PlatinumGames Got A New JRPG - Granblue Fantasy Project Re:Link

[Val the Moofia Boss]

I'm a couple hours in. I had to try out different alternatives to using the Steam screenshot key, as whenever I took a screenshot the game would stutter for a few seconds. Currently using Nvidia GeForce's screenshot functionality, and used AntiMicrox to set my controller's back button to take screenshots.

I got noticeable framedrops in the forest and town areas even though I am using a 3070ti.

It's nice that so far, the music is new arrangements of the gacha soundtrack rather than a straight up lift of stuff I've already heard for hundreds of hours before.

 

[Yosharian]

I'm waiting for ultrawide support or a mod, and a sale. It was on CDKeys for 10% off but that's still too steep for me.

 

[Elttharion]

Apparently the game has been plagued by startup and blackscreen bugs, and audio cutting in and out. Going to wait a bit before buying. Also hope that a decensorship mod is made.

What is censored?

The localization is horrendous (not that its anything new for Granblue) and they added spats and shorts for most female characters.

 

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Apparently the game has been plagued by startup and blackscreen bugs, and audio cutting in and out. Going to wait a bit before buying. Also hope that a decensorship mod is made.

What is censored?

The localization is horrendous (not that its anything new for Granblue) and they added spats and shorts for most female characters.

I'm playing with Japanese voices since that's how I'm used to hearing the characters speak from the gacha. As for the text, I haven't seen anything egregious thus far (besides calling races "peoples"), but the way the text was written does not feel like it was written by Cygames' inhouse English translation team. The dialogue feels stale and sometimes out of character, and at times you can tell that the translated text is completely different from what the character is audibly saying.

Hopefully a decensorship mod gets made soon, should be pretty easy to do some simple geometry tweaks.

 

[Elttharion]

Apparently the game has been plagued by startup and blackscreen bugs, and audio cutting in and out. Going to wait a bit before buying. Also hope that a decensorship mod is made.

What is censored?

The localization is horrendous (not that its anything new for Granblue) and they added spats and shorts for most female characters.

I'm playing with Japanese voices since that's how I'm used to hearing the characters speak from the gacha. As for the text, I haven't seen anything egregious thus far (besides calling races "peoples"), but the way the text was written does not feel like it was written by Cygames' inhouse English translation team. The dialogue feels stale and sometimes out of character, and at times you can tell that the translated text is completely different from what the character is audibly saying.

Hopefully a decensorship mod gets made soon, should be pretty easy to do some simple geometry tweaks.

I only played the demo but from that and the pics I saw they inserted a ton of shitty memes, slang and unfuny jokes to the dialogue.

 

[Rean]

Hmmm...
I haven't crashed at all, and performance seems really good thus far (just made it to town), but the game definitely has technical issues.
First of all, non-configurable AA sucks, there's a distinct blur that implies TAA or similar, which often doesn't mesh well with bright, soft visuals. Second, audio is completely and utterly fucked up in more ways than one - speakers/headphones/3D etc. options don't seem to do anything, voices and sound effects are buried, music is three levels too high. I honestly don't know if I can keep playing when the sound is this messed up.

As for non-technical, the game seems beyond easy on Hard, almost Trials of Mana/YS IX tier. Hopefully it gets a bit more challenging later on.
For the positive, I like the animations, and the Japanese voiceovers are top-tier, as expected.

 

[Val the Moofia Boss]

It is frustrating that I cannot pause during cutscenes.

 

[Val the Moofia Boss]

Gallanza feels like a rehash: Draph male who is one of the chief lieutenants of the empire who wants fights. Already seen him two times before with Ghandharva and Baragona.

I am investing into Gran for now. I've built him to reduce the party's incoming damage, using Phalanax (reduce incoming damage by 40% to 70%), Substitute (redirects all of the party's incoming damage to Gran, increases Gran's defense by 20% to 50%), and Stall (slows' the enemy's actions by up to 50%ish). Due to the long cooldowns of these abilities, I am trying to rotate through each one rather to maximize defense uptime, rather than popping them all off at once.

