God Eater is a franchise in the hearts of many, often comparable to other franchises like Monster Hunter. With large monsters, ridiculously large weapons and a variety of preparation and customisation options, it can provide a fun and interesting experience for each player. However, with the 3rd title of the main series, God Eater 3 is released, how does it measure to every other title? Let's find out.
Gameplay
As stated above, it holds some similarities with Monster Hunter. Most of the objectives often involve you hunting a primary target Aragami (the huge monster thing). You do have a selection of a number of weapon classes in the melee and ranged category. Finally, you can play and hunt with your friends to take out the objective.
The gameplay is perhaps one of the better parts of the game, offering a number of abilities, movesets and customisation to fit your playstyle. Perhaps you like to play a hyper-aggressive God Eater with a Daggers/spears, shotgun and buckler combo, or you prefer a more methodical approach with the buster sword, sniper and tower shield set. The game allows you to mix/match all kinds of choices to fit your preferences.
That said, there are some feelings of missed opportunities from my perspective that could've enhanced the gameplay or even expanded upon. Overall, the gameplay is solid fun and allows some nice amounts of experimentation.
Story
The God Eater 3 story was mediocre. The characters were somewhat unremarkable and the game suffers from the 'silent protagonist' syndrome. While not literally, their lack of lines in the narrative is a bit of a disappointment. I do think that the game isn't exactly trying to be the most in-depth of deeply layered kind of story. However, had the protagonist has some form of voicing and lines in the story (not action gameplay), it might've had more interesting character interactions and fleshed out the relationships a bit more.
Despite all of that, the background lore is still fairly fascinating about the whole post-apocalyptic like environment with all the different types of Aragami and organisations about. It does put a number of hooks that might work as some DLC extra content, but we'll have to see where it lands in the narrative perspective.
Aesthetics
Along with new tech, developers get to play around with, it's a safe bet to assume God Eater 3 will get some visual upgrades and it didn't disappoint. While the creativity of dungeons could be improved, the designs capture the post-apocalyptic setting really well. It may not be like Mad Max or Metro, but it still has that feeling of the absence of humanity fairly well.
As with music, it was pretty good and follows through with the Japanese styled visuals really well. While I'm not a huge fan of the genre itself, it was still a nice tidbit and the sounds clicked with every scene, game environment in a solid setting.
Background
Finally, let's get to how playable God Eater 3 is. With every game, you can pretty much expect some form of bugs and glitches to show up. Personally, I didn't experience any bugs throughout the game and pretty much played the game seamlessly. The loading screens are decently short and thankfully, there are some control customisations if you want to tap that and give yourself a bit of extra comfort.
That being said, the controls on the PC port is pretty awesome as it doesn't suffer from 'Controller only hints'. This allows newer players to get into the game and understand the tips and tricks quicker than the poorly made ports for the JRPGs.
I wasn't able to check it's networking/server capabilities as it does have content related to the system. From my personal point of view, it's likely that I'm an outlier case where I wasn't able to join any friends or random players to play with me throughout the content. That being said, it does have strong potential for the fun multiplayer game, but I was not able to consume it due to networking issues on MY part.
Overall
It is a pretty fun game, killing monsters, mixing and matching your character and tonnes of ways to customize your own playstyle really gives it a lot of freshness to the game. However, it isn't particularly a game that would make me go 'Oh I know this game blows me off my socks'. A lot of things it did was tried and true, but part of me wished it tried something a drastically new.
Regardless, this is a game to play if you are looking for something with action and customisation but not a strong amount of competitiveness and dependent of optimising your character. This is a solid 7/10.
