God Eater 3 is a strange child. While the previous two installments were co-developed by Bandai Namco & Shift, GE3's co-developer was Marvelous. More importantly, GE1/2's lead director Hiroshi Yoshimura vacated his driving role in favor of Ittetsu Suzuki, and the game shows a proportionally drastic change in its developmental priorities. Shift and Yoshimura themselves both moved onto Code Vein, which in its turn is a spiritual successor to God Eater, as well as their answer to Dark Souls—in the same way that GE is their answer to Monster Hunter. How and why this farrago of a development process happened is hard to piece together, but it isn't hard to see that it yielded a stronger work.
One can see almost immediately on playing the game what the improvements are. Japanese voices are available, the mission levels no longer look like they're from a mobile game, composer Go Shiina decided to abandon his experiments with autotuned classical-opera-dubstep-core and write music that doesn't violate the Geneva Conventions, there's more weapons and each has a significantly deeper moveset, the player moves faster and overall keeps up better with nimble enemies... as for the aragami, they are less likely to spam one (easily counterable) move repeatedly, run away much (much!) less and thus waste less of your time, don't include the Ouroboros (aka God Eater's Zorah Magdaros), and have more interesting variations as the developers realized that Borg Camlann But Yellow, Speedhacking Hannibal, and Borg Camlann But Red aren't very creative designs.
For the overwhelming majority of the game, these changes in direction make GE3 much superior to its predecessors. God Eater was already marked for its much faster paced action combat than Monster Hunter, situated somewhere in between this slower style and the classic action of, say, Devil May Cry. The player being faster is an overall boon to this pacing because it actually leads to fewer balancing issues (like the aragami having unpunishable moves). On the other hand, the increased speed along with the game's other systems like Burst Arts lead to an immensely powerful player character, sometimes disproportionately so. There's certainly dangerous aragami still, but others have turned almost trivial, like Hannibal/Caligula (a real shame since these were some of GE1/2's best fights).
In general, the only dangerous aragami remaining are the so-called ashborn ones, who are unique in the fact that they themselves possess the capacity to enter Burst. Each of them has a unique Devour attack, which can vary drastically in how difficult it is to avoid, but they all cause the aragami to Burst if they land—on [i] anyone,[/i] not just the player. When in Burst, an aragami deals staggering amounts of damage, and is given new moves including some kind of nova-type move that always one-shots if it hits. This is overall a successful mechanic, but it's crippled somewhat by the factor of RNG that comes with the Devour attack itself, namely the fact that one can't help an AI teammate getting hit, and the fact that many of these Devour attacks are impossible to avoid if the aragami decides to do it when one doesn't have enough stamina to kite it out or reach a dead angle. Especially egregious for this is the Nuadha, whose Devour will literally chain-jump from one side of the map to the other unless the close-range attack is baited out. While appropriately dangerous, it's also cheap. Despite this, the fact that some challenge remains in a much improved combat system is impressive.
The post-game includes two stories, which, like God Eater as a series, are quite confusing. The first story is what one would expect; a generic story with some new and challenging aragami. The second introduces, for reasons I can't fathom, a version of the Character Episode system from GE2. These episodes were already a slog to get through in the previous game, rescued only a little by their piecemeal progression, which meant they would unlock along with the main story (at least for the player's preferred teammates). GE3 relegating them to the post-post-game without making them any less grindy is a tragedy not only because they're boring, but also because finding out more about one's companions is actually a compelling reward. This goes especially for Ein, since he's the game's only returning character from GE1/2, but whose story is also locked behind [i] every other character's story, [/i] forcing you to grind for hours to see it. The obvious solution was to intersperse these missions with the main storyline, but I suppose the Demiurge compelled Bamco not to—as with many of their decisions.
The reason to play God Eater lies in its unabashed inspiration, Monster Hunter; a series of games so astoundingly important to the action genre that entire other series—even within different genres—exist solely by its virtues: a true canon for the medium. Seeing how other developers tackle its core ideas is fascinating as well as entertaining, and GE3 is easily Bamco's best attempt at it. With the original director Yoshimura having recently expressed interest in a GE4, this series has genuine potential to improve further. If given a chance by the publishing department, perhaps it will even be able to rival Monster Hunter itself.
