After having completed the epilogue, I know finally feel comfortable rating this game. Granblue Fantasy: Relink is a game so thoroughly streamlined, so optimized for fun, that it's very hard not to enjoy your time with it. The gameplay is snappy and varied through all of the different unique characters with their own movesets and game plans, the presentation is beautiful and the main story goes over so fast there's literally no downtime. What happens after that is a cleverly designed loot grind to optimize your loadout and team, one that is so addictive even I wasn't able to shy away from it (normally, a single hour of grind would be a reason to drop a game). In short: It's a really fun game. And I was and am still able to derive a lot of joy from that. Granblue Fantasy: Relink is a completely frictionless game. And if you want exactly that, a fun way to spend 15-999hrs and not think about anything, I can't recommend it highly enough.

But this also results in me not really loving it. Because all this streamlining also results in a game experience that is entirely toothless, it has nothing to say. Its story is as bare-bones and clichéd as they come, it's characters mostly rough caricatures. Which is sad to me, as they didn't feel like that in the other Granblue media I looked at in preperation for this, neither in the anime nor in the (admittedly terrible) gatcha game. In a way, Granblue Fantasy: Relink lost a lot of soul in this streamlining, and no amount of optimization grind can fill that void. There are moments where that soul shines through, the completely voiced Fate Episodes i.e., or some smaller character interactions in the moment-to-moment gameplay, but overall, it's a little too streamlined, a little too frictionless. Which doesn't take away from the fact that it's still a very fun game, but I feel like it could've been a lot more.