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/

Disco Elysium

One of the most interesting games that I’ve played, politically rich and philosophically dense game which is definitely a huge standout. I initially assumed this would be a confusing experience but it has a surprisingly easy sense of direction while you make your way across many intertwined offshoots of the main plot in order to figure out the killer behind a murder mystery, a catalytic event ready to ignite a civil war.

Where I find the game’s sense of direction a huge positive I do think its also a polarizing title, the pace is in your control but the conversations you have often become too meaty or the dialogue feels overproduced sometimes, simple conversations double and triple in size and if you really don’t like absorbing long-form thinkpieces the game throws at you it may be a bumpy ride. There’s a LOT of worldbuilding and if you aren’t familiar with baseline communist history etc the game may feel confusing and at worst, a history lecture. In some ways I find the world of DE a weird kind of satire or parody of which it derives from.

In this way, the game tells two stories, one is on the surface, and one is on the back, I’ll only be tackling the one on the surface since in all fairness, I think I barely understood the story on the back myself in complete detail.

(+) Story (NOT CONCLUSION THAT’S THE CON)

I really liked the way the game tackles the story; you can take a non-linear approach and solve other problems which in one way or another tie around to the main story and you’re often times rewarded with some sort of acknowledgement having resolved a problem before its officially pinned as a to-do task. The first time I passed the check in the library and ventured into the abandoned commercial center it really felt like the game ticked the right boxes in my head, this compliment bleeds into the entire game, the way its able to keep you tethered enough to remember any tasks that have either a time-gate or a special tool requirement is fantastic, I knew exactly when I had to place a call, visit someone, wait for a bridge to be repaired, when to use a password, who to talk to, where to buy something, it didn’t feel like a web of tasks that was difficult to understand, the game is intuitive in how it hands out its tasks even if such tasks are sometimes inferred.

There’s a VARIETY of outcomes that come from your decisions, either you punch the racist meathead or internalize critical race theory, you forge signatures to fuck up the fat pig or don’t take that risk and get them from the source, the conversations can have so many variants and its honestly astounding how much effort it must have took to map it all out.

(+) Characters

Some good and some mediocre, its not that their quirky or something they just fit right into the world of DE, even the most annoying ones (Cunou). I enjoyed both Harry and Kim and their mini interactions (a mix of briefings, decision makings and jabs), Joyce is fun and the one who outlines the pale for us, Titus is a righteous man with platitudes that he holds dear, the military agents are erratic, spontaneous and violent, Gart is this annoyed manager who actually holds the rundown shed of a hotel dear, Klaasje draws you in with her charisma, blanketing her offenses effortlessly with a veneer of coolness, and many many more. The character writing is good, even as my aforementioned complaint about the dialogue being often times too meaty.

(+) Soundtrack

I like it a lot, its very atmospheric, somber (24 HOURS OF AMBIENT MUSIC)

(+) Gameplay

Sometimes the camera fucked up which annoyed me (in the last island), I found spending time via conversations and reading books to be a weird system but it also meant that I wasn’t risking anything with an in-game timer incase I wanted to step out for a bit and walk around and check places. I originally thought the map would be confusing but its actually so simple, I wonder if you can zoom out since most of the time the limited view was what threw me off a bit. I wish when I was outside that I could directly trigger fast-travel instead of having to go to a central hubspot to activate it which annoyed me, but walking around meant I got to see some faces again and check if they had newer dialogue and it doesn’t take that long to get from A to B in this game so all’s well I suppose.

The DND elements were very unique with these cacophony of voices inside your head being able to provide extra layers to every conversation, again my pre-conceived notion was that they’d fuck with the pace of conversation and make the game annoying, but it was the exact opposite, they were the often times the most interesting part of conversations and I enjoyed it when they went against each other which was particularly amusing. It also genuinely feels like you’re a madman that’s trying to navigate a role of a detective as if you’re animating a dead body.

I did infact cheat some checks, to anyone’s dismay, when I punched the meathead I succeeded but failed when I had to do a follow-up attack, annoyed me so hard because it was such a rare check to pass, other times I redid the check for the Klaasje door on the balcony a few times and got lucky even though it was another rare check but yeah even if I didn’t do that I knew how that I could just investigate the kitchen at a specific time and get access to that place. Another instance I had to paint a mural and got annoyed and redid it 3 times as well.

