause such a small cast, but I keep forgetting in this one lol
 
0
Just finished this game. Fantastic I really enjoyed this game, I was really nervous going into it with the tower defending portion of the game as I suck at those games but, no problems overall.

My biggest failure was until I unlocked Miura's story, I thought he and Sekigahara were the same person so I definitely confused myself with any story interactions he had with people until then.
 
Good to hear it sold well considering its niche nature and the fact it's a two year old port. It deserves better, but this is still better than I expected.

Also just finished part 2 of Megumi's story and I teared up when Juro Izumi "dies" in her arms after succumbing to brain damage from fighting too long in the Sentinel. The situation was sad enough, but the music made is even more heart-breaking. It's very rare that a game manages to evoke this kind of reaction from me, I can count on one hand the amount of times one has brought tears to my eyes.
 
curl-6 said:
Good to hear it sold well considering its niche nature and the fact it's a two year old port. It deserves better, but this is still better than I expected.

Also just finished part 2 of Megumi's story and I teared up when Juro Izumi "dies" in her arms after succumbing to brain damage from fighting too long in the Sentinel. The situation was sad enough, but the music made is even more heart-breaking. It's very rare that a game manages to evoke this kind of reaction from me, I can count on one hand the amount of times one has brought tears to my eyes.
Click to expand...
Yeah the music really sells the emotion for certain scenes in the game. Sakimoto and Basiscape are in a league of their own, IMO.
 
0
Okay Fami, let's see your tier lists!

ssc5Gfr.png
 
WestEgg said:
Y’all I don’t even know anymore
Click to expand...

😆 I can't even count how many times I uttered something similar to my wife and friends when I was the only one playing through 13S back in 2020. My wife would ask, "Oh, what's going on in the story now?" when I'd come out of my office after a play session, and typically after a barrage of revelations/twists I would just be like, "Man, you don't even know."
 
0
SiG said:
Gameplaywise or storywise?
Click to expand...

Make two separate tiers if you like. :)

I ranked them as a combination of both, how I felt about them overall, both in terms of their place in the plot, as well as their personalities. For example, not the biggest fan of Amiguchi as a person, but his story was SO engrossing. Reversely, I felt Minami's story sort of fizzled out by the end, but it's impossible to not love her.
 
Quoted by: SiG
1
Okay, general mechanics question:

I’ve cleared my first character (Juro Karabe) but I know there were some paths I didn’t take, and they don’t appear going back into the character. Are there alternate story resolutions depending on choices made/missable content, or does the game have redundant scenes and just eleminates them if they’re already covered in a previous path?
 
WestEgg said:
Okay, general mechanics question:

I’ve cleared my first character (Juro Karabe) but I know there were some paths I didn’t take, and they don’t appear going back into the character. Are there alternate story resolutions depending on choices made/missable content, or does the game have redundant scenes and just eleminates them if they’re already covered in a previous path?
Click to expand...
There's no missable content or alternate paths.
 
I've been taking my time with this and doing about 2-3 chapters a day along with a destruction battle; like a good book this is a great game to chill out with after a long day. However that means that I'm not breezing through it as fast as some of you lol, but that's fine cause Vanillaware games should be savored.
 
2/3rds through the game overall, some more theories heading into the homestretch.

So I know the following pretty well at this point:
-the Kaiju we’re originally construction equipment, and their behavior comes from being modeled on a video game, and they are enabled in someway by some incarnation of Ryoko being scorned by Ida and wanting to destroy humanity. But I’m expecting a few more “BUT THIS IS THE REAL TRUTH” moments so I have a couple competing ideas.

In both cases, I’m making an assumption that the 1985 city is in all actuality contained within the UFO. So…

1. Each era is actually a self contained area within the UFO, and the characters are not actually time traveling but moving between areas.

2. The whole thing is a simulation inside the mainframe within the UFO, and all the characters are based on memory data from people in the far future.

Both of these could also mean the UFO is not on Earth at all, and that the whole game takes place in the future, with no real time traveling occurring.

