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GAME: Granblue Fantasy Relink Video Game Review

It really reminds me of the awesome Persona 5 Strikers that came out a while go - I'll defend to the death that Strikers perfectly captured everything that modern Persona has become known for while perfectly translating the dungeon-crawling, combat skills, and difficulty/challenge to the action system of a Musou game.

A lot of people have been comparing this Granblue to Monster Hunter, but the moment I saw them X > X > X > Y > Y combos, that's a Musou combat. It does it pretty well with all of its systems, and the graphics and characters are really nice. I was pleasantly surprised at how much exploring there was available right off the bat, and honestly? ...everything flows and feels pretty good.

My only concerns are that the story campaign could be longer - they've apparently back-loaded a lot of the content to be online-party oriented so if you were buying this as a solo RPG with a big story, you may run a bit short. Otherwise as an action game, this doesn't quite hit the high skill ceiling that Strikers requires when you crank it up to 11, at least not as early as I would like it to. Folks that aren't typically interested in the sort of twitch skill required to frame-perfect a dodge or a Just Guard are likely going to be fine with it, but players that semi-non-seriously attempt to run a Souls game without taking hits will probably only get truly challenged if they let their gear lag a bit behind with upgrades during the story - and that's not necessarily a bad thing, I just wouldn't mind the option to push it farther.

A lot of people have been comparing this Granblue to Monster Hunter, but the moment I saw them X > X > X > Y > Y combos, that's a Musou combat.

LinkTSwordmaster wrote:

A lot of people have been comparing this Granblue to Monster Hunter, but the moment I saw them X > X > X > Y > Y combos, that's a Musou combat.

Nah, that's pretty harsh to call it a Musou combat, because just simple button-mashing will be punished greatly on the higher level of difficulty - if anything, the combat formula is pretty much as same as action-type JRPG such as Tales of or Y's - except they reduced the number of skills per character in exchange of variety of the characters themselves.

You can do every quest solo and offline.

My issues are with story and secondary systems. The story is short, repetitive, and might have a cast too large for the story- even as pared down as the "story" crew is. The secondary systems are not garbage; but they feel poorly considered. The sigils are...why I've dropped the game. Sigil gacha? Curios? Damage cap issues (and how that system renders a lot of support skills/builds irrelevant?)

Having just farmed the last quest a bit for Ferry's last weapon which thankfully dropped first, I feel like calling the secondary systems garbage, despite some of my enjoyment of it, would be a fair assessment if someone brought up points as to why it's just bad.

I just would not be able to explain to you why some of this stuff isn't bad.

The general flow of endgame is as follows (obviously, it's possible that I'm still not 100% efficient, but I try as much as possible to learn things on my own before consulting with youtube-kun):

1. Farm knick knack vouchers and curios using various recommended farms on youtube
2. Get a rare tier V sigil that has an augmented skill in it that is hopefully useful in your build (I already have War Elemental and one supplemental damage V sigil... thank god)
3. If applicable, go to the blacksmith and find out that you don't have the materials to upgrade the thing
4. Put the material in your wishlist and go farm the enemy that has it and pray for good drop rates
5. Level up the sigil like once and realize you are broke again
6. Hit level 15 with your + sigil and then move onto trying to roll for another Sigil V + thing that has trait you want... statistically speaking, people probably want it to be a damage cap up V + sigil
7. Repeat

I think the issue with playing solo is that you have to farm for a complete team. So that's 4 times the amount of Damage Cap Up + sigils or whatever that I would need to optimize. And like, 4 times the amount of materials to upgrade everything and 4 times the amount of RNG hoping that the damage cap up sigil + is paired with something useful.

It's absolutely obnoxious.

that's pretty harsh to call it a Musou combat, because just simple button-mashing will be punished greatly on the higher level of difficulty

I do agree that it's a bit of a disservice to the combat to boil it down to mashing random buttons since the larger enemies that don't take hit stun are actually designed with interesting patterns in mind relative to what your characters can do.

(also, PKP is a Bayonetta combo, so the discussion surrounding this should be more complicated than the generic combo routes)

Oof, big RIP to Hyrule Legends and P5 Strikers, I gotta wonder how many people actually played those games outside of journalist-difficuty mode. You don't unlock the good stuff in Legends if you even take damage, and Strikers enemies can drop your party in one or two big hits before you even realise your HP was in danger. I have yet to be seeing the high-skill level players saying that bosses on Granblue are so dangerous, and there a lot of folks even in this forum thread saying they didn't really struggle in their time with it either.

the video you posted is funny to me because I'm under the impression the guy just gave me the game winning combos for the majority of situations: something to zone the AI with since they don't block it due to how the AI is designed and then something to melt bosses with.

THAT SAID... if you thought these random Musou games were better than Relink, I would just ask you to describe to me what the endgame progression was like. You would have a very easy time convincing me that most things are better than what WANNFH described in his post detailing endgame meta where I played for dozens of hours only to realize I was getting funneled into a damage cap RNG build hamster wheel of endless material farming.

For myself, I think a slower build-up would have been more beneficial.