Granblue Fantasy: Relink Review: A Great RPG in the Spirit of the Cool Rule

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Granblue Fantasy: Relink is a JRPG that ticks off a lot of action RPG tropes. It runs the risk of becoming artisanal, there are so many things you can tick off on your fingers like a plumber ordering parts: boss fights with impossibly immense glowing monsters, an evil god, cat boys, numbers popping out of enemies, women appreciating the combat uses of thigh-length skirts, anachronistic sunglasses, horned giants carrying halberds roughly the same size as a hearse.

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In practice, though, you can’t really get mad at Granblue Fantasy: Relink. The game relies on a multi-layered combat system that seems impossible to get through unless you take the time to understand it. But in reality, Granblue Fantasy: Relink is just a game so committed to the idea of ​​frosty that every environment is physically impossible, and every battle is a disorienting Panic! At The Firework Factory flirting with the nightmare of photosensitivity. I’m not selling it as such, but it’s really cute.

Astute readers may remember that I had trouble reviewing this game, but since its retail release it has been much more stable for me. Stable enough that I was able to join the crew of the Grandcypher on a standard rescue-the-chosen-and-save-the-world adventure. In this case, the world is the Sky Realm, where instead of continents there are simply a bunch of tiny islands with different biomes floating in the expansive sky. Oh, Neil deGrasse Tyson tweets. The Chosen One is a magical teenage woman named Lyria, who can control a giant dragon, and to whom the main character – the captain of the Grandcypher, in my case a girl named Horace – is bound for life.

This life bond happened in the mobile game Granblue Fantasy, which Relink is a direct sequel to – although Relink doesn’t bother to rehash the plot. The significant thing is that Lyria has been kidnapped by an evil but sexy woman named Lillith (aren’t they all like that), who uses Lyria to awaken… some kind of bird that travels the lands, made of stone… I forgot the details. The significant thing is that, taking three crew members with you, you explore the islands and get into gigantic fights between extremely dramatic cut scenes.

The most significant thing is the leftovers. You start in an idyllic floating city and fly in your steampunk airship to a nearby stunning island, often with an elemental theme (snow island, lava island, collapsing goblin mining island, etc.). These islands are semi-open maps where you can find optional treasure chests, but they’re all basically oriented in one direction. Ultimately, the calming rhythm is that you’ll fight increasingly arduous waves of mobs and mini-bosses until you reach the main boss of the area, which is usually some kind of fire wyvern or, most memorably, a giant Shadow Of The Colossus-style mech.


Image Source: Rock Paper Shotgun/Gry Cy

You can play as any member of your crew in battles, a diverse roster that includes gun-toting brawlers, earnest paladins, and seductive mages. It’s in combat that you discover that the Relink in the title refers not only to Lyria’s rescue, but also to the way you fight. When an enemy’s stun meter fills up, you can perform a chain attack with anyone else attacking them – a sort of special double. You also have Skybound Arts (SBA), which are each character’s additional special attacks (i.e. if they have a sword, they’ll often hit the enemy with it). To trigger them, you need to max out your SBA meter, which fills up as you perform your smaller, more common special abilities, such as healing, buffs, debuffs, area attacks, and the like. If the other characters have also filled their SBA meter, you can trigger a Chain Attack. Each character on the board dusts off their SBA meter, and then they all work together to perform a super hyper mega ultimate attack, called Void Bastard or something similar.

But that’s not all! There’s also your Link Level. Performing Link Attacks, SBAs, or reviving downed buddies contributes to your Link Level, and when This reaches 100%, you can trigger Link Time – which means your enemy goes into super slow-mo and you can swing around for extra damage. It’s a lot to take in, and combined with a few infrequent boss fights where it’s suggested that you split up, the combat is easier to handle if you’re playing co-op with real people. Unfortunately, and despite Relink selling a million copies, I found matchmaking to be incredibly volatile, so I’d suggest having a group of friends designated as “people I play Relink with.” But if you don’t have them, the combat isn’t ANDto master. Or rather, the combat is so frenetic, with magic and colors exploding everywhere like an over-the-top Jackson Pollock, that the single-player mode doesn’t feel much less disordered.

There are other things to contend with that also make things easier. A savvy player should check and upgrade their Mastery, a sort of simplified version of the Final Fantasy Sphere grid where you can spend points to win rewards (attack and defense stat boosts and up-to-date special abilities). As you adventure through the grids, you earn infrequent crafting materials that can be traded to forge and upgrade weapons, and Sigils, which are magical items that can be attached to your character for passive buffs, and can and should be changed depending on the biome you’re going to. In case you run into a boss you can’t defeat, you can return to town to earn XP through quests from the XP Farming Quest Booth, which basically replays previous levels you’ve beaten and gives you XP and crafting rewards. It’s worth taking the time to understand all of this, as it makes combat less confusing and more satisfying, but the game introduces many of its core concepts through quick tips rather than action tutorials that you can learn by heart. That works against it.


A nice, good boy, Rolan's helper, captured by the enemy in Granblue Fantasy: Relink
This is Rolan. Sometimes he will complain that enemies working for Lillith have to pay the ultimate price. As you can see, this morality works very well for him. | Image Source: Rock Paper Shotgun/Gry Cy

Defeating the Large Goblin Leader in Granblue Fantasy: Relink


Granblue Fantasy: Relink Mission Acceptance Screen

Image Source: Rock Paper Shotgun/Gry Cy

Still, you can probably get through the first few hours of Relink without understanding anything. It’ll just take you a lot longer to finish, though there are also accessibility and assist options to automate some or all of the more complicated aspects of combat. In any case, there are some bigger issues with a few of the basics. The combat lock is useless to the point where it’s easier not to have it if there are a lot of enemies to take down, and despite the nice animations, all of the attacks feel weightless, making your giant sword feel more like a cosplay replica with a security tag attached to it by a guy in a reflective vest who clearly doesn’t understand who you’re dressed as.

Maybe it’s because they’re so huge that the relative size of each attack loses all meaning. In one boss fight, I racked up almost a million damage with my special attack, the damage meter alone being used as a story for the sake of drama. But the bosses are such huge spectacles that they don’t get in the way, and in other places the game is silky and streamlined to remove any friction from the game. When you complete a side quest (kill X wolves), you can automatically teleport to the quest giver to turn it in. If you’ve returned to town to farm XP, you can instantly teleport back to the last checkpoint in the main story.

Granblue Fantasy: Relink has absolutely no pretenses, says nothing, and is committed to its fantasy. The good guys are good, the bad guys are bad, and a heated witch who explodes roses everywhere in battle is frosty. As are planet-sized attacks and monsters with hands on strings flying everywhere, and pirate captains who are also guys with gigantic cow horns. Unless none of that sounds frosty to you, in which case it’s best to avoid this game if I were you.


This review is based on the version of the game provided by publisher Cygames, Inc.

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