I’m not super confident in either scenario, but I look forward to finding out what’s actually happening.
 
WestEgg said:
2/3rds through the game overall, some more theories heading into the homestretch.

So I know the following pretty well at this point:
-the Kaiju we’re originally construction equipment, and their behavior comes from being modeled on a video game, and they are enabled in someway by some incarnation of Ryoko being scorned by Ida and wanting to destroy humanity. But I’m expecting a few more “BUT THIS IS THE REAL TRUTH” moments so I have a couple competing ideas.

In both cases, I’m making an assumption that the 1985 city is in all actuality contained within the UFO. So…

1. Each era is actually a self contained area within the UFO, and the characters are not actually time traveling but moving between areas.

2. The whole thing is a simulation inside the mainframe within the UFO, and all the characters are based on memory data from people in the far future.

Both of these could also mean the UFO is not on Earth at all, and that the whole game takes place in the future, with no real time traveling occurring.

I’m not super confident in either scenario, but I look forward to finding out what’s actually happening.
Click to expand...

I can neither confirm nor deny the validity of either of your theories, but I'm loving your ongoing posts as you make your way through the game. I look forward to hopefully discussing some of the finer details of the game's labyrinthine plot with you once you've finished it. When I played it back in 2020, I absolutely devoured the entire Analysis section as well as any online commentary from the developers and other fans that I could find after I completed it, so I'm a pretty good resource to ask if you have anything you'll want to clear up about even the tiniest details.

Believe it or not, the entire game's plot holds up incredibly well with very little in the way of plot holes or contrivances. Every time I thought I'd stumble upon something that had no in-game explanation or contradicted something else in the game I ended up finding the answer that ensured the puzzle pieces all fit together neatly. It's a real testament to George Kamitani's writing ability that he basically wrote the whole thing by himself, reportedly.

One of the best analogies that I've seen someone make for the story structure of 13S is this: it's like someone wrote a story on the back of a completed jigsaw puzzle, then broke it apart, stuffed it back into its box, shook it up, and then handed it to the player and said, "Now put the pieces back together."
 
WestEgg said:
That’s weird though because I did note a few ? Boxes that were outside the path I was on that didn’t seem to show up going back in.
Click to expand...

Answer to your question (Juro Kurabe, very light spoiler)

Those are the "dead end" boxes that signal an ending to the story that don't go anywhere, both Juro and Yuki has those. For example, if you're having out with Shiba as Juro, you can progress the story as usual with keywords etc. But if you just choose "go home" at a point, you'll get an ending called "Daily Life" that doesn't progress the story at all.
 
50% battle, 45% adventure, 30% archive

I tried to explain the plot to a friend and it sounded like the ramblings of an insane man.
 
Joseki said:
50% battle, 45% adventure, 30% archive

I tried to explain the plot to a friend and it sounded like the ramblings of an insane man.
Click to expand...

Someone once said that while the overall plot itself is something that one can keep track of, trying to explain the entire thing to others sounds like a mixture of a quantum physics class and a room where a bunch of stoners tries to be philosophical.
 
Irene said:
Someone once said that while the overall plot itself is something that one can keep track of, trying to explain the entire thing to others sounds like a mixture of a quantum physics class and a room where a bunch of stoners tries to be philosophical.
Click to expand...

Yeah the general flow of the story is at this point pretty clear already, what is actually very hard is explaining how all the events and characters connect to each other.
 
0
Jesus, man. The later battles in the Switch version are so much harder than they were on the PS4. I had to actually bump it down to Normal difficulty, which is insane given that I easily S-ranked everything on Intense in the PS4 original. It's hard getting an S-rank in these later stages even on Normal in the Switch version.
 
I'm at 3-5 and yeah it's giving me a pretty rough time. I think I can still win (I haven't actually lost a battle yet), but the perfectionist in me keeps wanting to restart as soon as I start taking heavy damage because I want that S rank. 3-2 also gave me some trouble, I got an A-rank initially and have replayed it twice, but keep only getting A. Weirdly, 3-3 and 3-4 were ridiculously easy for me though, I only took .1% sentinel damage on like both of them.
I'll probably just keep chipping away at 3-2 until I get that S rank as an excuse to grind a bit for the last set of levels.
 
