13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim

I played this game at the recommendation of Henry Liu and what a GREAT recommendation. Such an odd game. It's basically a visual novel game that also has a little strategy game mixed in. The plot is you're a kid at school in Japan in the 80s and then Kaiju attack and suddenly you wake up in a mech and are fighting them.

The standout here is the story. Very quickly time travel comes into play. Where did these mechs come from? Who are all these people? Some of them are from the future? Some from the past? You end up bouncing around between characters in different points in time but in terms of 1950s, 1980s, 2010s but also within each of those eras earlier and further back. It starts off incredibly confusing. But eventually you start to piece together what's going on. What's super cool is you can explore a fair amount of the stories in different orders. That means the way I learned the story could be significantly different from the way others learn it.

You slowly start to learn the origin of the robots you're using, the origin of the Kaiju, how actually there's no time travel and you're all just inside of a simulation and each era is actually just a different part of the simulation. You learn how a lot of the characters are actually clones of previous incarnations of themselves and in fact sometimes both exist simultaneously with wildly different prerogatives. It's such a complicated and cool plot which is oddly human in how everything kicks off (someone is in love with someone else and spitefully causes everything).

The ending is cool too. They were all the last remnants of humanity and the simulation was to train and prep them for colonizing a new planet. Which they do. And they even come back to the simulation because they still feel for and connect with their artificial families inside.

I'd be remiss to not mention the whole strategy game inside. It's fun. Almost an RTS where you're fighting huge numbers of enemies with a small number of controllable mechs. There's ranged focused mechs, melee ones, and support ones. I favorite were the support ones that just spawned turrets. I cheesed most of the game by just dumping all my upgrade points into those and watching them auto destroy all the enemies. It was a fun little side thing and when I started playing I'd usually not stop till I hit the next point that required me getting farther in the story.

Well, I've written a lot but this is a great game. I kind of hope I can replay it in 10 years after I've forgotten the plot.