Attack on Titan 2: Season Pass

Attack on Titan 2: Season Pass is a downloadable content package for the base game ‘Attack on Titan 2’. It provides players with 12 additional episodes that expand the game’s narrative and gameplay. These new episodes are integrated into both the ‘Story Mode’, where they appear in the Daily Life section, and ‘Another Mode’, where they are accessible as Scout Missions. Players can access this new content by interacting with Scouts in their respective modes, offering more adventures within the game’s world of battling giant Titans.

Attack on Titan 2: Season Pass: A Historian’s Dissection of a Contentious Expansion

Introduction

In the annals of licensed video games, the union of Koei Tecmo’s Omega Force and Hajime Isayama’s monumental manga, Attack on Titan, stands as a surprisingly effective fusion of source material and gameplay. The release of Attack on Titan 2 in 2018 was widely regarded as a significant improvement over its predecessor, refining the exhilarating Omni-Directional Mobility Gear (ODM) combat into a truly visceral power fantasy. However, the conversation surrounding a game is often incomplete without examining its post-launch strategy. The Attack on Titan 2: Season Pass represents a fascinating, and ultimately flawed, artifact from the early peak of the “season pass” era—a product whose very nature as a compilation of downloadable content (DLC) makes it a challenging subject for critical review. This analysis posits that the Season Pass, while offering a discounted avenue for dedicated fans to acquire additional narrative and cosmetic content, ultimately serves as a stark case study in the opaque and often disjointed nature of piecemeal game expansion, failing to coalesce into a meaningful or transformative experience of its own.

Development History & Context

To understand the Season Pass, one must first understand the studio behind it. Koei Tecmo, and specifically its Omega Force division, is a developer with a storied history defined by the Dynasty Warriors franchise and its musou-style gameplay—a formula of combating vast hordes of enemies with flashy, powerful combos. Their foray into the Attack on Titan license was a departure from their typical historical settings, yet a natural fit for their core competency: making the player feel like an unstoppable force against overwhelming numbers.

The gaming landscape of 2018 was deep within the industry’s embrace of the “games-as-a-service” model and the proliferation of DLC. Season passes had evolved from a novelty to a standard expectation for major releases, promising a curated bundle of future content for a single, upfront price. This was a period of both consumer optimism and skepticism; a pass could represent valuable savings for committed players or a preemptive purchase for content of unknown quality and quantity. Koei Tecmo, like many Japanese developers of the time, was actively engaging with this model, supporting their titles with a mix of cosmetic items, bonus missions, and narrative expansions.

The technological constraints are twofold. First, the base game, Attack on Titan 2, was developed concurrently for a wide range of platforms, from the high-end PlayStation 4 and PC to the technically limited PlayStation Vita. This multi-platform development likely influenced the scope of the DLC, ensuring it could run on the weakest hardware. Second, the season pass itself is not a standalone game but a key—a financial transaction that unlocks content already embedded in a game patch or downloaded separately. Its existence is entirely parasitic, reliant on the health and installation of its host game, Attack on Titan 2.

Narrative & Thematic Deep Dive

According to the official description sourced from its Steam store page, the Season Pass for Attack on Titan 2 (Moby ID 106121) contains “12 additional episodes.” These are not, as one might assume, an adaptation of a new anime arc, but rather a series of “Scout Missions” that are integrated into two existing modes: “Story Mode” and “Another Mode.”

In “Story Mode,” the episodes are added to the “Daily Life” section, the game’s hub area where players interact with characters between major battles. These missions ostensibly offer vignettes—side stories that explore character interactions and daily life within the walls, a concept central to the Attack on Titan theme of humanity persevering in the face of existential terror. However, without specific narrative details, we can only assess their structure. They are likely brief, disposable conversations and minor objectives that provide marginal character development and rewards. Their thematic impact is inherently lesser than the main plot’s exploration of sacrifice, freedom, and the corruption of power.

In “Another Mode,” the game’s original character and mission-based mode, these same 12 episodes become “Scout Missions.” Here, the narrative is almost certainly secondary to the gameplay loop, serving as a pretext for another sortie against the Titans. The pass, therefore, does not advance the core narrative of Attack on Titan in any significant way. It provides more content—more scenarios, more dialogue, more objectives—but not more story in the impactful, canonical sense. It expands the game’s width without adding to its depth, a common critique of narrative DLC in this format.

