Granblue Fantasy Relink PS5 review – Cygames has quickly begun to expose the world to its Granblue Fantasy franchise. With two excellent fighting games under its belt, the developer is now expanding into the RPG genre. With Granblue Fantasy Relink, they’ve crafted a stellar action-RPG that rewards you at every turn with fantastic cinematography and excellent combat.
Granblue Fantasy Relink PS5 Review
A Grand Story That May Have Needed A Little More Backstory
It’s hard to talk about the game’s story without prior knowledge of the world and its characters. The story takes place after Captain Gran/Djeeta, depending on which one you select, has established their crew and is taken to the skies on their skyship, the Grandcypher. In the world of Granblue, some individuals can make pacts with Primals. Giant beasts of immense power that are worshipped across the world
In the story of Grandblue Fantasy, The Captain is almost killed but saved by a young girl named Lyria, who saves their life by linking her soul with theirs. Lyria also has a pact with one of the most powerful Primals, Bahamut. Monsters attack the Grandcypher during their travels, and Lyria and The Captain summon Bahamut to defend them. Still, Bahamut goes berserk, trying to destroy the ship and everyone on it.
After quelling the Primal, the crew docks in a small town for repairs; this sets up the beginning of a grand story that forces the crew to try and stop and find out what’s causing Primals to go berserk.
Those unfamiliar with the story may be initially lost with the franchise concept, but thankfully, the game provides an excellent assortment of tools to help you catch up on the story. You can read through an entire glossary to learn everything you need to learn about past events.
Incredible Set Pieces And Cinematography Work
During conversations, some keywords will be highlighted, allowing you to press a button and get a description and explanation of the term for those unfamiliar. Characters even have backstory quests that you can take on to learn more about them and how they meet the crew of the Grandcypher.
The game’s story takes twists and turns but never takes significant risks. It isn’t anything we haven’t experienced in other titles, but the visuals used in its story will stick with you. Relink has excellent cinematography with epic battles and fantastic lighting and camera work.
The cinematography can also be found in the game’s combat. Characters have flashy attacks and excellent particles, and special effects are added to emphasize the elemental damage. Combat is one of Relink’s most vital aspects. A lot of effort went into the game’s action combat to make it feel unique and exciting.
Relink features over twenty characters that can join the party. Unfortunately, besides your main party of six that you start with, you are the only ones featured in the main story and appear in cutscenes. The rest can be played in the story but don’t impact the overall narrative.
Excellent Combat Utilizes Great Character Attacks And Abilities
Each character has a unique mechanic in combat that makes them play entirely differently from the others. This mechanic makes combat so fun, as there is a character for everyone to enjoy. Rosseta can plant roses around the field of battle, which she can then use to attack enemies or heal party members.
Narmya, on the other hand, is a samurai who can change her weapon stance and combine the two stances for various combos. Zeta plays more like a Dragoon from Final Fantasy, utilizing aerial attacks to drop down heavy attacks on her opponents while using them as a stepping stone to keep herself in the air.
Combining these mechanics with combo attacks and unique skills gets exciting. Besides skill attacks, you can unlock healing abilities and boosts that increase your attack and defensive stats. Some characters also gain unique skills that make them invulnerable to attacks and even dodge attacks automatically.
Dodging and blocking are just as important, and some characters even have counters that allow them to counterattack enemies with perfectly timed blocks. Each character has a vast skill and attribute tree. You use Mastery Points to unlock these. There are three tabs: offensive, defensive, and weapons.
A Fun And Engaging Progression System Makes You Question Your Choices
As you upgrade weapons, they come equipped with attributes such as a health boost, critical damage boost, or extra damage to enemies’ weaknesses.
Sigils are the other pieces of equipment in the game. These level up a character’s power level, determining how strong they are to challenge a specific mission. These also become important in the Endgame as they help you shape your character. These Sigils are your weapons’ unique attributes, but you can equip multiple ones. Some of them even provide characters with more EXP or currency gains gains.
Weapons can be levelled up with materials you find and earn from quests. When you reach a specific cap on the weapon, you can uncap it, which unlocks another boost for that weapon’s attribute stat that you can unlock with Mastery Points.
You gain Mastery Points from levelling up, completing quests, and opening treasure chests. The skill trees feature new skills to unlock and increase health and attack stats. Some of the more critical attributes you can find are stun resistance, poison, and element resistance, which go a long way for the long battles in the game.
Unfortunately, party members share these Mastery Points among themselves. This means you’ll have to choose which characters you want to play with the most and prioritize them, or you can try to balance every party member, which will be a long process. You may have some difficulty in the Endgame’s more complex challenges and battles.
