God Eater 2 Rage Burst Ranking: B
Three years after the events of the first game, a lady known as Dr. Rachel Claudius creates a new group of God Eaters known as Blood Special Forces. These people have a different Bias Factor (read my review of the first game if you don’t know what this is, but even if you don’t, it’s not that important for the purposes of this discussion) from other God Eaters, which…well, the game never overtly explains what the new Bias Factor does, exactly, but anyway, you play as a new member of Blood. Go forth again with your comically giant anime sword that can deploy a shield or turn into an equally comically giant anime gun and kill some animals that have the names but not forms of gods!
…Actually, I used a scythe in this game, but whatever.
Rage Burst came out before Resurrection, and it shows, as Rage Burst has some major technical issues. Voice volume is all over the place, so about half the time I can’t hear what the characters are saying. Cutscenes sometimes don’t have voices at all and I don’t know whether the voices are there but really soft or whether they just for some reason didn’t voice act some scenes. Rage Burst also has some major stability issues – it crashed a chunk of the time, whereas Resurrection crashed maybe once or twice.
Otherwise, Rage Burst plays and looks pretty similarly to Resurrection. It has a few new mechanics, such as Blood Arts, abilities that modify your melee attacks; and Blood Rage, which gives you temporary invulnerability on top of heightened melee power and speed. I had fun with these and they make melee more viable when comparing to the first game. Rage Burst also features Character Episodes, which allow you to hang out with the various NPCs and get to know them better. I loved many of these, especially Kigurumi’s and Haru’s. While Rage Burst’s main plot is generally darker compared to Resurrection’s, the Character Episodes inject some great humor to lighten the setting.
…And that brings us to Rage Burst’s weakest point, its plot. Throughout my playthrough, I kept waiting for the game to explain the plot to me and then it ended without doing so, leaving me with so many WTFs in my head. So…let’s go.
At the beginning, Blood has two members: Captain Julius and Romeo. Blood then gains Nana, Hiro (the protagonist’s canonical name), Gil, and Ciel. Everyone in Blood except Gil and Hiro came from an orphanage that Rachel founded (so, in essence, Rachel raised them all), except they don’t really remember one another, so…just keep this in mind for now.
Early in the game, you see the Red Rain. Red Rain is exactly what it sounds like, and if a human gets caught in the Red Rain, that person gets an illness known as the Black Plague, which has a circa 100% mortality rate. One upshot of this phenomenon is a push for the development of God Arc Soldiers, which are mechs that can fight Aragami. Since they’re mechs, they’re immune to Red Rain. In particular, Leah (Rachel’s hot sister) is developing piloted ones, but her subordinate by the name of Souhei Kujo would rather build fully unmanned robots.
So far, so good. Rachel secretly gives Souhei a device that can run unmanned God Arc Soldiers, and at one point, they help in evacuating some civilians. But then Rachel secretly drops a bunch of Red Rain in the area and remotely shuts down the God Arc Soldiers. Romeo runs out to save the civilians himself, but then Aragami attack. Julius runs out to save Romeo, but Romeo dies and Julius falls ill due to the Red Rain. This is because Rachel is actually evil and can also control the Red Rain. How? I’d love to say I’ll get to that later, but no, the game doesn’t explain this.
Why’s Rachel evil? Leah eventually reveals that when Rachel was a child, Leah got irritated at her because she was too quiet and pushed her down a flight of stairs, which nearly killed her. Their father saved Rachel by injecting her with the same Bias Factor Soma (from the first game) was born with, and after that, Rachel began communicating with “the Restless God,” which told her the world needed to be purged and reborn via the Devouring Apocalypse. So the Restless God’s the villain, right? No, the game never explains who or what it is. The game hints that it possessed Rachel because she got the Bias Factor, except Soma was born with that Bias Factor, and he never had any of these issues.
