Granblue Fantasy Relink: Endless Ragnarok can be, at times, a bag of mixed signals. On the one hand, it isn’t a live-service game. Everything is contained within it, and never once did it present me with a purchase option. This isn’t so much shocking as it is at odds with my next point. That is, every so often the game sneaks up with a metal chair, like you are in a cage match, with a “Hey, are you playing this RPG game all by yourself? You are doing it wrong.”
It’s a weird juxtaposition, even if it isn’t ever present. Although, if you are playing this with hopes of reaching the Endless Ragnarok DLC, you will get hit with a chair way more than you want to and yet less than you might imagine.
Previously, my experience with Granblue Fantasy Relink was, at the time of launch, playing a bit of the storyline before getting very sidetracked playing the sidequests. Sidequests, in this context, are a series of missions that serve, in some respects, as an analogous model for how other live service games have missions that are undertaken for materials or currency to continue character growth within all their metrics once the leveling actually stops. The game has actual side quests as well, but they ultimately amount to killing certain enemies or getting materials, so basically take them when they unlock, then just play to complete them.
To make a long story short, I had never actually beaten the main story before. It remains engaging, though at times it can commit the grave sin of feeling stagnant. This became exacerbated in my more focused playthrough to get past this and ultimately reach the new content, as the main story is very short, or at least very short for a JRPG. It clocks in at about 20 hours if you take your time; it took me about 12 or 13.
This was a bit of a revelation for me, because then farming levels like I got sidetracked doing the first time were basically pointless, as all of that is baked into what is essentially endgame content. Head, meet steel chair under dangling metal briefcase, not that this is in and of itself a bad thing.
The narrative is fun, though barebones at times, but at least Granblue Fantasy Relink knows how to get flashy with its action-packed cutscenes. Combat is equally action-packed, so there isn’t really a disconnect even though the moves in cutscenes aren’t replicable. Or maybe they are; there are plenty of abilities that have your characters doing crazy stuff mid-fight. I think the biggest disconnect for me is that I’m not really sure what I am supposed to KNOW, if that makes sense. You join the action with Captain; the players stand in, sailing their ship with their friends into an island chain in the sky.
There are narratives in Granblue Fantasy Relink you join in the midpoint of, but that isn’t uncommon for a JRPG. Most of these plots get resolved, or at least fleshed out, so there is that. That said, you play as the same cast of characters, more or less, in this game, though in a different location than the preceding mobile game.
The good news is there is an easy-to-access lore compendium that makes a valiant effort to get you up to speed, but there are points, if you don’t have the familiarity, that it feels like you are missing something crucial. Never so much that it diminishes the experience, though, but it’s a word of warning: you might want to do some reading up on the series. Once you accept the beginning, though, you can live mostly self-contained.
The combat itself is the highlight of Granblue Fantasy Relink for sure, though. Again, to that first point, you have a large number of characters you can unlock with Crewmate cards that feel, kind of, like a gacha game, but they are fairly easy to earn, at least until the late game, and never forced on you through purchases. Beatrix was added in the Endless Ragnarok DLC and is accessible from the get-go for one card. Being the only character I know from watching Granblue Fantasy VS Rising at EVO, I unlocked her pretty quickly and was pretty quick to understand the hype.
All of these characters can have wildly different attack types, making for a deeply replayable experience as you switch between each and learn how they work and in which circumstances they excel. Better still, each has a pretty big mastery tree, with many abilities to unlock that are where the real damage lies. Then, you have your power level, which is the endgame metric that might drag you down, though I will go into detail later.
One of the more frustrating elements of the main story, though, is just how massive the areas are. Absolutely frustratingly massive. I hear you saying now that “Hey, that’s not a bad thing.” Well, it can be. Main mission stories are self-contained, so you don’t have a large world to explore and complete them in. Arriving in them, you are typically met with a map with big areas that typically only have two things you are guaranteed to do: grab materials from material points or find treasure chests.
I chose my words carefully there because the other thing you can do, fighting monsters, is not as guaranteed as one would hope, and this being truthfully my favorite part makes for a sad, sad Zach. The worst part is that early missions actually include them as part of the loop, with the first mission in particular asking you to save people from groups of enemies in certain areas, which is a great first introduction. Hordes in particular are the best showcase of the quickfire combat and the special moves. These stages can actually take upwards of 2 hours, which feels crazy for instanced levels.
These never ‘go away ‘; that would be an unfair claim to make, but around the midpoint the experience starts to devolve into a boss rush, with some having very little combat between them, almost shockingly so. Bosses can actually be annoyingly time-consuming, so even in the cases where you fight a boss, head through the next area, and get into a fight along the way, these are so minimal compared to everything else, which is all-encompassing, and I desperately wanted there to be more.
