Attack on Titan (Xbox One)
Giants aren’t the first creatures to come to mind when you think of horror, but once you consider they could squash you like a bug without even trying, it’s a bit easier to see their potential. However, the Attack on Titan series choose an interesting direction for making its Titans horrifying, since most don’t look fearsome at all. Most look like regular humans but with their proportions stretched out of shape, these gangly giants often looking a bit empty-headed too. It would be far too easy to think they pose little danger, right up until they’ve dug their teeth into you in the type of bloody detail the manga and anime do not shy away from. With the threat posed by such towering foes who barely need to think to kill with ease, Attack on Titan sees humanity hiding itself behind a set of walls for safety, only for those walls to begin to break when its story starts. Humans hadn’t been waiting to die though, and in the Attack on Titan action game, also known as A.O.T. Wings of Freedom in Europe, you’ll be able to fight back with the incredibly satisfying tool known as omni-directional mobility gear.
While the towering walls lined with cannons helped repel Titans for a while, the ODM gear allows individual humans to actually have a hope of taking down a Titan. Cables shoot out its side to latch onto buildings, trees, walls, or even the Titans themselves, and with a set of dual blades, the protectors of this shrinking society aim to carve out a chunk on the nape of a Titan’s neck that will kill them instantly. Attack on Titan’s video game adaptation has you utilizing the ODM gear for most of its battles, and once you come to grips with it, it can be an extremely satisfying way to navigate and tackle the towering threats you need to extinguish. Leaping around the towns and getting a feel for when to launch your next cables ends up feeling a bit like you’re Spider-Man, the player gradually figuring out the best way to build speed and cover distance that gets a little boost thanks to the pressurized air in ODM gear meant for smaller bursts of speed. In a Titan fight though, you’ll instead start factoring in things like swinging around the giant’s body, trying to avoid having your cable get broken, or making sure you have a good angle as you fly in with your blades to try and land those killer strikes.
A lot of the Titan combat ends up exhilarating simply because of how well Koei Tecmo adapted this complicated movement system into a fluid and faithful form. You need to think about its use enough to avoid losing momentum or smacking into a wall and picking your latch points is important to actually targeting parts on a Titan’s body effectively, but once you start to understand the rhythm of movement and smaller details of your gear, you can start fighting like one of the more effective warriors in the manga and anime. Understandably, the Titans aren’t easy targets at first either, and they come in a range of varieties that further test your movement abilities. Titans come in many sizes, the smallest ones practically free pickings but those deformed proportions can make maneuvering around them sometimes difficult. Many Titans can follow your movements well, keeping their neck out of view as they reach for you or walk in place. As a result, sometimes you’ll want to carve through their limbs first to incapacitate them, but then there are Titans like one with thin arms and an enormous gut that practically defends the limbs just because of how easy his stomach accidentally blocks the elbows. Others may crawl on all fours, their odd position turning their four limbs into towers that can easily block an attempt to go for that exposed neck. You even need to watch out for something as simple as a head turn, especially since the Attack on Titan game is pretty lenient with health but not so much when a Titan actually goes for a bite.
Beyond the Titans themselves, there are other factors involved in the fight that can shift your fortunes. Your pressurized gas can run out and your blades will dull, meaning sometimes you’ll need to flee and resupply. Weapon upgrades and purchases can make your gear more reliable or stronger, but the best stuff often involves some sacrifice so a strong blade often needs frequent replacement and you can barely carry replacement blades for it. A more interesting mechanic comes in how the other people fighting the good fight against the Titans can assist you. You’re able to recruit other people in the area to fight alongside you and instruct them to do things like focus on the same target as you or protect innocents, but they come with different ratings based on how well they can assist. Get a team of S rank fighters with you and you can carve through Titans at impressive speed, but oftentimes such allies first must be bailed out of a bad situation where they’re being overwhelmed by a group of Titans. The Attack on Titan game is happy to remind you how skewed the battle should be as you get death alerts that are almost unavoidable to at least a small degree, but protect the right soldiers and you can lessen casualties.
There are other elements that influence the way fights can unfold. Battles on the plains rely a lot more on using the ODM gear exclusively on Titans or riding your horse into battle, cannons can sometimes be commandeered for quick easy kills although you’ll be a sitting duck. There are even special parts on some Titans that drop valuable materials for upgrades when destroyed, but the most interesting shake-up will be the special Titans. Abnormals already exist that are often tougher and move in strange ways, but special Titans like the bluntly named Female Titan exhibit much greater intelligence and have unique abilities. Moving with greater intent, these special Titans serve as boss battles where they can do things like harden the part you’re aiming for to block damage or more intelligently aim their attacks at you, but the Attack on Titan game does hit a small snag. The point in the series it was created to adapt doesn’t feature too many of these special Titans. You get to play as one, able to fist fight with the towering foes in a way that often feels more like a power trip than a challenge, but otherwise the game’s main story wraps up before it can adapt conflicts with other more interesting foes. An interesting compromise is made though, the game featuring epilogue missions that introduce enemies like the Beast Titan but any story revelations tied to its presence are left out so these extra bosses are merely powerful enemies instead of meaningful players in the plot. It does feel like the wise way to handle things to avoid spoilers at the time, and it also helps the game make up for its odd handling of a story that had to be incomplete due to its time of release.
