God Eater 1+2 is the ultimate definition of what I'd call a "Mixed Review".

It's not that the games are bad. Indeed, I clocked in so many hours onto my PSP playing God Eater Burst alone that it was staggering, and the additions/changes made to God Eater Resurrection would have me tripping over myself to buy it again alone if I had to. Likewise, God Eater 2 is an amazing title that manages to be a clear sequel to GE1 but still have itself stand out. No, the main issue with the games is the horrible port-job done by Bandai Namco.

For those unaware, the PC version of these games suffer from massive bugs, some I would consider deal-breakers. First off, co-op is extremely bugged: If you're playing with more than one other person, you're very, very likely to end up with the game locking up at the end of the mission. This doesn't sound too bad except that it doesn't count the mission's progress because you don't get to save(!!), meaning that you likely just wasted 5-10 minutes of your life, with the bug happening frequently enough with 3 people(let alone 4) that it's a complete show stopper. There are many 'fixes' for this issue but it's all a crapshoot if it'll work, and unfortunately, Bamco seems to have closed the game off from modding enough that no one is able(or willing) to get in there themselves and fix it. Ironic that such an amazing co-op title is hamstrung right out the gate.

But there's more! The audio in these ports is completely screwed up. I don't know how it is on the Vita and PS4 versions but it's almost insultingly bad: The audio frequently stops, not just in the HQ but in battles as well, and the music can frequently become muted. It's such a damn shame because the music in God Eater is always amazing to listen to, and stands out to me as one of the best soundtracks in the MH-Like genre.

As it stands, you can work past these two issues, you can play 2-player or solo, and you can just put on the game's soundtrack on Youtube, these are horrible, but workable bugs(Well, kind of).

What's worst of all, however, is the framerate bug. If you don't know, GE1+2 normally run at 30 FPS, but on the PC, it can hit 60. This is great!...Except for when it's not. Turns out some oafs at Bamco don't know how to playtest the game(As if that wasn't obvious already), as this introduced MANY MANY issues. Most pressing of all is that this COMPLETELY breaks the AI and renders them brain-dead idiots. AI will no longer devour or use any of their charge moves, which suddenly MASSIVELY increases the difficulty of any mission because the game is kind of built on the expectation of bullet-passing for Link Bursts and using charge moves for massive damage when applicable. The worst part is you can actually see them struggling to do the move, only for it to stop part-way through(I'm not a developer, but it's kind of astounding that the charging is just literally set to a timer that's tied to fps).

This also affects: Just Guard timing, Aragami down time, and AI Partner's shield timing. There's likely other stuff too(I heard that Difficulty 15 missions can be cheesed by an application of Venom thanks to the 60 FPS), but it escapes me at the moment. All of these together make this one of the worst ports of a game that I've EVER played, if not the outright worst.

It's heartbreaking to type this review, God Eater is one of my favorite series and I was excited beyond belief when the PC version was announced. Even now at the end of this, I don't know whether I should recommend it or not, because even with these bugs the games are still amazing. At the end of the day though, I think I'd rather recommend that people play the Vita or PS4 versions and check out God Eater 3 on PC instead, which doesn't seem to have any of these issues.

EDIT: So after someone suggested "Just use Nvidia's Control Panel to limit the FPS", I went back and tried it. And yeah, it still doesn't work. Even if it DID work, this would probably(From how I see it, PLEASE keep in mind I'm not an expert and this is just a guess) lead to massive desyncing across clients if you wanted to play with a friend online because you'd essentially have NPCs doing two completely different things for each player. My review still stands.

this game has a long term bug that is all over the forums:
You can play 2 player coop, but if you have 3 or 4 players, the game displays an error when you return from a mission that prevents you from progressing.
Bandai Namco are no longer supporting this game, and when contacting them about the issue my 4 friends and I recieved no response.
Recommend if you only want 2 player or single player, but the game doesn't actually work for 3 or more.

