The thrill of adventure awakens the imagination in the boundless playground, a familiar sensation for Granblue Fantasy players. Granblue Fantasy has been an international success for over a decade. The original resembles 16-bit turn-based RPGs like the early Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest games, leaving behind fantasies of larger scale and magnificent feats rather than inevitable realities.
In Granblue Fantasy: Relink, developer Cygames has the opportunity to explore a fantasy world full of open skies and magic, transforming the game from a relatively modest mobile game into a full 3D action game. Although not entirely successful, Granblue Fantasy: Relink should be commended for its success in becoming a game to remember, but it needs more ambition and unique content to get there.
ReLink takes players on a journey through a single-player campaign with the crew of the Grandcypher on a combat adventure on each new island. For this game, a completely original island and story was created, with the task of having the crew save their own people by defeating giant monsters known as primordial beasts, and defeating the witches who control them.
For players unfamiliar with Granblue Fantasy's story and characters, it won't be felt that Relink is particularly interested in keeping players informed. A vignette about how the characters met and how they arrived at the latest docking island that sets up this game's adventure, is basically everything that all players get without a fan-made Wikipedia to fill in the rest. It has an energy similar to joining the anime One Piece halfway through or jumping into a game of Xenoblade, with no intention or desire to stay in the past history that the player is thought to have seen.
Relink is also visually beautiful, especially its painterly setting, but it's hard not to notice the inconsistent transformation of the art style between the characters. Granblue Fantasy Versus by Arc System Works used the same design, but with a more successful effect.
The single-player campaign, while short, presents some interesting dilemmas, such as climbing to the top of the Anemo God or reclaiming the castle from the invading forces. Players control 19 unlockable characters with different fighting styles and special moves, following a basic storyline without too many bold or undesirable transformations.
These characters all share a similar template, using four special moves and movement options, but there are significant differences in special skills and expressiveness. My favorite characters jump over the heads of enemies and focus on parrying on the ground, but late-unlocked characters are more focused on transforming and building energy, making it feel different even with just those two characters.
Unfortunately, the levels are mostly linear paths and don't have much room to explore. Endless skies and levitating islands are rarely used for anything other than background and transfer to the next battle, and there's little reason to explore anywhere but the most linear path. In a world where characters talk about infinite space, they spend most of their time in caves and walkways, and this sense of inconsistency wears down over time.
After completing the single-player campaign, players can take part in combat missions, which can be co-op with friends or strangers. As you rank up, so does the difficulty, and characters must work their way up through selective means such as skill trees and ** to stay competitive. By the end of the game, it takes a lot of polish to keep a team strong enough to complete these tasks on your own, but focusing on one character reduces variety, especially when there are 18 other characters to choose from. There's no way around this grind, wanting to get you through the level in one go, with guaranteed materials and experience to level up, and while the feeling of how smoothly the game progressed in the early days can be frustrating, this reversal can become a frustrating puzzle.
Bosses in the later stages of the game have huge health bars, making combat tedious. Unlike Monster Hunter, your prey never escapes or requires a different strategy, and the possibility of frustration before finishing the battle is mostly a race against time.
According to Moon Wheel Games: The salvation of these extended gaming experiences is that the combat is quite engaging, and the interaction between the characters is likely to be enjoyable for existing Granblue Fantasy fans. Relink is unlikely to be a favorite of any new players. But the basic gameplay is fun and keeps you alive as you progress along the treadmill, especially if you have a group of like-minded raw material fans to help you defeat its biggest symbolic and literal dragon.
Azur Fantasy Relink