God Eater Resurrection is a remaster / remake of God Eater and its expansion God Eater Burst for the Vita and PS4. Outside of North America, it was released as a bonus to God Eater 2 Rage Burst and is a game in the same genre as Monster Hunter, Freedom Wars and Ragnarok Odyssey. What’s interesting was that the original God Eater was released on PSP, then Burst added in a new story arc and heaps of improvements from player feedback, before finally Resurrection added yet another story arc to help bridge the gap to the sequel.
When you first play the game, you must fiddle around with the options to get to a point where it is suitable for you. Importantly, this includes the control schemes as well as the camera, which you can pull back as the default has it situated close to your character. Camera rotate speed can be a tad fast on default and whether you rely on the lock-on or not depend on which of the flaws of each alternative you are willing to accept. Lock-on makes the camera swing wildly as it follows the aragami, while no lock-on means you can easily lose track of the enemy as they jump around.
When starting the story mode, you create your own character and there are a number of customization options. The story takes place in the future where monsters known as aragami roam around and humanity is pushed to the brink of extinction. Humanity is holding out in fortified buildings and has God Eaters, people who are capable of wielding weapons known as God Arcs. God Arcs are made of oracle cells, the only substance capable of hurting aragami, which is also what they are made of. The player takes the role of a silent protagonist, joining the organization Fenrir as a new God Eater, and proceeds to help hunt down the aragami.
There are three key types of equipment: sword, gun and shield. Each type of equipment has more subtypes, each having their advantages and disadvantages to suit all types of playstyles. So once again, it is important to experiment with the various equipment and decide on which ones you like best. One type of sword has short range and does little damage but is fast, while on the opposite end of the spectrum, another sword has longer reach but is much slower.
While you’ll start off with mostly melee attacks, you’ll quickly come to realize that melee does a lot less than ranged, especially after the first few chapters. You’ll end up alternating between using your gun to shoot until you run out of bullets, then rush in to melee to stock up on ammo before swapping back to gun attacks. In the last few chapters, you won’t even need to melee as you’ll have buffs to automatically restore ammo at high speed. Guns are by far the superior choice of weapon as you can do ranged attacks. Play around the bullet editor and it’ll make the game much easier thanks to the myriad of customizations and effects that you can do.
The combat may be easy to learn but it takes a long time to get used to. Melee weapons have a light and heavy attack that you can chain together into a combo, as well as special attacks. Using the right shoulder button will swap it into gun mode and vice versa. Guns can use two types of bullets on the field. The hit detection takes the most to get used to, as well as learning the timing to dodge, block, rush in and aiming. Aragami loves to zip around and never stays in one place long enough for you to slowly get into position to wail away at them.
Unique to God Eater is how the oversized weapons have the ability to “devour” parts of the aragami. This puts you into a status buff condition known as “burst”. You can customize the types of buffs you get when you go into burst, and it’ll automatically recover your ammo bar, as well as increase your stats.
The gameplay loop is that you fight aragami in order for them to drop materials, which are crucial in using them to upgrade or craft new equipment. This allows you to get stronger, in order to fight against stronger aragami, and it’s an addictive loop by the time you’re midway through the game. The story and gameplay is mission based though. You’ll pick a mission, play it, and then get sent back to the hub. The amount of materials that you can craft become too numerous by the middle of the game. The menu system lacks useful sort options making it tedious to try to search for the specific material you’re missing.
Unfortunately, the game is very uneven and missions spike from extremely easy one minute missions to fifteen minutes of chipping away at a damage sponge enemy. It’s really frustrating when this happens, and it is just not fun when the enemies jump all over the place so you can never really be able to hit it. It’s worse when every attack that it does will stun or knock you over yet your attacks won’t do nearly the same.
Perhaps the worst part with difficulty spikes is the huge amount of health that some of the enemies have so that it can seem never-ending. It’s not very fun when enemies do huge damage to your character but you only do chip damage even when striking against weak points. All of this combines into a very niche and newcomer unfriendly experience, especially when you need to craft overpowered bullets to dramatically lessen the difficulty.
To be honest, the armor and equipment that you can craft is not enough to keep up with the massive increase in power to aragami in the last few chapters of the game. One swipe from them can take off two-thirds of your health. This makes dodging and blocking more important but you cannot rely on a battle of attrition due to the time limit. However, the harder aragami’s attack patterns leaves very little opportunities where they are open and you can wail on them. You’ll end up having to rely on buffs a lot more, by constantly customizing the abilities you get when you devour and go into burst.
The camera angles are an issue when you begin, especially in small enclosed spaces. You can take up to three AI team mates in most story missions, they’re useful in diverting the attention of the aragami but aragami does have a tendency to continually target you instead. While you can’t rely on them in this role, AI will heal you if you’re on critical health. If you lose all your health during a mission, it is not an instant game over, rather, you can be revived.
The storytelling is really bad as all the scenes feel boring and bland. It’s supposed to be a story about camaraderie with your teammates when you’re putting all your lives on the light against the big and powerful aragami. It’s about hidden schemes and plans from people with ulterior motives. However, it’s just told in a way that doesn’t make you care very much about it all.
The original game’s story spans from Rank 1 to 6, the Burst addition from 7 to 10, and Resurrection from 11 to 14. The quality of storytelling marginally improves in the later additions. It’s still basically just you as the New Type God Eater fighting off the aragami, learning about their history, their nature, their weakness, and what people are doing in this hopeless apocalyptic world. It takes around forty hours to finish all three story arcs. However, it highly depends on your skill level, whether you spend time on hunting for equipment, and whether you do the optional missions.
The game is at its funnest towards the last few story chapters, when you have finetuned your playstyle, have considerably powerful equipment, and are familiar with the basic movements of all the aragami. Since the new aragami are basically evolutions of existing ones, they share several moves with what they are based on. Although the game makes aragami harder by giving them faster movesets and attacks that sweep an ever increasing area, this feels like a cheap and lazy way to provide additional challenge.
The harder aragami is manageable until you are introduced to the Blitz Hannibal near the end of the game. It is absurdly fast which is extremely annoying, but what is ridiculous about the whole situation is that it hits like a truck even with a ton of upgrades. It kills your AI within seconds and because it constantly moves with its hyper fast attacks, there is no opening to do anything. It is frustrating, cheap and unfair, which ruins the whole game.
That being said with the difficulty spikes, once you fiddle around with the various skill effects (such as considerably buffing your character’s defense) and upgrading equipment to as high as you can, then it is a lot more manageable. AI still dies, and the aragami still runs away at least twice when you do a certain amount of damage, wasting your time, but at least you’re not getting two-shotted.
Overall, God Eater Resurrection is a fun game. It has a high learning curve since the controls at first definitely seems to busy. It can also be very difficult on default weaponry so you must invest some time in making strong bullets if you want to have an easier time and advance without too many issues. Using one of the overpowered bullet recipes on the internet will make the game a cakewalk. There are definitely difficulty spikes but as you keep playing, refining your playstyle and learning how to use all the systems of the game, then it is a lot of fun. RNG for materials is always sucky and it takes at least until you finish the first story arc before you’re a lot more comfortable with the mechanics, but it is a rewarding experience even if it is quite frustrating at times.
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