Hayamo
Bio
Nothing here!
Badges
N00b
Played 100+ games
Roadtrip
Voted for at least 3 features on the roadmap
GOTY '23
Participated in the 2023 Game of the Year Event
Favorite Games
193
Total Games Played
003
Played in 2024
018
Games Backloggd
Recently Played See More
Recently Reviewed See More
In August of 2016, Cygames announced a new spinoff to their ever-popular mobile game: Granblue Fantasy. This project, known as Granblue Fantasy Project Re:Link, was planned for release in 2018. You may notice if you look up the release date of Granblue Fantasy: Relink that it did not launch in 2018. Not to mention if you look at the first footage shown of Project Re:Link, the game looks noticeably different than the game that released in February of this year.
Granblue Fantasy: Relink has had a troubled development cycle. Starting life as a co-development with Bayonetta developer PlatinumGames until they ended up leaving the project in 2019, leaving Cygames to rebuild the game from the ground up until it was finally released on February 1st 2024. Relink’s perpetual development became memetic in GBF’s community, which was only exacerbated when a completely different spinoff (Granblue Fantasy Versus) was announced and released in 2020 before it.
So what did Relink end up becoming, then? Well, the final product doesn’t differ too much conceptually from that original footage shown in 2017. The game is a mission-based action RPG where you play as one of a variety of characters from the Granblue Fantasy universe alongside a party of three other members which can be either AI or player controlled if you choose to play the game’s online co-op. You will progress through the game’s (relatively short) story-driven campaign, while unlocking a series of side missions which are where the main meat of the end game lies.
If this gameplay loop sounds somewhat familiar to you, it should because it is very similar to Capcom’s Monster Hunter franchise. However, I consider this a positive because I believe the gameplay loop in Monster Hunter is highly engaging, addicting, and worth borrowing. The biggest difference between Relink and Monster Hunter would be that Relink relies on a variety of characters to vary up the gameplay rather than Monster Hunter’s variety of weapons.
Each character in Relink has a basic attack string, a unique attack that differs per character, and up to four assignable skills that you acquire as you progress through each characters’ skill tree. On top of this, each character also has a variety of weapons (though these provide no change to their gameplay) and you can equip a number of different passive traits to power up your character’s stats and even provide some unique effects.
If you couldn’t tell, there’s a lot of ways to build and optimize each of the characters in the game. You might think this would end up becoming a grind. You would be correct, but I’ll get to that later. It’s obvious by now that there’s lots of ways to build and improve your characters, but thankfully each character provides a fairly unique gameplay experience and I would be surprised if someone couldn’t find a character they enjoy.
There’s the captain and main character of the game (whose name and gender you choose at the start of the game) who has a large variety of skills to fully customize their gameplay to your preferences. There’s the hyper-aggressive helmsman of the crew, Rackam, who puts most of his skills into pure firepower and gunplay. Then there’s Io, the ship’s mage, who boasts a Final Fantasy black mage-inspired tool kit of elemental spells while building toward explosive spells. These are only three of the games’ 18+ characters and each of them provide unique and varied gameplay for different playstyles.
However, the moment to moment gameplay can often boil down to being somewhat simplistic. Despite the different skills, combos, and traits each character has, in the end most of the characters’ gameplay amounts to: “Hit the attack button a lot. Use your skills when they’re off cooldown. Rinse and repeat.” Only 2 or 3 members of the game’s cast discourages this playstyle in a meaningful way and it could lead to the gameplay being somewhat repetitive when you, inevitably, have to grind out the same missions over and over again.
This is most apparent in the missions where you don’t fight a boss, as most of the non-boss enemies have low health and don’t provide any real challenge. This leads to you wanting to save your skills for “harder” enemies and can often end up with you just never using them because those harder enemies never come. However, this is only present in the non-boss missions which, thankfully, is not the main appeal of the game.
The core of the game revolves around the various bosses you have to fight. Each fight provides its own unique mechanics and strategy that players have to learn if they want to succeed. While some of the lower difficulty engagements can be fairly simple, once you get to the end game challenges each fight requires you to engage in each moment of the fight to achieve victory. The boss fights are absolutely where the game shines and slogging through the less interesting horde encounters is worth it to get to these bosses. Big props to the combat design team as they definitely understood the assignment.
