From early on it’s clear that GOD EATER draws its central inspiration from Neon Genesis Evangelion and Attack on Titan, amalgamating and imitating both to an unflatteringly high degree. To those who have seen both, I will include the special service of giving a perfect depiction of the early episodes using nothing but a paragraph of comparisons. For all others, the next paragraph will only be half as useful, but to be fair GOD EATER is worth far less than half the sum of its parts. It's only thirteen episodes, almost a quarter of the length of watching Evangelion and Attack on Titan back-to-back, but I would recommend watching thirteen episodes of either over this show, as I can’t recommend watching the thirteen episodes of GOD EATER at all.
The first episode only distinguishes itself from the first episode of Evangelion by featuring an Eren Yager knockoff named Lenka in the place of Ikari Shinji. In a small city walled off from the apocalyptic creatures called Aragami, Lenka is a teenager seeking to become one of the elite Aragami-exterminating fighters called God Eaters. He is more powerful than his peers (which is never accurately explained beyond taking a page from Mobile Suit Gundam and calling him a Newtype, a label that drops into obscurity mere episodes later), and single-mindedly seeks the absolute extinction of the Aragami (which is explained, but could be easily guessed in its entirety from the first five minutes of the show). In his first combat against the Aragami, his weapon evolves, cuing reactions pulled straight from the control room at Central Dogma when Evangelion Unit 01 transforms. Two episodes later a female German Newtype God Eater around Lenka’s age named Alisa (read: Asuka) flies in from one of the other branches of civilization, a fight with Aragami on a ship ensues, she makes a point to protect her doctor, and just in general emulates the “Asuka Attacks” episode of Evangelion to a T. It genuinely makes me wonder why copyrights weren’t contested.
Lenka and Alisa meet a series of other God Eaters whose names I am drawing a blank on now that they are no longer on screen. They fulfill no purpose, have no character or depth, and quite literally exist to highlight the worth of the protagonists. There is a captain, Lindow, whose name I remember only because the last few episodes are spent by him taking on the fatherly-elder-captain-on-the-verge-of-retirement role, complete with smoking, snappy one-liners, and commands for his crew not to die. A separate story runs in parallel, giving the backstory on how the world devolved into its current state. In the first such scene we meet a trio of scientists, and immediately the rest of the story writes itself. They are also named characters in the current time, wracked with guilt and working at the various outposts of humanity, with one at the top of the chain of command. When the supreme plans for the continued survival of the human race are brought up, along with some hacking and other human interference from the unknown, we have already had a half season of red flags and smoking guns to trip over and fill in the rest.
And for all that they talk up about the “survival of the human race” and the like, I couldn’t point to a single accomplishment that the God Eaters could claim by the end of the show. They save one remote settlement from extinction, kill a big bad Aragami from their traumatic pasts, and procure some materials for the poorly specified plans to go “forward”, an ill-defined concept in and of itself. That the show talks a big game and then refuses to deliver anything tangible is unfathomably annoying.
The show was clearly written for the express purpose of having a young male protagonist and his merry sidekicks hack-and-slash their way through an oppressive alien race, which begs the question of why they bothered to frame everything around a progressing plot in the first place. With acclaimed studio ufotable doing the animation, it was a guarantee that this work would be visually stunning, walking the tightrope between a classic anime style and 3D-modeling quite well. The many appearances of vocal insert music by GHOST ORACLE DRIVE are driving, albeit overused to a certain degree, and what the fight scenes lack in originality they make up for by being entertaining enough to watch.
But perhaps without a plot, they couldn’t explain away Lenka getting skewered through the chest only to carry Alisa all the way to a faraway shelter. They couldn’t explain away Alisa’s extreme PTSD being used to turn her into a mindless killing machine, only to have that be relevant for a sum total of three minutes in the second to last episode. And they definitely get a lot of mileage towards their goal of making Lenka the central figure in the God Eater chain of command, despite being a teenager with anger issues and canned dialogue. It isn’t enough that the plot is so partial to him that the looming specter of death itself is a minor inconvenience to him at best; we are supposed to further care about him because of his perfect people skills that only seem to emerge in times of extreme duress. He’s the only character who we could possibly be led to relate to.
The first nine episodes of GOD EATER were aired contiguously, but there were sudden delays that pushed back the last four by half a year or so. Obviously they had to push back production in order for it to be well-animated, considering that was all it had going for it by episode nine, but to me it was even more disastrous. By the time episode ten was airing I had forgotten everything about the show, from the Aragami to the God Eaters to Lenka himself. If you want to go through the entire show and not suffer from object permanence, there are only two possible options. The first is to take it like a shot and marathon the whole thing in one contiguous block, the only possible chance for remembering any of the characters from one episode to the next. The other is to watch erratically, randomly, and throw continuity the winds in favor of enjoying a couple pretty fight scenes. For countless reasons I cannot recommend the former, and the latter is tenuous at best, so I propose a third option: watch Evangelion, watch Attack on Titan, watch five minutes of a fight scene from GOD EATER, and let your mind do the rest.