God Eater 3 is a monster-hunting game that wants you to care about its world as much as its combat. It mostly succeeds at the second thing.
Trailer, via Bandai Namco Entertainment America.
A World Buried in Ash
The premise is simple and grim. Earth has been overrun by Aragami, creatures that eat everything and adapt to whatever kills them. A corrosive ash has spread across Europe, leaving huge stretches of land uninhabitable. Those stretches are the Ashlands, and they keep growing.
What is left of humanity lives underground, in facilities called Ports, built from the ruins of old Fenrir satellite bases. The people who defend those Ports are Adaptive God Eaters, or AGEs — warriors modified to survive the ash and carry living weapons called God Arcs. The Ports treat them like tools, not people.
That is a strong frame for a game about hunting monsters. The ash gives God Eater 3 a reason to exist beyond its predecessors, and the game uses it. You travel through ruined areas the earlier God Eater games never showed.
Port Pennywort Leaves Its People Behind
The early story does more work than the premise. You play a young God Eater serving a contract at Port Pennywort alongside three companions: Keith, a mechanic; Zeke, a close-quarters fighter; and Hugo, their leader. The Port sends AGEs on dangerous missions and treats them as less than human.
When an Ash Storm hits the Port, management runs and leaves the AGEs to die. Hilda Henriquez, who owns Port Chrysanthemum, rescues them. She is carrying cargo for Gleipnir and traveling with Claire Victorious, a Gleipnir support-type AGE. Hilda takes the Pennywort group on as passengers, though Ash Navigation Law means she has to return them eventually.
Hugo has a plan: buy their freedom and start their own Port. Along the way the group picks up Lulu, a scout AGE from Port Baran who was stranded during a mission. She shares a prototype Acceleration Trigger, which Keith finishes.
That is a lot of names, factions and laws in a short stretch. The game introduces people faster than it lets you care about them, and the early hours feel like a briefing rather than a story.
Phym Is the Best Idea Here
The cargo turns out to be the thing the game needed. An Ashborn attack tears open the crawler’s cargo bay and reveals a small girl the group names Phym. She can heal wounds and purge the corruption Ashborn leave behind.
Aragami attacks increase after she arrives, and the group suspects she is drawing them. With her help and the protagonist’s Resonance powers, they kill an Ashborn — a feat the game treats as previously unheard of.
All of sudden, unknown life forms called “Oracle cells” begin their uncontrolled consumption of all life on Earth.
Phym gives the story a center. Without her, God Eater 3 is mercenaries doing contract work. With her, it is a group protecting something that might save the world.
Three New Weapons, Three Different Problems
The combat is where God Eater 3 earns its keep. It is an action role-playing game with hack-and-slash fighting, and your God Arc can transform. You hunt Aragami. You absorb energy from them to fire Burst Arts, special attacks that hit hard. AI companions fight alongside you, and the Engage System lets you share combat perks with them.
God Eater 3 adds three God Arc weapon types:
- Biting Edge: dual blades with the fastest attack speed and the lowest damage of any class. They transform into Glaive Form for more damage and mobility, at the cost of stamina.
- Heavy Moon: a large moon-shaped blade that becomes Axe Moon Form. Attack speed and damage climb the longer you swing, and it works well against heavily armored Aragami, but you cannot move in Axe Form.
- Ray Gun: fires a continuous laser that hits harder the longer you hold it. Its Oracle Reserve system stocks OP up to two bars so you can fire longer.
The game also adds Accelerator Triggers, passive abilities that grant temporary boosts when certain conditions are met in battle. Their effects are shared when God Eaters are Engaged, and each one has its own experience gauge that fills as you use it, similar to Burst Arts.
Multiplayer supports four players, and assault missions take up to eight. That is the version of God Eater 3 that will keep people playing long after the campaign ends.
The Story Keeps Stopping the Game
The weaknesses are structural. God Eater 3 is a game about speed, and its story is slow. Cutscenes are frequent, dialogue is expository, and the pace collapses whenever the game explains a faction you already met.
The Ashlands are a good idea, and the game does not always trust them to be interesting on their own. The Aragami are frightening in motion. They are less frightening when a character stops to describe them.
The other problem is density. Three new weapon types, Accelerator Triggers, Burst Arts, Engage, Oracle Reserve, Gleipnir, Crimson Queen, AGEs, Ports, Ashborn, Ash Storms. Biting Edge and Heavy Moon genuinely play differently. A lot of the surrounding noise does not.
Gleipnir and the Crimson Queen
The most interesting thing in the plot is the fight underneath the monster hunting. The Ports answer to Gleipnir, the organization that replaced Fenrir and wants to retake the Ashlands. The Crimson Queen is an AGE resistance group that opposes Gleipnir and wants to adapt to the ash instead of fighting it.
That split is a real argument about how to survive, and the game barely uses it. A sequel that committed to that conflict would be a better game than this one.
The Verdict on God Eater 3
God Eater 3 released for PlayStation 4 in Japan in December 2018, then worldwide in February 2019 for PlayStation and Microsoft Windows, with a Nintendo Switch version following in July 2019. The co-op is the answer. Four players, eight in assault missions, and a combat loop that rewards learning a weapon over following the plot. The Engage System gives your AI companions a purpose beyond filling space, and shared Accelerator Triggers make team composition matter. That is the part that will age well.
God Eater 3 is a good monster-hunting game with a story that keeps interrupting it. The combat is fast, the weapon variety is real, and co-op is the reason to stay. The plot is a means to an end, and the end is killing Aragami with friends.
The score sits at 7.3/10 in the IGDB critic aggregate. That is about right for a game whose best ideas are the ones it keeps stepping in front of.
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