WestEgg said:
I'm at 3-5 and yeah it's giving me a pretty rough time. I think I can still win (I haven't actually lost a battle yet), but the perfectionist in me keeps wanting to restart as soon as I start taking heavy damage because I want that S rank. 3-2 also gave me some trouble, I got an A-rank initially and have replayed it twice, but keep only getting A. Weirdly, 3-3 and 3-4 were ridiculously easy for me though, I only took .1% sentinel damage on like both of them.
I'll probably just keep chipping away at 3-2 until I get that S rank as an excuse to grind a bit for the last set of levels.
Click to expand...

Are you playing on Intense?

In the PS4 version, Intense was about as challenging as Normal is in the Switch version. Maybe even easier, actually. It was easy to a fault on PS4, whereas here Normal feels like a pretty balanced default difficulty level. I'm gonna leave it on Normal for this whole last zone because I can't even imagine doing the last fight on Intense in this version.

It's good, though. The more balanced combat and new abilities really make battles feel more strategic on Switch than they did in the original release.
 
ScOULaris said:
Are you playing on Intense?

In the PS4 version, Intense was about as challenging as Normal is in the Switch version. Maybe even easier, actually. It was easy to a fault on PS4, whereas here Normal feels like a pretty balanced default difficulty level. I'm gonna leave it on Normal for this whole last zone because I can't even imagine doing the last fight on Intense in this version.

It's good, though. The more balanced combat and new abilities really make battles feel more strategic on Switch than they did in the original release.
Click to expand...
I’m playing on Normal, haven’t adjusted the whole game, but I might do Intense on a replay.
 
0
ScOULaris said:
Are you playing on Intense?

In the PS4 version, Intense was about as challenging as Normal is in the Switch version. Maybe even easier, actually. It was easy to a fault on PS4, whereas here Normal feels like a pretty balanced default difficulty level. I'm gonna leave it on Normal for this whole last zone because I can't even imagine doing the last fight on Intense in this version.

It's good, though. The more balanced combat and new abilities really make battles feel more strategic on Switch than they did in the original release.
Click to expand...
I remember having to lower down to Normal on the PS4 version, even, just due to mech damage being so high on Intense. It was probably my own fault for moving my units to bad locations, but it felt to me like they would take a LOT of damage almost out of nowhere sometimes. But I also wasn't engaging particularly hard in the combat systems portion, since I was so focused on the story parts.
 
0
ScOULaris said:
Jesus, man. The later battles in the Switch version are so much harder than they were on the PS4. I had to actually bump it down to Normal difficulty, which is insane given that I easily S-ranked everything on Intense in the PS4 original. It's hard getting an S-rank in these later stages even on Normal in the Switch version.
Click to expand...

3-10 isn't messing around on Intense. It took, like, seconds for Yuki to first get heavy damage, then get heavy damage again after a heal, then get heavy damage again after another heal, then get heavy damage again after yet another heal, then get emergency rejected, then get killed.
 
0
Alright got my S ranks in 3-2 and 3-5, now I need to do more story to progress.

That golden drum was ridiculous. I cleared the RPF boss pretty easily, but kind of just had to throw all of my punchy/leg spike units on the drum to slowly whittle it down.
 
0
Finally managed to continue my playthrough. The plotline is throwing me for a loop right now and I am absolutely here for it.
 
Just went three days without playing due to family staying over for the long weekend and I swear I went into withdrawal haha, this game is so damn addictive, I just always wanna see what happens next!

Also, I swear this game has the power to warp the space-time continuum, I sit down to play it, enter a sort of trance, and suddenly it's been an hour. I don't think I've ever played a game that makes time slip by like this.
 
2 battles left, which I need to finish the story to unlock. Should probably finish today or tomorrow.

Had a ridiculously good 3-8 fight, zero damage in all three categories, and only 25 seconds of game time.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.


Back
Top Bottom