With about 30hrs on record and having got up to about rank 115~ (main story arc complete), this is what I think about the game; I will throw in some occasional comparisons to Monster Hunter because they are both "hunting" type games and I've played both:

What I like:
-Starting positions on the maps. They often spawn you right next to the target monster, which I really like (no blind hunting monsters throughout the whole map like in Monster Hunter, yay!)

-Being able to craft materials that you've potentially missed by using the tickets randomly obtained from quests. It's nice that when you need to craft that new weapon or armour piece you can usually just craft the materials you miss.

-Passive buff upgrades and "blood rages" later on in the game are a nice addition but nothing exciting.

-Numbers to show how much damage you're doing. This is so nice in comparison to Monster Hunter where you don't see the damage being done. You can personally see where the weakzones are by hitting different areas which really helps in general but it's even nicer for when the monsters go into rage mode and their weakpoints change.

-I didn't have any problems with the controls and the "committing" delay for attacks feel different for each weapon as they should.

-Plenty of skills (passive buffs) to choose from and stack up on your gear and you can do the same on your allies, though I didn't really bother with this after the first couple of hours since everything dies so fast anyway.



Things that weren't bad or good, or you could say what was split between the middle:

-The general graphics aren't exactly up to stratch, however I'm not too bothered about them that much.

-The characters really don't seem to have much physical emotion... Their faces look great for 3D anime style (I quite like that style), however this is ruined because they are barely animated and only the mouth seems to move most of the time. This makes them look like robots. It's not even the faces though -- when all of the NPCs are standing around after missions in the lounge or whatever, no-one is moving, no-one is doing anything... This is even the case in cutscenes and it really bugged me.

-I don't like the idea of swapping between guns/melee midfight but it's nice it's there and they don't force guns on you; you can make melee/ranged only builds if you really want although I'm not sure how viable the ranged only builds are. The melee only build I had felt incredibly powerful and I didn't really use gun mode much at all.

-Elemental and weakness system with great potential but weak execution. I started off the first 10~ hours crafting all sorts of different elemental weapons which felt cool doing more damage to the monster. But then realised I couldn't be bothered making all these different weapons when a raw, non-elemental weapon would only do a tiny bit less damage. I figured that if I just roll with a raw weapon the entire way then I'd save time by skipping the time spent on crafting the weapons and changing sets for each mission only for a measly 10-20 sec saved on the mission itself.

-Not much weapon variety but what can you expect when you're used to Monster Hunter; I don't think it's fair to give a negative point for the 5-6 weapons when Monster Hunter has built it's weapon arsenal up for many years gradually.

-Since I didn't use guns much I didn't bother at all with the hyped up "bullet crafting" system.


What I don't like:

-Gonna start with the biggest gripe I have about this game and the thing that turned me off even from the first 5ish hours of the game -- You fight the exact same monsters... over and over and over and over again... They make you fight 3-4 large monsters so many times even towards the end of the main story arc it's ridiculous... It's every other mission. Fight monster 1, fight monster 2, fight monster 1, fight monster 1 but oh wait there are some trash adds that are with it this time!!!!! Fight monster 2, oh look now you can fight monster 3, fight monster 1 and 2 a couple more times then you can fight monster 3 again and about every 10 other missions we'll add a new monster. Sometimes you'll even fight monster 1 and 2 at the same time! Oh my God... This really frustrates me. I really like Monster Hunter and I believe having a good amount of large monsters is key to keeping the game's repetitive nature fresh and unfortunately even after 30hrs into the game there is hardly any monster variety at all even with the 3~ variants of each monster I've seen so far. From a rough guess I'd probably say I've seen about 13-15~ large monsters discounting variants. Variants which are basically the same but they have an extra attack or they are weak to different elements.

-Laughable story with too many overused tropes and bland backstories that really try to make me care but I really don't feel like it because I've seen them all before.

