When I first watched God Eater, I didn’t know the source. Being left with some constructive questions, I discovered the truth, that it was based on a Video Game, and that honestly changed a good deal of my opinion. So, perhaps it’s best not to look at this as an anime so much as a twelve-episode trailer.
God Eater takes place in a world where humanity has been pushed to the brink of extinction by the arrival of beings known as Aragami. The Aragami are beasts that simply spawn into existence, have no biological needs that would seem to limit them, are pretty much invincible to conventional weapons, and pretty much seem to exist to desolate the world and mess up humans. You know, the full package.
Humanity’s only realistic defense line against Aragami are “God Eaters” – supersoldiers who wield living weapons called God Arcs that can actually deal real damage to Aragami. These God Eaters protect the last fortress cities of mankind as supported by an organization called Fenrir, which may have deeper ties to the crisis than it appears.
The main handwavium that supports all of this is the idea of “Oracle cells” – cells that are able to organize independently. Aragami and God Arcs are both made from Oracle Cells, which is why Aragami are so tough – either every single cell needs to be destroyed to prevent more Oracle from filling in the gaps, or the “core” that defines the Aragami needs to be consumed by a God Arc to neutralize it.
To talk about this is to talk about speculative fiction genres (Science fiction, fantasy, supernatural horror, and so on) in general. If you want a story to still be relatable, or “earth-like except where noted” you get a finite number of breaches from reality on which to predicate your story. Some advice for writers will say “one”, with which I respectfully disagree, but suffice to say that each unreal element has a higher “cost” than the one introduced before it, since it ever more challenges the audience’s ability to use basic grounding.
Throwing everything in the air can be done effectively, but it’s usually not both serious and mass-market, existing in the realms of surrealism or else the far corners of exploratory xenofiction that dedicates itself to bringing something extremely alien to the small audience that wants to see it. For ordinary genre fiction, the rule stands.
And there can, of course, be multiple manifestations. If you want to introduce “magic”, sure, magic does a lot of things. But what needs to be kept down is the number of magic systems, not the number of magical effects. Academy City shows you can go with two if you have a good reason, since the explicit magic and esper powers are non-transparent and operate on different mechanisms, but that’s already stretching things.
This is why, in good shows, even things that look different at first tend to have the same grounding as each other. In Fullmetal Alchemist, everything boils down to Alchemy. In Fate there are a lot of mystical things, but there does seem to be a “grand unifying theory” of mystics and mystical powers that provides consistency.
This is something that far too many amateurs and even proper creators screw up, introducing new rules for new circumstances that don’t really tie into anything. I bring that up, because Video Games tend to be guilty of it more than other professional works, perhaps because these things tend to get tied to mechanics that are different from one another.
In any case, God Eater is mercifully consistent: Everything is tied back to Oracle Cells and bio-science around them. There are still a lot of terms, but they all have one root.
The story follows new recruit player character Lenka Utsugi. He starts out rushing to answer a call that he is by far under-equipped to handle, but though he gets his butt kicked, he gives a decent account of himself and lives. One of the senior God Eaters isn’t so lucky, being struck down by a straggler after the fight, which means open slot in the ace team for Lenka. He learns the ropes, especially alongside the team’s captain, Lindow, who fills the “cool older guy” role.
Lenka is himself a “new-type” God Eater, which means his weapon can transform between melee, gun, and chomp modes. He gets to cut his teeth on a mission escorting another New-type to the Far East branch where he works, which turns out to mean fighting off an insane swarm of flying Aragami while riding on the top of the transport plane. This is because the other New-type, Alisa, is unwilling to abandon the other people who were in the transport with her.
Just when you think this show is going to level out into a standard monster-fighter, probably with chemistry between the main boy and the girl who can never find a shirt that fits, God Eater decides to go a different direction. It reveals a main plot, that Aragami cores can be used for something called the “Aegis Project” that will protect the entire remainder of humanity within a shielded arcology. Lenka believes in this very strongly, and thus opts for top-end core hunting, helping guide his team to that.
Their intended marks are handled just fine, but a particularly nasty Aragami called Dyas Pita decides to show up, take their prey, and go full sadist on the team. Alisa ends up having a panic attack facing it because it’s the same Aragami that ate her parents when she could do nothing but watch from her hiding place (so, fair to break down at that), and without her psychiatric meds, she’s not particularly operational when she and Lenka get separated from the others and placed in a survival situation.
Eventually, the rest of the team manages to pick them up, but Alisa’s brain and Lenka’s God Arc are broken and Dyas Pita is still on the loose.
The recovery takes a while, during which we see how messed up the world can be. For instance, refugees heading to the Far East Headquarters’ city are only allowed in if a family member has the affinity to be a God Eater; all others are turned away to die in the Wasteland. Lindow seems to have some of this covered, though, and secretly runs supplies to a hidden village, protected by a tree-form Aragami (the whole forest, really) that drives off all others and doesn’t really attack anything that doesn’t touch it.
