God Eater Resurrection’s Bullet Editor May Baffle You

God Eater allows people to customize their loadout and equipment. This gets especially intricate when it comes to guns, as you’re able to customize bullets. Note that this isn’t actually crafting and determining what they’re made of. Rather, you’re able to edit the properties and behaviors of the bullets that you’ll use in your favorite guns. While God Eater Resurrection gets major points for letting you get into such intricacies immediately, it doesn’t do a very good job of actually introducing you to the art of bullet modding.

To start, there’s really no bullet editing tutorial in God Eater Resurrection. If you head to a Terminal to check your mail, you’ll find plenty of documents describing the different types of bullets you can create and use with your guns. There are no example recipes, however. Seeing such walls of text is, quite frankly, intimidating. Especially since the God Eater Burst recipes don’t exactly work anymore. While you can try and piece them together, the modules you might be familiar with could need to be unlocked by playing through the story. 

Since this is a rather complicated area of the game, I recommend beginning with an Assault Gun. It has no restrictions, unlike the Blast Gun that needs bomb and radial ammunition and Sniper Guns that require laser bullets. This way, you can experiment with any bullets you like in the test, then perhaps switch to a more specialized gun once you find a type of ammunition you prefer.

Once you have an Assault Gun equipped, you need to hunt down God Eater Resurrection’s bullet editor. Find a Terminal and look at your Loadout. You’ll be able to check your bullets from there. Once you do, press the triangle button. You’ll then be able to adjust each of your bullets, assigning them names and, depending on the bullet, adjusting the modules. For example, an assault bullet only gets six modules. Remember that for each module added, it’ll do 10% less damage than the one before. So, the first one will deal 100% damage, but an assault bullet with all six modules will do 100% on the first hit, then 90% damage, followed by 80%, 70%, 60%, and 50% damage.

Now, when you go to look at a mod to apply to a bullet’s slot, you’re going to see a number of elements. There will be elemental, non-elemental, status, and healing bullet options. So, you could see Blaze, Divine, Freeze, Heal, and Poison modules in your list. You’ll also see a size, which can be SS, S, M, L, and LL. These correspond to cost, size, and strength. SS is smallest and has the lowest cost and damage, LL is the most expensive and has the highest cost and damage. Generally speaking, it’s best to stick with one element and maintain it for each module. These modules will specify their range, so you’ll know how close you’ll need to be, and some may also have homing abilities, turn off friendly fire, become more powerful the longer it takes for them to hit, or even deal critical damage at specific distances.

There’s also trajectory and control to take into account. You can adjust the degree at which a bullet is shot out. In some situations, it’s possible to have it hitting at multiple angles to ensure better coverage. This is pretty advanced stuff, and more able bullet creators will be able to have lasers hitting from multiple directions, to be sure an attack hits. You may want to use a less costly Deco module to get a control bullet in place to arrange a more powerful and costly attack on a subsequent hit. Like, say, a LL Deco-Shot straight behind you, then have a control to aim a sniper bullet at an enemy that gains power with distance from the firing point. You could also have a shot aim straight up into the air, to target aerial enemies. Or, someone with more skill could find a way to send a bomb careening into the ground for an area attack.

Timing matters too. Bullets can conflict if you keep adding on new modules and setting them to fire with or at the same time as the previous one. Instead, you need to adjust the timing. You can work on delays, setting them to go a certain amount of time after a previous module. It’s also possible to have one take effect when another hits. Paying attention to whether or not a shot can connect to another for a compound effect will let you know whether you should or shouldn’t try to put together some sort of chain.

You may want to also try for a knockback and stagger on your bullets. This is a technique that’s been around since God Eater Burst. It will result in a temporary staggering after making a shot, which will make you very, very briefly invincible, reduces the Trigger Happy Skill’s stamina cost, and lets you shoot off bullets a little faster. You use the last two module slots to put in a S Deco-Shot: rotate right, tight 120 degrees with a M Orb: Stop/Normal chained to it. I attach it to my recipes out of habit.

Most importantly, preview your bullets. I can not stress this enough. There is a testing range that lets you see how good or bad your recipe works. You can check for conflicts, see if it’s performing the way you’d like, and get an idea of what kind of damage it’ll do. Even with my admittedly poor crafting skills, I found myself going through quite a bit of trial and error to work things out. Since this is a very intricate process, most of my ideas didn’t pan out, but at least I know I gave it a go.

As you can tell from all this, building bullets in God Eater Resurrection is hard work. It doesn’t come easy to some people. (I’m one of them.) I’m not very good at cobbling together recipes, but here are some very basic Blaze, Freeze, Divine, and Heal shots I’ve put together. Again, I’m prefacing this by saying I’m not one of those intricate creators who can put together a bullet that does 3,000 damage or curves around to hit special spots on an enemy. These are rudimentary recipes to build off of and tide you over until someone who’s actually good at it can come up with some awesome recipes to save us all.

God Eater Resurrection is immediately available for the PlayStation 4 and PlayStation Vita in North America. It will come to the PlayStation 4 and PlayStation Vita in Europe, as well as PCs worldwide, on August 30, 2016.