I rolled credits on Granblue Fantasy: Relink after about 20 hours of play. That might sound short for an RPG — and it is, by modern standards — but reaching the end of that main story is also potentially far from the end of your time with the game.

We’ll explore that side of things in more detail another day (mostly because I haven’t really delved into the “endgame” as yet) so today we’re taking a look at the gameplay experience while you’re playing through the main scenario.

Without wishing to spoil things too much, I had a great deal of fun playing through Granblue Fantasy: Relink. So let’s take a closer look at exactly why this game works so well.

Granblue Fantasy: Relink is, as we’ve previously discussed, based on an extremely popular and long-running mobile game. There’s no need to be familiar with the mobile game to enjoy Granblue Fantasy: Relink, thankfully, but at least a passing familiarity is helpful from both a mechanical and a narrative perspective.

On the mechanical front, the progression side of Granblue Fantasy: Relink is remarkably true to its source material. While characters do grow in power by simply gaining experience and levelling up as a result, two other aspects of the game have a more significant impact on a character’s overall “Power” level — a numerical value that can be compared against various quests to get a rough idea of whether or not the character should be able to handle the challenge ahead.

The first of these is the weapon upgrade system. This isn’t an especially complicated procedure, but for those unfamiliar with the way the original mobile version of Granblue Fantasy does things, it might seem a little strange.

Each character’s weapon has two important stats: HP and Attack, both of which are added to a character’s base stats when the weapon is equipped. There are only two other stats besides these in Granblue Fantasy: Relink — critical rate and stun power. Most weapons also affect these to a varying degree.

There are several ways a weapon can be upgraded. Firstly, and most simply, it can be levelled up by making use of “fortitude crystals”, which can be acquired in varying quantities and sizes as loot throughout the entire game. Fortitude crystals translate to experience points for a weapon when applied, though using them on a weapon also costs in-game money, so you need to have enough cash on hand as well as fortitude crystals if you want to power up a weapon.

Upgrading in this way is a painless process: simply open a menu at one of the blacksmiths available to you in the game, choose “Level Up Weapon” and then hit a button on the controller to automatically level up the weapon as much as possible with the fortitude crystals and money you presently have available to you. If this reaches the weapon’s current level cap, great — you move on to the next step. If it doesn’t, you’ll need to get some more money and/or crystals and get the level up to that cap before you can proceed.

The next step in upgrading is breaking that level cap on a weapon. This involves acquiring various items that get increasingly rare and valuable as you progress through the several “star ratings” it’s possible to upgrade a weapon through. Each new star rating provides a substantial increase in the weapon’s soft level cap, and thus considerably higher stat increases for your character. For context, a zero-star weapon can level up to 10, a one-star weapon up to 30, a two-star weapon up to 50, a three-star weapon up to 75 and so on, all the way up to six stars, which equates to a hard cap of 120.

You can’t just immediately power-level a weapon to six stars and level 120 by playing through the main scenario, though. The game quietly gates your progression at various points by keeping some of the materials required to break the various level caps out of reach until later. This means that while it is possible to get quite powerful while playing through Granblue Fantasy: Relink’s story, you never feel like you completely overpower the game and make the mechanics feel meaningless. This is, on the whole, a good idea; once you’ve beaten the story and unlocked the “endgame”, that’s the point at which you can start getting more ambitious, since that’s also where significantly harder quests unlock.

Alongside upgrading weapons, it also becomes possible to forge new weapons for each character at various points in the game. The different weapons aren’t necessarily “better” or “worse” than one another; rather, they’re intended to allow the character to specialise in one area or another. For example, one weapon for a character might emphasise attack power, making it suitable if you enjoy dealing lots of damage; another might increase HP, making it good for tanking. Others still might focus on the critical hit rate or stun value, which again have their own distinct utility.

The weapons tie in with the game’s other main progression system, which is known as Masteries. Reaching each “star rating’s” level cap with a weapon unlocks a Mastery node for that weapon, allowing you to spend Mastery Points on a significant stat boost that is usually in keeping with the weapon’s main “role”. These are significant, because they continue to apply to the character even if the weapon is not equipped, so it’s worth levelling even weapons you don’t intend to use.

The main point of Masteries is to buff up various aspects of each character and unlock their various skills. Besides the weapon Masteries, each character has an “Offensive” and “Defensive” Masteries tree, and your accumulated Mastery Points (which are shared among your entire squad rather than character-specific) can be spent on unlocking nodes on one, the other or both.