Thankfully, the bosses are actually really fun. This is largely because they have multiple components to them, rather than just attack and grind. Multiple points will see the boss switch to a new ability you must contend with, and they have a sort of “enraged” mode that makes them more powerful. One boss, a gigantic golem, requires you to approach his legs and break through armor plates to attack weak points. Then after this ends, you have to grab a mounted gun in the area and shoot several weak points on the golem’s body, which causes it to collapse. After this, you get to climb up the golem’s back and attack its weak point there to finally defeat it.
In truth, I bring up the Golem example both because of how it exemplifies the elements of combat against these enemies that I loved and that burned me to no end. Mainly, the fact that the game has respect for your time. This enemy is fought in a massive area that requires slow traversal. You even get these green rings for faster movement, and they really don’t help the whole thing feel slow. Approaching the legs gives the enemy the ability to knock you back constantly. It’s more of a pushback after dealing a set amount of damage, but there are points where you just keep getting pushed back.
All bosses have these moments where they drag you into a series of attacks that you have to dodge, or at least avoid the best you can. You have a block and dodge, so there are multiple ways even in this that you can contend with these moments. Even playing the main story without branching out for leveling, I never really felt a threat on normal mode. What these moments really do is drag you into points where you just can’t actually attack, and these periods can last for a minute, sometimes two. I imagine it’s more fun with a friend or two, but it can be frustrating and time consuming otherwise.
This is compounded by the massive areas that can also take a long time to just wander through, with it feeling like you didn’t really accomplish much to get there. The tragedy there is when the game chooses to push into more action-oriented exploration, like the stage getting ripped up around you by strong winds as you run through it. This contrasts with a desert stage that has a painful distance between the things that matter and the things that don’t.
All of this, in part, brings us to the Endless Ragnarok expansion, which in and of itself is a time-consuming slog to painfully wade your way through. This all starts at the endgame, given that beating the main game provides access to a whole other chapter that, and this is true, took me about 4x as long as the entire main story combined. The chapter asks you to collect 8 items in total, and to achieve this, you need to do the sidequests, and almost all are boss fights. Because you don’t get these items every single battle, what appears to be initially a few missions devolves into about 40 across three post-game difficulties, with constantly progressing difficulties.
These difficulties progress fairly rapidly, so this will be when you really need to start grinding for materials or mastery levels to improve yourself further. This is also when the game starts actively punishing you for playing solo. The issue is that in multiplayer, you can pick your character and go into it with that character’s grade, making you one part of the metric for success, with the other players having their own metric. If you continue to play solo, you are using your characters, which means to hit recommended power levels, you need to balance four characters rather than just one.
Frustratingly, it was hard to find random matches to join online. There is a function to join a player in their game, but there is also queuing for matches, or just quick queuing. With both quick queuing and match queuing, I found maybe one match in 50 tries. There ARE a few specific stages that people use to grind that you can find matching, something I learned online while trying to solve my issues, but by this point I had 20 mandatory missions I needed help with and could not find a thing.
When I DID get online, I actually enjoyed it. I can see why grinding this all out with people can create an enjoyable loop; you just require a group so you can control where you put your efforts.
The issue is that Endless Ragnarok, once you reach it, does literally nothing to justify the grind to get there. Beyond the new characters, the DLC also adds a few new ways to grind, which is good. That mode, the Conflux, is encountered early and becomes one of my favorite features in the game. However, the brunt of this experience is locked behind completing a massive amount of side quests in the post-game, with the entire last two difficulties, with most of this being just frustratingly grindy rehashings of bosses you have beaten 50 times prior, now with an additional move and more health. It could have been scaled down and accessed much earlier.
Even when you reach the DLC of Granblue Fantasy Relink, it’s more of the same. This is not meant to be an attack, but more of a resignation. If you liked the game enough to beat through all this, you will probably enjoy what it has to offer, and if not, well, you can show yourself out. Inevitably, the boss rush aspect of the core game returns in strides in this portion as well, with everything just being a slightly harder version of what’s come before.
There are new characters, a new narrative, and all of this good stuff, but the road to get to it is extremely off-putting. There are also four characters you can unlock from moment one that warn you to unlock them through the story, but they are unlocked in Endless, so you know, 100 hours or so into the game. That might be hyperbolic, but I think I reached this in the latter half of 60 hours, so it will take a while.
Verdict
Granblue Fantasy Relink: Endless Ragnarok is a foundationally good game that has a great strength of introducing itself very well. The combat is never boring, and there are so many ways to make the game your own through character selection, mastery abilities, and party combinations that make at least that portion incredibly enjoyable well into the late stages of everything. There are just so many other elements that drag what would be an otherwise great game down. The game doesn’t value your time properly, not through boss fights or exploration.
The endgame also feels painful, though it might not be if I wasn’t working towards a new narrative some buried behind them. The thing is, Granblue Fantasy Relink: Endless Ragnarok feels heavily geared towards hardcore players who were already there, grinding it out past the credits, and doesn’t really feel like an entry point for players looking to try it.
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