I come back to the game properly after all these years and now 40 boxing is a cinch. Took me a couple hours of attentive grinding every day for a week straight in the past, and now it took me a few hours of pressing one button. God bless powercreep.

Granblue IP has been winning too hard lately for me to ignore, between Relink standing tall after 7 years of tumultuous development, and Rising commanding the accursed FGC's respect. Eased myself back into it during the 10th (that's right, 10 years) anniversary festivities, read some dissertations that would make an FF11 player tremble to get myself caught up, and then boom, it was like I never left. Hit 1b honors of my first GW back, gave a gold ring to Sakura Kinomoto, and I still have every version of Narmaya. There is great peace to be found in doing the same thing over and over and over again.

Time to physically and emotionally prepare myself for the next Guild Wars. This one will be a doozy.

I never expected any gacha to actually get me, but it appears even I can be fallible. Has an incredibly charming fantasy world that has something for basically everybody to enjoy. Starts off as a very early One Piece-y fantasy RPG adventure and allows itself to branch off into so many other directions at a scale that fills me with absolute wonder and amazement. Gameplay was kinda mind-numbing early on but the later parts really gripped me with how much variety you get in builds and team composition, though I still have a lot to learn about what the hell a grid is. Also been having a very smooth F2P experience personally, though I probably should owe a lot of that to good timing with fully diving in during the 10th Anni celebration. Cagliostro is literally me.

In the vast expanse of blue skies an incredible adventure awaits. I absolutely adore almost everything about this game. From the main story to the events, they provide an interesting and exciting experience within the world. A colorful cast of characters have captured my heart where I don't see myself forgetting them for a very long time. The gameplay is turn based with RPG elements, you fight against powerful foes with a team built to your preference and once the battle is done you can reap the rewards of weapons and materials to further boost your prowess. A fair amount of the music tracks in this game are at the top of my favorites and I greatly enjoy the artwork the game makes. Truly the only things that holds this game back is the ridiculous grind it takes to get to "high level" as well as the ever soul crushing fact that this is a gacha game.

As of now, I've reached a point in this game where I am satisfied with doing my dailies every day until I eventually get back into the mood of spending my entire day refreshing for a weapon, yet still somehow felt satisfied by the end of it. To keep myself from rambling on too long, I'll do my best to keep where I think the game succeeds in, and where it falls short, straight to the point. It is also important to mention that I am rank 161, and would be considered around the mid-game. I experienced the early-game back in around 2019-2020, and stopped playing for a few years.

The greatest aspect about this game, in my opinion, is the large scale of progression. I have never played a game that gives you such a gradual sense of getting stronger. This is likely due to the fact that game has been out for 10 years, and the power ceiling has gotten to such an absurd point, but not crossing the threshold of completely neglecting and ruining the early/mid game.

Because the game has been out for so long, there is a lot of content to do. This plays a large factor into the long-term progression. Typically, as a free to play player, you would start with magna1 for early-game, magna2 for mid-game, and higher level raids for end-game. Yet, the content is as simple as following that route. There are characters to unlock, a main story to explore, different weapons to grind for that make your grid better, and so much more to the point where it feels almost like a sandbox. This variety of content always kept me engaged, yet it all falls back under one gameplay loop.

The introduction of full auto may be controversial as it literally takes away the player from playing the game, at least when you're not aiming for more difficult content the game has to offer. However, I consider the planning of your team and grids as part of the gameplay, which has so much depth to the point where using a wiki to learn how the mechanics work and to look up suggested builds is highly encouraged. For those looking for an experience that you can enjoy completely blind, this can be considered a large flaw with the game, but I genuinely think it works well this type of game and the use of a wiki essentially being required to progress through the game's meta shouldn't be dismissed immediately. Games like Dwarf Fortress or EVE Online require great use of outside resources to be enjoyed to the fullest, yet I don't think that harms the quality of the game. Rather I think players coming together to discuss what the best builds might be in different situations enriches the community associated with the game. All of this is to say that while the game might be simple while in action, there is a lot of research and planning before partaking in combat.

This has already gone longer than I would've liked, so here is a short list of other aspects of the game that I enjoy.
- The amount of characters with different backstories
- The frequent updates and new content
- Music
- Art
- World building
- Stories

As for why I couldn't give a game I love a higher rating, the first is that because of the gacha system in the game, some content is just much harder to do if you are simply unlucky, and there is little you can do to mitigate it. This is something that I think is inherent to all gacha games, and if I allowed myself to ponder about it some more, I may even change my stance on it, but as of me writing this right now, I believe that the very fact that units being significantly worse than other units is detriment to the games quality, despite it being the main way the game makes money. (Side note, I would love to play a game similar to this with no gacha, and make it a pay to play game, or even a subscription)

The second biggest issue with the game, in my opinion is the outdated ui. There's no excusing this really. Menus are cluttered and organized. In order to really min-max this game, you need to refresh every time you attack so that you can skip animations and do more damage as debuffs on enemies are on a timer. A lot of it is very archaic, and is a direct blow to the quality of the game.

Overall though, despite it being an endless treadmill designed to suck away money from those vulnerable to it, it's the best one I've seen yet, and I'm hoping that Cygames experiments more with the Granblue IP.

It's called "Grindblues Fantasy" for a reason. Not the easiest game to grasp but can be incredibly rewarding once you get into the flow of it. It's a really hefty time sink, but I'd say it features some of the coolest progression systems I've seen in any live service game. There's just so many different things you can work on to get your grids kitted out to the point it can feel incredibly overwhelming. But like any game of this nature, you're gonna have a bad time if you try to hyper-optimize the crap out of everything. Though if you pace yourself and set reasonable goals, you'll still be able to progress steadily — just maybe not as fast as the tryhards. It's definitely more of a marathon than a sprint.

The writing is pretty decent too, and the game has built up a huge cast of lovable characters over the years. Of course, not every story event is stellar, and there have been some notorious flops along the way (looking at you Seeds of Redemption), but it's solid for the most part. The Society and What Makes the Sky Blue arcs in particular deserve special mention because they're just THAT good. The latter especially; shit permanently damaged me and rewired my brain chemistry.

So yeah, I think Granblue is pretty cool. I played the crap out of it during the pandemic, took a break for a couple of years, and now I'm back on the grind (though I'm definitely taking it easier this time to avoid the burnout). Would I recommend it to most people? Probably not! It's definitely not a game for everyone, but if you're looking to scratch that MMORPG itch, then I think it's bound to have you covered.

Also it has Sandalphon. He's awesome. I love Sandalphon. My #1 meow meow ever.

(While this isn't directly related to the game, I think it's also worth mentioning that the unofficial GBF wiki has got to be one of the best gaming wikis out there. Granblue is a behemoth of a game and the player experience would be a lot worse if we didn't have access to such a good resource.)