The good news is that when you unlock new characters, they don’t start at level one with no skill points in their trees. Chances are they will have more attribute points and skills unlocked than most of your party.
A Gorgeous World Filled With Plenty Of Secrets And Dangers
The world is full of secrets and hidden chests and journal note entries to find. The exploring will net you plenty of materials for crafting and upgrading your weapons. You may even find new weapons and Sigils to equip as well.
Treasure chests are scattered worldwide and are well worth the time to seek out, as some may even contain new weapons and Sigils to equip. There are challenges to finding and completing, though some may be too difficult when you first encounter them. There are even hidden chests that start a challenge where you have to collect Crystal before time runs out to unlock.
The locations are varied, and you’ll get to explore a wide range of areas, from grasslands to snowy mountains and deserts full of old ruins. Each location features its traps and enemies. The snowy mountains, for example, have large crystals that break apart and fall on the party or enemies when destroyed. Some of these environmental dangers are also used during specific encounters as well.
Quests are littered in the two towns available, and quest givers will ask you for specific things. Some you may already have and complete the quest right away. Others will ask you to hunt down mighty and dangerous monsters to acquire the materials they drop.
To complete these quests, you can take on Expedition missions. You can tackle these independently with A.I. party members or go online with friends or strangers. These missions range from eliminating enemies to defending a given location, among many others.
These quests are ranked depending on how well you do. The rankings range from B to S++. The better you do in the mission, the higher your score will be. Each mission has three challenges, from completing the mission within a specific time to more unique challenges, such as defeating foes with throwable objects. This adds to your score; the higher the score, the more rewards you’ll receive.
Incredible Boss Fights That Keep You On Your Toes
Boss battles in Relink are epic. These encounters are large and come in multiple phases. One was even so long that it took me over half an hour to get through the fight. Each boss has various stages, and I often felt like I was fighting a raid boss in an MMO.
You’ll have to dodge attacks indicated by circles or lines that appear all over the field. Sometimes, it can be too much to comprehend or even avoid, but boy, is it a lot of fun.
One boss was the size of a skyscraper, and you had to climb it like Shadow of the Colossus and destroy weak spots, then later get on cannons all over the area to shoot various target points on the boss. Epic isn’t a big enough word for it.
Recruiting party members isn’t an easy task. You have to acquire Companion Coupons, and processing through the story will only offer you a few tickets. The other way is to complete these Expedition missions, and most of the Companion Coupon missions unlock after you finish the story and enter Endgame content.
Endgame Content Feels Like A Second Game In One Package
Endgame is where most people will spend their time. Though there are still a few epilogue story missions to finish, the bulk will tackle the most challenging missions and defeat the most dangerous monsters.
The Endgame also unlocks chapter selection. Due to the fact you aren’t able to return to previous locations in the story, Chapter Select is the only way to return to these locations and find treasure chests or other collectibles you may have missed.
Endgame will also give you a ranking. As you progress through missions, your ranking will increase, unlock more missions, and allow other players to see your ranking to see if you can join them in those missions.
You’ll also unlock a co-op-specific currency to exchange them for high-level crafting materials and Sigils. These can also be earned on your own, but there is a more significant incentive to tackle missions in co-op.
Endgame also provides color variations for the party members and allows you to switch The Captain from the starting gender you chose to the other. You’ll also unlock more weapons you can craft, some of which have crazy designs like a giant fish.
A Fantastic Action-RPG Set Against A Gorgeous Background
Visually, the game is another strong point. Utilizing a unique style, the game does something I’ve never seen before. The textures and characters look nicely detailed when objects and characters are close to the camera. Still, the further you look, the buildings in the distance and the environment begin to look like watercolor paintings or a Bob Ross painting.
It’s fantastic to see and creates excellent scenery for snapping pictures.
Voice work is also great, bringing back the voice actors from the 2017 anime and the Versus Fighting games to reprise most of these characters. The soundtrack is also epic, especially during the boss fights with a grand orchestral performance.
Granblue Fantasy Relink is an exceptional game with a lot going for it. While some may have an issue jumping into a world without knowing its characters and how they came together, there’s plenty of tools available in the game to help you catch up. Besides my issue with characters sharing skill points, there isn’t much to complain about. Being rewarded for almost everything you do and accomplish in the game is refreshing.
Granblue Fantasy Relink releases on February 2, 2024 for PS5 & PS4.
Review copy kindly provided by PR