More props are deserved for the game’s composer, Tsutomu Narita. Narita is quite possibly Cygames' best-kept secret because this man churns out banger after banger on a consistent basis. The tracks in this game are no exception to that. While the boss themes are obviously going to be the stand outs, the town themes, shop themes, and the pieces composed for the story beats all nail it and I struggle to find a bad track amongst the group (even if I wouldn’t necessarily blast every song in my car).
If you’ve played the mobile game, though, you would be familiar with Narita’s work as you would also be familiar with the game’s, let’s call it, inconsistent writing. Relink keeps up that tradition with a story that is fine if not necessarily groundbreaking or engaging, but it has some notable moments and fun new characters to accompany the mobile game’s original cast. As someone who used to play a lot of the mobile game, it’s hard for me to evaluate how well the game does at introducing the world and cast of Granblue Fantasy. I can say, however, that the crew of the Grandcypher — the ship that our main cast pilot — don’t get a lot of development over the course of the game’s main story.
Most of the character development in the game seems to be directed toward the new characters, Rolan and Id. While I find both of these characters likable and interesting in their own ways, their writing is left wanting as a result of the game’s pacing. The main story can be completed in under ten hours, and while this is not a problem in and of itself, the story doesn’t use its shorter time efficiently. You’re split between developing these new characters, while establishing the old characters in a new environment, while trying to bring players unfamiliar with the world into the fold, while introducing new lore to the already existing world, and it all just ends up not having enough depth.
The biggest tragedy of the writing, though, would be the fate episodes. Fate episodes are a carryover from the mobile game and are essentially side stories that focus on specific characters. As the writing in the mobile game has leveled up, these stories have leveled up alongside them and provide a fun source of entertainment and even pathos for the characters. The fate episodes in Relink, however, seem to miss the original point of fate episodes as the character’s drone on about some random nobody they met in town as we focus on their story instead of the story of the character we’re playing. I admit that I did not read every fate episode, but the few I sat through were genuine chores and I eventually ended up skipping through them so I could get the rewards.
The last few points I want to make are tied together, so I’ll start with the game as a co-op experience. Unfortunately I never got the full experience of teaming up with a party of friends to play the game, but I played a significant amount of time using the matchmaking feature to do various missions online. The matchmaking is… iffy. I don’t know if it’s just due to lack of people playing by the time I got to end game, or if the matchmaking is just bad, but sometimes it would take me a while to find people to play with. Not to mention when you would be randomly kicked out or end up stuck in a loading bug and having to force quit the game.
I would absolutely recommend playing the game in co-op rather than solo, though, as it not only makes the fights more interesting and engaging, but it really helps you feel the power scaling the game offers you when each player brings in their fully powered character of choice to beat down on the various end game bosses. While matchmaking left a lot to be desired, I never experienced problems once in actual gameplay and each mission was a smooth experience.
Another reason why I would recommend playing in co-op, though, has to do with the game’s most controversial aspect. The grind. Granblue Fantasy: Relink is a spinoff of a mobile gacha game. These games are grindy. It also borrows a lot of structural elements from Monster Hunter and MMORPGs. These games are also grindy. Add all these grindy experiences together and you get a game with the grind of all grinds. Each step of the grind unlocks a new step, which unlocks a new step, and that keeps going for a long while and basically is what the entire end game consists of. I don’t mind a grind. I like the feeling of incremental upgrades to a character to get to the point of being overpowered. I would be remiss to not point out, though, that the grind basically is the game. For all the cool boss fights, fun combat systems, and kickass music, it all leads to you hoping you get that drop you need so you can get an extra +1 on your cool sword.
This grind also belittles one otherwise lovely aspect of the game: playing solo. See in Monster Hunter when you play solo you do just that. Play solo. More recent entries have introduced AI companions to assist you and make the experience easier, but these pale in comparison to you or another player. Relink, though, allows you to bring in a full party of characters that all retain their skills and stats. While this is great on paper, it ends up meaning that instead of grinding one character up you actually have to grind up at least four to be able to play the end game solo. While it’s not an immediate issue, if the playerbase ever dwindles to the point of it being unlikely to find anyone to play with, then this problem goes to its logical extreme. Add on top of that the AI being single-minded and non-optimal in its gameplay and the boon can end up becoming a curse.
Granblue Fantasy: Relink had a very troubled development cycle suffering from multiple delays, a co-developer dropping from the project, and development having to restart entirely. After eight years, though, the game finally came out and that begs the question: was the long journey worth it? The short answer, I would say, is yes. Granblue Fantasy: Relink provides a fun and fulfilling action RPG experience with enough depth to keep you engaged despite it’s simplistic combat and grindy endgame. If you can hop on with 1–3 friends to mash out some visually dynamic and challenging fights it elevates that experience even higher. If you plan on engaging with the vast end game, it is absolutely worth the price of admission. If you just want to jam out a quick little action RPG experience in a weekend, though, I would recommend waiting for a sale. Overall I recommend Granblue Fantasy: Relink and encourage you to check it out for yourself.