Like with the weapon levels, there’s a soft cap on how far you can progress down the two Masteries trees prior to beating the main story; this equates to a character reaching roughly 50% of their full potential. The two trees unlock fully in the endgame when the harder quest difficulties become available.

The Masteries present a certain illusion of choice in that they seem to branch off in various directions, but in reality progression is relatively linear; the branches tend to be there more as a means of having prerequisites for certain progression nodes than anything else.

That doesn’t mean that Granblue Fantasy: Relink’s characters are fixed and unable to be customised, however; quite the opposite. In fact, progressing down the Masteries trees provides you with more options to customise your characters according to the situation, meaning that the further you take one character, the more flexible they become.

Besides the previously discussed weapon types, your main character customisation in Granblue Fantasy: Relink will likely come from the loadout of four skills you choose to equip on a character, coupled with the passive bonuses that come from the “Sigil” items you can equip. The further down the Masteries trees you are, the more skills you have to choose from, and the more Sigils a character can equip simultaneously.

Most characters can be built into various roles by carefully choosing skills and Sigils. For example, a tank build might take Sigils that boost HP and make enemies more likely to attack the character, as well as using a weapon that emphasises HP; this can then be complemented with skills that are defensive in nature, such as a boost to the character’s defensive capabilities or even temporary invincibility.

Likewise, a character can take on a supporting role by boosting things like their stun rate through Sigils and their weapon, then equipping healing or stat-boosting skills that allow them to help the party out rather than deal direct damage.

Or you can simply throw everything into attack power, load up on skills that deal heavy damage and just make big numbers pop out of enemies. That’s fine, too. The nice thing is that you’re never railroaded into playing a single role; changing roles is just a matter of swapping around your equipment and skills to suit the situation. I haven’t played the game online at the time of writing, but I suspect having several different “loadouts” for a favourite character will become helpful when playing with others — and thankfully, the game offers the facility to save character loadouts so you can make a quick change if required.

While all this might sound quite complicated, the execution of it in-game is very straightforward and easy to understand, and the game gradually unlocks its systems at a good pace as you progress through the main scenario. Indeed, the soft capping of progression prior to unlocking the endgame is a good means of ensuring players don’t get too overwhelmed; capping out an individual character prior to endgame gives you a good taste of the systems’ flexibility without providing so much choice it becomes impossible to decide what to do.

It’s worth noting at this point, too, that all the playable characters in Granblue Fantasy: Relink play markedly differently from one another, even without taking any progression elements into account. While the protagonist Gran/Djeeta makes use of a fairly standard “weak/strong attack” combo system, other characters branch out into a variety of different areas, including ranged combat of various types, sustained damage over time, heavy burst damage and plenty of others. If there’s one aspect of the game that can become potentially overwhelming prior to endgame, it’s choosing a character to “main” — although to be honest, it’s a perfectly valid approach to just pick which character you fancy the most and play as them for the rest of the main scenario, focusing most of your progression efforts on them.

One nice thing that carries over from the mobile game to Granblue Fantasy: Relink is the “Fate Episodes” system. These are personal stories that are unique to each character, and each of them begins with a short summary of what they got up to in the original Granblue Fantasy — a good means of catching up for lapsed players or newcomers — and then moves into a story that is specific to the part of the world Granblue Fantasy: Relink unfolds in.

Most Fate Episodes are presented in “NVL-style” narration, with a background image overlaid with narration and dialogue presented by the character in question. Those with little patience for visual novels needn’t worry, however; most individual episodes are a page or two at most, with subsequent Episodes unlocking according to character level and progression through the game’s main storyline.

They are worth engaging with, though, because each completed Fate Episode provides a significant buff to the character’s base HP and attack power, meaning they’re actually yet another progression system, cleverly disguised as narrative content.

But the other good thing about Fate Episodes is that they occasionally feature “quest” sequences, where after reading the narrative context, you have to actually take control of the character in question and complete a short mission with them. Since these missions aren’t generally super-difficult to get through, they’re a good means of trying out the various characters and getting a feel for them “in context”; any character can also train against the dummy “Sir Barrold” at any time, but hitting a static, non-aggressive target is rather different from actually using a character in the context of a mission to complete.

Like the other systems in the game, Granblue Fantasy: Relink gradually trickles out Fate Episodes to you rather than overwhelming you right from the beginning. It’s another means of engaging with a favourite character that allows you to get to know them a bit better from a narrative perspective as well through their mechanics — a great way of helping you feel a sense of attachment to them as you work on their progression.

