Lived up to its reputation
In 2019, at the Tokyo Video Game Show in Chiba Prefecture, Japan, a newspaper with a release date marked 1985 was distributed to people who came to the exhibition. From the dense information in this newspaper, exhibitors can understand that it is publishing local news about what happened in a city called "Ashitaba". In addition to the high-definition color printed pictures that clearly do not fit the background of the times, there is another catchy element in the newspaper, that is, the title of the note -
"Giant robots appear".
"Huge robots appear!!"
"The story of young boys and girls who ride giant robots to the battlefield in order to save the world."
When I first heard about the gameplay of "Thirteen Fighter Defense Circles", I couldn't help but wonder if my ears were — the modern urban background, coupled with the mecha sci-fi genre, which is not like the game content that VANILLAWARE.Ltd is good at, from Princess Crown to Dragon Crown, whether it is a 2D clean action or a single-player role-play, vanilla Society seems to be more keen to show players a world full of Japanese fantasy elements.
It turns out that for the Vanilla Society, which is so exquisite that every frame can be called a picture book, it is applicable in any context or era. After getting used to the products of the fantasy world, the "Japanese Showa Era" brought to players by "Thirteen Fighter Defense Circles" is equally fascinating.
Most of the scenery in the game is based on the "Showa Sixty Years (1985)" design
But to be honest, when the GamePlay of "Thirteen Aircraft Defense Circle" was really put in front of me, I still had some small "dissatisfaction" in my heart. The game is divided into three parts: "Memoirs", "Crash Chapters" and "Discovery Chapters", of which the largest proportion of "Memories", from the perspective of thirteen young boys and girls to develop a linear story, the player has to do is to manipulate the characters to move in the pre-made scene, interact with the various characters, mechanisms, to see how they piece together the story step by step; and "Crash Chapter" is mainly for Gameplay, "Giant Robot Battle" is used to adjust the rhythm of the story and supplement the plot" The gameplay of "Joiner", "Tower Defense" and "Strategy" is not new, and it can even be said that there are no highlights; as for the "Discovery Chapter", it is from a more objective point of view, the information collected before is explained and analyzed, helping players to further understand the story and world of the game.
Leaving aside the story, if we just talk about whether the process is "fun or not", it is really too difficult to answer. Most of the time, the player seems to follow the arranged script, personally starting a beautiful "paper zhiju", and unconsciously seeking the "common ground" and "horse's foot" deliberately revealed by the screenwriter between each story.
Of course, this "dissatisfaction" does not stem from negative feelings about the game mode "ADV" itself, on the contrary, it does not require too much concentration and play cost, and can fully enjoy the premise of the story, which makes me extremely fond of this game genre. And the excellence of "Thirteen Machine Defense Circle" itself is beyond doubt. Even if I don't say much about it, you'll be able to see this in the feedback since the Release of the PlayStation — after all, there aren't as many video games that can be nominated for the Nebula Awards.
If I had to say it, I really liked Odin Realm and Masamune Tsubasa, where vanilla Society presented players with the ultimate in 2D action games, including the special smoothness based on 2D mods during combat, the connection between every frame of the character's movements as they moved, jumped, and fought, and the subtle stickiness that did not depend on the trickery of the camera, which many game makers later competed to imitate.
Fortunately, although "Thirteen Aircraft Defense Circle" does not have any "action" elements to speak of in terms of gameplay, after the actual play, you can realize that these things with the most "characteristics" of the Vanilla Society have not been left behind this time. Each character in the game holds their own unique action module, and its rich body and expression language can be said to be more than the past works of the Vanilla Society.
Interestingly, the most important, most exquisite, and heaviest design mechs and monsters in this game have been placed in the "crash chapter" that is least noticeable to the player, and in battle, although the actions of the mechs and monsters will not be presented on the map, the player can confirm the animation of the actions of the mechs and monsters from a small window on the side - there is no moisture, even for those skills with the lowest usage. Such a "dead-button detail" behavior is also one of the biggest features of the Vanilla Society.
In April 2022, the Switch version of the "Thirteen Machine Defense Circle" was released, which gave me the opportunity to re-examine the story of "Thirteen Machine Defense Circle" from the beginning and the "story told with the game". At the same time, I also became more and more curious about why the Vanilla Society was able to spend so much time making such an untried work.