That isn’t Lindow’s only little secret – he’s also investigating Fenrir and the Aegis project on the sly, and seems to come across something worth writing home about. Meanwhile, someone (it’s unclear with what allegiance) seems to be hacking Alisa’s broken brain to turn her into a sleeper agent to kill Lindow. On Lenka’s side, it seems his God Arc can be fixed… but that might not be a good idea since his high compatibility is causing Oracle cells to overtake his body, resulting in a corrosion that will overwhelm and kill him, faster if he takes his God Arc up again and fights.
This all comes to a head in a major operation to kill a bunch of Aragami and collect materials for the Aegis project. Devices are used to lure in Aragami by breed, but at least one is sabotaged by one of the men at the top of Fenrir to send its Aragami at the hidden survivor village instead. Lindow rushes to help and Lenka (deciding that the front is better suited for him than commanding from the rear) ends up helping along with the rest of their squad.
There, Alisa goes berserk, setting off the Aragami forest with her wild shots. Dyas Pita also appears, and Lindow ends up fighting it. He’s evidently killed (though technically we never see proof that he did more than lose a limb), but Lenka, Alisa, and the others work together to save the town and take down Dyas Pita, though it very nearly consumes Lenka’s life
In the aftermath, we get more about the evil conspiracy: evidently, the chief responsible for the sabotage believes all Aragami will one day unite into a single organism, that will (having consumed all life on Earth) then depart in pieces for the rest of the cosmos. So, like Kill la Kill but you’re supposed to take it seriously. He plans to have his chosen group ride this out in a space station, and to trigger the mess on his schedule by creating an artificial ultimate Aragami out of all those cores, this two-pronged plan being the true nature of the Aegis project. Lenka also evidently survived, possibly with some new treatment to help his corrosion issue, and if you want to know what happens, play the game I guess.
If that seems a little brief, it should be noted that we both get good character issues, including an extended flashback to how Lenka got to be a God Eater and all the sacrifices made to bring him there (including a very well done tragic scene where his adoptive big sister, half-mad and dying from an infected wound, has a beautiful dream of the two of them together in a clean world while she’s being eaten alive by Aragami) as he comes to terms with his mortality and what he has to do with the time he has left. There are also many extended flashbacks to the Fenrir heads, including the schemer, a kindly doctor who helps Lenka and seems to oppose the schemer somewhat, and a woman the schemer eventually married. We see how they discovered Oracle cells, how they planned to use them, how the technology was militarized, how the Aragami emerged, and how the plans to counter the Aragami were first made, including the woman scientist’s death in (artificially augmented) childbirth, resulting in our “closest thing to a villain” gaining his mania and one of the squad members, Soma, being born.
So, while the plot is, let’s be honest, the first act of a Video Game that clearly has more to it and thus is maybe a little light for twelve episodes, the running time is admirably filled by exploring both characters and the setting in a really nice way.
When I first watched God Eater, I was not aware of its origins. I looked at it as a stand-alone anime and as a stand-alone anime it was… profoundly mid. It did a good take on the “humanity on the brink” plot that knew how to use death and tragedy to paint a picture that was… dark, but had enough hope to keep moving forward. I thought it was nice that for all the horrible things that happen, the characters are very determined to power through and make things better, and that it made the show a lot more watchable than it could have been. On the other hand, I was rather disappointed with the ending. Sure, we had a climactic battle with Dyas Pita, but it’s clear that Pita was little more than a King Mook; bigger and badder were clearly on the horizon, and we addressed them and lost Lindow over them (since he was burned for discovering the truth of Aegis) and never actually engaged with that.
When I looked into it more and found out that this was a video game adaptation, my esteem for the show oddly rose. It was middle of the road as an anime, but for a video game anime that was fairly high, and I found myself reasonably motivated to check out the source material. Again, nothing to report there so far, but on thinking about God Eater as basically an advert, I found that it had created some degree of mark and connection
But, ultimately, I do have to rate God Eater specifically as an anime and for that… it gets a B. No, the story’s not finished, and that hurts it. But the story it does tell is a solid one with a consistent threat and melancholy, and you are interested and invested in the characters. Lenka is okay as a protagonist. I like that he’s challenged with his mortality and that despite his opening he doesn’t stay the hothead who runs in and screams about the right thing to do. I like Lindow, as the gruff and somewhat enigmatic mentor goes, he feels like he’s well done. I like his relationships with his sister (a Fenrir command officer) and his second in command (who he seems to have a romantic “it’s complicated” with). I like Soma – the child of the flashback scientists – despite his start as “the angry one”, because we get to see how he’s hurting, where, and why. I’m even shockingly okay with Alisa, though I do think she’s under-utilized, and would like to see where she goes after coming through this mess, especially now that Pita is dead.
For all that, God Eater is reasonably deserving of a watch. It might be more deserving of a play, or it might not be, but that’s not what I’m here to judge. Instead, I’ll simply grant a mild recommendation to the show and call it a day.