I realise I’ve spent a lot of time talking about probably the most “boring” part of the game, which is character progression — but as anyone who has played the Granblue Fantasy mobile game will attest, that’s an important part of the Granblue Fantasy experience. But for the sake of those craving a little more action, let’s talk about the actual “gameplay” side of things.

As previously noted, each character plays markedly different from one another. My character of choice so far has been the ghost girl Ferry, who wields a whip and can deliver sustained, ongoing damage by planting herself in a spot and repeatedly “swishing” her whip out in front of her. This swishy-swishy move can either be cancelled into a dodge or jump, or released for a wide-ranging conal area-effect attack that deals some respectable damage to anyone caught in its arc.

Ferry also summons some ghostly pals via various means as she fights, and these will attack independently of her and passively buff her overall effectiveness. Some of her skills also change their exact effects depending on how many ghostly pals are on the battlefield at the time, so thankfully this is easy to keep track of with an on-screen interface element.

From my limited experience with other characters in the game, many (though not all) have some sort of “meter” like this that allows them to perform certain feats when it is full. The knightly Katalina, for example, has an “Ares Meter”, which allows her to summon primal beast Ares when it’s full, changing how some of her attacks work and affecting her overall effectiveness.

One particularly interesting element of the game comes from the “stun value” I mentioned a few times above. This relates to a blue meter that appears over an enemy while repeatedly attacking them, with higher stun values filling it quicker. Once this fills, everyone in the party standing near the enemy (with the effective area conveniently highlighted in blue) is able to perform a “Link Attack”, a powerful unique attack that deals a not-insubstantial amount of damage and also adds to the “Link Meter”. When the Link Meter reaches 100% and the whole party performs another Link Attack, you enter Link Mode, during which time slows, HP regenerates and attacks are significantly more powerful.

Granblue Fantasy: Relink is good at on-screen telegraphs and cues. Ranged enemies have “aim lines” that pop up before they fire, allowing you to dodge or get into cover, and area-effect attacks feature ground telegraphs with a clear indication of how much time you have to get out of the way.

Particularly elaborate boss attacks also feature clear visual indicators that allow you to intuitively understand how to deal with their mechanics without explicitly telling you; for example, a fight against the frosty wolf primal beast Managarmr features a sequence where he summons a huge ice storm; the way to avoid taking damage here is to get behind an ice crystal, clearly indicated by the area behind said crystals having a clear, dark-coloured floor while the rest is white ice.

Skills and attacks performed by your playable character and your allies also have visible telegraphs, which is particularly helpful for heals and buffs; when casting them, you can see the area that they affect, allowing you to understand how close you might need to be to your allies for them to benefit from your ministrations.

Even simple things that don’t come up much, like throwing exploding barrels at enemies, have well-implemented interfaces, allowing you to aim, see the arc through which the thrown object will travel, and the area of effect its explosion will cover upon landing. It really is some exemplary interface design for a game like this, and has clearly learned some lessons from games like Final Fantasy XIV.

And, pleasingly, the AI party members you proceed through the main story with are, for the most part, perfectly capable of helping you out rather than just being there for the sake of it. You can customise their behaviour to a certain degree by allowing or disallowing them to use their “Skybound Arts” super-moves without you performing one first — and a further setting in the options menu allows you to forbid them from using them on anything other than bosses — and setting a suitable loadout of skills, weapon and Sigils on them means that they generally do a pretty good job of performing a helpful role in combat.

Of course, you can help them out a bit by remembering to upgrade their weapons and Masteries alongside those of the character you’re spending most of your time playing — and indeed, long-term “mastery” of the game would involve maxing out all playable characters — but so far, I’ve had no parts of the game where I felt like any of the computer-controlled characters were a liability. It remains to be seen whether player-controlled characters in the game’s online mode will be better or worse than them!

You’ll notice I haven’t really talked about the story of Granblue Fantasy: Relink much. It’s a decent enough RPG narrative, to be sure, and I have no complaints about how everything unfolded, but with its relatively short length I’m hesitant to spoil too much about it at this juncture — particularly given the mountain of words I’ve already used today. So perhaps we’ll talk about that another time; suffice to say for now that 20 hours felt like a good length; each new chapter of the main story felt nicely different from the last, and there are some excellent setpieces to enjoy along the way.

So all in all, having now “finished” Granblue Fantasy: Relink, I feel like I have very much had my money’s worth, and I’ve had a good time. But, as noted at the start, the game doesn’t have to end there by any means. So we’ll take a closer look at that side of things once I’ve had some time to truly delve deep into the grind.

The real Granblue Fantasy: Relink starts here, as they say.

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