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/

My new favorite game of all time. Everything about it is literal perfection. Except the difficulty, but how I play Persona games is very prone to making the game piss easy, so that's not too much of a worry to me. (I quite literally have nearly 600 hours in P5R on PS4 will the goal of making my party as broken as possible.) The themes, the beauty of the original magnified tenfold into the new generation of gaming. I can only hope a rumored Persona 4 remake in the same vain will be able to match this gem.

Persona 3 Reload is a remake of the PS2 classic 'Persona 3'. You play as a highschooler whom attends school during the day, and fights shadows with his allies during the night.

With such a great story (I can't stress this enough, the story is phenomenal), music, characters and artstyle, whether you've played the original or not, if you're a fan of JRPGs or Turn-based combat, you owe it to yourself to experience this game.

Easily one of my favourite games of all time, now with a fresh coat of paint making it more accessible than ever.

Amazing gameplay
I love every character
The story is amazing
It's just so fun I always have a smile on my face when the characters are chilling or digging on each other.
Can't wait for part 3

This game exceeded even my highest expectations in almost every way.

I could talk about it for hours but as with Remake I don't think it's possible for me to do it justice, it's peak. I've spent over 200 hours with FF7 Rebirth now and I could easily jump back in for a 3rd playthrough today.

This game is such an achievement, and home to some of the most beautiful scenes, characters and music in memory. If the final part is able to do even half as many things as well as this does, then we're in for a phenomenal trilogy of games.

As an aside, getting the platinum for this was insanely fun and surprisingly easy ... until the last few combat simulations. It took me around 40 hours over 5 days to get them done. I am begging that part 3 is easier 🥹
Thanks for reading folks, hope you're all doing well!🙏

This isn't quite a 4/5 but I'm going higher to help the avg smh.

[Disclaimer: This 'review' is basically just a ramble I had in DMs with some edits to be real sentences and legible, if it feels like there's even less flow or format than usual, that's why! Also it's kinda long sorry oops ]

The hate for this game is so much more extreme than it deserves. Sure, I miss being able to throw cash registers as much as the next guy, I think they seriously fumbled by not letting you throw melee weapons, but I also think that the separated inventories is a benefit overall. Having only 10 slots or whatever and having to use them for food items, melee weapons and guns was arguably where the first games got their difficulty, but was mostly just kinda annoying. Getting stuck in a fight against humans with 8 melee weapons and 2 sandwiches was an easy way to lose hours of progress, and that's no longer an issue.

They've also removed the super restrictive timer in this game, which again could be called the 'difficulty' of DR1, but if we're being real that game's timers went so hard that if you weren't sprinting everywhere in the optimal order you couldn't do it anyway. There's definitely a charm to that, but the amount of times I failed something, even the entire story mode, just because I went the wrong way or got lost was frustrating. Especially when particularly useful items were often only found in corners of the map, so you'd head to the weapon shop before going to a psycho only to run out of time to fight them on your way back :p

Also, Frank is an ass and the plot is dumb, but there's no pretending that the first 2 games weren't just as silly. This one is just straight up zombie-killing fun, without the timer and with the map being more open with items scattered around more, it feels more like Dead Rising 3 did: You can mess around as much as you want, get sidetracked as often as you like, just play at your own pace. To me personally, that is what Dead Rising should've been like from the start.
Sure, I still wouldn't say that it's great or anything, but in a franchise that's built on killing zombies in dumb ways the only thing this does particularly 'wrong' is redacting our right to throw everday items, and honestly, I kinda got over this within the first 2 hours.

This game may have a random ass COD UI for some reason, but I don't understand why people are so mad or saying it 'killed the series'. When you encounter survivors in this game you can't accidentally kill them in 2 hits and when you save them they run off on their own. They actually run past zombies! Insane right, the first 2 games taught me that all survivors are obsessed with slowly walking to safety or sprinting headstrong into the horde 😭
I honestly believe at this point that it's just nostalgia. "Why can he be megaman" because it's fun killing dozens of the dead with a blaster why is that a negative 😩

I had never played this game before now because I was lead to believe that it was too over the top and had been stripped down to a sandbox. Just "here's a billion zombies and a bunch of dumb weapons, have fun" with no characters, story, nothing. Knowing it had a story and maniacs is all it took for me to wanna play it and now here I am having had a perfectly enjoyable time: It's Dead Rising, I experienced exactly what I expected to while playing a Dead Rising game 😅

To comment on the game proper: The UI is weird but it's dumb fun and that's really all it has to be, I don't care lol. Also the Christmas/Black Friday theme is perfect for this franchise, don't see enough praise for that. Hearing holiday music on the radio and pause menu is much loved by me, might make an annual habit of spending some time on this each December idk. Besides that the trophy list is atrocious as always. I want this series back, in the RE Engine please 😌

Happy Holidays everyone, appreciate you all greatly❤️

I probably set myself up to fail for this game by expecting it to be a short, one-sitting 3-4 hour game (screw you HLTB you lying little-!) but here we are.