-Horrible voice acting that made me take off my headphones sometimes (forced voiced acting from Ciel and then Yuno singing). I don't think the voice actors themselves are to blame because they are famous and have done a loooooooooooot of things very well elsewhere. Google their names and you'll see a lot of the voice actors such as Romeo, Julius and Ciel have done quite a lot of other voice acting in anime and games. Saying this... I have no idea why the voice acting was so bad, perhaps they were given the wrong advice on how to voice their lines? Romeo wasn't actually that bad in this though, he was kind of funny in a whacky sense. Unfortunately Romeo was the only character I started to like in terms of voice acting.

-Out of place use of music in cutscenes. This one is a bit trickier to explain because you kind of have to see it to understand, but they often play rap/hip hop in cutscenes where it doesn't belong... It's totally out of place. To be honest the music in general in the game is pretty generic/forgettable.

-Most character designs are pretty awful; examples: overactive wannabe catgirl that talks about her favourite sandwich every other sentence... Edgelord guy who pretends he doesn't care but he actually does. /puke

-Ridiculously easy fights, I breezed through every fight with the exception of a couple ("bosses", mostly), with each monster only taking 1-3 minutes to kill each; average being around 1 min 45 sec from guessing. Got S-SSS on most of the fights, the lowest I got was an AA and that was because I was super tired at like 4AM.

-Weapon movesets are very basic and don't have much to them. Saying this however, each of the weapons do feel different.

-The game supposedly starts to get difficult at difficulty 7 and I can confirm that the monsters do start doing a lot more damage at this point, however... I seem to have a build that allows for maximum damage given and minimum damage taken. I use the Hammer and have Iron Heart IV passive buff enabled which basically means I do enhanced damage on hammer boost attacks and also take almost no damage from attacks whilst also in boost mode; it even prevents most knockbacks. This combined with link mode:"heal on attacks" and "stanima reduction" means I can stay in boost mode on the hammer almost indefinitely whilst having no risk of actually dying unless I somehow get knocked out of the boost mode. A monster that was dealing 1/2 my hp without boost mode activated was doing about 1/10 on it's strongest attack in boost mode... This was healed by the link heal upgrade after only 2-3 attacks. You might say "well don't use Iron Heart then because it's obviously broken", well, I don't really feel like doing less damage and taking more damage by using other traits and weapons... This is just bad game design they overlooked something as overpowered as this, no monster should just be completely harmless to you and your build, let alone pretty much all of them.

tl;dr = too easy, extremely repetitive (same monsters), bad story, plot holes and bad character design. Decentish crafting system

Might as well download a PSP emulator and play GEB/GE2 there.

Good game, new features, more tactical gameplay compared to previous series. If only pc version weren't so poorly optimized this should've been a recommended review instead of a negative review.

Basically there's this huge multiplayer bug where it softlock players on loading screen and player lost their progression after restarting their room (happen super frequently).Me and my friends started with a full 4man squad buying this game on one of the steam sale. We didn't realize how big of the impact of the bug caused and slowly the squad went from 4 to 2 to ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ 0 to 2 to 3 to me writing this fking review here because of how sick I am because of this loading screen ass bug. Not to mention the disappointment when you searched up for solution and come across a steam/reddit discussion where players from 2016 (fking 8 years ago) faced the same issues you did and there weren't any update/patch from the publisher

Honestly, the game would be good if it weren't for that bug (that didn't occur on GE Resurrection) which never got fixed even though players complain about it since day 1:
You can't play with more than ONE friend, because if you're 3 or more, you get an infinite loading screen every 2 missions that doesn't validate the mission, so you have to do it twice. Worst, the survival missions in 3 parts, you can never complete it with your friends, you always get the infinite loading screen after part 2

No JP voice.......

Original Intent: I was going to Delete this Negative Review once the Denuvo Key Authentication was Fixed but now, this Review is a Permanent Negative for 3 Reasons.
1: Forum Abuser >> Isshak Gravi << for Deleting a Technical Thread I created that was Officially Accepted and Acknowledge by the Official Bandai Technical Team.
2: Banning me without Reason but to spit at me for trying to help Fix and find their Technical Problems and Ignoring the Thread was Acknowledge by Official Bandai.
3: Their Denuvo Key Authentication is still not fixed despite the 20th September Patch and being acknowledge about it.

