Something I've learned about myself over the years is that I love minutiae, and I love getting sucked into the weird little details of a fictional world. Tangents in genre fiction are like catnip to me.

I'm not the fastest reader in the world, I'll admit, and the number of books I finish reading in a year is somewhat stymied by my love of books that come with extra stuff that you have to flip to as you read. This started early on, when I learned that I love books with maps thanks to the Redwall series. As an adult, I cannot tell you how much delight I got out of reading Pale Fire, House of Leaves, and Infinite Jest (I do, don't @ me), books that require you to head over to the footnotes like, every three pages. I love that Dune has an entire glossary in the back of it. I even enjoyed listening to the audiobook of Moby Dick not despite but because it kept going off on long digressions on how exactly every knot on a ship works.

This love of digging into the nerdy specifics and details of things spreads to other areas of pop culture, too. I was the kid who read every single entry in the Star Wars Encyclopedia and still care about the difference between Figrin D'Aan and Tech M'Or (Figrin D'Aan plays one of those hookah jazz flute things, Tech M'Or is playing that little DJ gadget).

And naturally, now that I have a Marvel Universe subscription, I get to learn all there is to know about Elsa Bloodstone, Danny Ketch (who is NOT Johnny Blaze), the Guthrie family (there's a lot of them), Rachel Summers, the Morlocks, and all the other bits of minutiae in a dense, nerdy universe. It's great.

For whatever reason, this love of weird, specific little details that make up a world doesn't always translate to love of an elaborate fictional world in and of itself. I struggled to get into Game of Thrones, both the books and the series (I liked the book I read though) because the focus was so much on the macro, not the micro. A series like Game of Thrones requires an understanding of the political system, alignments, things that I struggle enough to understand in the real world. In the real world, my brain naturally gravitates more towards questions like "What do they eat for breakfast in Iran?" (it's not really that exciting) and less towards "How is the relationship between Iran and the US going?" (not well). It's a failing of mine, I admit. I blame ADHD, because little distractions take up so much more of my headspace than actually important concepts.

Loving minutiae and having ADHD can cause a lot of delays in your media consumption; you get distracted by minutiae, and you end up in a wormhole trying to find out does anyone else think Kinbote is in love with John Shade when Jesus, you should have finished Pale Fire two months ago, it's not that long of a book.

But nerdy properties like Dune and Star Wars and Infinite Jest (again, don't @ me) go so well with ADHD because they're all about the minutiae. And speaking of something that's all about minutiae, let me talk to you about 13 Sentinels: Aegis Rim.

13 Sentinels is a video game developed by Vanillaware and published by Atlus Games, who you've probably heard of if you're into the Persona games and their offshoots. The basic premise of the game is a little tricky to explain without giving a lot away (I really think it's worth picking this one up blind) but I'll do my best.

Basically, at the start of the game, gameplay is divided into two segments: remembrance and destruction (which you should just call "battle" in your head because it's more accurate). Remembrance, at least at the start, is a charming high school adventure game where you follow characters from place to place. There's not really much to this, gameplaywise, but you can make the character you're controlling "reflect" on various keywords. Sometimes those keywords are plot relevant, and sometimes they're just what the character had for lunch. All 13 characters are charming and interesting, but so far I'm particularly enjoying the adventures of Shu (the slacker), Natsuno (the spunky friend to robots everywhere), Keitaro (the teenage soldier), and Ryoko (I have no idea what's going on with her yet, but she has a mysterious bandage over her head and she seems to have had a weird time of it, so I'm very curious). All of the characters' plots intersect in interesting ways. There are hints (some big, some small) early on that there's more sci-fi weirdness going on than meets the eye, but these segments are from the kids' points of view and they all go about their lives as normal high school students, some of them in different decades than others.

The Destruction segments, however, tip the game's hand a bit more. These are real-time-strategy battles that flow in a way that feels like Starcraft meets Persona 5. You control the same 13 characters, but now they are in giant mechs called Sentinels and they are fighting kaiju, most of whom look very War of the Worlds inspired (although on the overworld map, they're digitized and look closer to the original Space Invaders). The game does not make it clear how your characters got from their high school adventures to the strategy battles, and a big part of the game is figuring out how all of these story threads connect up. It already feels like the video game version of a footnotes-heavy novel like Infinite Jest, but then after a prologue, it adds another layer of gameplay. After the prologue, you get more freedom as to which character stories you play through and when you battle. More importantly, though, you also get a new segment called "Analysis," which isn't so much a game as an index where you can look up different characters, items, events, and keywords. It basically lets you go back and piece together what's going on without having to play through everything again. The more you play, the more information gets added to Analysis. That's where the reward system comes in, and the reward system feels tailor made for minutiae-loving nerds like myself. When you play through Remembrance, you get points you can use to upgrade your fighters in Destruction, and if you do well enough in Destruction, you get Mystery Points that unlock information in Analysis.

The Mystery Points, for me, are maybe the best rewards to get in any game. You spend a point to unlock information about some keyword you've come across in the game. It's probably not even new information, it's just information to help you keep everything straight. You can spend Mystery Points on SO MANY things. You can get a clue about a suspicious character, or you can just learn a little more about Takatoshi's favorite sandwich (yakisoba pan).

A lot of games have dense glossaries and information sections you can tab over to if you really want to do so, but they always feel like they're afterthoughts shoved in by the developer in case the player forgets who Samus is or whatever. I do enjoy exploring these sorts of thing once in a while (the Dragon Age games usually have some interesting world-building stuff in there), but they always feel overwritten and the presentation is always the blandest thing in the game: just paragraphs of text shoved into a box. But the brilliance of 13 Sentinels is that it makes this info section a part of the game, something you're encouraged to explore and spend points to expand so that you can get the biggest picture possible. These aren't walls of text; these are little rewards you get for fighting well, and even better, they expand and grow as you play. For instance you might unlock the entry for yakisoba pan, but if you later learn that, say, every yakisoba pan was destroyed in the apocalypse, that information will get added to the entry and you'll get a nice little notification that "yakisoba pan" has been updated.

I love this stuff in games, and I really only realized it as a result of playing 13 Sentinels. I love the weird little clues you get about the world of Dark Souls and Bloodborne, and the absurdly overcomplicated mythology of the recent DOOM games (by the way, I got so sucked into DOOM that I almost wrote an entire essay evaluating DOOM's place in depictions of Hell in art; lmk if you want me to keep working on this), and the glimpses of everyday town life you get in Final Fantasy games. But 13 Sentinels has really come up with such a clever way to make you engage with the minutiae by making it a part of the rewards system. It's delightful, and it feels like a game made specifically for nerds like me.

And it's borne out by the fact that most of the kids in this game are also huge nerds. They all have different sci-fi movies floating around in their thoughts that they'll reflect on and recap for you. And yes, you can spend mystery points to unlock entries on movies, like the specific UFO conspiracy theory movie one of the characters watches.

I recommend this game so highly. It's not very difficult; even the battles have been very forgiving so far. The story is fascinating. The mystery at its core is one I really want to uncover. There's even an adorable kitty.

But it's only on PS4 right now. But PS4s are more affordable right now! You can probably get a used one real cheap! But yeah, sorry. Console exclusivity sucks.

And it should really be on Switch. It would be incredible on Switch.

... Okay, have a nice day.