Canceled on a PS Vita which brought such honor to the Vanillaware studio with Dragon’s Crown, Muramasa: The Demon Blade and Odin Sphere Leifthrasir, 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim will still have the right to live a second life as a portable game thanks to its arrival today on the Nintendo Switch. A particularly neat and faithful portage, which does not reserve any bad last minute surprises. No more loading times, no noticeable visual deterioration (the handcrafted paintings in adventure mode still look gorgeous with their nostalgic sensibility in the lighting) and no more slowdowns during the battle phases. “No more” obviously does not mean “none”: the slowdowns already present on PS4 were not going to magically disappear on Switch, especially in the face of a rain of missiles or when the Kaiju are really too many on the map. But hey, we’re not talking about a frame rate which could thwart a battle plan and any fear of a botched carry can be swept away.
On the other hand, Atlus and Vanillaware haven’t particularly racked their brains trying to exploit the touchscreen, for example. But portability is always welcome in a game as dense as this one, and the portable mode does not affect the readability, certainly quite special at first glance, of the combat phases.
This Switch port is not a carbon copy, however, Vanillaware having taken care to add a small bonus: two additional weapons/skills to unlock for each Sentinel. An addition that does not radically change the experience and obviously does not justify repeating the game if you have already played the game on PS4, but which allows you to dig a little better into the differences between each of the 13 units. If he doesn’t really have the profile of a game that calls for a second run for those who have already done it, 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim In any case, it is a perfect success for its arrival on Switch and remains a unique narrative adventure game of its kind, which we always highly recommend to lovers of science fiction, destructured stories, talking cats and yakisoba sandwiches.