Please Read Before Judging. This is a Important Technical Issue to everyone.
Ignore the Play hours. I started playing Resurrection 1st due to Nostalgic of countless hours during the PsP.
You are asking why am I giving a Thumbsdown?
Read this Thread and you will find out.
Buy this game at your own risk after learning the problem with the Denuvo DRM that was implanted here. This is a temporary Thread and will be Deleted and change possibly to a Positive till this issue is resolved and patched out. This is not about Anti-Denuvo. Its about a Activation Denuvo Code process that's Broken. The Thread and post of other Owners of the game will explain the Situation in detail.
http://steamcommunity.com/app/438490/discussions/0/350540780274243980/

Update 3: (Since Thread and Evidence got Deleted, I'll explain: Since the game came in a Bundle, both God Eater Resurrection and God Eater 2 Rage Burst share a Denuvo Key Authentication Process that requires you as usual to be activated online, only then you can play Offline and anytime you want. But the Problem is that there only put 1 Denuvo for both Games instead of 2 Denuvo. This cause both game to have Authentication Problem when you play Offline. You can only play one of the 2 Game Once (or get luckly and play all the time) and if you try to reopen the game/play the other game, the Denuvo Authentication will popup asking you to reactivate it online again even though you already did it. So basically you cannot play the game Fully and Freely anytime because it will only let you play once/one game until you go back online to reactivate the Key and this can cause problems to most people who travel frequently or go to No-Internet Zones.)

Update 1: The Thread officially got Deleted and I was ban without "Reason" as it was filled Blank.
The Thread has been linked to Bandai Technical Customer Support and I got replied by them they will take a Look. But a Isshak Gravi Moderator decided to Delete the Thread thus erasing all Evidence and Technical Problems found by the community.
Evidence of the Abuse of power.
Evidence 1 = http://imgur.com/mKh1CYa
Evidence 2 = http://imgur.com/1m3w1PW

Update 2: Seems The Official Bandai Customer Support can't touch that Abusive PR Developer. They do manage to collect the evidence and Data of the game Denuvo Key Authentication Problem before said PR Developer Deleted it.
Beware with >> Isshak Gravi << for he is an Abusive Forum EU Community Manager Developer/Moderator that will ban without reason and delete any evidence and information that was suppose to help the Technical Team about faults being found that can be fixed. If you see him on any other Bandai Game Forums, beware. He will unjusticely Ban you for anything regarding Technical Fault you find in a Game. Its like he wants to promote Piracy and Torrents. It you like, you can report his Profile and link this Preview for Evidence of an abuse forum power and censorship. Also his Twitter https://twitter.com/Isshak_Gravi

Bandai Official Customer Support Evidence That the Thread and Discussion ongoing there was Important to them for the Technical Team.
Evidence 1 = http://imgur.com/5Wd75lb
Evidence 2 = http://imgur.com/IWANu1L

Update 4: As of 6th September, this Game has yet to be Patched and Fixed for its other Bugs and Glitches found in the game and Devuno Key Authentication. The other game, God Eater Resurrection also has bugs mainly on the Urgent mission which will Crash your game, has also yet to receive any patch and fixes.

Update 5: Date is now 14th September with no Patch or Updates on the Horizon. I officially Regret buying this for the PC. I should have sticked to playing it on the VITA because I can play "Offline" anytime without Restriction on BOTH Games. Also seems Steam and Bandai aren't doing anything about my Forum ban against Scumbag >> Isshak Gravi << even though they said they will look into it and has contacted him about this on the Steam Support/Official Bandai Customer Support Mail, so there's that to look forward for any other future Bandai Games with him as Community Forum PR as he will just Ban you for "Zero" reason.

