Granblue Fantasy Relink Trades Its Signature Storytelling for Big Boss Battles

The last thing I did in Granblue Fantasy Relink was fight a boss for nearly 25 minutes. It was a big fuck-off mech. A cool one too, big Shoji Kawamori vibes but with swappable chainsaws and magical laser gatling guns for arms. I didn’t think I was going to make it at first. It was 16 levels above my highest level character. I had been really lax about upgrading my gear. We had no elemental advantages, and I’ve barely engaged with the weapon upgrade system. I tried making the best elemental-affinity party I could, but that also meant none of them had been skilled up appropriately. It was 20 minutes of struggling, perfect dodging as much as I could to gain precious seconds of temporary invulnerability, trying to eke out what damage I could by maximizing combos, skills, Link Attacks, and Ougis. But a lot of it was spent racing across the room to save AI-controlled NPCs who had been downed because they couldn’t perfect dodge, and didn’t know not to stand in giant void zones of purple electricity.

When I finally got the mech down to 10% health, I had less than five minutes on the timer. If you’re a Granblue veteran, I don’t need to tell you that the last 10% is where shit often gets really real—this was no exception. The void-pool spawning adds became more frequent and numerous. As the seconds slipped by, I didn’t have time to focus down robot pods that spewed electric shit on the floor. Meanwhile he began charging from one end of the arena. Not only was I having to dodge through all of the AOE bullshit, but also I was losing precious seconds having to chase his ass down. I had to hope the AI would take care of the AI.

Somehow, with 24 seconds left on the clock, I pulled off a last ditch ougi (think of these as limit breaks) from Charlotta, my little paladin potato princess, and he went down. I hadn’t sweat bullets in a boss fight like that since the Fume Knight in Dark Souls II. It was sick and unexpected. I’m not too proud to say I cheered a little, especially because I needed to beat him in order to progress the post-game narrative. Yeah, there’s a post-game. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

Last spring, after seeing friends talking about the game for several weeks on Twitter, I decided to finally commit to playing Granblue Fantasy. Sure, I’d ducked in, gone through the mess of side-loading it on my phone, drew some introductory offer big titty anime girls, and got slaughtered by the event that was going on. I halfheartedly thumbed through some of the main story, got bored, got distracted, and probably went back to playing Persona 3 on my Vita. But this time was different. I made a new character, I named her “Dia” because you have to invest yourself in things, and that time all the charms of this massive full-fledged turn-based RPG world inside my little phone worked on me. At the end of the day, it’s a game about friendship. And I’m always going to be a sucker for that.

Granblue Fantasy Relink is no different. Within minutes of starting, the initial party was already spouting off some truly A+ anime bullshit about friendship and teamwork. They’re going to do this for the rest of the game. Just go with it. Friendship is cool. A little blue-haired girl wonders what will happen when our adventure finally comes to its conclusion. At the end of the skies, will we still be friends? I say out loud, “It’s okay, there’s no money for Cygames in letting us get to the end of the skies.”

That little blue-haired girl is Lyria, the softer and gentler Zelda to the main character’s Link. She’s naive, constantly ravenous, and also basically a bio-weapon with the ability to absorb and summon the essence of countless world-destroying, god-like entities known as Primal Beasts (which are bio-weapon relics from an ancient, ancient war). Lyria and the main character have a special link, they’re dragonhearted, and both are super crucial to the existence of the known universe. Within the first couple of hours what should have been a nice trip through this latest skydom (they’re like kingdoms but floating sky islands) turns into a complete clusterfuck after Bahamut is summoned and he decides to rip apart our airship forcing the crew to find some place to repair the ship.

Like Final Fantasy, Granblue Fantasy is all about the towns. Relink starts you off in Folca, a lovely anime medieval fantasy town surrounding the base of a church. It has a rustic country charm, but eventually you’ll move on to Seedhollow, the big city. I know, the names seem backwards, but go with it. They’re beautiful (this game looks gorgeous) and cozy. Everything feels like an outdoor cafe or high-end patisserie, every shop looks like an art glass gallery, and even the seedy bar where the cow-guy Yakuza boss runs his operations feels too nice and pristine. In terms of services available in the game, and the general size and activity of the towns, it feels a bit underwhelming coming off of the contemporary Monster Hunter games, but it absolutely feels like walking around inside of Granblue.

There isn’t much here that doesn’t feel like Granblue Fantasy, to be honest. This is still a grind fest, material drops are rare, and you need a lot to make things happen. Character progression isn’t exactly speedy. And Sierokarte is still an adorable little guy who is everywhere you want to be, and also still 100% a motherfucker. When you’re in combat the original character voice actors will shout over top of each other in encouraging, exuberant Japanese (no shade to the English voice actors, these just are my Granblue voices for life at this point).

Weapon grids have been replaced for a simpler weapon collection system. Each character has a set weapon type, and classic Granblue weapons can be unlocked for them (and then leveled and uncapped like you would in GBF). Fans of the mobile game will find grinding out materials to make the Tiamat Bolt Omega for a Fire-aspect Rackam to be particularly silly.

Instead of gachapon-style drawing for party members, you’ll periodically collect Character Cards you can trade to Sierokarte like the mobile game’s Tickets.

Characters are auto-level when you get them, so the ones added later don’t need as much catching up, but just like Granblue Fantasy, if they’re not in your active party, they’re not getting XP. But while XP isn’t shared, Mastery points are.

