Sorry to bump the thread with a negative opinion, but I gotta get this out of my system.
I really, really suffered getting to the end of 13S.
I mean, it starts interesting enough. And it somehow managed to keep my curiosity piqued for about half of it. About the time it takes you to exhaust all the plot lines you can explore until the game forces you to go on with the SRPG part of the thing.
And that's one huge problem I had with the game. The SRPG part is not fun. Not one bit. It's awfully confusing, especially when playing on a handheld, and it's just not interesting or engaging at all. It's just a chore to get through so you can go on with the VN part. I put it on easy to get it over with asap, and it was still worse than watching pixels dry. Absolutely awful. I feel that if a VN somehow needs some actual gaming to gel the various narrative parts together, this is one of the worse things they could do.
But then, even the VN part gets extremely redundant after the midway point. Natsuno's story in particular had me hooked for some reason, but after you get access to all the 13 characters' stories it falls off a cliff spectacularly. And once you start seeing the same scenes again in the storyline of another character, the story starts losing its spark quickly.
And it doesn't help that the story is filled to the absolute brim with all the usual anime tropes, and not the best kind of tropes. I could make an extensive list, but it's really not worth the time. It should be enough to say that a few characters come off as complete idiots who add way too little to the overall story, and that the way most of them react to the events doesn't make a lick of sense. Of course the plot is overcomplicated too, and I'm not going to rant about how because I'd have to spoiler a lot, but whoever played the game will know what I'm talking about. The story can easily be described as an Evangelion tribute that somehow manages to last way longer than the entire original anime series, while also making things ten times crazier and more needlessly convoluted while not being one tenth as engaging.
The interface of the VN also gets needlessly redundant in parts, then at times it gets much cleaner for no reason at all. Every time you start a new chapter in a character's story most of the keywords are green again even if they have no new information attached to them, then the story takes a new turn and somehow most of those keywords are stripped from the list. And there's some instances where it takes way too long to understand what the game expects you to do, even if you can only visit a small number of locations at any one time and the interactions with the environments are barebones. Thank God there's a speed-up button. Too bad that the ending is like 20+ minutes long and doesn't allow you to speed up even the dialogue.
For me, the game's only saving grace is the spectacular visuals and the Japanese dub. I understand only a a few words and expression of Japanese, but I always play this kind of games in their original language. And that part was very, very nice.
But the overall game? No, I just didn't like it. It's too fragmented, too convoluted, too redundant and too tropey for its own good. My patience for this kind of content dried up a long time ago, and 13S is choke-full of stuff I have no tolerance for anymore.
Danjin44 Tagging you here since maybe you're interested to see these pics I've taken from the art book.