Update 6: Bandai drop in a Patched. September 20th. http://steamcommunity.com/games/438490/announcements/detail/590359138921400304
Decided to check if the Denuvo Key Authentication was fixed (usually they don't mention it) so you can play BOTH games Offline at ANY time without the need of always going online to reactivate it after 1 play session and 1 game only. I am sad to say, the game still requires Online Activation and won't allow you to play Offline. So for anyone wishing to Purchased this game, do so at risk if you plan on Travelling or going to School/Uni or anywhere there is no Internet. My best suggestion is to spend your money on Console or the PsVita if you wish to play Offline and have complete Freedom to play Anytime & Anywhere.

Update 7: A New Patch Update has kicked in and guess what. They still didn't bother to fix Denuvo to allow Offline Playability. Stick to the Console/VITA version. Or F..U..C..K IT!! Even the Pirated Version lets you play offline!! Just go visit $kidrow or CPYGames for a Superior Version and Product.

Update 8: Thank you whoever is the Owner of this reddit post. I must have missed it.
https://www.reddit.com/r/CrackStatus/comments/50sxzz/god_eater_2_developer_permabanned_legit_game/

Update 9: Unban from the Forums after godly how many months has this game been released here?

I will preface this review by saying, while there are anime series I truly enjoyed and loved, I don't typically like most anime I've seen/anime tropes. That will probably color this review a bit and help you get to your own conclusion.

Pros:
-Easy to get into, fast gameplay
-Bullet Customization is actually a really cool idea and there's a lot you can do with it.
-There's a decently heavy emphasis on story and individual "character arcs", which isn't common in this genre.
- The Blood Art system is a step in the right direction to give each weapon a bit more variability.

Cons:
-Gameplay feels weightless; even the larger weapons feel like you're swinging a stick through the air.
-Extremely repetitive. While repetition is part and parcel of the genre, this feels more like strict padding, especially because its so enforced.
-Characters are extremely one-note, and the character development arcs barely develop anything about them. If you've seen a few shounen anime, you can guess each character archetype/personality immediately upon first interaction.
-The plot itself is weak, there's a lot of poorly explained pseudo-science that exists mostly to cover up holes, the main villain is so obvious it hurts, and you're constantly getting 10-20 seconds of plot crumbs to then be told "go fight a Kongou for the 300th time".
-Blood arts don't do enough. Will explain further.

Overview:
God Eater 2 Rage Burst is one of a few "hunting" style games: You pick a loadout of equipment, go fight a monster or monsters in a small battlefield, and then collect area materials and monster parts to create new equipment. Compared to another series in the genre (Monster Hunter to be direct), this game is definitely more straightforward for newer players. Combat is fast, there's less animation lock, generally less material requirements for upgrading, and many alternative ways to get said materials.

Combat:
As stated, combat is fast, and even many reviews will simply refer to it as "anime Monster Hunter". They are similar of course; you face off against multiple large monsters, or Aragami, each with their own elemental and physical weaknesses, split up between 4 elements, 3 physical damage types, and a few status effects for good measure. The game has 6 different weapon types, however, outside of their special abilities, they feel a bit too similar.

Combat as a whole lacks impact; each weapon effortlessly glides through enemies, and the main feedback you get to help determine if you're hitting a weakspot or something resistant are hitsparks and sound effects. However, even the slower weapons, despite the initial slow swings that start their combos, still feel like they fly around way too much, and are wielded too easily. While I'd prefer to not constantly compare to another series, compare the Buster Blade's charge attack with that of Monster Hunter's Greatsword. The animation feels as if your hunter has to put their entire body into the swing, and in newer games, they really nail the visual feedback to ensure you feel like you did damage. In God Eater, It simply doesn't feel satisfying, and personally, none of the weapons in this game feel that way.