After decades of precipitation, developers with "good stories" have long found that because of their "interactive" and "multi-faceted" attributes, the game shows scalability that cannot be matched by other media, and the name "Ninth Art" is not without reason. A story-led game that can be classified into qualified to high-quality intervals usually has the following characteristics: a closed-loop framework that does not produce flaws in the end, a narrative rhythm that can be mastered by the user to a certain extent, the self-grooming of the story framework (regardless of its presentation), and the text information that can be quickly digested.
These characteristics are in the "ThirteenThmes Defense Circle", of course, one of them is not a lot. The story outline is still presented using a multi-line model of the treemap, and gradually unlocked through the player's progress, but the most amazing thing to talk about is the script creator's deep play with the concept of "Science Fantasy". Under the premise of absolutely conforming to the aesthetics of the public, the story turns out all the science fiction categories familiar with popular culture, telling a Showa story with the labels of "time travel", "space travel", "alien life", "clones", "artificial intelligence", "parallel universes" and "giant robots" at the same time. What's more, after creating a super-massive narrative framework with thirteen simultaneous routes, it was able to tell a story so brilliantly.
Regarding the deconstruction and application of science fiction elements in "Thirteen Machine Defense Circles", it has been analyzed very thoroughly in the evaluation of the PlayStation version of this site as early as the previous year. Here, I will not make more random analysis, I hope that I can make some shallow analysis of this work from the narrative method.
First of all, the narrative framework of "multi-line and multi-protagonist" is a very interesting thing. This is a narrative style with a high "fashion value", which can make the player have a stronger sense of participation while setting up suspense, and can alleviate the indigestion caused by reading and understanding some long scripts. But underneath the glossy exterior, it also has its biggest drawbacks, namely the logical relationship that is gradually difficult to gesture as the story progresses, and the stickiness of the script that is difficult to maintain for a long time.
If you really want to look back, the game that adopts the "multi-line, multi-protagonist narrative" is not less. The best of them, and the most representative, belong to CHUNSOFT's "Street ~ Fate Crossroads~ " and "428 ~ Blocked Shibuya ~", but the biggest difference between "Thirteen Machine Defense Circle" and these storytellers is that it does not rely on words - or not entirely on words.
So much suspense, how to unravel together in the end
Without a text display box, some information must be completed by the construction of the picture, sound effects, and scene atmosphere, which is back to the best place of the Vanilla Society.
Because the story involves multiple era backgrounds, in the game, the player will have to see the same region, different era background scenery or character descriptions, and "Thirteen Machine Defense Circle" is very good at these links, building a variety of contradictions that cannot be explained clearly, when all the suspense is gradually answered in the closed loop, the player will get a strong sense of unobstructed (although you may still inevitably need to get some additional text information from the "exploration chapter").
In addition, while using the "multi-line multi-protagonist" narrative, the script of "Thirteen Machine Defense Circle" seems to be trying its best to lock the player's attention on the broad story. The plot of many characters requires the player to cycle back and forth over the same period of time and obtain information about the next route one by one, and the process itself will require the player to struggle in the same information many times, which is not fun.
But the cleverness of "Thirteen Machine Defense Circle" is that it can throw different suspense and leave buttons in the right place in every attempt of the player, based on the same timeline. This method appears in almost all of the characters' storylines — you know, the "retention" thing itself, although not rare, is just so frequent and precise to use, it is definitely not a simple thing.
At the same time, the route setting of each character in "Thirteen Aircraft Defense Circle" also has a very meticulous approach. Because the same thing needs to be told from the perspective of thirteen people, the story will inevitably "overlap" - like the same dialogue, which must be read again when the route is carried out, and the other route must be read again. But "Thirteen Machine Defense Circle" has never been in this situation at all, and the creators of the story not only know how to avoid the repetition of useless information, but also know how to extend the story of each character in different directions while being closely linked.
This is directly reflected in the story style of each character. Next, without spoilers, let's take several character route stories as examples: one of them is the sports girl Nanatsu Nori route. In a fortuitous situation, Natsu meets the alien "BJ" and is tasked with finding the means of transportation from the Men in Black. Because it has the meaning of paying tribute to the movie "E.T.", coupled with Natsuno's cheerful and lively personality, the story is relatively relaxed and straightforward.