The Attack on Titan game lets you play as a handful of the notable characters from the anime and manga, although only four of them can be used for the main story missions. Eren, Mikasa, and Armin are a group of friends who were children when the walls were first breached by the Colossal Titan, the fearsome Titan with exposed muscle from the front of the box even able to peer over the fortifications that had protected humanity. Scarred by the awful death toll of that day, they end up training to be members of the Survey Corps, a group sent out beyond the walls to fight back Titans and search for something of value beyond. One particularly notable member of the Corps is Levi, a gifted fighter albeit a rather off-putting one due to his grim no-nonsense attitude. The story presented here is actually rather faithfully adapted, even sparing moments for scenes that don’t set up new action scenarios. The game didn’t need to show Levi comforting a dying ally or the trio’s friend Sasha sneaking meat for them to eat later for example yet it seems the game wants to include as much as it can even if it can’t fit in every characterization moment that allows the frequent deaths to hit as hard as they do. However, you still get a cohesive story where the game can deal with the intrigue of learning more about the Titans and the world these characters live in, it’s just a shame the point it has to wrap things up is a bit anticlimactic.
The epilogue smartly gives you some much stronger battles with special Titans who didn’t yet have their time in the story that had been told in the source material yet, and what’s more, it even introduces new mechanics like throwing firebombs so it almost feels like it shouldn’t have been framed as just a set of extra missions anyway. One thing that might make players miss the epilogue though is the need to unlock it through Survey Missions. Survey Missions have no plot really and they’re mostly ways to remix old locations with new threats and there are a good deal that need to be done to unlock the actually unique epilogue fights. Survey Missions are smart as extra content for players who want more after the plot, but gating off the epilogue also perhaps encourages speeding through them, especially since by design many of them can be wrapped up quickly if you just gun for the main objective. You can play as anyone you like in Survey Missions as well as the game’s multiplayer Expedition Mode which is similar in design, and some characters like Armin and Hange Zoe even have unique mechanics like giving direct orders to allies so you can pick when they attack. However, if you’re not interested in the bonuses for doing a good job clearing out enemies or doing the sub-missions where you help other characters out, the Survey Missions do start to show that Attack on Titan is at risk of getting repetitive.
The Attack on Titan game is actually built on the framework Koei Tecmo often uses for their Dynasty Warrior series where you can often finish a level having killed a thousand troops with ease. The adjustments made for a threat like the Titans are actually surprisingly effective though as you’re more likely to kill between 10 and 20 giants in a stage with kills rarely feeling like empty action. Still, those Survey Missions often leave off things like progressing through multiple objectives and you reach them when you’ve got a good deal of character and weapon upgrades. They aren’t able to muster up quite the excitement the usual battles provide, but if not for blocking off the interesting epilogue missions, it would be easier to appreciate the option to keep playing the game to make expert use of your ODM skills. It becomes a question of how much a game’s structure can let down the solid action, but they’re not entirely hollow battles either especially as you start reaching the later ones where the Titans get a big boost in their competence. Admittedly Survey Missions become available before the story is over too, so a good mix of doing the two could potentially lead to a more effective overall experience.
THE VERDICT: Attack on Titan is an excellent adaptation of the show, carrying over its art style superbly and even making sure its story elements include smaller moments despite the need to wrap things up at an anticlimactic point. Use of the ODM gear is a thrilling skill to develop that makes taking on the Titans exciting and kinetic even as you start to get a hang of it, and extra systems are layered on to keep the story missions fresh. Locking the unique and well-designed epilogue chapters behind the otherwise optional Survey Missions though was a poor choice, the otherwise simple extra content growing repetitive as it doesn’t muster up the same level of challenge as the core adventure. It doesn’t bog down the game entirely, Attack on Titan still best defined by your gradual growth into a high-flying Titan slaying machine in the better structured main campaign.
And so, I give Attack on Titan for Xbox One…
A GOOD rating. Even if the Survey Missions straight up didn’t exist, Attack on Titan would still land squarely at Good rather than something higher mainly because there is always the small element of repetition waiting to push through even in the game’s main story. More clever Abnormals or a quicker push into using special Titans could have kept up the thrilling pace of the early game where you’re getting the hang of the ODM gear as the enemy in turn gets more competent to match. All the sub-missions appearing across the map apply a time pressure and add some of that much needed hectic energy to match the horrible idea of giants running amok in civilized areas, and since regular Titans even get hardened necks later down the line, you have to start taking individual conflicts seriously to wear them down rather than whipping from one to the other after mastering the maneuvering gear. In some ways it is locked into this design based on the game coming out well before the story of the anime or manga could push into deeper territory and the epilogue itself is well constructed for its attempt to bring things to a cleaner close without touching on plot details anime fans shouldn’t have at that point. Playing as a Titan feels a little too simple but was used sparingly to accommodate, but it’s really when the game starts slipping back into the kind of formula common in Dynasty Warriors games that it jeopardizes its enjoyability. It is fortunate on one hand you can gun straight for the objective and clear some Survey Missions in around two minutes so they don’t block the epilogue from access as long as they could have, but it does feel strange how the game doesn’t make more necessary actions for these otherwise optional tasks to make the missions robust. Most just involve taking down one or a handful of specific Titans, but main missions can involve things like protecting people or places and your resuppliers and allies are often placed away from those targets to make balancing it a challenge. Making such things required in the extra missions would add some helpful substance, but the best idea really would be to attach the epilogue to the main story or reduce the required Survey Missions considerably so only die-hard fans might plunge into these sometimes cookie-cutter challenges.
The Attack on Titan video game got so much right that it is a shame to see the post-game fumble it, but that doesn’t completely invert the game’s quality or drag it through the mud necessarily. The Titans are still faithfully adapted as unusual threats fought in a unique way. Some Titans are quickly dispensed with while others start to test your ability to maneuver in the air, and the sense of danger is often less for the main characters you’re playing as and more for the people and world they need to protect. This game’s special style of combat provides exhilarating moments that are hard to argue with, a series fan likely to walk away pleased with how well the game gets so many details right on top of being fun to play.