Granblue Fantasy: Relink

released on Feb 01, 2024

A grand adventure in the skies awaits! Form a party of four from a diverse roster of skyfarers and slash—or shoot or hex—your way to victory against treacherous foes in this action RPG. Take on quests solo or with the help of others in up to 4-player co-op play!


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This game surprised me with it's set-piece-oriented gameplay. As a fan of Uncharted, I was pleasantly surprised.

Minor con was the brief runtime of the campaign; one might expect a game in development for so long along with it's high price tag to have a bit more depth in gameplay as well as narratively.

It's still a realllyyy fun adventure, however. A great lightning in a bottle action RPG.

jogo direto ao ponto, divertido, variedade de mecânicas e personagens, chefes muito bons, e musicas épicas

Monster Hunter is a popular series by Capcom. As the name implies, the main bulk of the gameplay loop is to hunt monsters and use their corpses to create armor and weapons. Many of the monsters resemble real life creatures, with some major inspirations from series like Jurassic Park and The Lord of the Rings. During the hunts, you can explore the wilderness to uncover new spots, campsites, and items to harvest. With a strong focus on the environment and ecology, it provides an experience that is uncommon in many other series, especially at the time it was released.

One aspect of Monster Hunter's iconic formula is the 14 different weapons you can choose from. Each weapon caters to a specific style of play. Do you want something slow and methodical? Use the Greatsword. Would you like to mash your face on your controller? Use the Dual Blades. Do you like the idea of being completely useless? Use the Insect Glaive. All of the weapons have an extensive move list with attacks for any occasion. After a few dozen hours, you'll likely know the moveset down to the motion values and timing you need for your weapon's strong attacks.

Alongside the expressive and personal combat, there are many armor sets in the game. Each monster has its own line of armor and weapons (most of the time). You can see your Hunter's progress by just looking at them, because unlike many RPGs, Monster Hunter's progress completely changes how your character looks. You can either decide to wear a full set for fashion or a clown suit to maximize the amount of damage you produce. Some of these sets provide bonuses that certain weapons might favor, and thus, there is a specific look to the hunters and their weapons.

Monster Hunter is also very well known for its multiplayer. You can play with up to four hunters on a single quest. Load into a lobby, greet the other players, put up a quest, and happy hunting! Now, it might be a bit of a stretch to call it this, but Monster Hunter is another example of a genre that exists, but not really. Monster Hunter is a Pseudo-MMO, which I can't really quantify, but it has a lot of systems that aren't out of place in games like Lost Ark or FFXIV. Things like weapon augments, the gem system, or the actual raids in World and Iceborne—Kulve Taroth and Safi'Jiiva, to be exact. Just like a normal MMO, the endgame systems are so complex—so much so that I don't really want to talk about them. Another aspect is personalization. I personally spent a ton of time making my character all nice and pretty. I was one of the weirdos who avatar-posted in /mhg/ when Iceborne was still getting updates. That too, this game was live service, so there were a lot of mechanics meant to keep player retention high, if you enjoyed minmaxxing, of course. A few popular examples of this false MMO phenomenon are Destiny 2, Path of Exiles, and Diablo.

What does this have to do with Granblue Fantasy: Relink? Simple, Granblue Fantasy Relink is the culmination of the faults found in the aforementioned games.

Granblue Fantasy, originally a mobile game developed by Cygames known for its legendary grind-heavy nature, has an action game spin-off under the name "Granblue Fantasy: Relink." The game has been in development for a staggering 7 years, and it's had a rather tumultuous development phase considering the departure of the original developers.

I actually played this game before the release date at Anime Expo 2023. Cygames was holding a booth dedicated to showcasing this game in the entertainment hall, and I just so happened to be waiting for someone. And so I stood in line and talked to some of the employees. One employee kept giving me more Vyrn paper crowns, another employee was shilling the mobage and a VPN to accompany it, and the last one at the front of the line talked to me about FFXIV raiding. Looking back at it, that last employee gave me a strong sense of what kind of game this was (she was a savage tier Sage main, btw).

As for my actual impressions of the game, I would consider them generally positive. I pushed a button, my character moved, I pushed another button, and my character exploded in a million effects, and the boss died. The game was pretty, and that's all that I could comprehend with 20 or so people staring at the back of my head. Although the first thing I told someone after playing was, "It had a ton of cutscenes."

