Granblue Fantasy: Relink

[one-armed dwarf]

I played the opening hours of this, it's a sort of mission based Monster Hunter thing. Party based combat, you have a shitload of 'crew mates' you can recruit to go beat up goblins with, who are AI controlled (tho you can swap to them in the pause menu). It's a bit of a mashy party based character action game, and it's very very easy. But from what I hear the real game happens in postgame. The story is basically a long tutorial, apparently.

 

It's kind of annoying, but it can also be pretty hype when you party syncs up their limits breaks. I read a comment somewhere that this is like a PS2 game with all the budget, and I think that explains it. If you want a PS2 game with modern graphics, get this. 

 

The characters I'm mainly playing are Narmaya, who I played in the fighting game. Like in the fighting game, she's a stance based character with a katana. She goes between crowd control and one-v-one damage based stances, and can switch and combo between them. Pretty standard archetype. The other is Rosetta, who's more interesting. Kind of a support role, very slow and hits things with a big vine whip and plants roses everywhere. Her combos create party wide buffs, and the roses can be used to distract enemies, beat them up, and be re-positioned to pressure/explode enemies. 

 

There's another character who's a fencer who has an ability that makes everyone invincible. There's a ton of characters, so a lot to learn. 

 

There's lots of items and resources for upgrading weapons, skill trees and such. There's nothing here that's all that surprising, really. It's just a Capital C Content game, you do lots of side quests and unlock missions and characters and fight things and level everything up forever and ever.

 

Story wise, I've skipped every fucking cutscene. I cannot stand how these characters sound when they talk. I've gathered that they are sky pirates and they're off fucking around the place, fighting monsters and rescuing people. That's all you need to know. But the fighting can be cool sometimes, when you can see what's going on. I genuinely get dizzy sometimes trying to keep track of things so I've set the battle effects to the lowest setting and screen shake off. Even then, it's a challenge to parse. 

[one-armed dwarf]

Man, this game sucks. I feel like I've been gaslit by people hyping it. It's so lightweight, just grinding through boring, repetitive missions, hoping that the postgame higher difficulties are where the juice is. I'm sure that postgame is more meaty from a mechanical point of view, but it's crazy to have this load of mid shit to trudge through to see it. 

 

This is game for people who love 'consuming content', with annoying characters who talk like babies. Play the fighting game instead, not this shit. 

[Maf]

I think I bought this game 50% off on a Christmas sale on PS5, played it for an hour and trashed it. There’s a specific anime bucket of things like this and Visions of Mana (even more so) that is really off-putting. I don’t remember how it played but more the general style of it 

[one-armed dwarf]

I don't want to hear another complaint about Aerith is all I'm saying, people don't know, they don't fucking know how bad things can get. 

 

edit, here's a great mod, it shuts up characters selectively, which would be great for the characters who have the stupid vubter baby voice issue

 

https://www.nexusmods.com/granbluefantasyrelink/mods/637