Granblue Fantasy: Relink Review

I haven't played a "traditional" JRPG in so long I dabbled in stuff like Dragon Ball Kakarot and Super Mario RPG and played a few JRPGs before but not much. I have some experience with the Granblue Fantasy franchise, with me playing Versus and watching the first 12 episodes of the anime so on top of this, I also heard the game was short which was the final seal that made me try this game out. I'm using Relink as a way to slowly ease me back into playing JRPGs again and I'm hoping this amounts to something.

Anyways, that out of the way, I think the game is "fine" but nothing too amazing which is exactly I was expecting out of it.

I'll start with the biggest issue with the game and that is the story, it had a number of problems going for it. If you are new to Granblue Fantasy, right away, there's a number of refrences, callbacks and aspects you aren't going to be familar with, it's kind of like watching a TV show and you start with season 2 or start the Lord of the Rings trilogy with the Two Towers. On top of this, the original game from what I can tell isn't very accessible and the only reason I had some clue about what was going on in the story and some of the characters at all was because I watched the anime, my recollection of it did allow me to fill in some of the holes but not entirely.

Then there is the story itself which isn't really that good. It's not terrible since the cutscenes never drag on and the english voice acting is good enough that it does an okay job at selling me on the material but on top of being familar with Granblue and the actual plot mainly just consists of rescuing people more so than anything else. For example, multiple chapters of the game is dedicated to finding the location of an important character, finding the means to help her and then when you come close to it, she gets kidnapped again. Once the rescue is done, you then have to rescue someone else.

It doesn't help that as a result of needing to know the Granblue Fantasy, the characters themselves feel underdeveloped outside of maybe Rolan. There's heel face turns that almost feel unearned since all you were doing with some of the villains were fighting them and their character development was off screen. The english voice acting once again does much of the heavy lifting and maybe to some degree me watching the anime.

Another good thing about the story, which once again, involves voice acting is that every line is voiced as far as the campaign goes.

The gameplay is where things get better but it ultimately depends on what you are expecting, there isn't really much that you expect out of JRPGs for when it comes to gameplay. There is no dungeon crawling or heavy amounts of level exploration. The game is very linear, and you got quest markers telling you where to go. You only fight hordes of enemies on occasion and the game mainly just consist of scripted sequences and bosses, especially bosses so much so that 80% of Relink's main campaign is basically a boss rush.

I don't dislike the idea of this since I found the bosses to work in term of providing specticle and the set pieces are pretty interesting Excavallion being a highlight since it's very reminiscent of games like God of War 3 and Halo 3 with the Chronos Boss and the Scrab Tank respectively.

As much as I did enjoy the bosses for the most part, it can get pretty exhausting fighting them since this is basically 80% of the game.

One thing that did annoy me was how much HP bosses had on normal difficulty. This is one of those games where bosses can take out your health pretty quickly when not careful when dodging and learning attack patterns and they can take up so much HP that I eventually got sick of getting their health bar below 20% just to die and then try to widdle down their HP down to 20% again because I'm trying to get back to learning the attack pattens that are throwing me off. Then there is fact that teamates might need to get revived as I dodge these attacks and I only get to have one revival potion when in critical condition and I only get revied by teammates a few times before a game over, this was too much for me. I eventually lowered to easy because of this and enjoyed the game more as a result.

The lock on system also isn't very good and it often feels like it tracks different so many different targets at once.

Some positives I will say the visuals do look really nice and when it comes to anime asethetic games, this is by far the nicest looking game I have ever seen bearing the style. The cutscenes look very nice and colorful and the enviroments look crisp. The music is also immerses me into the game.

Overall, Granblue Fantasy Relink is a solid game, I had a lot of issues with it but this is a game I ultimately had a good time with, I didn't take many breaks inbetween play sessions which is a sign that the game was at the very least moderately engaging. I use that as a metric to see if I enjoyed a game and Granblue did deliver that.