Granblue Fantasy Relink Review

Overview

This review may contain gameplay spoilers and light story spoilers.

Granblue Fantasy Relink is an action-adventure RPG set in a world of Skydoms. Skydoms consist of lands and continents floating in the air where the main transportation is via super cool airships.

What makes Granblue unique is the fact that while you have a “main” character, you can choose to play as any member of your crew for almost any quest or mission. On the other hand, the mission structure and much of the progression feel very much like a Monster Hunter game. Complete with a central hub, a board of quests to take on, and plenty of weapons to upgrade.

You can find a video version of this review on YouTube!

Combat in Granblue Fantasy Relink is fast, furious, and incredibly flashy. The numerous characters you can play each have their own playstyles and abilities, and you can play with up to three other players online. If single-player is more to your tastes, the other members of your party can be AI-controlled and feature the best companion AI I’ve ever seen in a video game.

The fantastic combat, addicting progression, epic battles, and great AI are all ingredients capable of making Granblue a truly great game. I’d even say it was game of the year material, if not for one thing. The fact that the game’s lack of meaningful challenge sucks the wind from Granblue Fantasy Relink’s otherwise powerful sails.

Gideon’s Bias	Granblue Fantasy Relink Information
Review Copy Used: Yes	Publisher: Cygames Inc
Hours Played: 40+	Type: Full Game
Reviewed On: PlayStation 5	Platforms: PC, and PlayStation 4/5
Fan of Genre: Yes	Genre: Co-op Action RPG
Mode Played: Hard	Price: $59.99

The Granblue Sky

There’s more to the Granblue universe than just Relink. There’s an anime, manga, mobile game, and a fighting game all featuring the same characters. Relink is either set after or during some of those events, although I can’t say for certain which. Relink is my first experience in the Granblue universe.

I was more than a little confused when I first started playing Relink. It was clear these characters had an extensive past together, and many references went cleanly over my head. There are, however, Fate Episodes you can play that reveal the past of some of the characters. But in some ways, it muddied the waters even more.

For example, there are a ton of characters you can unlock by acquiring and spending “crew cards”. These characters are never featured in the main story, but their Fate Episodes make it clear that they are assumed to have been with your crew the entire time.

Confusion aside, the story is decent, and the characters are voiced very well. Even if I want to strangle Vyrn, the small annoying character that every single anime game in existence must feature. It’s like a universal law or something.

In true anime trope fashion, you play as the 15-year-old captain of the Grandcypher Airship. Your character rarely speaks, with Vyrn doing most of the talking for them. The rest of the crew is far more interesting, however, including the unlockable ones. You have everything from a Ghost Girl and her ghastly pets, an Alchemist who placed her soul in another vessel, or the reincarnation of a primal beast in human form.

In fact, it’s the surrounding world and lore that really sells the setting. I’m a sucker for Airships, and I enjoyed learning about the Skydoms and the primal beasts that inhabit them. Primal Beasts are essentially elements made manifest, and most of the game’s story centers around them.

Intently Intense

One of the most notable things about Granblue Fantasy Relink is how it hits the ground running and just never stops. The very first battle you play involves a Skyship-sized dragon, and the game keeps that intensity for the rest of the experience.

There are two parts to the gameplay, the main story and a Monster Hunter-esque quest board. The quest board is always present but doesn’t really take the forefront until the main story is complete. However, everything is mostly structured the same way.

I want to be crystal clear here. Granblue Fantasy Relink treads incredibly close to being a boss rush-style game. While some areas can be explored, they are fairly narrow in scope. The exploration never lasts long before you reach the next big fight. This isn’t an RPG with a massive world to run around in with puzzles to solve. It’s very much instance-based.

That said, every one of those instances is on a grand scale that you would only ever see after tons of hours in another RPG. Most bosses you fight are huge with earth-shattering attacks and multiple phases.

Not only that, but Granblue often and unexpectedly switches things up, especially during the main story. In addition to standard combat, you might end up manning the guns of an airship, piloting a mech, or battling against a colossal titan that you can’t fight conventionally. The entire game has a really nice pace that throws you a curveball anytime the action starts to get repetitive.

Grandiose Combat

Combat in Granblue Fantasy Relink feels like a combination of a faster-paced Monster Hunter and the strongest parts of the Kingdom Hearts series. That influence can be felt in both how the monsters fight and how your character controls. It’s a fantastic combination that makes for an extremely fluid combat system that looks every bit as awesome as it feels.

