I have a difficult relationship with nostalgia. Specifically, I don’t want my memories to be sold back to me, and that’s usually how nostalgia is represented by pop culture – it’s a product.
But we are all nostalgic for more than the media of our youth. The shining white tile of the elementary school halls, the seemingly endless chain of the best swings, that one worn down cushion in the middle of the old blue couch that was always there for over a decade – and then it was gone. Replaced. Too old, too weathered by kids running across the top of it. Those memories have a specific texture that don’t wear away with time. They are feelings that can’t be repackaged to capitalize on cycle exploited by cynical marketing experts that are ready and waiting to cash in on a Harry Potter reboot simply because it’s a hot property.
Memory is not a product. It can not be contained and packaged in a cardboard box, nor can it be contained in a photograph. Even the knife edge of hard times can be betrayed by a simple image.
Still, so many memories seem to bask in the glimmer of memory, perfectly illuminated by beautiful sunlight, ever present, glorious and golden.
It is in this glow that we meet and become familiar with the cast of Vanillaware’s 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim. .
Maps of Memories Lost
13 Sentinels is, first and foremost, a visual novel. While there is a deep turn based strategic RPG in the mix, players will spend the majority of their play time in the Remembrance mode, recollecting the story as viewed by thirteen protagonists, and trying to assemble an understanding of eons of conflict that forms the story. From the outside, the premise is familiar: a group of teenagers are thrust into combat with an alien threat, armed with massive mechs. There are dozens upon dozens of these tales filling out the history of anime – especially from the nineties.
This is in place before a handful of movie references start falling into place, such as Exterminator 2 and EXT, the latter of which accompanies an homage to the film. The in-universe 1954 film Mighty Kaiju Deimos echoes the genre of films that produced Godzilla, and a massive video game was made to celebrate the 200th anniversary of that film, Deimos, for the VS4. The VS4 box art bears the Vanilaware logo as well, in case you thought that the studio was going to leave itself out of the metanarrative fun. Sci-fi literature such as The War of the Worlds and 2001 are also sourced as well. The first kaiju the player sees is an obvious reference for anyone who knows of the H.G. Wells tripods.
It might seem crass from the outset to frame up this soup of sci-fi tropes with classics of the genre, especially through the lens through which I usually look at media. But it’s fine enough, barely distracting against the large cast of characters and the challenges they are set to face over the course of the next 25-30 hours. Once the prologue chapters are all explored, players are set to unwind the tangled relationships and identities at the core of the story. Stories that start familiar are eventually twisted, expectations are subverted. Speaking personally, my understanding of the world in the game shifted constantly until about half way through as I scanned over the plot maps and hunted for the clues necessary to find a new path on the plot map.
But this isn’t a review. I’m not here to elaborate on the quality of the storytelling – though it is a great story, and a great game.
I want to talk about Juro Kurabe.
A Mind in a Plastic Case
Many from my generation like to reminisce about going out to rental shops and pick up a few movies to watch. Some might remember going to Blockbuster Video, but we didn’t have that chain. In my hometown, we had Bazooka Video, but my family didn’t rent there until I was in high school. We usually went to Video Wiz in the next town over. It was infrequent, though. We didn’t rent many movies when I was a kid, and my own love for cinema didn’t blossom until I was in high school, deepening further when I went to college and made friends with someone who still knows more about film than I ever will.
Still, the early conversations and interactions between Juro Kurabe and Kyuta Shiba are familiar. It starts as a mutual appreciation for science fiction films, dodgy television shows about UFOs being caught on tape, and even video games. They’re the conversations many of us had when we were younger, born from a pre-internet time. Kyuta gives Juro movies to watch, and they talk about them after class. It’s what we did in our youth, before everything went to streaming and having a DVD collection became a weird thing that visitors associate with you.
I am going to try to talk around spoilers here, but be aware that the impact of certain plot reveals may be lessened if you carry this next part into your play of the game.
Juro Kurabe’s memory is filled with all of our favorite science fiction films, a life experience inferred from countless classic scenes. He’s in a time travel story about an alien invasion fended off against with robots. He dreams of his classmate fighting by his side in the climactic assault on the Cyberdyne Labs from Terminator 2: Judgement Day. The homages are blatant, depicting what we recall as heroic scenes, casting Juro in the center of those familiar stories.
And then the other foot drops. Juro has had a complicated life, fraught with tragedies set across more than one of the time periods depicted throughout the story. What remains of Juro is a mesh of the young sci-fi nerd, going to school, hanging out with his friends playing video games and watching movies, and the solider fighting against a threat that has been made entirely real to the player. Putting Juro back together, making him into a whole person in any capacity, means coming to terms with those memories and their origin. The heroic, cinematic memories, eventually decay into a dreadful reality. Again, I don’t want to say too much.
Everything familiar about 13 Sentinels twists into tragedy. The ET homage breeds sadness in the truth about the little mecha-drone that stands in for Spielberg’s alien. The time travelling backbone of the story spells disaster for the earth that everyone believes they know well. The mechs aren’t the devices that anime fans have seen a thousand times. Every sub-genre and trope is here, but rarely is it there for comfort and joy.
Synthetic Damages
13 Sentinels, despite it’s heavy handed use of familiar tropes, explores the idea of memory being interrupted by outside influence through several characters. Juro Kurabe’s external force comes in the form of a comfortable memory for some player’s youth. It’s not quite so gentle for the other characters suffering the affects of the Deimos Code. Nevertheless, these characters (not mentioned to keep up as much of the experience as I can muster – I really think you should check this game out) all experience the most intricate and looping stories in the game, requiring specific item and character flags to be tagged on each run in order to proceed down a different path in the story. It is entirely possible to replay entire sequences and not see new developments.
The entire narrative of 13 Sentinels is told out of sequence, requiring the player to piece much of the story together on their own as it progresses. Some stories overlap, especially towards the end of each arc. There’s a ludonarrative harmony in play that sells the entirety of the experience. The sense of mystery that keeps the experience moving between every To Be Continued and sequence unlock returns to the idea of rebuilding the memories of the sentinel pilots, even those that haven’t suffered similarly to Kurabe or Shinonome.
The relief was never found in the familiar. Certainly the game does end on an emotional high point, following an intense battle between the sentinels and the mechanical kaiju threatening humanity, but the happy ending is not found in the epilogue where everyone reconvenes at the high school. A new world awaits the survivors of the fall of humanity, rich with new experiences.
But 13 Sentinels is aware that nostalgia is neither positive nor negative. The sentinel pilots are born to thrive and rebuild, but they carry memories of lives long lived. They are still happy to retread the memories of everything that brought them together. New experiences await over that golden horizon, and there is no happier ending than knowing that the journey isn’t over.
WordsThing 