My senses did not fail me.

The most important aspect of an action RPG would be its controls. Does the character move responsively? Are you constantly locked into animations with no proper recourse? Does the camera function as intended? Is the gameplay system fun? I'm glad to say that it does most of these right, with some caveats. The player's characters move as you'd expect in an action game. They are fast, they are snappy, and they are able to react to most of the sudden attacks you'd face. Not to mention that the abilities are colorful and vibrant, making for a really pretty light show (to the dismay of said viewer). The animations for attacks are generally long, but you can roll out of the majority of them and retain the skill cooldown given that the action hasn't fully completed.

As for the caveats, the lock on system is horrendous. In this game, you can lock onto multiple parts of a boss, sort of like Monster Hunter. Be it their arm or their head, all of your attacks will naturally incline towards the direction of the part you are locked into. Now, I'm not sure how the developers have done it, but the lock on system never seems to lock onto the right thing. It always locks onto the body part you don't want or the trash mob all the way across the arena. I genuinely believe that somewhere in the code, it is programmed to force the player to change it for an extra lot of "interaction." Another issue with the camera is when it doesn't know what to do. Allow me to lay the stage out. You are fighting a giant golem, and the golem inexplicitly targets the Rackam (gun character) all the way in the corner of the stage. You make the correct call and use your gap closer, but the rest of your attacks move you forward, so much so that you end up between the two invisible walls. Now, your camera will lock in place and make it impossible to view the boss (or too much of the boss) and even your player character. This adds another level of irritation and forces the players to wrestle with the camera in order to actually see what's happening on the screen. In some cases, the game will do this on purpose and force the camera to look in the direction of a huge spectacle of an attack. It's no surprise that taking away control from the players is annoying, especially when the camera is locked (on purpose, mind you) in a way that makes the raid AOEs hard to see. The camera work in this game is almost as bad as in an old XBOX game, namely Ninja Gaiden Black.

The gameplay system consists of basic attacks, unique attacks, link attacks, an ultimate, and four skills. Each of the characters has specific gimmicks built into their moveset that are unique: Narmaya's Butterflies and Sheathing, Charlotta's Noble Stance, and Rackam's Heat Gauge, just to name a few. It sounds like a good amount of player ability, right?

Not quite, especially in a game that incentivizes you to choose a single character. The basic attacks tend to be the last option, and they're a distinctly boring option too. During your skills downtime, you just mash the left mouse button to do minimal damage until you can press your big buttons again, like an MMO.



The unique attacks are different for every character because of their gimmicks, but from what I've seen… It doesn't add another level of depth or versatility to the kits. In the case of my main, all it does is make her jump and choose from a few different attacks. One of these attacks is your highest DPS move, meaning that you'll spam it at every given moment.

Link attacks are a team wide mechanic that everyone needs to partake in for "Link Time." Basically, when you hit the boss and deal a certain percentage of their health, a bar fills up, and you are able to get a free hit that refills the majority of your resources. Link Time slows the boss down to a fault and gives you a free DPS phase.

The ultimate is a cutscene that everyone has to look at that forces the boss to stand completely still during its animation. You build this meter up by attacking or using skills. One of the most common ways to use this attack is to force out a third cutscene to allow your team to whale on the boss. Use two ultimate skills to proc the duo ultimate explosion, and then have the other two party members do the same thing for a total of six instances of the boss doing nothing but sitting there. You begin to see a pattern through it's gameplay.

The four skills you are allotted are adequate at a cursory glance, but after spending as much time with a single character, you'd come to the conclusion that they simply aren't enough. In the case of actual MMOs like Lost Ark, you are given a multitude of abilities to use that aren't just DPS buttons, but more buttons for your monkey brain to press. This game has a severe lack of APM, and playing the game "correctly" ages me to the point where I deserve a pension. All of your skills are down. Press a single button repeatedly. That's as far as the gameplay goes. You get bored of playing this game in less than 30 minutes; anything more feels like a full-time job. Somehow, even the different characters with all of their gimmicks feel the exact same to me after 2-3 quests on them. There's a particular moratorium that permeates this game.

