God Eater 3 Demo: From Protectors to Prisoners

So Bandai Namco just dropped a bomb in the form of a God Eater 3 Demo in the Japanese PS Store. And like the hype beast that I am for anything God Eater-related, I jumped in and never emerged back. The sequel to the previously localized and re-imagined God Eater 2: Rage Burst that came along with the God Eater Resurrection which is the re-imagined first game of the series with a lot of new mechanics that redefined its playstyle is back and interestingly enough it comes out as a slightly different game yet still holds the base mechanics of the previous. It officially comes out on the 13^th of December 2018 in Japan for 8856 JP Yen including some pre-order bonuses like a PS4 Theme to go with the flow. The Western audience will get to play it in early 2019 for both PC and PS4.

Strap up and create a character. What you get is a more graphically stunning character creation while being the same old story with the menu and its usage. Get passed that and you’ll then be introduced to your new cell. A prisoner of sorts and gives the same vibe as a Freedom Wars atmosphere with the chains and being locked up. You got a sorry excuse of a bed, the terminal to change your loadouts as well as to save and execute multiplayer and the monitor to accept quests. While behind you is a guard that you’ll be required to talk to in order to sortie into the mission area.

You and many others are considered as the AGE or Adaptive God Eaters. A new breed that is capable of resisting the corrosive effect of the new enemies which can turn what they touch into ash. Fenrir was helpless then and got reduced to naught. However thanks to the AGE, they can fight back but also offers a huge threat and considered dangerous. Thus they are not allowed freedom.

Just like every game, tutorials are the most basic thing you need to learn and it introduces quite a few things like the Dive mechanic which you can activate by pressing the R2 + X button on a dualshock 4 controller. This lets you cover huge distances with a shield charge animation that you can execute either on the ground or in the air. It consumes a chunk of stamina for each use and you can chain it to another action like an aerial devour if you decide to dive after a jump.

An engage system, however, procs when players are close to each other filling a meter that can be consumed by pressing both L2 and R2. What ensues later is a timed buff that increases both linked players to share buffs from one another including acceleration trigger, a new passive skill that heightens a player’s abilities when conditions are met.

The God Eater 2 Blood Arts feature lets you change how a certain combo or attack works. Be it a powerful charged attack from a spear god arc or the many ways you can customize how a long blade’s impulse edge works. But unlike the GE2 Blood Arts, the third goes on a different route by introducing BURST ARTS and lets you equip three… one for every attack type. You have your ground BA, an aerial BA and a step BA. These changes how a certain combo or attack goes. The new god arc, Heavy Moon is a crescent moon blade that can and will transform into a battleaxe while slamming into the ground and along with its plug-ins, it can have more special effects like emitting pillars of light from the ground as it slams or shoot a wave of energy frontward when activating its Aerial BURST ART. The catch, it’s only available while in BURST and would simply make your aerial slam into a spinning attack with no visual effects.

While there are new God Arcs you can equip, GE3 removed Blast Guns in the mix and replaced it with a Raygun. Guns that fire radiation which grows stronger the more it gets radiated. Its power, however, resets when firing another shot. From the melee side of things, we’ve got the previously mentioned Heavy Moon by using certain button presses and combinations it can turn into a huge battleaxe that provides huge raw power but with a slower execution animation. Then comes the Biting Edge. A dual wielded sword or rather swords that can also be transformed into a Mow-Down that combines both swords by their handles to make a deadly guandao but on both ends. Dual wielding provides quick slashes and thrust but the Mow-Down mode halts player stamina regeneration but hits have more raw power and a wider range of attacks.

Other than the major changes and upgrades, there are some minor ones also worth noting. Link Burst has been limited and can’t go pass three stacks of bullets after devouring an active Aragami. And while I find it a bit too early to speculate, Blood Bullet creation doesn’t seem to be a feature in the demo nor does obtaining Aragami bullets after a successful devour. The game does, however, include a shooting range to test out your default bullets. Depleting your HP also instantly decreases your number of revives instead of having a limited amount of time for your companions to do a Link Aid. Rotating during a block animation is slower and required the character to move its feet in order to turn. This makes for a very slow and harder experience to block from all angles when multiple enemies are hitting from different sides. On the bright side, no one’s going to be spinning like crazy while blocking. Will you be getting the Japanese version when it hits the 13^th of December or will you wait next year for its western release?

An 8-Man Assault Mission demo will also be available from October 20 to 21 in Japan. It’s a new multiplayer feature that randomly matches you with other players but also fills in with NPCs if no players are available. Five minutes to beat and failure would still net you some rewards.