A critical point of confusion arises from the existence of a separate product also titled Attack on Titan 2: Season Pass (Moby ID 105341). This product, for Windows, contains a completely different set of content: “20 additional costumes.” This discrepancy highlights a significant issue in the DLC landscape: a lack of clarity and consistency. A consumer purchasing a “Season Pass” expects a definitive bundle of a game’s post-launch offerings. The existence of multiple, differently configured products under the same name creates consumer confusion and fragments the content ecosystem, undermining the very value proposition a season pass is supposed to offer.

Gameplay Mechanics & Systems

The gameplay offered by the Season Pass is an extension of the base game’s well-established systems, not an evolution of them. The 12 new episodes are additional nodes in the existing mission structures of “Story” and “Another” modes.

The core loop remains unchanged: players are deployed into large, open areas, use their ODM gear to traverse the environment, identify Titan weak points, and execute precise strikes to sever limbs and finally the nape of the neck. The DLC missions may introduce specific win conditions or enemy layouts, but they do not introduce new Titan types, new ODM gear mechanics, or new combat abilities. The progression systems—leveling up characters, improving gear, and developing relationships with other scouts—are simply provided more contexts in which to grind.

The value of this content is purely quantitative. It offers more hours of the same enjoyable but repetitive gameplay. For a player who cannot get enough of the core combat loop, this is a valid proposition. However, for a player seeking a meaningful expansion of the game’s mechanics or a fresh challenge, the Season Pass falls short. The UI and integration are seamless, as the missions appear naturally within the existing menu structures, but this seamless integration also makes the new content feel less like a distinct expansion and more like something that was simply held back from the initial release.

The separate costume pack DLC mislabeled as a season pass is an even purer example of quantitative, non-mechanical expansion. It offers aesthetic variety, allowing players to customize their favorite characters with new outfits. While this can enhance player attachment and enjoyment, it has zero impact on the gameplay systems, representing the shallowest form of post-launch content.

World-Building, Art & Sound

As an extension pack, the Season Pass does not contribute new assets to the game’s world-building, art direction, or sound design in any significant way. The additional episodes reuse the existing game environments—the forests of Wall Rose, the ruins of Shiganshina District, the interior of Stohess District—and populate them with the same enemy Titan models and ally NPCs.

Any new art assets are likely limited to the 20 new costumes from the other SKU, which are texture swaps on existing character models. Similarly, any new dialogue in the 12 episodes is delivered by the same voice actors, reusing the same battle cries, musical scores, and environmental sounds. The pass does not build upon the game’s already strong atmosphere; it simply provides more opportunities to exist within it.

The overall experience is thus one of familiarity. The DLC does not seek to transport the player to a new locale within the Attack on Titan world or introduce new audio-visual themes. Its contribution to the game’s aesthetic is negligible, serving only to prolong the player’s engagement with the art and sound that were already present in the base game.

Reception & Legacy

The most telling data point regarding the reception of the Attack on Titan 2: Season Pass is the profound silence that surrounds it. On MobyGames, one of the most comprehensive databases in gaming, there are zero critic reviews and zero player reviews for this product. This absence is deafening. It was not deemed significant enough by media outlets to warrant critical analysis, and it failed to inspire even the most dedicated players to leave a user evaluation.

This lack of engagement suggests a product that was perceived as obligatory rather than essential. It was a checkbox on a publisher’s financial spreadsheet, not a meaningful expansion that captured the community’s imagination. Its legacy is therefore minimal. It did not influence subsequent games or DLC practices in any positive way; instead, it serves as a footnote—a reminder of an era where the mere existence of a season pass was often enough to satisfy corporate strategy, if not player desire.

The pass’s legacy is intertwined with the broader conversation about the value of DLC. It stands as an example of content that is difficult to review in isolation, whose value is entirely dependent on the player’s appetite for more of the same. It did not tarnish the reputation of Attack on Titan 2, but it certainly did not burnish it.

Conclusion

The Attack on Titan 2: Season Pass is a product of its time, embodying both the potential benefits and the inherent flaws of the season pass model. On paper, it offers a discounted bundle of new missions for dedicated fans. In practice, it offers a handful of disposable side stories that fail to expand the narrative, mechanics, or world of the base game in any meaningful way. The confusion caused by a similarly named costume pack further muddies its value proposition.

For the historian, it is a fascinating artifact: a commercially released product that generated no critical discourse and left no mark on the players it was designed for. It is the definition of superfluous content. Its place in video game history is not as an influential title, but as a representative example of a common, often-criticized monetization strategy. The final verdict is clear: the Attack on Titan 2: Season Pass is a product that only the most completionist devotees of the game would have found worthwhile, and even for them, it offered diminishing returns on an already repetitive formula. It is a compilation in the most literal sense, and nothing more.