I didn't know what to expect going into this, but I really enjoyed Hatoful Boyfriend. It was a lil slow to start but was still pretty funny and had its charm.. The early chapters of this, however, were honestly just kinda dull. Chapter 3 was good, and Ch4 was really good, but given how the events unfold it felt as though the first 2 weren't even required as set up for them, so I'm really not sure why half the game was spent on what could've been a single chapter's worth of content, ah well.

Overall, this is saved/carried by its final chapter, the rest of the game has its moments but I didn't really settle in for a good time so much as I was just waiting for it to get good. When it did though, it was right back to what I'd been wanting all along. This game could've easily gotten a 4/5 were it not for the first half of it feeling like a slog for me, the last chapter is well worth playing and I'm really glad it stuck the landing. But unfortunately despite how strong it gets, the early game was honestly just boring, and it wouldn't feel right not to factor that into the score.

Side Note: The trailer on Steam is of the birds all single Jingle Birds.. idk if this is a side-story in the game but it does not happen in the main chapters, I was looking forward to it the whole time goddamnit 😭

Final verdict: If you can speedrun the early chapters paying just-enough attention to keep up, I would recommend this. Otherwise it may only be for you if you really liked the characters from the first game lol

Happy New Year everybody! 🎉

as a person who knows absolutely fucking nothing about ys as a whole series i ended up doing what i do for a lot of series around which is just starting with the first game and while lacrimosa of dana is looking at me as the most appetizing entry in the series i just really wanted to play this one in order since it wouldve been the best way to do it in my eyes

did i regret it ? not really i genuinely do think this game has a lot to offer mainly due to the fact that its a remaster/remake/port of something i still have no idea actually i didnt do any study on this series i just went with the flow and played this one whatever

it sure as hell got the skeleton of an old rpg but i dont know what they did to me but the bump system was such a fucking blast ??? it wears thin after a while but during the first hours of the game when i actually realised how this worked i swear it was so fucking funny just to be running around and bumping into enemies and seeing them EXPLODE in front of my eyes literally most fun ive had with an old snes ish title secret of mana can only learn from this like forreal i wasnt a huge fan of this combat system in the beginning but it definitely grew on me pretty fast and i was left with some of the best fast paced action rpgs ive ever played im not joking here the bump system stole my heart sure i still have no idea how it actually works since theres a lot of nuance here in the “hit them diagonally pal” and most of the time i was actually confused as to WHAT this off centered attack actually was which led me to die in many many different situations during the beginning of the game it gets progressively easier after leveling up and getting some new equipment but the weird nature of this system shows its seams after a while

what surrounds this gameplay loop actually gets tiring after a while due to the fact that most of the other elements of the game arent supporting it the enemies are pretty samey after you get the best equipment you got rings with different uses that can be switched for each situation and you can use some objects that give some nuance to the gameplay but apart from this theres not a lot here the exploration is pretty bare bones theres like 2 towns a couple dungeons and some hidden chests with actual good stuff but apart from this nothing truly groundbreaking and it was pretty weird that the game stopped my leveling right at 10 (and completely annihilated any interest to actually kill enemies I encountered) which is the max just so that i wouldnt be overleveled for bosses that would fuck my ass up like why would you NOT make me overleveled for these insidious bosses whatever im not a game designer i wont ever learn the answer to this i guess its an rpg i should be free to overshoot my characters levels so that i would breeze through the game (not you fire emblem) and also fuck that final boss im not gonna honestly spend more time honing my abilities just so that I could beat an unfair shmup final boss

as for the story in it of itself it doesnt get too convoluted but it sure has some interesting story beats and plot twists here and there that i wasnt expecting but the general skeleton is poor adol gets stranded on a continent and here he tries to find out what happened to the ancient land of ys and why the two goddesses vanished STOP this is the stuff the game is working around and most of the time youre just gonna go from town quest to town quest so there's not really a lot of implications in the lore department but I gotta say I'm in love with feena she's my sweet little baby I love amnesiac girls and I'm pretty sure this game as a whole just acts as a prologue to ys II since the story just ends abruptly not giving any real insight to the story implications but I will be tuning in for the next installment since I really want to know what the fuck happens since it should be a direct sequel

art style is cool and looks like some 80s anime and the in game sprites remind me of those rpg maker horrors so there's that not really the most groundbreaking art direction ive ever seen in my life but it brings the whole idea home and also for some reason this has such a fucking banger soundtrack ??? like it's so out of place and awesome that it honestly shocked me a little for how good it is like the “battle” themes are honestly legendary and this one absolutely stole my heart the drums hit a little too hard and the electric guitar fucks everyone up in here I was eargasming the entire time

so ughhh all in all that was a nice good 10 hours of my life maybe with the prior knowledge of the later installments I wouldve liked this more bit still pretty excited to explore the rest of the series from here feena wait for me

WAIT WAIT WAIT THIS SONG TOO ???? OH LOOOOORD MASTERPIECE