HomeReviewsGranblue Fantasy: Relink
Granblue Fantasy: Relink review: a slick JRPG wedded to the rule of coolYou know what’s cool? Sky pirates and massive spells and that
You know what’s cool? Sky pirates and massive spells and that
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Cy Games
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Cy Games
Granblue Fantasy: Relinkis a JRPG that is ticking off many of the actionRPGtropes. It would be in danger of becoming workmanlike, such are the number of things you can tick off on your fingers like a plumber ordering parts: boss fights against improbably huge glowing monsters, an evil god, catboys, numbers popping off enemies, women who appreciate the combat applications of a thigh-high split skirt, anachronistic sunglasses, horned giants carrying halberds of the same approximate size as a caravan.
In practice, though, you sort of can’t be mad at Granblue Fantasy: Relink. It’s built around a layered combat system that seems impenetrable if you don’t take some time to understand it. But really, Granblue Fantasy: Relink is just a game so committed to the rule of cool that the entire setting is physically impossible, and every battle is a disorientating Panic! At The Firework Factory that flirts with being a photosensitivity nightmare. I’m not selling it as such, but it’s actually charming.
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Astute readers may remember thatI had trouble reviewingthis game, but since the retail launch it’s been much more stable for me. Stable enough that I have been able to join the crew of the Grandcypher for a standard, save-the-chosen-one-save-the-world sort of adventure. In this case the world is the Sky Realm, where instead of continents there are just loads of small islands with different biomes, floating in an endless sky. Oh, the tweets Neil deGrasse Tyson would thread. The chosen one is a magical young woman called Lyria who can control a big dragon, and with whom the main character - the captain of the Grandcypher, in my case a girl called Horace - is life-bonded.
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Cy Games
You can play as any of your crew in the fights, a varied roster that includes gun-wielding swashbucklers, serious paladins and alluring magicians. It’s in combat you discover the Relink of the title refers not only to rescuing Lyria but also how you fight. When an enemy’s stun gauge fills up, you can perform a link attack with whoever else is attacking it - a sort of special double-up. You also have Skybound Arts (SBA), which are each character’s extra special attacks (i.e. if they have a sword they will hit the enemy with the sword a lot). To trigger these you need to max out your SBA meter, which fills as you perform your smaller, run-of-the-mill special abilities, like heals, buffs, debuffs, AOE attacks, that sort of thing. If the other characters have filled their SBA meter too, then you can trigger a Chain Attack, each character on the board dusting off an SBA before you all work together to do a super hyper mega final attack called, like, Void Bastard or similar.
But that’s not all! There’s also your Link Level. Performing link attacks, SBAs or resurrecting downed pals contribute to your Link Level, and whenthatgets to 100% you can trigger Link Time - which means your enemy goes into super slow-mo and you can swish about dealing extra damage. It’s a lot to handle, and combined with some rare boss fights where it’s suggested you split up, the combat is easier to manage if you’re playing in co-op with actual people. Unfortunately, and despite Relink selling a cool million copies, I found the matchmaking extremely variable, so I’d suggest having a group of friends earmarked as “the people I play Relink with”. But if you don’t have any, then the combat isn’tunmanageable. Or rather, the combat is so frantic, as magic and colour explodes everywhere like an over-the-top Jackson Pollock, that single player doesn’t feel much less chaotic.
This is Rolan. He will sometimes bemoan that the enemies working for Lillith must pay the ultimate price. As you can see, that morality works out great for him. |Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Cy Games
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Cy Games
Maybe it’s because they get so huge that the relative size of any one attack loses all meaning. In one boss fight I generated almost a million damage with a special attack, the damage indicator itself used as storytelling for drama. But the bosses are such massive spectacles that you sort of don’t mind, and elsewhere the game is slick and streamlined to remove any friction in playing. When you complete a sidequest (kill X number of wolves) you can automatically warp to the quest giver to turn it in. If you’ve returned to town to XP farm, you can immediately warp back to the last checkpoint of the main story.
Granblue Fantasy: Relink has absolutely no pretensions about it, isn’t saying anything, and is quite dedicated to it’s fantasy. Good guys are good, bad guys are bad, and a hot witch who explodes roses everywhere in battle is cool. So are attacks the size of a planet, and monsters with hands on strings flying everywhere, and pirate captains who are also dudes with big cow horns. Unless all of that doesn’t sound at all cool to you - in which case, best avoid this game, if I were you.