You also have a gun that you can swap to that uses OP (gained via melee or specific Assault Gun bullets). Overall, using the gun doesn't feel amazing; the controls scheme is simple and its simply point and shoot. However, the bullet editor allows you to make very interesting bullets with a myriad of effects. Want to make a shot that latches an orb onto a monster, and then fires off several close range flamethrowers directly into its body? You can. This is easily one of the best features in the game in my opinion, as it allows for a lot of creativity (and you can equip up to 15 bullets at once, so you have room to actually play around with things and feel how they perform differently against monsters without much hassle).

Lastly, Blood Arts are the biggest part that sets God Eater 2 apart from 1. Each individual portion of a weapon's moveset, such as the the two main combos, aerial attacks, their special moves, etc. can all be upgraded via use. They eventually gain either simple damage upgrades, or replacements that alter how they behave. This is a good idea, but they could have done more with the system overall. The major gripes I have are below:
-In order to level up a type of ability (such as your aerial attacks), you have to constantly use them. The more you use them, the more exp they receive. This often incentivizes simply spamming one ability you wish to level so it can get exp, as if you don't use it, it won't level up.
-You can only equip a single Blood Art at a time. This also ties in to the above point. This makes the game feel even more repetitive than it needs to. Let's say you've been leveling up your main Square button (for playstation players) combo for Shortsword, and have its blood art equipped. Since only one part of your weapon can be modified via Blood Arts in a mission, you have no real incentive to want to use other moves. "Why would I want to use this when its not affected by my Blood Art?". It turns into a negative feedback loop. At higher levels, you'll find yourself likely using only the stronger abilities from your moveset, and then ignoring the rest entirely.

Story:
The game... is generic Shounen anime. I'll avoid spoilers, but as previously stated, the characters are all one-note, and a lot of character interaction simply happens off screen. In the span of 2 or 3 missions, you're now "best friends" with characters you've literally never talked to. The villain is obvious from the get-go, and combined with their physical state, just makes a lot of things hard to believe. As with the previous game, they also tend to rely on the universe's natural (or unnatural) phenomena to gloss over parts of the plot that don't really make sense. "We can just toss the words singularity/resonance out a few times here and advance the plot, even if none of it really says anything".

Monsters and Gameplay Loop:
The gameplay loop is also an issue here. As stated before, its a hunting game. Kill monster, make weapon with parts, kill more monsters. However, the monster roster is extremely weak; If you discount variants of monsters, you're pretty much fighting the same 10 or so large aragami for the entirety of the base game. And I do mean the entirety of it. Whereas in Monster Hunter, its more of a choice to go back and fight monsters you've killed already for progressions sake in order to craft their armor or weapons, in God Eater, its just a requirement. You'll likely have everything you could possibly want from a monster and more, and after talking to a story relevant character for 5 seconds be instructed to "Fight 2 Kongous in the old city!", after you've killed literally 50 of them. This combines to make essentially a 25-45 hour game if you're watching the cutscenes. But it feels like a few hours worth of real content, just constantly being reused.

The monster variants are also weaker than in Monster Hunter; Whereas in MH, many of the variants do incorporate new movesets and have drastically different weaknesses and hitzones, you can typically approach all the variants in GE exactly the same. "Oh, its blue now, I'll use a Blaze weapon and run up to it and smash it in the face". "Oh, its a yellow one, can't use spark, and now I'll go and smash it in the face". This impression however is likely me being shaped by the fact that I generally find GEs Aragami less interesting in general. The overall monster movesets lack the weightyness or cool factor of MH in comparison. Nothing really stands out personally.

In conclusion:
Overall, I... didn't have fun with the game. There are some cool ideas here and there, but the overly repetitive nature of the game structure, general weightlessness of the combat, and poor story/characterization just made it a drag to complete.

Comes with God Eater 1 and 2, neither work on steam deck. 1 claims to be verified, but opens to a black screen and nothing else.

I love this franchise but if you can get the console version. Your AI party members can't use any type charge attack. From Buster sword to devour. 2 years after the game launched the AI is still as dumb as a bag of bricks. I can confirm on console the AI knows how to hold down a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ button.