Namco Announces God Eater PSP: First Details

Kris Erickson • Jul 1, 2009 • Comments (2)

The Monster Hunter series has been the top selling franchise on Sony's PSP by a wide margin. This success (and the profits that it generated for Capcom) has led other publishers like Koei and Sega to try their hand at capturing some of that same magical formula with their own 4-player community-building games. It does not come as a surprise, therefore, to hear that Namco Bandai would like some its own multiplayer co-op action on the portable platform. Via Famitsu magazine, the company has announced a brand new IP exclusively for the PSP called God Eater. The game will be arriving in Japan this fall, with a North American release sure to follow sometime afterwards.

According to the Japanese announcement, God Eater is set in a dystopian future. The game centers around the struggle between the Aragami, divine creatures that have suddenly decided to attack the planet, and the God Eaters charged with taking them down. Wait, this is already starting to sound very familiar.

You can build a party of up to four characters offline, or you can connect with three friends for an all-human questing party. Your characters use a special kind of weaponry called "deus ex machina," to suck the life essences out of the aragami and absorb it. This allows the player to power up their weapons in a variety of ways. Just like Monster Hunter, there are different classes of weapons, but these can be swapped more easily in God Eater. Namco Bandai has also said that it expects God Eater to be much faster-paced than Monster Hunter. Clearly, these two games will be compared with much scrutiny by hordes of Monster Hunter fans who might be eager to try something new.