Granblue Fantasy: Relink Review
Was going back to school, moving to Japan, working as an English teacher and starting a blog just the longest con to give me a place to write game reviews? Perhaps. Granblue Fantasy is the first game kicking off another stacked year of RPGs, and I was delighted to jump in.
This game was announced all the way back in August 2016, and has a bit of a troubled development. For a while it felt like one of those games that might never come out, so there's been plenty of time to get excited about this game.
Mostly, I was excited for what seemed like an interesting, fun combat system, that with any luck I could recruit some friends to play with me. I knew this series had a few fighting games, but before playing the excellent Street Fighter 6 last year I had thought fighting games just weren't for me. So in terms of the story and the characters, I was going in pretty blind.
This game drops you right into the action, taking on the role of Gran or Djeeta, the captain of a group of skyfairers. Shortly into the game, Lyria, a character whose fate is bound to the protagonist, is whisked away by a cult formed around our villain, Lilith. The rest of the game revolves around your pursuit of Lyria and this cult.
It's not quite a sequel to the long running browser/mobile game never released outside of Japan, or a sequel to the fighting games in this series even. The cannon of this series has been pretty hard to parse, and seems to be similar to filler arcs in anime. All the events probably happened, they just won’t ever come up again.
It does its best to establish a brief history of the series, but the core cast of characters already have existing relationships and adventures taking place before this game even starts. They relegate a lot of this backstory to optional, visual novel style segments that give you a look into the characters and their past.
It was a bit of a tough sell for me in the beginning. Your crew is about 8 characters strong, and I had little idea who these people were, what they meant to one another, and why I should care about this girl Lyria.
While more context would have been nice, and I could have dove further into the visual novel backstory chapters, in the end, I enjoyed the game just fine. The plot was rather generic: chase the damsel in distress, fight monsters, be one step behind the villains, continue to give chase, wash, rinse, and repeat.
What I found refreshing though, was this game isn't overly concerned with being too generic. Instead, it leans into it, being earnest and relying on its characters to drive the plot and be the heart of the story.
For the most part, this works. I found enough of the cast charming, complemented with pretty sharp writing and great voice acting, to carry me through the relatively short campaign. The localization was expertly done, with plenty of puns and natural english expressions.
I finished the main story in around 15 hours. I'm a glutton for long RPGs, with Persona 5 Royal and its 120 plus hour campaign being an all time favorite. In this case though, 15 ish hours was just perfect. The story is brisk, but enjoyable, and it highlights the real shining star of the game, the combat.
The combat is fairly approachable, with square being basic attacks and triangle being a unique action, usually combos, for each character. Building a stun meter for a monster, you also can unleash a Link Attack, where members of your party pounce on an enemy to deal some big damage.
With enough Link Attacks you can trigger a slowdown where you can really put the hurt on a monster. You can also build a meter that lets you unleash a flashy Skybound Art and can chain these together with other party members.
It's pretty easy to pick up, but with a large cast of playable characters, each with their own mechanics and skills, there's plenty to keep you interested. Some characters are more straightforward than others, but with plenty of build options mastering any character will take a bit of work.
There are plenty of ways to progress your character, from unlocking their various skill trees, to enhancing their weapons, or equipping sigils that provide various stat bonuses to your characters. These progression systems give you a long runway to learn, and slowly build up your favorite characters until they're monster killing machines.
In order to really start to power up your characters, there's a bevy of mission based sidequests that you can tackle offline with AI companions, or hop online with 3 other players. This feels like the real meat of the game, and it does seem like a monster hunter-esque gameplay loop of grinding missions to power up, to tackle new even harder challenges.
Now that I've finished the story, I'm pretty excited to dive in deep into these missions. Combat is still plenty of fun, and I have plenty of characters to learn, and still to unlock, even after finishing the main story.
I also now have the option to revisit old story chapters that I blitzed through my first time playing through them. The exploration, while not anything revolutionary, had enough treasure chests and secrets tucked away that I was surprised how many I had missed during my initial playthrough.
This game runs great on Ps5, and while not often breathtaking, the art and design of the characters, world, and monsters is consistently great. I didn’t notice the music too often, which puts it in the good category, only really noticing when the song was particularly a banger. I was usually too focused on dodging the next attack, watching my skill cooldowns, and keeping an eye out for link attack opportunities.
Overall, I think it’s a pretty strong game. If you like anime, don’t mind a fairly generic story, and are willing to do a little extra work to get invested in the world and characters, you should be able to click with this game. The action combat is lots of fun, and giving players the option to do everything offline with AI companions is a nice touch for those adverse to playing online.
I think that most people will be able to tell if this game is for them just from checking out a few trailers or gameplay videos, there’s even a pretty great demo available if you want to get some first hand experience with the game. It wears its heart on its sleeve, and it's not trying to be anything it's not. It's a fairly average fantasy story and setting, with fun characters, and really fun combat.
Mr. Hunter’s Grade: 8.5
Given that this is my first review, I’m going to try out this dual review score system. Often how I feel or enjoy a game is rather different that what I think other people’s experience with a game might be.
Granblue Fantasy: Relink was right up my alley, and I don’t mind it’s more negative aspects. For people with different tastes though, I’m not sure this’ll change their minds, so my more objective score, or final grade is…