Closely connected to the Minami Natsu Line, but with a strong contrast, the character is the route of Takashi Takashi, who is a bad girl. As Natsuno's Aome Bamboo Horse, Takamiya Yuki and his assistant Aiba Erihana tracked down Natsuno's whereabouts all the way, but found that things were full of suspiciousness, although the plot was closely related to the Natsu Noh line, but from the way the suspense was set to the truth was explained, it was deliberately packaged into the appearance of a detective story.
Another character closely related to Yuki Eagle Palace is the mysterious girl Tomoun Yoshiko. This bandaged girl has a similar motivation to Yuki Takashi Takashi, but due to some special circumstances, her story is almost completely wrapped in mystery and unknown in the early stages, with a heavier suspense flavor than others.
Different story styles ensure that players will hardly get bored with any one person's story. At the same time, the self-consistent relationship between them also allows players not to be confused when they suddenly need to face the route switch.
But then again, the second round of play also made me unconsciously have some different views on "Thirteen Machine Defense Circle" - that is, it is indeed excellent, but not perfect.
The "cumbersome part of the battle part of the crash" that has been criticized by many players is of course on the one hand, as the most simple and rough plot lock form in this work, there is a strong sense of separation from the "reminiscence" responsible for telling the story, coupled with the real-time strategy The gameplay and performance itself are not outstanding, and it is inevitable that people will feel tired after repeated play. But the "crash chapter" also has its own meaning, such as creating an urgent scene of the oppression of the army, showing the tenacity of young boys and girls on the battlefield, and even after completing the story completely, you will find that even the "do not directly show the machines and monsters" has some special meaning - in the 2D picture, it is really unrealistic to show all of this.
From this point of view, the insertion of the "collapse chapter" is a flaw, but it is necessary.
On the other hand, in order to complete the current closed-loop story, the creators of the game also sacrificed something.
However, this is definitely not a criticism of this work, as a non-visual novel game, the story completion of "Thirteen Machine Defense Circle" is surprising enough, which is an indisputable fact. As we have said repeatedly above, it is remarkable enough to be able to achieve almost no flaws in the case of thirteen parallel story lines.
But if you open the game for the second or third time, it is not difficult to find that in order to close so many story lines, "Thirteen Machine Defense Circle" uses too many interludes while leaving players with almost no additional possibility of exploring the script. In many character routes, there have been cases where fragmented information needs to be supplemented by the use of "recall" or even "recall in the form of recall". This practice, although it ensures that the script and lines are absolutely clean, still occasionally feels a little cumbersome.
As a storytelling game, you only need to complete the level once, and your script progress and file collection can reach 100%, which is really not so common. Although you can see the script timeline in the form of a treemap, there is no real divergent route or "multi-ending" design, if you must say where its story left me regrets, it is probably that its story is too complete, the end is too clean and neat, clean and clean so that I do not have to go to multi-week play.
Although the way of expression is different from the past, "Thirteen Machine Defense Circle" is undoubtedly a masterpiece worthy of the vanilla society's daimyo and long production cycle. What's even happier is that even after logging into the relatively weak Switch platform, the performance of this game has not shrunk in any way (except for the excessive number of enemies in the "Crash Chapter"). If you're the kind of player who's prone to getting caught up in a story because of the rich suspense, the seamless switching between handheld and console modes may also give you a smoother and more comfortable gaming experience.
About a decade ago, when Dragon's Crown was still being developed for the PlayStation 3, Moriharu Kamiya, the representative of the Vanilla Society, evaluated his company as a "company that makes games with life". In the past, for them, whose volume and capital are far inferior to those of other game companies, whether the games they are making can sell well is related to life and death, and this sense of crisis makes "no second chance" become the bottom line of the vanilla society when making games, and they always polish each work in a "costless" way.
To be honest, if "Thirteen Fighter Defense Circle" is just a simple text story, it may not get such a high evaluation, but as a video game, it does carry too much persistence and sincerity. I wouldn't call this the "craftsman spirit," but I can assure you that spending dozens of hours on it is definitely worth it.