You may recall, if you read my review of the first game, that the Devouring Apocalypse is an event in which an Aragami becomes big enough to eat the entire world. In Rage Burst, we find that the Devouring Apocalypse is in fact a natural occurrence where Earth decides there’s a threat or something and triggers it as a sort of reset button. So now we have a semi-sentient planet, kind of like in Final Fantasy VII? Continuing, the Devouring Apocalypse has two components: an Aragami big enough to eat the world and a Singularity, which the second game reveals governs a phase in which after the Aragami eats the world, it redistributes life and recreates the world. How does this work? How does anyone in-universe know this? From their perspective, Oracle Cells appeared one day and began eating, allowing them to grow to multicellular organisms, which ate bigger things, and so on, until most life went extinct. That’s it. How do we go from that to a semi-sentient planet redistributing life?
So…anyway, Rachel wants to create a world-eating Aragami and a Singularity, so she needs a living thing to house many different Bias Factors and Oracle Cells that will develop into the Singularity. To this end, she opened that orphanage long ago and secretly tested Bias Factor and Oracle Cell administration on the orphans – not that anyone in Blood ever comments on any of this, even though Rachel must have done some sort of experimentation on them in order to determine they could take the special Bias Factor specific to Blood. So…we have an orphanage linking much of the cast but nobody really talks about it because I guess they forgot? I’m getting Final Fantasy VIII vibes over here.
Back to the disastrous mission that led to Romeo’s death. Nobody knows Rachel was behind it besides the player. So let’s look at this from Julius’s perspective. He’s part of a mission when a large, unprecedented amount of Red Rain hits. The God Arc Soldiers that were supposed to be the crux of the operation for whatever reason shut down. For all Julius knows, inclement weather coupled with technical difficulties led to the death of one of his team members. He responds by resigning from Blood, making Hiro the captain, and going with Rachel because she asked him to help her develop more unmanned God Arc Soldiers. Why the hell did Julius agree to this? The unmanned God Arc Soldiers’ catastrophic failure was what killed Romeo, and now he wants to help build them? If Rachel told him, “yeah, they failed, but I can fix them and make them actually work” then wouldn’t Julius’s question be “if you could do that, why didn’t you do it before?”? Rachel convincing Julius to help her build unmanned God Arc Soldiers makes no sense.
Then we learn that the Red Rain’s mechanism of action is to create a Singularity, so the Black Plague is actually a Singularity attempting to develop within a person. Julius develops the Singularity successfully, which we later find out is because his body can incorporate any Bias Factor, meaning he can essentially “eat” anything if he were an Aragami, so all Rachel really needed to do was dump some Red Rain on Julius and put different Bias Factors into him, something she could’ve done long ago at the orphanage without this entire Blood Unit God Arc Soldier thing.
Anyway, Julius figures out Rachel’s evil, but it’s too late, and Rachel turns him into an Aragami and he triggers the Devouring Apocalypse. But Paylor from the first game posits that if everyone who got the Black Plague Resonated, they could also combine their wills to create a Singularity, which would trigger a second Devouring Apocalypse, which would counteract Julius’s. And so they hold a concert with the world’s most famous idol, Yuno, who’d contracted the Plague, and all her fans with the Plague sing along with her, which leads to Resonance and triggers a Devouring Apocalypse as planned. We save the world by having everyone sing, Final Fantasy X style.
Okay, so here’s the problem with this part. When you write fiction, you’re going to have lots of fictional concepts. Since they’re fictional, it’s up to you to explain them to your audience, since anything and everything they know and understand about these concepts must come from you.
In the first game, Resonance is a phenomenon where when two God Eaters make physical contact, they undergo a sort of mind meld. They can see one another’s thoughts and share feelings. Yuu does this with Alisa, which is instrumental to helping her overcome her past and her brainwashing. It happens again with Ren and Lindow, which leads to them saving Lindow from Aragami infection.
In the second game, Resonance is where people with Bias Factor and/or Oracle Cells can emit waves of willpower to affect one another. Yuno and her fans all sing to emit waves that combine to form the Singularity. Hiro’s special power is to Evoke latent power in others, which he does by basically just being around them for a bit and sending those willpower waves at them.
In the first game, the Devouring Apocalypse is an event by which a gigantic Aragami, empowered by a Singularity, eats the world and then redistributes the biosphere, recreating the world.
In the second game, the Singularity can summon…I guess tentacles? The tentacles eat the world in the Devouring Apocalypse, no Aragami required. Julius gets an Aragami form, but the world singing? Tentacles and energy waves just sort of appear out of nowhere to counter Julius.