Granblue Fantasy: Relink has had a troubled development cycle. Starting life as a co-development with Bayonetta developer PlatinumGames until they ended up leaving the project in 2019, leaving Cygames to rebuild the game from the ground up until it was finally released on February 1st 2024. Relink’s perpetual development became memetic in GBF’s community, which was only exacerbated when a completely different spinoff (Granblue Fantasy Versus) was announced and released in 2020 before it.
So what did Relink end up becoming, then? Well, the final product doesn’t differ too much conceptually from that original footage shown in 2017. The game is a mission-based action RPG where you play as one of a variety of characters from the Granblue Fantasy universe alongside a party of three other members which can be either AI or player controlled if you choose to play the game’s online co-op. You will progress through the game’s (relatively short) story-driven campaign, while unlocking a series of side missions which are where the main meat of the end game lies.
If this gameplay loop sounds somewhat familiar to you, it should because it is very similar to Capcom’s Monster Hunter franchise. However, I consider this a positive because I believe the gameplay loop in Monster Hunter is highly engaging, addicting, and worth borrowing. The biggest difference between Relink and Monster Hunter would be that Relink relies on a variety of characters to vary up the gameplay rather than Monster Hunter’s variety of weapons.
Each character in Relink has a basic attack string, a unique attack that differs per character, and up to four assignable skills that you acquire as you progress through each characters’ skill tree. On top of this, each character also has a variety of weapons (though these provide no change to their gameplay) and you can equip a number of different passive traits to power up your character’s stats and even provide some unique effects.
If you couldn’t tell, there’s a lot of ways to build and optimize each of the characters in the game. You might think this would end up becoming a grind. You would be correct, but I’ll get to that later. It’s obvious by now that there’s lots of ways to build and improve your characters, but thankfully each character provides a fairly unique gameplay experience and I would be surprised if someone couldn’t find a character they enjoy.
There’s the captain and main character of the game (whose name and gender you choose at the start of the game) who has a large variety of skills to fully customize their gameplay to your preferences. There’s the hyper-aggressive helmsman of the crew, Rackam, who puts most of his skills into pure firepower and gunplay. Then there’s Io, the ship’s mage, who boasts a Final Fantasy black mage-inspired tool kit of elemental spells while building toward explosive spells. These are only three of the games’ 18+ characters and each of them provide unique and varied gameplay for different playstyles.
However, the moment to moment gameplay can often boil down to being somewhat simplistic. Despite the different skills, combos, and traits each character has, in the end most of the characters’ gameplay amounts to: “Hit the attack button a lot. Use your skills when they’re off cooldown. Rinse and repeat.” Only 2 or 3 members of the game’s cast discourages this playstyle in a meaningful way and it could lead to the gameplay being somewhat repetitive when you, inevitably, have to grind out the same missions over and over again.
This is most apparent in the missions where you don’t fight a boss, as most of the non-boss enemies have low health and don’t provide any real challenge. This leads to you wanting to save your skills for “harder” enemies and can often end up with you just never using them because those harder enemies never come. However, this is only present in the non-boss missions which, thankfully, is not the main appeal of the game.
The core of the game revolves around the various bosses you have to fight. Each fight provides its own unique mechanics and strategy that players have to learn if they want to succeed. While some of the lower difficulty engagements can be fairly simple, once you get to the end game challenges each fight requires you to engage in each moment of the fight to achieve victory. The boss fights are absolutely where the game shines and slogging through the less interesting horde encounters is worth it to get to these bosses. Big props to the combat design team as they definitely understood the assignment.
More props are deserved for the game’s composer, Tsutomu Narita. Narita is quite possibly Cygames' best-kept secret because this man churns out banger after banger on a consistent basis. The tracks in this game are no exception to that. While the boss themes are obviously going to be the stand outs, the town themes, shop themes, and the pieces composed for the story beats all nail it and I struggle to find a bad track amongst the group (even if I wouldn’t necessarily blast every song in my car).
