Review: Attack on Titan 2: Final Battle
The female titan ravages the city, leaving chaos in her wake. It’s up to you, and your fellow soldiers to stop her. Strap on your ODM gear and attempt to take down the colossus before it’s too late.
Omega Force’s Attack on Titan 2: Final Battle is basically a deluxe edition of last year’s Attack on Titan 2, adding additional modes and DLC to expand the scope of both gameplay and story.
The main story mode takes you through the events of seasons 1 and 2 of the Attack on Titan anime as a self-insert character, a soldier who left their diary behind to tell the story of their time with the 104th cadet squad. The narration frames this character as basically an unknown quantity, their name and gender left a mystery, referred to with “they” pronouns in the subtitles. This changes as you progress through the opening of the game.
There’s a surprisingly robust character creator where you are forced to choose a binary gender for your character. There are multiple skin tone options, though the darker ones suffer from the lighting issues that tend to plague the games industry when it comes to people of color. You can choose between multiple different styles of clothing and even the color palette of your outfit. You can also add extra accents to complete your look like eye patches and hats.
You follow the anime’s main cast through their training, learning to fight titans alongside them. This is where you’re taught the main combat mechanics that will follow you throughout the game. You use the ODM harness to swing around the environment and find the best angle of attack. Each titan has the canonical weak point on the nape of its neck, but attacking its arms and legs is meant to weaken them and make the fights easier. The actual implementation of this is questionable at best. I often found it easier to just go for the neck for a quick kill than waste time chopping off limbs for essentially the same result. There are stronger enemy types down the road that force you to use this technique to fully weaken them, but outside of that, it’s easier to just strike at the nape and move on.
First using the ODM and taking on titans was thrilling. The movement, while not quite on par with something like Insomniac’s Spider-Man, is still fairly fluid and fun to play around with, though the occasional skipped frame can make it feel a bit shaky at times. Taking on something as large and imposing as one of the titular titans is exhilarating…at first. But soon the thrill slips away and the process becomes a bit of a slog. Each encounter ends up being a group of titans you need to kill: slice, dice, rinse, and repeat. Even when stronger titans are introduced, or when you switch to different weapons or types of ODM gear, it’s still the same basic formula. This is frustrating from a gameplay perspective, as it quickly becomes boring, but the titans and mechanics for fighting them leave much to be desired in regards to their source material as well.
In the show, titans are huge, impossibly imposing beacons of danger at the very least, and death almost assuredly. There’s a sense of almost sublime scale that instantly instills the fear of knowing you are small and very much on the verge of being consumed. But the titans in-game don’t capture that feeling. They’re large, sure, but through its nature as an action game, the game prioritizes player empowerment, which takes away the sense of dread and helplessness that permeates the anime. There wasn’t a single fight in this game where I felt truly afraid or worried that I wouldn’t be able to win, or that I even needed to switch up my equipment other than to relieve some of the boredom I was starting to feel.
This continues in the other modes as well. Each adds different elements, like online multiplayer or base building and management, but ultimately the missions are still ‘find the titans, kill them, get loot’ over and over again. This is somewhat assuaged in the newly added ‘Territory Recovery Mode’ where you’re also spending time working on building up your own regiment and improving your base, but the gameplay loop here becomes stagnant fairly quickly as well.
Other characters become playable in these modes, which is somewhat interesting in ‘Character Episode Mode,’ where you play through the events of the anime’s third season as various cast members, instead of your created protagonist. While these characters are unlockable in the main campaign and can be chosen at will in the other modes like ‘Another Mode” and ‘Territory Reclamation Mode’, in ‘Character Episode Mode’ they’re set for each part of the story.
Having both a story mode that centers your own character, and one that centers the other characters in a way that doesn’t make them feel identical, the way the other modes where you can choose them does, is a somewhat nice change of pace. Reliving the events of seasons one and two with your own character is kind of a fun foray into playable fanfiction, while seeing the events of season three through multiple character perspectives in ‘Character Episode Mode’ adds a layer of interest that the other modes lack.
If you’re a fan of the Attack on Titan anime, and don’t mind a somewhat same-y gameplay experience, this is definitely a title worth checking out. The additional content provides 6-8 more hours of story, and with the base-building in ‘Territory Reclamation Mode’ and online multiplayer in ‘Another Mode’ there’s plenty to spend time on between building up your regiment, and playing with or against your friends in the different co-op and multiplayer modes.
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