The point is I redid some checks because I wanted to have some narrative or gameplay control instead of the tedium of running around for alternatives which, I know, is very anti-DND of me. But overall, I faithfully committed to the checks since they led to fun outcomes regardless.

Before the end I got some advice from gappy to tie a few loose-ends so I could actually complete the game but it wasn’t anything too tricky I just refused a few tasks so I wouldn’t be locked into something that made the game conditional.

(-) Story Conclusion (SPOILERS)

The game’s conclusion is the biggest negative, I hate the conclusion, I hated the reveal of this X character on this X island that committed the crime, it felt counter-intuitive to the investigative nature of the game, where we spent the entire time ruling out suspects and fake claimers to be given a complete random guy at the end. This was the same for the person who took our gun, there’s so many old women in the game but nope its some X old woman who’s afflicted with some neurological disorder who took it. Ruby was faceless for the most part but at least you were already looking for her so I didn’t hate the fact that when we “catch her” we haven’t seen her before.

The conclusion is also bad because even though you ALREADY get the opportunity to investigate the trajectory of the bullet and its possible locations, there’s an X spot that Klaasje conveniently realizes before departing that allows you to single out the location of the culprit. There’re so many other ways to communicate this exact thing, had the MC himself come to that conclusion after re-investigating the place I would give it a pass but this was just such a bad plot device and it made any pre-investigation feel completely useless. You literally CANNOT guess who the culprit is because you don’t even know who they are. I enjoyed the idea of a mysterious X person, sanctioning themselves on an island for 40 something years and being the victim of this mysterious insulindian phasmid but the outlandish nature of the ending does not outweigh the nonsensical-ness of it. The complexity of the game does not beget an ending, which in my opinion (outside of the phasmid) was quite lame.
The game also wraps up with some mini reveals about you and your companions before the credits are rolled which don’t feel all that shocking especially for the final moments.

I quite literally cannot understand WHY this is how they handled the culprit, why not have multiple culprits or secret accomplices to spice up the game? Infact even Ruby would have qualified for a much better culprit than the one we got.

(+) Conclusion

Very good game and one of a kind, jaw-dropping level of depth to worldbuilding and conversations, it’s a bit fat in a lot of areas but I just happen to NOT be the target demographic for it. With a flop ending that left me just a little bit sour, I feel like this is one of the most competent detective games that genuinely make you FEEL like you are part of the investigative effort that ties everything together as you march around, barging into offices and crying on Edgar’s painful chair.

Now this is a game I'm entirely on the fence about. On one hand I think how the game is structured in tandem with the unique interactive mechanics and its overall non-linearity is downright brilliant (with a few hiccups, of course) And on the other hand I absolutely despise the unsatisfying and rushed finale that literally renders most of what you do in the game completely pointless.

Alright, so the beginning stretch of this game can be tad bit confusing and overwhelming but after sinking in a few hours and getting accustomed to all the mechanics and skills it's very easy to get hooked in and fast. The different skills aka the various parts of your psyche that affects the dialogues and how you interact with the world is unarguably the best part of this game. Depending on what part of your psyche you put the most points in you will get VASTLY different outcomes of little tasks like getting a hanged body down from a tree, while also affecting your abilities to pick up on certain leads. Which ultimately ends up giving the game a lot more variety and replay value than it'd initially have if it stuck to the more linear and rigid story telling formula of most other CRPGs. Also the way all the seemingly pointless and insignificant side quests loop back into main quests in the most unexpected way imaginable is done competently and can lead to a lot of "ah ha" moments. I also appreciate the fact that despite the game being entirely reliant on texts the dialogues are delivered in a digestible manner with everything fully voice acted and the voice acting is surprisingly top notch. At first when I was trying to read through every single line of text I thought the dialogues felt dense but that's objectively the wrong way to go about playing the game as you're punished for picking too many options. Once you start playing the game as it is intended you start to appreciate how well written the character interactions are with a lot of genuinely funny banters that don't feel forced. But there is something else entirely that can actually interfere the with the game's pacing and it's the constant DnD skill checks which forces you to do a lot of backtracking and chore-ish tasks just to have a higher chance of succeeding and even then you can fail. Which I can see being the main contributor behind putting off a lot of people and rightfully so and it's objectively a bad game design approach when most people playing the game save scum repeatedly to get past them.

