QuickSilverD
Member
Ive actually had this game for a while sitting on my instant game collection for Vita, and just recently began to play it.
This is an Action-RPG, very similar to Monster Hunter, is the future, humanity has been driven to the brink of extinction by these mysterious creatures known as Aragami, you are a member of an organization dedicated to protect humanity from the Aragami thread, which youll do by using ridiculous oversize swords and cannons.
You start the game by customizing a character with gender and appearance and then begin the story as a new recruit for the organization dedicated to Aragami extermination, you have a sword, a Big Ass Gun, and a Shield, checking their stats reveals several types of damages inflicted by each weapon and it becomes clear that this will be one of those games that have 1000 variables in gameplay.
Now Im not usually too fond of these types of games, cause I prefer just picking a set of weapons and then use that to kill everything, but in this game it is fairly obvious that you need to upgrade/craft/buy as many diverse swords types and bullet types (for the Big Ass Guns) and prepare each load out of your equipment before each mission depending on whatever type of enemies youll have to face, which again is not something I usually like to do, I prefer not having to micromanage my games, but in the end I dont think it ends up being too troublesome.
--GAMEPLAY--
Gameplay consist mostly walking to a reception like place and taking missions, all missions so far have been Kill # of XXX Aragami type that is weak to Y attribute oftentimes especially in later missions there are also some other Aragamies around in the map that will fight you but you dont have to kill to complete the quest (thought I usually just kill all of them anyway).
There are a lot more missions than there are Maps or Enemy types so, after been playing this game for 13 hours it definitely can feel like you are repeating the same missions over and over with just slight variations, especially because all you do is fight, there are no stealth, no rescue, no escort missions, which I feel could have a least added some variety to the gameplay, this game is lucky in that the main gameplay it has, fighting Aragami is fun as hell, at least when Im not getting my ass handed to me.
You usually go into battle with a team of 3 other characters, which apparently can NPC or other human players via Ad Hoc multiplayer, unfortunately I dont have anyone else to play with so I can only speak about the Single Player experience. For the most part your AI teammates dont seem to be too capable in battle and there was never a moment when they could just take the enemies by themselves, which is fine I guess, because really what would be the fun in that? If they could just kill everything before you could. They seemed to be mostly useful to distract Aragami when youre fighting a group of them and to give you recovery shots or revive you when you get knocked down. They also have a nasty habit of shooting when youre slashing away an enemy (Friendly fire is on), when they do hit you some apologize and some just tell you to stay out of their line of fire.
Like I mentioned before, most Aragami have specific weaknesses, resistances and attack properties which mean you have to carefully select your equipment before each battle. It is intuitive enough I guess, if your mission is to fight an Aragami that uses Spark (lighting) attacks and is weak to Ice/Fire/Crushing attacks, then equip the Crushing Club and the Freeze and/or Blaze bullet with a Spark Resistance upgrade equipped, should be easy enough, right?
However it does seems like Im trying to keep the pace here, so far I have apparently not done enough upgrades to my weapons (seems I always lack the needed materials for it) some of the stronger enemies take me about 12 minutes of hitting them with the weapon thats supposedly theyre weak against before they die, which Im suspecting points to me not having yet upgrade property.
As far as how the gameplay feels, I guess I could say, a little slow, each action you take has an uninterruptable animation, some swords can be slow to swing and in more than one occasion Ive found myself swinging in a direction I was not intended to swing. Youre also limited by a stamina bar, which doesnt actually limit your shooting or swings but your quick step movements and jumps, depleting it will result in your character standing in place for 3-4 seconds, more than enough to make you pray to some Aragami.
Speaking of the Aragamis, some of them are way too agile, they move much faster than you and can jump around from place to place never giving you an opening to attack, what is more egregious is that once you get them low on health they will run away, often leaving the map through places you cannot access, to give credit to the game you can actually stop them by hitting or shooting them, but like I said, they can be very fast and 8 times out of 10 when they decide to leave you wont have a change to stop them. This wouldnt be too problematic if it were not for the fact that you have a time limit for each mission (30 minutes) and you can expend a good 10 minutes hitting away their health just for them to run away and make you waste precious time either waiting for them or trying to hunt them down, this particular thing I found to be mostly irritating.
The camera is another thing that needs work. This is originally a PSP game, but Im not sure how anyone could tolerate playing it without using both sticks (Im playing on Vita with the D-pad (camera) mapped to the right stick). The camera doesnt track you from behind like in say Dark Souls, so you can easily lose track of your position when youre jumping and dashing everywhere.
You can also lock onto enemies which helps sometimes, but still, because the camera doesnt exactly tracks their movement on a fixed angle is easy to lose focus and when you get too close to the enemy (like when you need to Smash them in the head with a giant club) I feel the camera tends to stick too close to you, making it hard to see what youre doing.
Despite these problems however the game is actually really fun and rewarding and I am certainly looking forward to finish it.
