Trivia / God Eater

• Dueling Works: Funnily enough, the game actually tried to avoid this; the original release was on the PSP exclusively and was meant to exploit Capcom's initial plans to make Monster Hunter Tri a Wii exclusive and the gap in bringing it to handhelds (Tri first released on the Wii in August 2009; Portable 3rd wouldn't happen in Japan until December 2010), with both GE1 and Burst landing in the window in-between. Even so, comparisons were pretty inevitable (especially with Burst landing so close to Portable 3rd) and while the game was considered unique and different, Tri still "won" overall (though the more story-heavy direction of MH4 and World is often attributed to God Eater having a much stronger narrative element than MH did at the time).
• What Could Have Been:
  • Alisa's early concepts, shown in the first art book◊, actually trended much more toward making her a young twintailed girl◊ with serious gothic-lolita vibes◊ (and also looking generally a bit more chipper than she does in the game as published). Eventually, the team decided this clashed a bit too heavily with the rest of the game's aesthetic and their planned arc for her character (and, like Lindow below, there might've been concerns about making all those billowing twin-tails, skirts and ribbons look good on the aging, already-strained PSP hardware), and her current design came into being.
    • It also makes it a bit clearer where the seemingly-bizarre insistence on her having small jackets with weird Cleavage Windows comes from - all of her early outfit designs, even the ones that moved away from the twin-tails, were centered on a corset for her upper torso which accentuated her bosom, and the jacket evolved out of that.
    • Notably, the basic design sensibility of all this (minus the twin-tails being that big) would later go on to be used by Ciel instead.
  • Lindow was originally going to be the team's main gun user, rather than Sakuya, and he was planned to use an Assault Gun, rather than the Sniper Gun that Sakuya uses. He was also originally going to have an even longer coat than what he has in the game (it would've been a proper Badass Longcoat), but this was scrapped due to difficulty in getting it to look good within the processing budget of the PSP.
  • Also, in a lot of the early concept work, the God Arcs look somewhat smaller and often more resemble traditional gunblades from other franchises (some of Sakuya and Soma's earlier concepts have revolver gunblades that would be right at home in Final Fantasy VIII) and the distinctive biological elements that mark the God Arcs as artificial Aragami are nowhere to be seen. The idea of the fully-transforming God Arc, as well as the nature of God Arcs, was only nailed down a bit later in the development process.