Unfortunately, while Gran has access to a wide assortment of skills, his unique mechanic, Skybound Arts, works against rotating abilities like this. Gran has to build up to four stacks of Arts for his abilities to activate at maximum effectiveness (ie Phalnax at 70% reduced incoming damage). You build up stacks of Skybound Arts by finishing combos. The shortest combo is three moves. That means to build up four stacks to fire off an ability at maximum effectiveness, I need to use 12 moves, which takes a while. When I am fighting trash mobs, I usually can't even finish the short 3 move combo because they either die so fast, or there are so many mobs attacking that I have to interupt my combo by evading or blocking. Against bosses it is much easier to do combos and build up stacks of arts, but it still takes time, and I might be sitting on a cooldown that is ready to go because I haven't acquired four stacks yet.

For my fourth ability, I keep switching back and forth between using either Armor Break for its mobility and short cooldown (which means I'm not waiting until I reach 4 stacks of Arts to use it) which is great on trash fights for getting me to a living mob so I can do combos and build stacks, or Panacea as my AoE heal on boss fights.

I have heard that Vaseraga can be turned into a tank (presumably he has access to Phalnax and Substitute). If he doesn't have a mechanic like Skybound Arts that incentivizes firing off all of your abilities at once then he might be the better pick.


The white armor Rolan gave to Gran is quite nice. I hope it is added as a skin to the gacha soon.

 

[Yosharian]

Gallanza feels like a rehash: Draph male who is one of the chief lieutenants of the empire who wants fights. Already seen him two times before with Ghandharva and Baragona.

I am investing into Gran for now. I've built him to reduce the party's incoming damage, using Phalanax (reduce incoming damage by 40% to 70%), Substitute (redirects all of the party's incoming damage to Gran, increases Gran's defense by 20% to 50%), and Stall (slows' the enemy's actions by up to 50%ish). Due to the long cooldowns of these abilities, I am trying to rotate through each one rather to maximize defense uptime, rather than popping them all off at once.

Unfortunately, while Gran has access to a wide assortment of skills, his unique mechanic, Skybound Arts, works against rotating abilities like this. Gran has to build up to four stacks of Arts for his abilities to activate at maximum effectiveness (ie Phalnax at 70% reduced incoming damage). You build up stacks of Skybound Arts by finishing combos. The shortest combo is three moves. That means to build up four stacks to fire off an ability at maximum effectiveness, I need to use 12 moves, which takes a while. When I am fighting trash mobs, I usually can't even finish the short 3 move combo because they either die so fast, or there are so many mobs attacking that I have to interupt my combo by evading or blocking. Against bosses it is much easier to do combos and build up stacks of arts, but it still takes time, and I might be sitting on a cooldown that is ready to go because I haven't acquired four stacks yet.

For my fourth ability, I keep switching back and forth between using either Armor Break for its mobility and short cooldown (which means I'm not waiting until I reach 4 stacks of Arts to use it) which is great on trash fights for getting me to a living mob so I can do combos and build stacks, or Panacea as my AoE heal on boss fights.

I have heard that Vaseraga can be turned into a tank (presumably he has access to Phalnax and Substitute). If he doesn't have a mechanic like Skybound Arts that incentivizes firing off all of your abilities at once then he might be the better pick.


The white armor Rolan gave to Gran is quite nice. I hope it is added as a skin to the gacha soon.

So are you enjoying this?

 

[Arthandas]

I was semi interested in it until I saw the Tales like button mashing combat with AI companions. Super hard pass.

 

[Crayll]

Put some more time into it and it's real fun. All of the characters so far feel distinct and are good are different things. Example, Io (your starting mage) is great at gathering up hordes of small enemies and nuking them with a chargeable AOE that you can use repeatedly. Zeta (fast spear user, only side characters I've unlocked) is strong against single targets, with a repeatable back jump -> dive combo that can dodge close attacks and a counter button for things you can't outrange, but has little AOE capability other than a skill with a pretty long cooldown.
The side quests have different clear conditions and you get a ranking for how well you do and how many sub-objectives you finish, which encourages replaying with different characters and finding the best one for the job.

The framework of the combat system is there, with perfect dodges and blocks, and a lot of things to unlock for each character. Each has a long skill tree that's mostly small upgrades to health/attack/etc but also unlocks upgrades for their unique mechanics and new activate-able skills (you can have up to 4 skills equipped at a time).
Biggest complaint is that it's too easy so far even playing on Hard and trying not to upgrade my characters or equipment too much. I'm not far in so that might change, but from what I've read most of the challenge comes in the post-game when you unlock new missions and a higher-tier difficulty level. I haven't tried it yet, but I think you can also do missions with less than a full party, which would up the challenge as well since your AI team members are pretty competent.