Monsters have large telegraphed attacks that you can dodge or attempt to block. They can be stunned, staggered, paralyzed, and even have parts broken off of them. At the same time, you can unleash various attack combinations that vary by character and, by holding down a button, unleash skills that have a cooldown.

As you and your party attack a monster, you fill up a stun gauge, and when it’s full you can unleash a link attack. Eventually, a monster will grow angry and enter overdrive, where they attack much more aggressively. But if you break them out of it you are given a wide opening to deal a ton of damage.

Once you fill up your Skybound Arts Gauge, you can unleash a powerful cinematic attack. If you manage to time it near the Skybound Arts of your allies, the entire team unleashes a powerful full-burst attack matching the element of the character who started the chain. Every character and most skills have an element, and every monster is weak to a specific element.

The controls are incredibly snappy, and the animations are totally fluid. You can dodge out of most combo attacks and resume your combo right after. Perfect dodge and parries offer additional benefits, and each character has a bunch of nuances to how they control.

For example. Zeta is a flashy aerial spear fighter, meanwhile, Io can cast spells and also utilize powerful but slow-charging blasts. Rackam’s Guns unleashed a barrage of locked-on firepower, but Eugen’s can be aimed manually and utilize charged shots.

Every character has mechanics specific to them that benefit from the fluid nature of the game’s baseline combat system in great ways. All of which is animated beautifully, even if the amount of particle effects can be blinding at times.

The combat in Granblue Fantasy Relink is stellar, and with a roster of 19 Playable characters at your disposal, it offers a massive amount of variety.

Competent Crewmates

I didn’t have a chance to play Granblue Fantasy Relink in online co-op during my review. But I’ll be honest, outside of maybe wanting to play with a friend or two and my partner. I see no reason to actually jump online. Why? Well, the vast majority of players aren’t going to hold a candle to how well your AI-controlled crewmates play. It’s the best companion AI I have ever experienced in a game. They play better than I do half the time!

Your crewmates are incredibly good at dodging or blocking attacks, and they utilize each and every character exceptionally well. If they have healing skills, they are always on point about using them, and it really does feel like you’re playing with a group of really good players at all times.

They even adapt to individual boss mechanics really well. For example, there is this huge flying eyeball boss that causes huge icicles to burst from the ground. When it gets angry, it starts spinning and fires a beam from its eyeball. You can use the giant icicles for cover, and your companions cease being aggressive and run around taking cover, moving as needed as the creature spins around.

When a monster enters overdrive mode, your companions pull back and play defensively to avoid its powerful attacks as it gets worn down. In my playtime, I’ve only seen my computer-controlled crewmates go down a handful of times.

The only bad thing I have to say about them is that they never shut up. Every battle is a constant deluge of dialogue that’s jumbled together to such an extent that it’s nearly incomprehensible. The thing is, they tend to say useful things too. Such as Io when she exclaims “Healing circle! Stand in it!” but it gets lost in the torrent of constant word vomit.

On the behavior end however, Granblue Fantasy Relink sets the bar high and proves that companions don’t have to be useless, frustrating, or require you to babysit them, and I’d love to see more games follow in Relink’s footsteps.

Granblue Grinding

There are numerous progression systems in Granblue Fantasy Relink, to the extent that it can be overwhelming at times since you’re managing these systems for up to 19 different characters.

Characters level up, and you spend mastery points in three different mastery trees for each of them. Weapons can be forged, upgraded, uncapped, and imbued using the various materials you earn. Which in turn, opens up additional masteries for each character.

Sigils can be equipped on each character, and additional sigil slots can be unlocked. The sigils themselves can be upgraded too. Then, there’s the materials themselves. There are several systems at play for trading for them with the merchant, including a variety of vouchers, item trade, sigil synthesis, and…it’s a lot.

The learning curve is steep, but there is honestly a lot of satisfying customization to be had for each character. The mastery trees are a bit misleading. Its branching paths look like you are making character-building choices, but honestly, you will be buying all of the cheapest ones first and eventually end up with all of them.

The weapons and sigils, however, offer a lot more flexibility. Every weapon has traits and can be imbued with other ones. When combined with sigils, you really can outfit characters the way you want. For example, Io has a lighting spell that I really like, so I could outfit her with cooldown reduction sigils to use it more often. On the other hand, she also has a really powerful charge attack, and I could equip her with charge sigils to speed that up instead.

