ULTIMATE GAMING DESTINATION!

I had a few thoughts on my mind when I sat down to demo Attack on Titan 3 a few weeks back; first and foremost was wondering how out of my league I would be, having not played the previous games, and even worse - having not interacted with Attack on Titan besides the first season of the anime around when it premiered back when I was still in High School. What the title hadn't gotten across, despite the full description for the game stating as much, those concerns were unfounded - as Attack on Titan 3 is an adapation of the full story of Attack on Titan, requiring no previous knowledge of the series.

The framing device for this new story is by way of a no-name create-a-character who after they lost their entire team in a titan attack, retreated to being an instructor for the Cadet Corps. Your home base, then, is the Survey Corps Headquarters - where you'll interact with your colleages, manage your squad, upgrade and manage your equipment or abilities, and more. The parts you choose have their own stats, and their own specification - as you raise each of the 3 specification ranks, you unlock access to special abilities. 

That alone would be enough to warrant coverage as an RPG, but even more than that is the Motivation system. Bravery is earned by battling Titans, Knowledge by exploring outside the city and developing equipment, and Leadership by interacting with comrades. The latter also ties into relationships you can foster with your crew; these coalesce in Advice Events where you can deepenYou can spend points on each of the respective skill trees, unlocking skills and traits alike. It's a lot to take in, especially for an hour and a half demo; if nothing else, though, it makes it abundantly clear that this is an Action RPG first and foremost, even if Koei Tecmo themselves aren't really advertising it as such.

As for the gameplay itself, the primary change compared to the previous Attack on Titan games is the ability to target specific sections of a Titan to grapple towards and attack; the tutorial segment we played put special emphasis on how you can briefly immobilize a Titan by targetting its legs, or counter specific attacks by timing your strikes. This does mean that Titan fights are a more deliberate affair; some titans will not even make their nape directly targetable right away. I could see this being a dealbreaker for some players, since it drastically changes the flow of combat - but it does appear to tie into all the other RPG elements in a way that has me personally way more interested in checking out the full release.

Speaking to Producer Hideo Suzuki, the process of getting there with the new ODM system came with more trial and error than previous games in the series, and involved the team trying to juggle the desires of more technical fans hopes for more precision with their movements, as well as delivering combat that was accomodating for newer players.

"In the beginning, when you moved with the ODM gear, the left and right anchor... you had to know where each were going to go. It was very complicated; even for us developers, it was difficult to play the game. So the framework had to be revised so many times, a lot of revisions to make it simpler while still feeling good and exhilirating for players. So after all that trial and error we finally were able to establish it, but that took a long time. I think this might have taken the longest to finish our prototype of all the games."

Speaking more to the specifics of the target audience, Suzuki brings up the usually unspoken agreement; Attack on Titan as a franchise has most of its fans stemming from the Manga and Anime. Developing a game around Attack on Titan has to acknowledge that your target audience are not inherently skilled at action games, and any attempts at balancing things need to keep that in mind.

"I might be repeating myself, but our target audience is... well, a lot of them are not action game players; they're anime fans. So we wanted to keep the control pretty simple so that they can enjoy battling. However, we got a lot of feeback and requests from, you know, advanced players that they want to use the ODM gear a little mor freely - they wanted to improve their skills." Much of the game's new features, being able to target specific body parts, avoid attacks, or counter them all stem from a desire to offer something for more advanced players.

I, for one, am curious how folks will land on the different approach the team has gone with for the game, and how players will fare across the game's full runtime. Suzuki mentioned that they anticipate a "story only" playthrough to take up to 40 hours, with players endeavoring to explore everything clocking closer to 60 hours. I don't know if I have it in me to commit to an Attack on Titan game quite that long, but I'm certainly interested in playing more when it drops for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S and PC (Steam) on December 10. Stay tuned for our further coverage!