I beat God Eater 1 on PSP but never played the GE Burst expansion content. When God Eater 2 came out in the US it came with an enhanced port of GE1 so I decided to re-play God Eater 1, finish all the story stuff and then finally play God Eater 2. I ended up never even finishing the vanilla story and thus never get around to playing God Eater 2. God Eater 3 is now out. I have played it for 12 hours. I guess I’ll never play God Eater 2.
However the enhanced GE1 port did backport a lot of gameplay changes from GE2 so maybe I was getting the general GE2 gamefeel. God Eater 3 doesn’t feel too different! I think movement is a tad bit faster and there’s a new air dash ability that lets you cover a lot a distance quickly, so you can retreat a fair distance dodge an attack and then dash back into melee range in one action. A lot of little changes like that make the game feel a tad bit quicker.
But the game really doubled down on customizing your combat abilities. You can now equip new melee abilities, equip each of those abilities with special projectiles, equip two additional super modes in addition to the existing Burst Mode mechanic, equip new accessories called Control Units, equip abilities to each piece of equipment in their new Ability Slots that function a lot like Monster Hunter’s gems, and you can still create custom bullets in the Bullet Editor. With all of these different features the game’s gotten way more effect heavy as all these special moves and abilities constantly activate from all the players.
It feels really cool in just how much there is to customize and unlock, but at the same time the game is still just way too easy. Initially I was really happy with just how much more offensive monsters were in GE3 compared to previous games; they do more damage, attack several times in succession more often, use longer distance attacks, and have shorter rest periods between attacks. All of that felt like a nice upgrade to the monster behaviors. But the eternal thorn that appears in most every Monster Hunter clones came back in full effect: the partner AI is way too effective. Most MH clones have AI partners now to give solo players company, but they tend to be way too effective at dealing damage, healing you and themselves, and just generally taking care of business.
It’s hard to tell just how much all of the new character customization matters when you rarely ever seem to struggle during a match. I’ve had no reason to think about why one ability might be better than the other when everything seems to do the job just fine. Even if you go into a match solo, there are now healing spots on the map that randomly activate that give you a way to regenerate health without needing health items (monsters can use this too but it’s never seemed to make much difference to how long they last). I guess I could keep imposing rules on myself to try and find some way to make things challenging, but I don’t want to outright stop using game features.
The game’s got a new 8 player MP mode, I’m sure it’s got a better bestiary since it has more iterations to pull from, and the new customization options all seem really good on paper. But I don’t think the game is punishing enough to do itself justice.
