There are a lot of things to really like about God Eater 3: the hunting genre, the anime style, the characters and story, the customization of your character and play style... However, there is also a lot of things to be disheartened with. I played the original God Eater on the PSP and it gave me as much or more enjoyment as MH Freedom Unite did. Whereas Capcom managed to evolve the wayThere are a lot of things to really like about God Eater 3: the hunting genre, the anime style, the characters and story, the customization of your character and play style... However, there is also a lot of things to be disheartened with. I played the original God Eater on the PSP and it gave me as much or more enjoyment as MH Freedom Unite did. Whereas Capcom managed to evolve the way their franchise played and worked, God Eater 3 seems to have developed horizontally rather than vertically as MH did. What I mean with this is that GE seems to switch its focus on the story and customization rather than on improving its gameplay, which is surprising yet understandable from a franchise from the land of visual novels.
However, I think this is a big mistake, as hunting genre games are scarce and pushing this aside makes the game feel shallow, unsatisfying and too ephimerous to want to deal with the horizontal development of customization of your character and stats, so it ends up feeling like a strange novel with simple gameplay and heavy number management. Your management of skills, equipment, links, weapons, items and so on is too deep for what the battles, the core gameplay loop, have to offer. What's more, the fact that monster drops appear nowhere in your monster database is outrageous, as you are hindered if you're willing to invest time on grinding for drops.
But I digress; battles are too quick for the game's own good, as you may be even able to take a new monster down in less than 5 minutes. There is no tracking or previous thinking (besides elemental weaknesses and items to bring) to find and fight the aragamis, the monsters of the game, as the game already marks them on your map beforehand. This might be the result of developers not actually wanting you to really explore the maps, because, well, there isn't much to explore, as they are few and very unimaginative, colourless and composed of small arenas with long corridors. A big selling point of this game when it was about to come out was its graphical update, new weapons and places, but turns out this wasn't that much of a change. I do like the aesthetic and the concept of aragamis, the cinders problem and so, but I feel like it is all a premise to tell the characters' story and not that of the world itself, which is okay to do, but not on top of the sacrifice of the main attraction of these games as well: the game loop, the monsters and having fun. Now, you CAN have fun playing this game, but it's hard to, as you spend too much time on your base and too little battling. The story could be your priority for playing this game, but it's nothing special. I did enjoy the anime cinematics a lot, but it's a shame they were very few.
I am purposely avoiding major comparisons with MH in this review, as I think this game does not try to play on the same league as MHW, but I have to be very critical about it, as this game was being sold for 60€ in Spain for many years and suddenly dropped to around 20 near 2020. So, I have to consider this a triple A game, and, as with a lot of anime style games, this one does not really make the cut. I was expecting at least the same level of care on the game loop and fun factor as I had with the original PSP one, but all I can say is that there has been just a slight graphical update to mask the fact this is still a low effort franchise production so that it can be served at full price on a new gen console. God Eater has taken the wrong approach: it wants to tell a shounen story and for you to self-insert in said story, but it thinks it can do without the fun of the hunting game with a very confusing customization and managing system (not because it doesn't work, but because the game refuses to tell you what does what and what is what or what you should be trying to do on your build) and a surprisingly downgraded version of the hunting core gameplay in comparison to the original.
Nevertheless, I can't not recommend it, as there is an okay game within that may appeal to anime fans and beginners to the genre, but I feel like the jump from handheld was sudden and unfruitful. I hope the developers reflect on their mistakes and come up with a better sequel, as I would have only expected to find this sort of game on the PSVita for 20€, and most certainly not for the price it has been sold for for years in Europe since launch.… Expand
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