Visually it's great, love the environments. Feels like the devs had a clear vision for the world they couldn't realize up until now due to the original game being mobileshit, so they went all out for this one.

 

[Val the Moofia Boss]

So are you enjoying this?

Yeah. Great visuals and music, likeable characters, engaging enough story (not the best GBF story compared to the gacha's main story or some events like Seeds of Redemption but not a snooze either), the character building is interesting, and some of the missions are pretty spectacular.

 

[Anonona]

I don't know how good the post game is, but a striking thing about this games is that it is practically FF XIV but fun and done right. They share so many similarities: a focus on bosses (ff xiv raids are literally an arena and boss like this game bosses), cooldown based system, and most importantly, the boss design is striking similar (predefined mechanics and attacks that follow an specific order, with ground markers, lines and other indicators to help players visualize what the attacks are doing).

But what this game does right is the combat and RPG system. Surprisingly deep character customization, didn't see this one coming. You can build character for debuffing, CC, critical damage, weakness exploit, damage mitigation, buffing, stunning, etc. I'm planning on making Gran a SBA gauge battery in the future, once I get enough passive to build up metter fast, right now he is a stun/support fighter, focusing on trigering Link Attack fast and using Slow and Rage when the enemy is broken to maximaze party damage. And you can customize a full party, or if you are playing with friends, coordinate to cover a role each one. And because the quest mode encourage you to kill the enemy fast, it is actually satisfactory when you find a combo that works. Certain setups are better for bosses while others with more AoE are more suited for Horde quest. For example, my party that was demolishing bosses in quest mode couldn't get past A in a defense mission, because the enemies keep ignoring us and attacking the crystal. Haven't tried yet, but I bet a party full of CC skills would work much better.

The action combat allows for meaningful choices of when to use certain skills and how to deal with mechanics. For example, a giant eyed monster has a mechanic where it shoots a beam while spinning and moving in circles. To avoid the attack, a Ice pillar falls in the middle of the room and you have to go around it as the boss moves to stay shielded. But you can perfectly perfect block it, perfect dodge it or even, as I did, use Gran's skill that allows him to parry and become invincible if you use his charged attack just when you are going to get hit, which allowed to further damage the boss. But I could just as easily use something like stout hearth and anti-debuff skills to hyperarmor through it, or character specific parries. And this is just one example, I was surprised with the amount of player expression the game has. Things like status effects, buffs and debuffs are actually important and varied. Again, using the Slow spell at the right time makes a world of difference against certain bosses and enemies.

So far, I'm enjoying the game more than I expected, but I will still reserve my final judgement for the post-game, which seems to be a big part of the game, kind of like MH where the story is easy but the higher rank become harder from what I hear.

 

[Anonona]

It is frustrating that I cannot pause during cutscenes.

It seems that if you push the skip button, a windows appears summarizing the content of the cutscene and allows you to cancel or confirm the skip, so you can it use to pause cutscene. I started a new game to test some things up so I tested the skip cutscene button. Can't confirm that it works like that in all cutscene but it would be strange if that weren't the case. Will edit this post if I find a case on the contrary, otherwise it means it works for all cutscenes.

 

[Val the Moofia Boss]

I beat the second Primal. Took me three tries to beat him. On my second attempt I gameovered with 20% HP left, which felt really bad (it's a 10 minute long boss fight). The array of icicles flying around was really difficult to hit as Gran. Even when using my Armor Break skill as a gap closer, they would usually fly away before I could finish them off, and my ranged Regenleif attack has a 20 second cooldown. If the Icicles did manage to stay still, I couldn't wail on them for long because I had to dodge two or three other icicles targetting me.

I got to Seedhollow. Let me get this straight: Rolan is renowned throughout the Skydom, and is a Vicar. We arrive at the most fluential island in the Skydom, and rather than leverage his renown and go to the castle and consult the military for aid, or go to the cathedral and consult the clergy for aid, Rolan instead decides to take us... to a seedy alleyway, and now has working for a mob boss.