--STORY--
I do appreciate a good story and lore I can get myself immersed in, unless it is absolutely terrible I can usually enjoy the story of the game, so Im happy to say that in my book God Eater story is passable so far (Ive played for about 13 hours, I have no idea how long this game is total).
God eater lindow
Like I mentioned you are a new recruit and you are assigned to a unit under Lindow Amamiya a somewhat laidback leader whos orders are usually limited to dont die. Most other characters then are your common anime archetypes, theres a brooding loner, a mysterious Foreigner with an attitude and dark past, a lady fanservice (cause who the fuck needs a bra when fighting giant monsters), the dorky happy go lucky idiot and so on and so for. They work well enough for what they are.
The rest of the story of fairly straightforward, Aragami not evil in the traditional sense, but are simply a constantly evolving species to just happens to consume everything (and everyone) around them, thought the story has been hinting at the possibility of Aragami evolving to have human-level intelligence, but well see where that goes from there.
Cutscenes are done in-engine, but unfortunately this is game is not a looker, soundtrack though is appropriately epic and enjoyable. The execution of the story is nothing to write home about it, a particular scene comes to mind early on the game when youre introduced to a character named Eric for all of 10 seconds before he dies, then several times after that youll see his father and sister around being sad and people would talk about him as if he was a great guy (I mean I wouldnt know, he had all of 2 lines and where some duchy lines about how he was the greatest and you should look up to him or something). I can sort of see what they tried to do here, because the world where this characters live is supposed to be shit and friends and partners die all the time, but really his dead would probably have been more meaningful if I had at least done a single mission with him, wouldnt even had to create a new AI just copy/past any other you already had around.
Another, perhaps nitpicky of me, thing is that, while you play the game and go on missions, you can issue orders to your teammates (like Search for the enemy, Run Away, Converge) and you can do this from the very beginning of the game despite the fact that story wise you are just one more recruit and thus shouldnt have that kind of authority. Now my character did eventually got promoted to Team leader (11 gameplay hours in) so it makes sense now, but thinking back on it, that was actually a little odd, how they would listen to you when you where just the new guy.
Another small nitpick, which isnt so much about this game in particular but regarding silent protagonist in general (cause thats what you are in the game), which ok, I understand why they choose to go that route, but during cutscenes people will talk and address you as if you were talking back to them, when at best youre just nodding your head, and the animation for nodding is so, so dorky, like your character will use her whole body to do the affirmation, and it just looks so goofy, why isnt anyone concerned with the fact that Im apparently mute, I know, I know why, but still.
One last thing, I see there's DLC available for this game on the store, but it won't let me download it to the VITA, is this a fuck up on their part? does anyone else have this problem?
This is an Action-RPG, very similar to Monster Hunter, is the future, humanity has been driven to the brink of extinction by these mysterious creatures known as Aragami, you are a member of an organization dedicated to protect humanity from the Aragami thread, which youll do by using ridiculous oversize swords and cannons.
You start the game by customizing a character with gender and appearance and then begin the story as a new recruit for the organization dedicated to Aragami extermination, you have a sword, a Big Ass Gun, and a Shield, checking their stats reveals several types of damages inflicted by each weapon and it becomes clear that this will be one of those games that have 1000 variables in gameplay.
Now Im not usually too fond of these types of games, cause I prefer just picking a set of weapons and then use that to kill everything, but in this game it is fairly obvious that you need to upgrade/craft/buy as many diverse swords types and bullet types (for the Big Ass Guns) and prepare each load out of your equipment before each mission depending on whatever type of enemies youll have to face, which again is not something I usually like to do, I prefer not having to micromanage my games, but in the end I dont think it ends up being too troublesome.
--GAMEPLAY--
Gameplay consist mostly walking to a reception like place and taking missions, all missions so far have been Kill # of XXX Aragami type that is weak to Y attribute oftentimes especially in later missions there are also some other Aragamies around in the map that will fight you but you dont have to kill to complete the quest (thought I usually just kill all of them anyway).
There are a lot more missions than there are Maps or Enemy types so, after been playing this game for 13 hours it definitely can feel like you are repeating the same missions over and over with just slight variations, especially because all you do is fight, there are no stealth, no rescue, no escort missions, which I feel could have a least added some variety to the gameplay, this game is lucky in that the main gameplay it has, fighting Aragami is fun as hell, at least when Im not getting my ass handed to me.
You usually go into battle with a team of 3 other characters, which apparently can NPC or other human players via Ad Hoc multiplayer, unfortunately I dont have anyone else to play with so I can only speak about the Single Player experience. For the most part your AI teammates dont seem to be too capable in battle and there was never a moment when they could just take the enemies by themselves, which is fine I guess, because really what would be the fun in that? If they could just kill everything before you could. They seemed to be mostly useful to distract Aragami when youre fighting a group of them and to give you recovery shots or revive you when you get knocked down. They also have a nasty habit of shooting when youre slashing away an enemy (Friendly fire is on), when they do hit you some apologize and some just tell you to stay out of their line of fire.
