GOD EATER 2 Rage Burst

I've played this game for hundreds of hours on my PS4, and I will note that the PC port is noticeably worse. However, if you don't have a PS4, the PC port is serviceable; and the game itself is absolutely fantastic.
It suffers from the classic Monster Hunter/God Eater issue where the earlier difficulties can feel a little boring if you either have experience or a natural affinity for the genre, but the story is good throughout the entire game; something that cannot be said about most actual Monster Hunter games which barely have an actual plot.
The later difficulties can be quite challenging for the inexperienced, and once you beat the entire game you even unlike a "Perilous" difficulty setting that allows you to artificially make missions...well, perilous. Setting it to maximum difficulty can make you go down in one hit, and make the Aragami have tons of health; a challenge for only the most determined God Eaters with a finely tuned build.
All in all a good game, and I'm glad that the Steam port allows me to play with more people, my girlfriend especially.

If you have hundreds of hours of podcasts or audiobooks to catch up to, GE1 and 2 are pretty good games.
Both are pretty decent monster hunter clones, with simplistic combat, but not to the point it becomes braindead.
Story is incredibly anime and dumb to the point it actually becomes so bad it's good and it still manages to pull off good emotional moment every now and then.
Grinding is quite insane if you plan to 100% it, you are looking at something like 100 hours per game of killing same mobs over and over again. But then again if you do it slowly and while listening to something in the background it's quite relaxing.
Presentation is quite nice, graphics are of course anime as all hell with extreme jiggle physics attached to everything that at least resembles pair of boobas. Same with sound design, voicework, even the ENG one, really fits the Shounen style they are going for, music is quite excellent, memorable and retains same feel.
Out of the two games I'd say GE1 is better due to less bloat but if you are into cringy anime stories and like to grind every now and then, both games are worth the time.

Short version
It's Monster Hunter but anime, easier and faster
Long Version
First of all sit down, grab a coffee and prepare to scroll down
Second of all while I only have less than 60 hours of this game, its that fast if you use guns only, I am replaying it by using only melee for damage currently
You good? Okay, firstly the GAMEPLAY
If you never played any "monster hunter" genre, this game revolves around a gameplay loop of
- go into a mission (alone, with npcs or with friends)
- kill monster
- loot said monster
- get better gear
- advance in story/game
Equipment (Melee, Guns & Shield) yes you use all 3 in the fight, these together form the weapon you use called "God Arc"
You get 6 melee weapons with different unique ability
- Short Blade
- Long Blade
- Buster Blade
- Charge Spear
- Boost Hammer
- Variant Scythe
You get 4 gun types with unique ability
- Assault Gun
- Sniper
- Blast Gun
- Shotgun
You get 3 Shield types
- Buckler
- Shield.. yes shield
- Tower Shield
You might be asking so how this game "spice things up"
2 things, Blood Arts and Blood Rage
Blood Arts are basically special moves that you can only equip one in a mission, they can offer more attack, defense, evade options. You can level them up so they can do more of those said options, this is how one of the ways the game keeps you grinding
Blood Rage is your Ultimate with the shounen battle music, you select options while being invulnerable, depending how many and hard the options are, it can increase your damage by 200% or more, you need to complete said options for it to activate if you successfully do so, for several seconds you are immune to everything, so slash or nuke all you want within the limited time limit.
Monsters/Aragami
Design:
Monsters in this game are well designed arguably greatly designed, while yes there are a lot of recolors or reskins, some of them works different in the form of attacking or defense. Their overall design based on my own observation, is based off various gods irl but combining it with the anatomy of irl animals, human made objects and accompanying it with fire, ice, lightning or magic elements, some of the monsters are more designed to the fantasy or mechanical aspect.
An example of both of these, in the fantasy aspect, there is a monster called Venus, its purely just a monster with jelly parts, but within said jelly parts burst out other monster part that she uses against you making her fight very unique. WAIT... "you said her?" YES READER, it doesnt have a monster face, it has A HOT GIRL AS A FACE, so its literally a monster girl.
If you are weirded by that... there's a monster called Demiurge... its basically a small sauropod like monster, with a human mask lies a goat head within that roars with a creepy goat sound... what I'm saying is, its Satan
In the mechanical aspect, we have Quadriga, probably one of the monsters who has more recognizable mechanical aspects on their designs, a flesh that fused multiple military parts together and roars like an elephant, focusing more on missles and heavy dash attacks, its basically a tank but instead of shooting missles on the turret, it opens an armor on its chest to shoot a giant homing missle at you.
Overall, if you like the fantasy mixed with human elements type of monsters, you will like at least one monster in this game, my favorite is Amaterasu, its a monster that forces you to only use melee as its immune to gun attacks and... if you know you know, heh.
Music
I can't really give an opnion about music since I am somewhat of a monkey brain myself
but just like God Eater 1 & 3, music in this game are bangin, so good.
Especially ofc the music that plays when you activate Blood Rage
That is all, monkey brain out.
Lastly, Story and Characters
First of all you can skip to the Cons section if you do not care about the story as in this game you can skip cutscenes, unlike a certain popular monster hunter game *ahem*
I won't be spoiling the story and characters as I am pretty sure you want to experience the story and meet the characters first hand, heck even character names thus I will be giving you other points and such
Do you need to play god eater 1 aka. God Eater Ressurection, NO, the story is written to just give you clues on what happened in God Eater 1, so the story of God Eater 2 can stand alone on its own
The story "arcs" goes like this
First Arc (Chapter 1-6)
Second Arc (Chapter 7-8)
Spiral Tree Arc (Chapter 9-14)
Overall, the story of this game compared to God Eater 1 and 3, in my opinion, is the weakest in this series. It focused more on the "shounen" aspect of story telling and characters
OH HI THERE, here for the Cons of God Eater 2? here we go
- Lack of mobility, in part of chasing/searching for the monster, while you can see where the monster is in the map, going to the monster can be a bit annoying as you want to immediately fight them, luckily some maps are designed to be small so you can get into battle right away
- MAPS, while some maps are big and small, their biggest cons is mainly the lack of details in some of them although, this is an apocalyptic world, so it can be forgiven in that aspect, the map you might hate the most is the greenhouse/library and dam map, as they are too big and especially the dam map is too narrow for some monster fights and is kind of just a straight line.
- characters, subjective topic but as usual we will like or hate some characters, that is unavoidable, especially characters relating to the endgame
- Story, as I said in the story section, its the weakest story among all 3 God Eater games, the Spiral Tree arc is too dragged out, there are some parts where it you are just literally climbing a tower progressing slowly in each floor only to get bombarded with more villain "hehe you too weak" and more "closure" stories of the main cast
- Missions designs, I'mma struck fear to those who played through and probably dropped this game, "chapter 11, Suspension Bridge" DUN DUN DUUUUNNNN, while all missions upto this point have been too easy to its alright, this mission tests your ability to carry a character and play solo because of it, while it certaintly got easier in a bit after, the fights became too absurdly hard to the point that this might be not the hardest but definitely the most challenging game in the series
- Weapon Balancing, while yes you will be likely to use your melee attack, there is a reason why they call using the guns in this game "cheezing", in this game Assault gun and Blast gun deal more dps than any melee weapon wishes to do, so if you wanna play the game legit with no cheezing, use melee only, you can use the gun to heal your allies instead
- Blood Arts (now this problem was fixed in God Eater 3), so you can only equip one blood art for an entire mission, this limits your combos and moves that you do as you mainly focus to doing that specific blood art move so you can deal more damage and alike.
- Lastly ofc Blood Rage, the Ult, why? well as I mentioned in the monsters and mission designs above, both are designed to balanced out this "ult" mechanic, as you get 2 states of immunity, and one of them you just get to deal insane damage, so if you are like me who like to save the ult for NO REASON, you will have a hard time playing through the Spiral Tree Arc/endgame, so please for the love of Venus, use the ult don't save it, USE IT
I don't do game reviews but as someone who knows nothing about a lot of games especially this genre, I love this series, this game however is the weakest among the series.
Overall here are my scores
Gameplay 8/10
Story 6/10
Characters 7/10
Monster Design 9/10
Music 9/10
Amaterasu & Venus 100/10