Why can't we contact the Crew of Enforcers/4th Fleet (aka the international police) and ask them for aid?

 

[Crayll]

Game is getting better the further I get. Was a bit worried as the snow mountain island was disappointing in that it was pretty much one long corridor, but the desert zone afterwards immediately fixed that with a big area with multiple directions to head in, treasure to find, and several bosses + optional enemies. Actually came close to a game over for the first time so far, trying to fight everything without potions or returning to the save spot.

The penultimate boss of the chapter was also the best so far, fun mechanics and a nice difficulty spike. The final fight wasn't particularly hard, but was a fun spectacle.

Spoiler

Now I really wish the evil potato was the secret character instead of who we got, would be an interesting playstyle. Game could use a few more ranged characters.

 

[ADL]

I'm waiting for ultrawide support or a mod, and a sale. It was on CDKeys for 10% off but that's still too steep for me.

https://github.com/Lyall/GBFRelinkFix

 

[Yosharian]

I'm waiting for ultrawide support or a mod, and a sale. It was on CDKeys for 10% off but that's still too steep for me.

https://github.com/Lyall/GBFRelinkFix

Superb, hats off to modders as always for fixing what stupid devs are unwilling to fix

 

[Yosharian]

I'm waiting for ultrawide support or a mod, and a sale. It was on CDKeys for 10% off but that's still too steep for me.

https://github.com/Lyall/GBFRelinkFix

Alright now to wait for CDKeys to get it back in stock lol

 

[Alfgart]

Just finished the main story. I liked the game from the start, but now I'm starting to love it. Game is like 2 games in 1, a linear story-driven single player jRPG at first and then becomes an optional multiplayer coop Monster Hunter. Story is mediocre if you're not familiar with Granblue lore already. Gameplay is GREAT, it's easy to play and controls are super responsive, it's simple at first, but the upgrade and customization system in the endgame is what really makes everything shine. Boss battles are a spectacle. What I liked the most tho and I don't see enough praise, is the insane production values. The UI is gorgeous and provides shortcuts for everything, graphics and art style are phenomenal, the animations are AAA level even for the random NPCs in town. Voice acting being godlike was a given because the mobile gacha already has that and the cast is all renowned seiyuus (use JP voices, dont play dub, trust me). Same for soundtrack. Cygames made good use of their truckloads of gacha money, they put a lot of love on the game and it shows.

It's a great feature complete game with no microtransactions in 2024. Recommended. I'm glad it's doing great too, it has been in Steam top 3 sellers since release

 

[Reinhardt]

so it's just monster hunter?

 

[Val the Moofia Boss]

so it's just monster hunter?

It's Ys but with incredible production values.

 

[Damned Registrations]

so it's just monster hunter?

It's Ys but with incredible production values.

Does it have recent Ys' cancerous 'every fight is a parry fest because it makes you invincible or whatever' gameplay ethos, or is it viable to fight things by simply positioning and timing well? I haven't played a lot of PlatinumGames, but I recall MGRR being pretty obnoxious with all it's parrying and cinematic instakills in lieu of actual combat.

I wish someone would make a decent action rpg with no parry mechanics at all. 'Press button with perfect timing' is not interesting gameplay in my eyes.

 

[Yosharian]

(use JP voices, dont play dub, trust me).

Don't you miss out on a lot of banter doing this, though?

(I don't speak Japanese)

 

[Crayll]

so it's just monster hunter?

It's Ys but with incredible production values.

Does it have recent Ys' cancerous 'every fight is a parry fest because it makes you invincible or whatever' gameplay ethos, or is it viable to fight things by simply positioning and timing well? I haven't played a lot of PlatinumGames, but I recall MGRR being pretty obnoxious with all it's parrying and cinematic instakills in lieu of actual combat.

There are a few characters with explicit parry buttons, but most don't have parries. Every character can do a perfect block which blocks for more and causes less of a stability hit, but it it doesn't lead into combos.
Depending on who you're playing as you could also have hyper-armor or guard point mechanics on your moves, so there's some nice variation.

Positioning seems important. It feels like a less strict Monster Hunter in that your dodge doesn't have a ton of i-frames and dodging into an attack can still cause you to get hit, but if you time it correctly you get a perfect dodge which gives additional i-frames for a few seconds.