Other than being aware of God Eater, I had no idea what kind of game to expect. What I got feels like a very weeb version of Monster Hunter, or at least that seems like the closest thing to compare it to (Though this is coming from someone who hasn't played Monster Hunter since the PS2 game, so I could be very off on that comparison). You play as an AGE, or Adaptive God Eater. A new type of God Eater to the world, they are able to better survive the Ash, some kind of loosely explained substance that is very deadly to be in (Let's just ignore the regular god eater that follows them into an area with high ash density with no problem).
Each Mission sees you face off against Aragami, and this is pretty much the only thing there is to gameplay beyond crafting items. I'm not really against this as a concept, but it really does rely on a really solid gameplay experience since there is a lack of variety. God Eater 3, however, does not deliver that special of an experience.
It's a bit odd trying to explain why since that on paper, everything sounds like it should work. Without giving my opinion at first, I'm going to just tell you what's going on in combat. It's a high paced action RPG game. You have a Burst gauge that fills when using devour attacks, you have an 'Engage' mode you can activate by staying close to allies and using the prompt when it comes up, you have an OP gauge is expended when using your gun and is recharged when you use melee attacks, and you have a stamina bar that is expended when you run or block attacks, and charges when standing still or walking instead of running. Finally, you have the Acceleration Trigger, which activates after specific conditions depending on which one you have selected.
This is a fast-paced action game that is basically expecting you keep track of five different things at all times and this isn't even taking into account enemies using devour attacks, entering burst, weapons with properties they may or may not be weak too, and more. It's not that keeping up with all this is impossible, I mean I did beat the game, but it feels like you are keeping track of so many other things you aren't really focusing on playing the game.
Even that could be forgivable if there was at least a good variety of enemies, but you will constantly fight re-skins and stronger versions of the same Aragami. There are a large number of quests, and I felt like I had seen pretty much every enemy the game had to offer by the halfway point, with only a couple unique monsters to come after that point. In the end, it's not that the overall design is bad, there is just more there then needs to be in terms of mechanics, and not enough in regards to enemies to fight. And of the few unique ones, only one of them really looks that cool. The other one I remember is this weird three headed crocodile thing that looks like it's second and third head are just kind of loosly tied on to the main head and floating there.
The story is frustrating because there some interesting characters and moments, but overall the story is spread out way too thin in terms of both how many stories it tries to tell, and how few and far between the actual story bits happen. You are first a group of God Eaters being mistreated (For reasons never really explained) and forced to fight Aragami in the ash. Escaping that you ally with a Caravan and befriend it's 'Cargo', a Humanoid Aragami. You manage to convince the people the delivery was for to allow her to stay with you. There is also a rebel group of God Eaters that hate their mistreatment, a caravan conducting unethical experiments on God Eaters involving the Acceleration Trigger, a weapon created that can supposedly clear out the Ashlands if they could recover it and power it, and Ash Aragami, creatures so strong even AGES can't kill them, but for some reason you can. Gather up all the story scenes for all of these plot lines and even more, I would be shocked if you had more then two hours of footage. None of these stories feel like they were given any time to matter.
Despite that, you do get some good dialogue and character moments, like when one of the Ages teaches Phym, the Humanoid Aragami, how to cheat at card games. It's a dumb little thing, but it adds a certain something to the characters, and I kind of wish they were actually given time to grow. Though none of these moments involve your character, who has no personality or character, doesn't speak during important scenes as it's just an avatar for your control, and is nothing more than the group's muscle. You are not important or necessary for this story at all.
I can't comment too much on the online, because I barely managed to find other people to play the Assault missions with, but it's just fighting against strong enemies with a group of people. I had no issues with Lag in the few games I played, and it played well enough. But other than having help from someone other then AI, there really isn't anything special here.
One thing I also wanted to start making more of an effort to point out in my reviews is the music, but its something that usually slips my mind because in most games music effectively conveys what the game wants, and outside of a few examples line Nier: Automata, they don't do any more than that. This game, however, is almost hilariously bad with its bizarre choices of these epic-sounding quires that just don't match the scenes they are paired with. The crew of the ship was just talking about what their plans going forward were, and I swore my computer started playing an ad or something because I did not register the music was coming from the game. There was no reason that quire needed to be there, but it was.
God Eater 3 is a game that was on the cusp of being great, but on no front was it able to cross over. The story wasn't given the time to breathe, the combat was too cluttered with things to keep track of and lack of variety, and even the visuals weren't anything special. This game gets a hard pass from me.