With so many characters, there is a lot of menu-based busy work, and a whole heck of a lot of stuff to keep track of if you are hunting specific materials. There is a wishlist that helps, but it’s a bandaid at best. Regardless, there is a lot of satisfaction in using the systems once you climb that rather steep and confusing learning curve.

Blowing Hot Air

Unfortunately, Granblue Fantasy Relink falls prey to a common pitfall that modern games just love to jump headlong into. Relink is simply too easy, and that fact greatly devalues all the praise I poured upon it. I played on hard mode, and the main story was eye-wateringly easy.

Once the story is complete, you face post-game quests with new monsters and unlock increasingly hard difficulties for them. Think of the different ranks in Monster Hunter, and you have some idea how it works, it even features “rank up” quests to take you to your next Skyfarer rank.

Those quests being listed as harder are really just titles. You see, each quest has an advised power level, and I was lazy most of the time and ended up taking them on while below the advised power level and I still beat them without breaking a sweat. Even if you go down, which I did do quite a lot. You are given one revive potion per fight. After that, you can mash buttons to get back up while a critical gauge depletes.

The next time you go down, the critical gauge continues depleting from where it left off. You only lose if that gauge runs out, and it’s quite generous. Taking on quests at a lower power level certainly made fights take longer, but they weren’t necessarily harder. I only failed two fights, and they were special cases where I had to fight a boss alone. Hey, I said the AI companions were better than me, and I meant it!

The game’s lack of challenge sullies pretty much every other system the game has. The combat, and the progression. For example, I never fussed with weapon upgrades until after the main story because I never needed to. The entire reason I lost those one-on-one fights is because I was never forced to learn the nuances of how each character plays, heck, I forgot that you could block attacks for half the game!

Many quests have optional objectives that earn you more materials for completing them, but honestly, plenty of them were timers like, defeat the boss in one minute. Something that actually wasn’t possible by facing the boss at an equal power level. Instead, you could come back when you have over-leveled it to complete that challenge. Which obviously has to do with grind and not skill.

The reward is more crafting materials to make yourself stronger, not to win harder fights, but to make them go faster because you were going to win them anyway. It’s an endless cycle of pointlessness. It’s hard to care about making optimal build choices when I’ll never need them. Likewise, the epic scale of the fights is somewhat neutered when I know that the titanic monster is going to be as threatening as a bag of puppies.

There’s no reason for Granblue Fantasy Relink to be this way either. There are lower difficulties you can choose and an assist mode that quite literally, plays the game for you. Playing on hard should not be so toothless.

Sure, you can find ways to artificially make it more difficult. Bring fewer companions, for example, or try very hard not to power your characters too high for each quest. But by doing so, you cut pieces of the game away, such as the team play, awesome companion AI, and satisfying progression.

Not to mention. There are a ton of progression-related things to keep track of as it is, without also trying to artificially keep yourself weaker. Especially when, for the most part, it just makes the same fights more drawn out rather than more challenging.

It’s such a shame because the combat in Granblue is so good. I WANT to learn the ins and outs of every character and boss, but the game simply never gives me a reason to.

Verdict

Granblue Fantasy Relink is the greatest game I don’t want to play. Its stellar combat, great AI, interesting world, and epic quests forge the experience to a sharp point, but the lack of any meaningful challenge severely dulls its edge.

Every time I reached a new point in the game, especially after the main story. I constantly told myself “Now the real game begins” but for me, it never did. It’s never a good sign to have that thought to begin with. Sure, some games are a slower burn, but you should be playing the “real thing” from the start. Yet, hours flew by, and I waited, and I waited.

I waited because I really wanted Granblue Fantasy Relink to show me more, to bare its teeth, to make me care about the progression, to master the dodging and parry system, and to learn the ins and outs of every character.

It just never happened. I eventually hit a point where I was grinding to power up my characters to avoid grinding the next long boss fight for being underpowered, without the actual threat it should bring. I was grinding not to be stronger or better, but to avoid a different type of grind.

It severely bums me out because I really can’t overstate how much I love the game, or I guess it’s more accurate to say, how much I want to love the game. Granblue Fantasy Relink strikes so many great chords, and absolutely nails, so many great things. But the lack of challenge just takes that greatness off at the knees, and it left me feeling my own shade of Granblue.