When you define your fictional concept in two different ways, your audience is going to be confused. And I was.
…Anyway, that’s the end of the first storyline. The game then meanders around aimlessly with some side plots that never really go anywhere before the game finally enters main plot territory again.
When Julius’s Devouring Apocalypse and Yuno’s Devouring Apocalypse clashed, they combined to form a Spiral Tree. Julius remained inside it to keep the two Apocalypses balanced. Then Fenrir HQ sends a team over to the Far East Branch to take over everything; in particular, we get introduced to Ruby Rose - I mean Livie. Livie can assimilate any Bias Factor, meaning she can wield anyone’s God Arc, though it severely hurts her every time. We then learn that she lived in Rachel’s orphanage as well, and she was Rachel’s favorite to experiment on (remember, Rachel was looking for someone to take in many Bias Factors to become a Singularity), but then Rachel discovered Julius, who could take in Bias Factors without any side effects, so Rachel abandoned her.
Livie’s boss, the director of Fenrir’s Intelligence Center, is the one who tells Blood this. So…did Fenrir’s higher-ups know what Rachel was doing in her orphanage? Why didn’t they do anything about it? Why didn’t Julius say anything about the experimentation he must have undergone? Why didn’t anyone from the orphanage mention kids going into Rachel’s labs and just disappearing (because they died due to being incompatible with the Bias Factor)?
Livie then reveals Romeo is her best friend, because Romeo befriended her after Rachel abandoned her and she got depressed. Yeesh, this lady has a façade of ice, since she didn’t hint at all of any of this even though Romeo, her best friend, died while in Blood. You’d think she’d talk to his former teammates about him and their memories of him prior to this, but…whatever.
So Fenrir HQ takes control of the area where the Spiral Tree is so they can study it, but then Souhei plants a device into the Tree that…I guess resurrects Rachel’s soul inside the Tree, and she breaks the balance and attempts to unleash the Apocalypse again. Romeo’s God Arc wakes up (because God Arcs can do that now, I guess) and reveals his Blood Power can make Oracle Cells friendly and slow them down. Livie wields Romeo’s God Arc to neutralize Rachel’s obstacles and they get to her and Julius at the top of the Tree, and then Rachel turns into a giant naked woman with multiple limbs and a halo. She summons spikes to impale everyone in Blood and attempts to absorb Julius, but Hiro willpowers his way out of the spikes and barehandedly rips final-form Rachel’s chest open to pull Julius out, which kills her.
Then the Devouring Apocalypse is starting again because Rachel broke the balance, so Hiro I guess Evokes Blood Rage in everyone and they all touch Romeo’s God Arc (something I remind you only Livie and Julius should be able to do given that’s their special ability) and Romeo’s Blood Power activates to (1) eliminate the Apocalypse’s destructive phase and (2) slow down the Apocalypse’s redistribution phase to an almost imperceptible crawl. So now there’s a zone where the Spiral Tree once was where no Oracle Cells can function, effectively creating an area the Aragami cannot enter.
Oh, and Romeo comes back to life. The end.
No, seriously. That’s the ending. Look, this is an excellent happy ending and I love excellent happy endings, but all the events and concepts that allow them to happen just come out of nowhere with no explanation, so it all comes across as WTF deus ex machina and falls right flat on its face. And if you’re thinking, “oh, well if Romeo’s Blood Power can stop the Devouring Apocalypse, all the endgame content must be trivial because just bring him along on a mission and he’ll neutralize any Aragami by just being there” then you’re smarter than the writers of the game are, because that doesn’t happen – Romeo’s Blood Power in-game just prevents Aragami from seeing or hearing you from a long distance. They’ll still happily kick your ass when you get near them.
I’ll end my ranting now. Here’s my Avatar Card for this game – I can’t figure out how to get my Steam profile name to show up, so I’m guessing it’s yet another bug. Like in Resurrection, I named my bullets after anime:
Three years after the events of the first game, a lady known as Dr. Rachel Claudius creates a new group of God Eaters known as Blood Special Forces. These people have a different Bias Factor (read my review of the first game if you don’t know what this is, but even if you don’t, it’s not that important for the purposes of this discussion) from other God Eaters, which…well, the game never overtly explains what the new Bias Factor does, exactly, but anyway, you play as a new member of Blood. Go forth again with your comically giant anime sword that can deploy a shield or turn into an equally comically giant anime gun and kill some animals that have the names but not forms of gods!