Now onto my main gripe with the game and it's the ending. The finale is flat out terrible with absolutely zero thought put behind and it contradicts the whole investigation this game revolves around. Without delving too deep into spoiler territory, it's the whodunnit. It's entirely detached from everything you do throughout most of the game, from every lead you gather throughout your entire investigation. And to address all the idiotic copium takes I see defending this god awful ending like "oh no but it's supposed to be meta! it fits the themes! it was never about the murder mystery", The game quite literally frames itself as a murder mystery that is LITERALLY your entire objective throughout the whole thing and the game failing to deliver a proper satisfying conclusion shouldn't be above criticism, it's objectively bad and if you can't see that you lack critical thinking skills. Also if there ever was a game that would benefit from having several different endings that vary vastly from one another it'd be THIS but what the game delivered was the exact opposite an extremely linear final segment which contradicts the rest of the game's open-ended nature.

Disco Elysium is a game that has a lot of never-before-seen unique mechanics in a narrative game with a lot of entertainment value but all of it is bogged down by a HORRIBLY botched ending.

Hats off to the modding team for making this game accessible to the wider audience. I know it's a disservice to play the game in any other format because of HOW MUCH the VR plays into the flow of the gameplay and every combat encounter centers around VR, even reloading is something you physically do, but until VR tech becomes way more widely accessible this is a good alternative.

The non-VR mod also insta-solves all puzzles and there's like a billion of them which have already been a subject of criticism by reviewers, often times I had to go into the console and have to spawn ammo or medicine by the absolute scarcity that plagues this game, there's also issues with upgrading which is probably why I had to over-rely so much on ammunition with my lack of firepower.

Cons:
The "comedy" is horrible the borderlands writers were in the room, Russell is a good voice in your ear but the banter just wasn't tight enough, besides that there's elements of the plot I liked and elements of the plot I disliked.

I already knew the ending but now having played the whole game I can confidently say: I don't like the ending. I don't like a mish mash retcon for a game's pivotal ending after a decade, a plot that's been marinating for so long doesn't deserve to be written off, I HATE it. I like the final sequence where reality is warping as you're seeing silhouette's of people who resided in the apartment complex but everything about the implications of the actual finale annoy me. That being said a fresh slate to the plot after so many leaks about what episode 3 was actually I can't really blame them.

The gameplay loop is probably more interesting in VR but it really got tiring having to scavenge boxes and litter to find ammo, and it's clear this is probably way more immersive in VR having to physically move boxes around and shake stuff
I'm going to be controversial, THIS much combat in a VR game does it no favors whatsoever, and having contrived claustrophobic design to insist on a arm's reach VR experience takes away from the series' past design choices in many ways. The enemy body vocabulary HAS to be slowed so that VR can be accommodated but that's not the issue that I have, it's that some of the combat philosophy feels TOO repeated for it's own good, this means that the game is forced to put a lot of barnacles in the game, the combines don't feel good to fight at all

Pros:
The detail in this game is off the charts, there's SO much detail, the animations are done insanely well, the new enemy variants really compliment VR gameplay especially the armor crab and the electric crab (one of the best enemies EVER. It can animated corpses and it shifts and moves around the body while you try to hit it just absolutely amazing).

Jeff is singlehandedly the most genius chapter in the game and the it does a really good job of pre-teaching you what you're supposed to do before you actually do it.
The alien zombie infestation of Northstar just looks jawdropping, this game's horror is really fucking good and I can only imagine how insane it is in VR.

There's some lore implications sprinkled THROUGHOUT the plot which are just amazing as usual valve has really good worldbuilding

All in all, I DO NOT recommend anyone play the game like I did, but if you ever have a VR headset this is definitely a game everyone should try out