13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim (2022)

Stewarding a future in ruins

13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim
by Vanillaware
Released on Nintendo Switch in April 2022

When I was a teenager, I never thought the sheer force of my physical, emotional, creative, and intellectual potential would ever be enough to pilot a giant mech. I wasn’t an anime/manga kid, so that trope wasn’t even on my radar. Instead, I was stuck in the “I suck at music/I’m the greatest at music” loop, forever oscillating between the two without ever landing on a self-image rooted in reality. I know I’m a solid guitar player, but I don’t have that ineffable it, that innate musicality that radiates out of a person no matter their skill level. It’s a kind of fluency with rhythm and melody and harmony, a first language, whereas I need to continually brush up on my vocabulary.

I have my first performance gig since October coming up at the end of the month—a cabaret in New Jersey featuring songs from famous crooners from the 1950s and ‘60s. The music isn’t hard, but I’m stressed about rehearsals and the show. This is the pit-of-my-stomach anxiety that I felt in January 2022, when I began a months-long hiatus from guitar. Jess and I worked so hard to figure out the financial logistics of me cultivating more of a performance-based career, and once again I’m wondering, Do I actually want this? Is this the life for me? Even the easy gigs get under my skin to the point of driving me to tears.

I told myself I’d give it a year. It’s been 6 months.

I don’t know if it’s having been raised by Asian parents, some natural predilection, or just a lifetime of internalizing what it means to reach middle age, but all my life I’ve been preoccupied with the idea of (not) realizing my potential. Ambition can be good, but I know I’m also applying capitalism’s broken logic of perpetual growth to my artistic production, which is supposed to be something joyful and playful, not goal-oriented. So does playing cabarets and musicals constitute art for me?

Part of the pleasure of engaging with media about young people is witnessing the awkward charm of them figuring their shit out. There’s a kind of goodness in growth and learning how to be a better, more compassionate person. But this always plays out against a backdrop of fear and uncertainty—a struggle made manifest in 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim, where ordinary teenagers slowly discover how fucked the world really is, how they’re thrust into responsibilities they’re not ready for, how they have no choice but to steward a pre-determined future in ruins.

The game cobbles together a dizzying amount of references to dystopian sci-fi from the past forty years, making it hard to keep the narrative straight as the characters adjust to perpetually evolving understandings of what reality really is. My reality keeps shifting, too. The passage of time slowly sculpts me until I become someone with little resemblance to the person I was when I was young. At seventeen, I wanted nothing more to play bass. I didn’t care about the context; I just adored the instrument. A year and a half later, I dropped out of music school because I decided I didn’t want the working musician’s life—teaching, wedding gigs, etc.—anything that wasn’t me with my four-track and reverb unit, writing sad songs maybe eight people would ever hear.

As a young person, I was a mass of potential. Now I’m a mess of anxieties as the future grows ever more uncertain.

Time to practice.