…Actually, I used a scythe in this game, but whatever.
Rage Burst came out before Resurrection, and it shows, as Rage Burst has some major technical issues. Voice volume is all over the place, so about half the time I can’t hear what the characters are saying. Cutscenes sometimes don’t have voices at all and I don’t know whether the voices are there but really soft or whether they just for some reason didn’t voice act some scenes. Rage Burst also has some major stability issues – it crashed a chunk of the time, whereas Resurrection crashed maybe once or twice.
Otherwise, Rage Burst plays and looks pretty similarly to Resurrection. It has a few new mechanics, such as Blood Arts, abilities that modify your melee attacks; and Blood Rage, which gives you temporary invulnerability on top of heightened melee power and speed. I had fun with these and they make melee more viable when comparing to the first game. Rage Burst also features Character Episodes, which allow you to hang out with the various NPCs and get to know them better. I loved many of these, especially Kigurumi’s and Haru’s. While Rage Burst’s main plot is generally darker compared to Resurrection’s, the Character Episodes inject some great humor to lighten the setting.
…And that brings us to Rage Burst’s weakest point, its plot. Throughout my playthrough, I kept waiting for the game to explain the plot to me and then it ended without doing so, leaving me with so many WTFs in my head. So…let’s go.
At the beginning, Blood has two members: Captain Julius and Romeo. Blood then gains Nana, Hiro (the protagonist’s canonical name), Gil, and Ciel. Everyone in Blood except Gil and Hiro came from an orphanage that Rachel founded (so, in essence, Rachel raised them all), except they don’t really remember one another, so…just keep this in mind for now.
Early in the game, you see the Red Rain. Red Rain is exactly what it sounds like, and if a human gets caught in the Red Rain, that person gets an illness known as the Black Plague, which has a circa 100% mortality rate. One upshot of this phenomenon is a push for the development of God Arc Soldiers, which are mechs that can fight Aragami. Since they’re mechs, they’re immune to Red Rain. In particular, Leah (Rachel’s hot sister) is developing piloted ones, but her subordinate by the name of Souhei Kujo would rather build fully unmanned robots.
So far, so good. Rachel secretly gives Souhei a device that can run unmanned God Arc Soldiers, and at one point, they help in evacuating some civilians. But then Rachel secretly drops a bunch of Red Rain in the area and remotely shuts down the God Arc Soldiers. Romeo runs out to save the civilians himself, but then Aragami attack. Julius runs out to save Romeo, but Romeo dies and Julius falls ill due to the Red Rain. This is because Rachel is actually evil and can also control the Red Rain. How? I’d love to say I’ll get to that later, but no, the game doesn’t explain this.
Why’s Rachel evil? Leah eventually reveals that when Rachel was a child, Leah got irritated at her because she was too quiet and pushed her down a flight of stairs, which nearly killed her. Their father saved Rachel by injecting her with the same Bias Factor Soma (from the first game) was born with, and after that, Rachel began communicating with “the Restless God,” which told her the world needed to be purged and reborn via the Devouring Apocalypse. So the Restless God’s the villain, right? No, the game never explains who or what it is. The game hints that it possessed Rachel because she got the Bias Factor, except Soma was born with that Bias Factor, and he never had any of these issues.
You may recall, if you read my review of the first game, that the Devouring Apocalypse is an event in which an Aragami becomes big enough to eat the entire world. In Rage Burst, we find that the Devouring Apocalypse is in fact a natural occurrence where Earth decides there’s a threat or something and triggers it as a sort of reset button. So now we have a semi-sentient planet, kind of like in Final Fantasy VII? Continuing, the Devouring Apocalypse has two components: an Aragami big enough to eat the world and a Singularity, which the second game reveals governs a phase in which after the Aragami eats the world, it redistributes life and recreates the world. How does this work? How does anyone in-universe know this? From their perspective, Oracle Cells appeared one day and began eating, allowing them to grow to multicellular organisms, which ate bigger things, and so on, until most life went extinct. That’s it. How do we go from that to a semi-sentient planet redistributing life?