If you’re getting a sense of how the postgame and endgame loops shake out, you’re exactly right. Almost all of this you can ignore for the 20 blissful hours of breezing through some very classic PlayStation 2 feeling design that you’ll skate through weightlessly because there’s no friction or much gravity to speak of in Relink. You’ll fight some incredible set piece bosses that never really put up too much of a struggle (and borrow heavily from Final Fantasy XIV raid encounters, doing them much better in the process). And in the end, after not too much back-and-forth questing, revelations will happen, and you’ll kill God (well, a god) with the power of teamwork and friendship. It’s a JRPG ffs, what did you expect?

If you want, you can end your adventure there. It’s a solid little rpg story that doesn’t overstay its welcome. It’s exactly the kind of game I loved playing in college over a weekend, trading off the controller with my friends. But it’s in the postgame that Relink begins to truly wake up. Rise and grind, gamer. You’ve got some big ass monsters to hunt.

Having played it in the dark embargo times where no other reviewer on the east coast wanted to play online ever, I can say it’s perfectly fine and even enjoyable with AI party members. However, the demo proved this game absolutely sings in multiplayer. There’s nothing like rolling up into a boss fight with a squad made up of three giant, bearded, bull-horned old guy martial artists (Ghandagoza) with an off-element Charlotta leading the pack. Quests also have other modes, like Survival and Explore. Each one promises different item drops, so you’ll end up casting a broad net. They’re fine, and I’m looking forward to doing more than boss fights when the game launches. While the game’s mechanics aren’t as well-suited to Goofing Off, the atmosphere of multiplayer play is far less Serious Business when compared to Monster Hunter.

Up until now, my quibbles have mostly been that—quibbles. I think the pacing needs tuning, XP should be shared, Mastery Points should be shared per character and not one pool. Instead of having to run back and forth between Sierokarte and the Blacksmith, I should (like in the mobile game) be able to auto-trade for the materials I need. But there’s a big glaring flaw in Granblue Fantasy Relink. And it isn’t the pacing or systems at all; it’s the writing and lack of narrative ingenuity.

As much as I love a stock anime story about teamwork and friendship overcoming world-ending nightmares, what makes Granblue Fantasy so compelling as a 700+ hour RPG is that even when Cygames is doing some atrociously boring My Hero Academia crossover, the writing is still effervescent. Even without the tremendous work of the Japanese voice actors selling even the most generic story beat with raw vocal intonation alone, the story (and side stories) of a bunch of weirdos, war criminals, parents, siblings, lovers, and all manner of supernatural beings thrown together inside of an airship is incandescent. But there’s also so much artistry in how it’s all told. Character art is used and reused in absurd and impossible seeming ways, and abuses of image transformation tools are deployed with the steady hand of a master and the reckless abandon of a child. Even the UI is made an accomplice in the passionate joyful crimes the narrative designers commit in even the most throwaway of quest lines.

Here? The cutscenes are well directed and animated, and sure it’s funny at times. There’s charm and poignancy. Vyrn loves apples and hates being called a lizard. Lyria is perpetually ravenous and constantly needing assurance that nobody is actually mad at her for the havoc wreaked by her basically being the kaiju-whispering equivalent of Soundwave the Decepticon. Rackam is… Rackam. I’m sure he’s fine. The guys are physically here, and they have an adventure to do, but Granblue Fantasy seems to have forgotten that (again, like Final Fantasy) this really is a game about the guys and given them very little room to be the guys. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the Fate Episodes.

If you’re not familiar with the mobile game, these will catch you up on the story thus far, and provide insight into the characters. However, in the mobile game, these are gloriously funny and heartfelt puppet show cutscenes where every character is given the spotlight for their own weird little stories. They’re not as elaborate as the events often are, but they’re so much more than Relink lets them be. Here they’re a wall of text, narrated by the voice actor, over a static image. It’s kind of tragic, because so much of this game gets things right that this feels like the glaring misstep of Versus not including rollback netcode in the first game. If anything it feels like walking into an unfinished part of a building. Or peeking behind the facade of a movie set. There’s an expectation of the throughline to continue, except suddenly it stops.

But in the end, Granblue Fantasy is still tucked away in my phone. Perhaps they thought that a console game like Relink was merely the best way to onboard new players. You can’t hit them with the toxic, cannibalistic lesbians (this is a thing that happened, and was fantastic) or the Lowain Brothers Hostess Club out of nowhere. Most recently in Granblue Fantasy, my Captain got canonically married in a parallel timeline to Catura. Catura is a big-titty cow girl who is the Divine Ox of the 12 Divine Generals. She loves milk, her sentient motorcycle named Milky, her parents, a little cow named Moomoo, and me. And now my big-titty cowgirl is one of the hardest hitting attackers I have on my Wind element team. When she does her ougi, we divebomb the enemies on her motorcycle in our wedding dresses. It’s amazing. And while I admit that this is definitely the energy missing from Relink, it did take Granblue some time to get here.

I’ll hold out hope for DLC to inject some of the character and narrative liveliness back into Granblue Fantasy Relink, but until then I’m just going to have to content myself with going ripshit on bosses with my real friends. I think I’ll manage.

Granblue Fantasy Relink was developed by Cygames and published by Xseed Games. Our review is based on the PlayStation 5 version. It is also available for PC and PlayStation 4.

Dia Lacina is a queer indigenous writer and photographer. She tweets too much at @dialacina.