The Philosophy of God’s Eater Burst

Of all the giant monster hunting games out there Monster Hunter is literally the only one anyone actually knows about. But the reigning prince of this genre has always been God’s Eater Burst. The original game was unexpectedly the most popular game on the Playstation Portable, being the console’s highest seller. It was popular enough to, eventually, be adapted into an anime after the sequel, God’s Eater Rage Burst 2, was scheduled for release. The most confusing aspect of these games is that it has a weird combination of anime tropes, fanservice, and cringy characters that meet a legitimately bleak apocalyptic world populated by monsters who mimic the very gods and myths that humanity once worshipped.

This game was one of my favorite experiences as I started undergraduate university. Filled with a mysterious, biologically based science fantasy, and filled with so many cultural references, the game boggles the mind from everything from a religious to an empirical fascination. The developer of this game, Shift, also made another hunter-style game called Freedom Wars. Freedom Wars immediately established a philosophical narrative on the nature of freedom as license, and it made me want to go back and see what the game from my freshman year had to offer.

At the beginning of the game, you are a new recruit to Fenrir, a global military government, at their Far East Branch, which is currently engaging in this thing called The Aegis Project, a man-made island that will act as the new home for all of humanity, and protect them from the Aragami, monsters made of fully conscious, individual cells, called Oracle Cells, that network together and consume whatever they can find to grow stronger. The Far East Branch is a particularly dangerous place in the world, because the oracle cells were invented there, and thus the Aragami this part of the world are more numerous and more violent. You get outfitted with a weapon called a God-Arc, an Aragami that has been weaponized and symbiotically fused into your arm.

The twist was that the Aegis Project was an elaborate coverup for something else, the Ark Project. The Ark Project was a space station that used oracle cell technology to safely launch into space, but as consequence would cause an event called “The Devouring Apocalypse,” an explosion of oracle cells that would cause a worldwide mass extinction. Only a select few, wealthy, and high-ranking people can fit on the ark.

What follows is a terrible ordeal where you and your teammates decide to either follow Director Johannes with special permission to board, or Dr. Paylor Sakaki to prevent the Devouring Apocalypse. What plays out is a conflict of ethics, where people sacrifice themselves for the good of the many in a strictly utilitarian perspective against an elitist ethics that feels entitled to sacrifice the many for the sake of survival.

Thanks to some luck and a few unexpected allies, the Utilitarian ethics are victorious in battle. Together, you, your team, and Fenrir recommit to saving humanity the hard way.

When we return to the Far East Branch some three years later, in God’s Eater 2 Rage Burst, as a recruit from a different branch of Fenrir named “Friar,” we find a more prosperous region. However, in Rage Burst 2, we find our former team still struggling to accept the loss of the people who sacrificed themselves.

They often say something akin to asserting that there must have been a way to solve the conflict without the loss, yet no one is able to even posit a solution. They have rejected the difficulty of Utilitarianism, the situations hat call for sacrifice, and seek some kind of utopian, utilitarian sense. The captain of the Friar God Eaters, Julius, becomes so obsessed with this goal, that he let’s himself be completely manipulated by the psychotically destructive Dr. Rachel.

Dr. Rachel, too, wanted to cause a Devouring Apocalypse, and succeeds. To stop this, we counteract it by causing our own Devouring Apocalypse. This was, however, unsatisfying to me. The World is made peaceful and safe, because these two world-ending forces infinitely devour each other, and thus prevent new versions of themselves from developing. Are we really to accept that the main philosophical struggle of this game, the problem of sacrifice, is just an infinite struggle with this specific kind of loss?

Unfortunately, the game does not really give a satisfying conclusion to this conflict. The practical, narrative problem of the chaos caused by the Aragami and oracle cells is solved in a manner consistent with the world’s logic. So in that sense I still immensely enjoyed how the game wrapped, and how the game rapidly changed and forced me to learn a more patient, defensive style by the end. But the philosophical struggle was essentially dropped.

There was no dialogue that tried to move further than chastising he main characters for allowing their friends to be sacrificed. They ultimately left it to a matter of will. If your will is determined to face those Utilitarian challenges, where it seems most prudent to sacrifice some for the good of the many, with a denial of the sacrifice, then you may find a way to reach your goal without sacrificing anything. But such a will comes with the cost that you might lose everything if you fail.

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