God Eater 2 Rage Burst Review

God Eater 2 Rage Burst (GE2RB ) is quite possibly the next best thing we’ll get to having Monster Hunter on the PC (unless you play in China), but then that’s only because of the monster behemoths of boss like proportion monsters you hunt down make better and cooler weapons which you’ll expand over time. Really, this a game which is such a stand out for not being too Japanese for a role playing game.

Recently transferred to Blood, an elite taskforce meant to deal with the all consuming plague of Aragami that seek to devour the remaining humans alive. You act as the vice captain under Julius, leading your slightly ragtag squad of Nana, Romeo, Gilbert and Ciel to defend reaming human settlements referred as Branches and Satellites. Operating under Friar a subsection of Fenrir, you face the plight of new Aragami threat in the form of the red nimbus and the all consuming Black Plague.

Rage Burst is set after the Anime, so play resurrection first if you don't want spoilers.

From the get go the game gives you a simple but effective tutorial that opens up the core mechanics of the game as well the core premise: hitting things hard and fast until it dies. Once the tutorial’s done, the game’s difficult doesn’t amp up or be a dulcet slog but keeps a nice pace allowing you to adjust and change weapons to suit your playstyle with the six weapon types: Short Blade, Long Blade, Buster Blade, Boost Hammer, Charge Spear and (the newest weapon) Variant Scythe. Along with your ranged weapon in the form of Sniper Gun, Assault Gun, Blast Gun and Shotgun type guns. I indulged myself with the Short Blade since I enjoyed the short bursts of combos and rapid fire approach of the Assault Gun, but having tried the different weapons and combinations there’s bound to be a playstyle that will suit your needs.

The core meat of the gameplay is fast paced and depending on the play style will depend on the skill level required to be really effective in battle with precise and concise strikes being the toughest but rewards with higher damage output. By quite a stretch, GE2RB is really forgiving towards the player with the ability to have a squad a quick respawn if you are to fall, the game pushes you back into the core combat with little hesitation. From the looks of it allowing you to effectively respawn 10 times with each squad member being able to do the same. This works both ways, but for the main story component this can make certain fights feel trivial and whilst your squad members don’t deal significant damage to the enemy, their support can prove advantageous with stunning, trapping and healing when your health runs low.

You know a game's great when you spend more than 10 minutes designing your avatar

But what makes a great JRPG is music, writing and characters; GE2RB delivers on these fronts thereabouts, slightly meandering at certain points. The writing is really solid, doing what it needs to help propel the plot forward (ahem). I won’t get into it too deeply, but the writing definitely gave me the odd surprise here and there with how it’s progressing. This is really helped with the characters in GE2RB being unique in their own rights and whilst at times come off really corny with some of the writing. It doesn’t help that when parts of the story isn’t voice acted when you expect it to really throw out my immersion and that some of the voice acting (whilst really solid and for the most part pretty faultless from the main cast), it takes some cringy phases that make me wish that the Japanese voice was included to help stop some these elements by removing certain accents.

Whilst the main cast is great and the chemistry of the writing is good, at points it felt off with the odd translation not quite blending in or the phrasing missing the mark. Of course as far as translations go, it didn’t seem incredibly egregious and if there was any censoring of content it doesn’t seem like there was any. But that doesn’t mean it doesn’t suffer at times with the voice acting, being hit and miss at points with the support cast. Really though, having sat through a lot of bad Anime dubs, this is by far one of the best English voice I heard.

Ladies and gentlemen, I present best girl and waifu for laifu. Jiggle physics included.

And now the music, just solid. It’s not a stand out you’ve got to listen to this when you’re not playing the game, but when the moments hit, they really hit. But what undersells the music though is consistency of it playing, in the middle of combat the music might fade out and stop playing despite still engaging a mid-sized Aragami, which has happened a few too many times. Audio balancing has a similar issue in general, featuring preset audio levels, it can be hard to get the right sound balance especially considering that the background music can sometimes “overpower” information a squad member may inform you or just be plain irritating with the same tune on repeat for the most part.

Finally, the cracks in what is really an incredibly polished port/remaster of a PSP game. Adjustability of the game in terms of controls and audio/visual is slightly lackluster, the audio/visual being the more barren featuring: Screen Resolution, Refresh Rate, Fullscreen, V-Sync (which I recommend turned on to stop screen tearing), FXAA, Shadow Quality, Texture Filtering and Particle effects. I’m not one to complain usually, but the texture quality should be included since when my laptop initially ran the game on my integrated graphics, changing the texture filtering didn’t do much along with dialling back all of the settings in increasing my frames per second apart from making it more stable. I make this a point since my Nvidia graphics weren’t running the game initially as the Nvidia control panel didn’t pick up GE2RB and required to be manually set to run on my 860m GPU.

The game looks stellar for a PSP remaster, I hope there's another sequel.

Gameplay is partially a fault as well, whilst incredibly polished and integral to the game. This is by no means a mechanics first kind of game where every single attack, dodge and shot is nuanced, the story is (for the most part) front and centre. Which isn’t helped by the repetitive nature of the combat and missions facing a lot of Ogretails and Zygotes with reskins, along with repeatedly hunting the same mid-sized to large monsters. Which is the one thing that makes it pale in comparison to Monster Hunter in terms of monster variations, also the ability to dress fashionably isn’t that big a wardrobe sadly.