So…anyway, Rachel wants to create a world-eating Aragami and a Singularity, so she needs a living thing to house many different Bias Factors and Oracle Cells that will develop into the Singularity. To this end, she opened that orphanage long ago and secretly tested Bias Factor and Oracle Cell administration on the orphans – not that anyone in Blood ever comments on any of this, even though Rachel must have done some sort of experimentation on them in order to determine they could take the special Bias Factor specific to Blood. So…we have an orphanage linking much of the cast but nobody really talks about it because I guess they forgot? I’m getting Final Fantasy VIII vibes over here.
Back to the disastrous mission that led to Romeo’s death. Nobody knows Rachel was behind it besides the player. So let’s look at this from Julius’s perspective. He’s part of a mission when a large, unprecedented amount of Red Rain hits. The God Arc Soldiers that were supposed to be the crux of the operation for whatever reason shut down. For all Julius knows, inclement weather coupled with technical difficulties led to the death of one of his team members. He responds by resigning from Blood, making Hiro the captain, and going with Rachel because she asked him to help her develop more unmanned God Arc Soldiers. Why the hell did Julius agree to this? The unmanned God Arc Soldiers’ catastrophic failure was what killed Romeo, and now he wants to help build them? If Rachel told him, “yeah, they failed, but I can fix them and make them actually work” then wouldn’t Julius’s question be “if you could do that, why didn’t you do it before?”? Rachel convincing Julius to help her build unmanned God Arc Soldiers makes no sense.
Then we learn that the Red Rain’s mechanism of action is to create a Singularity, so the Black Plague is actually a Singularity attempting to develop within a person. Julius develops the Singularity successfully, which we later find out is because his body can incorporate any Bias Factor, meaning he can essentially “eat” anything if he were an Aragami, so all Rachel really needed to do was dump some Red Rain on Julius and put different Bias Factors into him, something she could’ve done long ago at the orphanage without this entire Blood Unit God Arc Soldier thing.
Anyway, Julius figures out Rachel’s evil, but it’s too late, and Rachel turns him into an Aragami and he triggers the Devouring Apocalypse. But Paylor from the first game posits that if everyone who got the Black Plague Resonated, they could also combine their wills to create a Singularity, which would trigger a second Devouring Apocalypse, which would counteract Julius’s. And so they hold a concert with the world’s most famous idol, Yuno, who’d contracted the Plague, and all her fans with the Plague sing along with her, which leads to Resonance and triggers a Devouring Apocalypse as planned. We save the world by having everyone sing, Final Fantasy X style.
Okay, so here’s the problem with this part. When you write fiction, you’re going to have lots of fictional concepts. Since they’re fictional, it’s up to you to explain them to your audience, since anything and everything they know and understand about these concepts must come from you.
In the first game, Resonance is a phenomenon where when two God Eaters make physical contact, they undergo a sort of mind meld. They can see one another’s thoughts and share feelings. Yuu does this with Alisa, which is instrumental to helping her overcome her past and her brainwashing. It happens again with Ren and Lindow, which leads to them saving Lindow from Aragami infection.
In the second game, Resonance is where people with Bias Factor and/or Oracle Cells can emit waves of willpower to affect one another. Yuno and her fans all sing to emit waves that combine to form the Singularity. Hiro’s special power is to Evoke latent power in others, which he does by basically just being around them for a bit and sending those willpower waves at them.
In the first game, the Devouring Apocalypse is an event by which a gigantic Aragami, empowered by a Singularity, eats the world and then redistributes the biosphere, recreating the world.
In the second game, the Singularity can summon…I guess tentacles? The tentacles eat the world in the Devouring Apocalypse, no Aragami required. Julius gets an Aragami form, but the world singing? Tentacles and energy waves just sort of appear out of nowhere to counter Julius.
When you define your fictional concept in two different ways, your audience is going to be confused. And I was.
…Anyway, that’s the end of the first storyline. The game then meanders around aimlessly with some side plots that never really go anywhere before the game finally enters main plot territory again.