If you’ve played the mobile game, though, you would be familiar with Narita’s work as you would also be familiar with the game’s, let’s call it, inconsistent writing. Relink keeps up that tradition with a story that is fine if not necessarily groundbreaking or engaging, but it has some notable moments and fun new characters to accompany the mobile game’s original cast. As someone who used to play a lot of the mobile game, it’s hard for me to evaluate how well the game does at introducing the world and cast of Granblue Fantasy. I can say, however, that the crew of the Grandcypher — the ship that our main cast pilot — don’t get a lot of development over the course of the game’s main story.
Most of the character development in the game seems to be directed toward the new characters, Rolan and Id. While I find both of these characters likable and interesting in their own ways, their writing is left wanting as a result of the game’s pacing. The main story can be completed in under ten hours, and while this is not a problem in and of itself, the story doesn’t use its shorter time efficiently. You’re split between developing these new characters, while establishing the old characters in a new environment, while trying to bring players unfamiliar with the world into the fold, while introducing new lore to the already existing world, and it all just ends up not having enough depth.
The biggest tragedy of the writing, though, would be the fate episodes. Fate episodes are a carryover from the mobile game and are essentially side stories that focus on specific characters. As the writing in the mobile game has leveled up, these stories have leveled up alongside them and provide a fun source of entertainment and even pathos for the characters. The fate episodes in Relink, however, seem to miss the original point of fate episodes as the character’s drone on about some random nobody they met in town as we focus on their story instead of the story of the character we’re playing. I admit that I did not read every fate episode, but the few I sat through were genuine chores and I eventually ended up skipping through them so I could get the rewards.
The last few points I want to make are tied together, so I’ll start with the game as a co-op experience. Unfortunately I never got the full experience of teaming up with a party of friends to play the game, but I played a significant amount of time using the matchmaking feature to do various missions online. The matchmaking is… iffy. I don’t know if it’s just due to lack of people playing by the time I got to end game, or if the matchmaking is just bad, but sometimes it would take me a while to find people to play with. Not to mention when you would be randomly kicked out or end up stuck in a loading bug and having to force quit the game.
I would absolutely recommend playing the game in co-op rather than solo, though, as it not only makes the fights more interesting and engaging, but it really helps you feel the power scaling the game offers you when each player brings in their fully powered character of choice to beat down on the various end game bosses. While matchmaking left a lot to be desired, I never experienced problems once in actual gameplay and each mission was a smooth experience.
Another reason why I would recommend playing in co-op, though, has to do with the game’s most controversial aspect. The grind. Granblue Fantasy: Relink is a spinoff of a mobile gacha game. These games are grindy. It also borrows a lot of structural elements from Monster Hunter and MMORPGs. These games are also grindy. Add all these grindy experiences together and you get a game with the grind of all grinds. Each step of the grind unlocks a new step, which unlocks a new step, and that keeps going for a long while and basically is what the entire end game consists of. I don’t mind a grind. I like the feeling of incremental upgrades to a character to get to the point of being overpowered. I would be remiss to not point out, though, that the grind basically is the game. For all the cool boss fights, fun combat systems, and kickass music, it all leads to you hoping you get that drop you need so you can get an extra +1 on your cool sword.
This grind also belittles one otherwise lovely aspect of the game: playing solo. See in Monster Hunter when you play solo you do just that. Play solo. More recent entries have introduced AI companions to assist you and make the experience easier, but these pale in comparison to you or another player. Relink, though, allows you to bring in a full party of characters that all retain their skills and stats. While this is great on paper, it ends up meaning that instead of grinding one character up you actually have to grind up at least four to be able to play the end game solo. While it’s not an immediate issue, if the playerbase ever dwindles to the point of it being unlikely to find anyone to play with, then this problem goes to its logical extreme. Add on top of that the AI being single-minded and non-optimal in its gameplay and the boon can end up becoming a curse.
Granblue Fantasy: Relink had a very troubled development cycle suffering from multiple delays, a co-developer dropping from the project, and development having to restart entirely. After eight years, though, the game finally came out and that begs the question: was the long journey worth it? The short answer, I would say, is yes. Granblue Fantasy: Relink provides a fun and fulfilling action RPG experience with enough depth to keep you engaged despite it’s simplistic combat and grindy endgame. If you can hop on with 1–3 friends to mash out some visually dynamic and challenging fights it elevates that experience even higher. If you plan on engaging with the vast end game, it is absolutely worth the price of admission. If you just want to jam out a quick little action RPG experience in a weekend, though, I would recommend waiting for a sale. Overall I recommend Granblue Fantasy: Relink and encourage you to check it out for yourself.