I think the developers know that the combat loop is tired and boring. To circumvent this, most of these systems work together to force the boss into submission, aka push buttons on a giant block of HP. Nobody wants to engage with the boss because the bosses are terrible. Nobody wants a slow clear because grinding is stupid and tedious, yet people still play. Everyone wants an infinite DPS phase, and it's incredibly boring. All you do is do your highest DPS combo during Link Time or the Ultimate cutscenes. You can't even make the argument that you'd play and not abuse the stupid mechanics, because none of these bosses want to fight you either.

In an incredibly strange twist of design, most, if not every single boss, goes completely untargetable. The developers at Cygames curmudgeonly tuned every single encounter to go into a phase where it cannot be crowd controlled nor can it be attacked with an ultimate. To make matters even more tedious, they take 50% less damage during those phases. It's a love letter from the designers to make us watch the beautiful mechanics the bosses have. I can't fault them completely because the graphics and particle effects are half of this game's draw. But again, taking away player agency throws away all of the respect you might have for beauty. I cannot understate how insanely boring these phases are. The mechanics are neither complex nor interesting enough to warrant dedicating downtime to them. It all comes down to whether you're able to dodge an AOE or meet a DPS check. The most complicated mechanic to date is a simple color matching game. The bosses are designed to be boring, and the game's mechanics incentivize you to treat the encounters like meat bags. Do tell me, why should I even play then?

All you really do is mash your face on your cooldowns, use your team wide abilities to keep the boss stagnant and skip its mechanics, and run around like a headless chicken due to AOE spam. The characters are a waste of potential, with interesting gimmicks and no good bosses to use them on, nor an moveset that expands on the ideas past a typical Musou fighter. Record your hands playing the game, and I can almost assure you that most characters play the exact same down to the button presses. Not to mention that each subsequent boss encounter plays exactly like the last.

But I have a bright idea that will save this game. It will save the player base and even tie back to the roots of this franchise. Let's create an endgame system. Let's take some inspiration from our sister RPG and some from Monster Hunter. We already have a four-player limit and a bulletin board.



This game's endgame is absolutely horrendous. It pads gameplay to an extent insane given the flaws of it's gameplay. Playing for short bursts feels fine, but anymore feels boring. Creating a system like sigils and awakenings just feels like a slap in the face.

Proto-Bahamut is a repeat boss from the beginning of the game. For most of the encounter, he flies around and shoots fireballs at you while random ADS spawn on the ship. Eventually, you crash the ship into him, and you get a DPS phase. You watch a total of three cutscenes of the boss transforming or going into a big raid ending attack. The fight generally lasts for about 5 minutes with a relatively geared group, or 3 minutes if everyone is on top of their game.

But this fight gatekeeps important progression for your character's gearing to inflate playtime and create a sunkcost fallacy. It has a chance to drop a weapon. There are a total of 20 playable characters, meaning that it can drop one of each of these characters. There is a 10% chance it will drop a weapon in the first place, and a 5% chance it will be the weapon you want for your main. You need this weapon in order to fight the next endgame raid. It can easily take you 100+ hours to get the single drop you need in order to play the next available raid. The fight isn't even fun; none of the boss fights are fun. There is no other reason for this grind other than padding playtime. This isn't "where the real game begins." This is where you put down the game and give it 1 star on Backloggd.

Sigils function the exact same as Gems did in Monster Hunter World, but worse in this game's case because the majority of gems were relatively easy to come across. But in the case of Relink, each sigil can come with another sigil that may or may not be useful. If you want to speedrun the bosses, you need good gear. To get good gear, you need to grind. To grind faster, you need better drops. It's an ouroboros where the only way to win is to not interact with it at all, or just cheat engine the good stuff in.

Granblue Fantasy is a game that overstays its welcome. The game actively gets worse the longer you play, and partaking in the "real game" is a fruitless endeavor that just inflates both player damage and steam playtime. It's not as bad as the likes of Destiny 2 or Monster Hunter's grinding, but this game is far more tedious. This game fucking sucks, and no, do not try to argue that "bring grindy is just a granblue thing." It just sounds like you love wasting time.

1/5
https://coconatsu.moe/2024/03/i-fucking-love-wasting-time-gbfrelink/

Como fan desde hace casi 10 años de Granblue Fantasy, decir que esperaba con ganas este juego se queda corto.
No solo me ha encantado, también me parece un formato idoneo y un bucle de juego que representa muy bien el del juego original... con todo lo bueno y lo malo que eso conlleva.

Un muy buen juego si ya eres fan de la IP, si no a lo mejor esperaría a una rebaja.