Monster Hunter-like with BIG ANIME aesthetic. At times the combat actually feels like Kingdom Hearts as well, in my opinion.
VERY grindy, kind of addicting. But if you aren't into the gameplay loop within 3 or 4 solid hours, this game isn't for you. Nothing wrong with not liking it either, it was originally a handheld (original PSP) exclusive and at times the limitation of both the graphics and gameplay emphasize this.
Story is... kind of "eh." But I think the world is interesting and one story element I did enjoy was the acknowledgement of events in the original game. Characters from God Eater 1 are acknowledged and some even make returns in this game.
The anime aesthetic is yes, kind of cringe. But it's stylish and even though the characters make me wince sometimes, I do find them kind of charming.
I've yet to play GE3 but one thing I REALLY dislike about this sequel is that there's not more to the customization. It feels very much like GE1 which isn't a bad thing, but also feels lacking in originality. So hopefully as the series grows in popularity (assuming it ever does) features like more elaborate customization, deeper character creation, and better articulation of stats (this is a big one: RPG leveling should be a thing in these games) should definitely be included in future installments.
GE2 is an enjoyable and addicting 7/10 that kills time like the plague.

Anime Monster Hunter with an actual story. It's an older game, so the combat and graphics are dated, but the story and characters make up for it. I've played through more than once and will always recommend it.
Also, Soma deserves infinite hugs.

Review for God Eater 2 Rage Burst (89.5 hours):
I love this franchise so much that I recommend getting this game. Getting God Eater 2 RB automatically grants you the prequel God Eater Resurrection in your steam library which are both heaps of content on their own. I entered this game right after completing its prequel, so this took me less time to complete compared to the previous game.
Although I prefer the predator styles, the introduction of Blood Arts opens more freedom for various play style options but it was just a pain trying to level them up to max for the achievements. It is also worth noting that this game has more than 50% additional story content from its prequel and has around 400+ outfits for character customization.
Review for God Eater Resurrection (97.3 hours):
Recommended game for casual aragami hunting. Love the anime-style graphics and hunts would take 5-15mins average which is pretty decent if you can't spend too much time grinding.
Predator styles styles were the bomb (offered good mobility and option for different play styles) but unfortunately they weren't able to carry it over to their succeeding games. Camera controls also worked a little wonky on larger aragami but shouldn't be too much of a problem seeing this is one of the older god eater games.

The God Eater series is basically anime Monster Hunter. I've been playing Monster Hunter & it's contemporaries for a long time. I originally played God Eater Burst, the first god eater released in the west for the PSP, when I was younger. I've also played the remaster/expansion of God Eater Burst: God Eater Resurrection. Finally getting around to this game, I can recommend it. The game has its issues, some of which are inherent to the genre: reused enemies, repetitive game-play loop, RNG being a pain in the butt, and so on. However, this game (and franchise really) has some of the best music out there, has memorable characters, and much more. I will say, I think overall God Eater 1, is a better game, with a tighter story, and perhaps less anime tropes. Alas, this game does a wonderful job building out the world created in 1 and really giving you actual development of the characters both old and new, something many sequels fail to do. If you can stomach some anime cringe (tropes, weird fan-service, odd voice acting, stiff cut-scenes) you'll find a really enjoyable game, absolutely reminded me of being young playing PSP hunter games.