Like I mentioned before, most Aragami have specific weaknesses, resistances and attack properties which mean you have to carefully select your equipment before each battle. It is intuitive enough I guess, if your mission is to fight an Aragami that uses Spark (lighting) attacks and is weak to Ice/Fire/Crushing attacks, then equip the Crushing Club and the Freeze and/or Blaze bullet with a Spark Resistance upgrade equipped, should be easy enough, right?
However it does seems like Im trying to keep the pace here, so far I have apparently not done enough upgrades to my weapons (seems I always lack the needed materials for it) some of the stronger enemies take me about 12 minutes of hitting them with the weapon thats supposedly theyre weak against before they die, which Im suspecting points to me not having yet upgrade property.
As far as how the gameplay feels, I guess I could say, a little slow, each action you take has an uninterruptable animation, some swords can be slow to swing and in more than one occasion Ive found myself swinging in a direction I was not intended to swing. Youre also limited by a stamina bar, which doesnt actually limit your shooting or swings but your quick step movements and jumps, depleting it will result in your character standing in place for 3-4 seconds, more than enough to make you pray to some Aragami.
Speaking of the Aragamis, some of them are way too agile, they move much faster than you and can jump around from place to place never giving you an opening to attack, what is more egregious is that once you get them low on health they will run away, often leaving the map through places you cannot access, to give credit to the game you can actually stop them by hitting or shooting them, but like I said, they can be very fast and 8 times out of 10 when they decide to leave you wont have a change to stop them. This wouldnt be too problematic if it were not for the fact that you have a time limit for each mission (30 minutes) and you can expend a good 10 minutes hitting away their health just for them to run away and make you waste precious time either waiting for them or trying to hunt them down, this particular thing I found to be mostly irritating.
The camera is another thing that needs work. This is originally a PSP game, but Im not sure how anyone could tolerate playing it without using both sticks (Im playing on Vita with the D-pad (camera) mapped to the right stick). The camera doesnt track you from behind like in say Dark Souls, so you can easily lose track of your position when youre jumping and dashing everywhere.
You can also lock onto enemies which helps sometimes, but still, because the camera doesnt exactly tracks their movement on a fixed angle is easy to lose focus and when you get too close to the enemy (like when you need to Smash them in the head with a giant club) I feel the camera tends to stick too close to you, making it hard to see what youre doing.
Despite these problems however the game is actually really fun and rewarding and I am certainly looking forward to finish it.
--STORY--
I do appreciate a good story and lore I can get myself immersed in, unless it is absolutely terrible I can usually enjoy the story of the game, so Im happy to say that in my book God Eater story is passable so far (Ive played for about 13 hours, I have no idea how long this game is total).
God eater lindow
Like I mentioned you are a new recruit and you are assigned to a unit under Lindow Amamiya a somewhat laidback leader whos orders are usually limited to dont die. Most other characters then are your common anime archetypes, theres a brooding loner, a mysterious Foreigner with an attitude and dark past, a lady fanservice (cause who the fuck needs a bra when fighting giant monsters), the dorky happy go lucky idiot and so on and so for. They work well enough for what they are.
The rest of the story of fairly straightforward, Aragami not evil in the traditional sense, but are simply a constantly evolving species to just happens to consume everything (and everyone) around them, thought the story has been hinting at the possibility of Aragami evolving to have human-level intelligence, but well see where that goes from there.
Cutscenes are done in-engine, but unfortunately this is game is not a looker, soundtrack though is appropriately epic and enjoyable. The execution of the story is nothing to write home about it, a particular scene comes to mind early on the game when youre introduced to a character named Eric for all of 10 seconds before he dies, then several times after that youll see his father and sister around being sad and people would talk about him as if he was a great guy (I mean I wouldnt know, he had all of 2 lines and where some duchy lines about how he was the greatest and you should look up to him or something). I can sort of see what they tried to do here, because the world where this characters live is supposed to be shit and friends and partners die all the time, but really his dead would probably have been more meaningful if I had at least done a single mission with him, wouldnt even had to create a new AI just copy/past any other you already had around.
Another, perhaps nitpicky of me, thing is that, while you play the game and go on missions, you can issue orders to your teammates (like Search for the enemy, Run Away, Converge) and you can do this from the very beginning of the game despite the fact that story wise you are just one more recruit and thus shouldnt have that kind of authority. Now my character did eventually got promoted to Team leader (11 gameplay hours in) so it makes sense now, but thinking back on it, that was actually a little odd, how they would listen to you when you where just the new guy.
Another small nitpick, which isnt so much about this game in particular but regarding silent protagonist in general (cause thats what you are in the game), which ok, I understand why they choose to go that route, but during cutscenes people will talk and address you as if you were talking back to them, when at best youre just nodding your head, and the animation for nodding is so, so dorky, like your character will use her whole body to do the affirmation, and it just looks so goofy, why isnt anyone concerned with the fact that Im apparently mute, I know, I know why, but still.
One last thing, I see there's DLC available for this game on the store, but it won't let me download it to the VITA, is this a fuck up on their part? does anyone else have this problem?