When Julius’s Devouring Apocalypse and Yuno’s Devouring Apocalypse clashed, they combined to form a Spiral Tree. Julius remained inside it to keep the two Apocalypses balanced. Then Fenrir HQ sends a team over to the Far East Branch to take over everything; in particular, we get introduced to Ruby Rose - I mean Livie. Livie can assimilate any Bias Factor, meaning she can wield anyone’s God Arc, though it severely hurts her every time. We then learn that she lived in Rachel’s orphanage as well, and she was Rachel’s favorite to experiment on (remember, Rachel was looking for someone to take in many Bias Factors to become a Singularity), but then Rachel discovered Julius, who could take in Bias Factors without any side effects, so Rachel abandoned her.
Livie’s boss, the director of Fenrir’s Intelligence Center, is the one who tells Blood this. So…did Fenrir’s higher-ups know what Rachel was doing in her orphanage? Why didn’t they do anything about it? Why didn’t Julius say anything about the experimentation he must have undergone? Why didn’t anyone from the orphanage mention kids going into Rachel’s labs and just disappearing (because they died due to being incompatible with the Bias Factor)?
Livie then reveals Romeo is her best friend, because Romeo befriended her after Rachel abandoned her and she got depressed. Yeesh, this lady has a façade of ice, since she didn’t hint at all of any of this even though Romeo, her best friend, died while in Blood. You’d think she’d talk to his former teammates about him and their memories of him prior to this, but…whatever.
So Fenrir HQ takes control of the area where the Spiral Tree is so they can study it, but then Souhei plants a device into the Tree that…I guess resurrects Rachel’s soul inside the Tree, and she breaks the balance and attempts to unleash the Apocalypse again. Romeo’s God Arc wakes up (because God Arcs can do that now, I guess) and reveals his Blood Power can make Oracle Cells friendly and slow them down. Livie wields Romeo’s God Arc to neutralize Rachel’s obstacles and they get to her and Julius at the top of the Tree, and then Rachel turns into a giant naked woman with multiple limbs and a halo. She summons spikes to impale everyone in Blood and attempts to absorb Julius, but Hiro willpowers his way out of the spikes and barehandedly rips final-form Rachel’s chest open to pull Julius out, which kills her.
Then the Devouring Apocalypse is starting again because Rachel broke the balance, so Hiro I guess Evokes Blood Rage in everyone and they all touch Romeo’s God Arc (something I remind you only Livie and Julius should be able to do given that’s their special ability) and Romeo’s Blood Power activates to (1) eliminate the Apocalypse’s destructive phase and (2) slow down the Apocalypse’s redistribution phase to an almost imperceptible crawl. So now there’s a zone where the Spiral Tree once was where no Oracle Cells can function, effectively creating an area the Aragami cannot enter.
Oh, and Romeo comes back to life. The end.
No, seriously. That’s the ending. Look, this is an excellent happy ending and I love excellent happy endings, but all the events and concepts that allow them to happen just come out of nowhere with no explanation, so it all comes across as WTF deus ex machina and falls right flat on its face. And if you’re thinking, “oh, well if Romeo’s Blood Power can stop the Devouring Apocalypse, all the endgame content must be trivial because just bring him along on a mission and he’ll neutralize any Aragami by just being there” then you’re smarter than the writers of the game are, because that doesn’t happen – Romeo’s Blood Power in-game just prevents Aragami from seeing or hearing you from a long distance. They’ll still happily kick your ass when you get near them.
I’ll end my ranting now. Here’s my Avatar Card for this game – I can’t figure out how to get my Steam profile name to show up, so I’m guessing it’s yet another bug. Like in Resurrection, I named my bullets after anime:
- Kanna Charge: reference to Miss Kobayashi’s Dragon Maid, in which Kanna plugs her tail into a wall socket to charge her energy
- Firey Shot: named after The Firey and The Shot, two Clow Cards from Cardcaptor Sakura
- Ice Queen: refers to Weiss Schnee, a character in RWBY
- Thousand Birds: refers to Chidori, Kakashi’s electric technique, from Naruto
- Knightmare: the giant mechs in the Holy Britannian Empire from Code Geass