Posted in: Games, Review, Video Games | Tagged: Bandai Namco, game review, God Eater, God Eater 3, Marvelous!, Shift

[Review] God Eater 3 is a Trash Anime Game but it's Fun

Published Fri, 01 Mar 2019 13:40:32 -0600

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God Eater 3, like previous games in the series, is an anime hack and slash game featuring hilariously oversized weapons. If you go into God Eater 3 expecting to be some combination of confused, intrigued, and amused, you'll be well prepared for the game.

The pacing is a bit weird, as it takes you a few missions to actually get through the base tutorial an onto the actual meat of the story. Throughout the tutorial, the player character is essentially a slave to a pseudo- military government system called a Port. The Ports all function in a rather feudal manner, with a Governer overseeing the entire Port, but the various Ports are only loosely connected by a larger military system. Ports are underground facilities that house regular humans, God Eaters, and the Adaptive God Eaters (or AGEs). AGEs are treated as sub-human, as they're even more like Aragami than regular old God Eaters. They've also got to use two of the fancy weapon cuffs, rather than just one.

AGEs have an immunity to the dust storms that have taken over the world after the events of God Eater 2, and are used to protect and harvest items for their Ports.

The game presents all of this information in a quick and brutal fashion that almost seems to gloss over the suffering of the captive Port AGEs. Granted, the protagonists keep mentioning how novel it is when people give them choices, and debate over the meaning of freedom, but the emotional resonance to those discussions is oddly absent. The lines are given with no inflection on either the English or Japanese voice tracks, which puts you in this bizarre suffering limbo which characterizes the entire plot, really.

The combat system is pretty fun, though the controls are fare from intuitive. On console, it's rather easy to chain combos, but remembering which buttons map to what combinations can be a bit of a trial as the default button mapping doesn't stick with the layout that's become standard in modern games. In order to execute certain key maneuvers, you'll need to make sure you're holding down the appropriate trigger or bumper in order for the button to do what you want.

Granted, you can customize some of this to make things easier, but there's really only so much modification you can do to the controls on God Eater 3.

Obviously the PC version of the game is far more easily customized with keybinds.

While the combat isn't the easiest to pick up, it does become more fluid with exposure, and the fights become far more interesting and fun as your arsenal expands. The combat truly is the bit where God Eater 3 shines, because there's little to complain about.

The game may be a hack and slash action title, but it does come with some crafting for your weapon progression system. The God Arc progression is mostly focused on upgrading and crafting new God Arcs with materials you pick up during missions or as rewards for finishing with a high score. Each mission has a set list of possible drops, so you can absolutely figure out which missions you need to farm in order to craft whatever weapon, gun, shield, or outfit you want. Which is pretty darn nice. The crafting system isn't particularly deep, you just need to have the materials to craft the item, but that's about all you want in a weapon progression system. Anything more complicated becomes a bore.

If you aren't expecting an incredibly deep story or major RPG elements, there's very little to complain about with God Eater 3. It's not Game of the Year, and it doesn't break any new ground, but God Eater 3 is absolutely fun. The only thing I'd complain about is the insanely slow walking speed when outside of missions. Which is an incredibly minor gripe.

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