My last several writeups about games of this nature have been criticized for being too long by some people so this time I am going to break the game down into 3 parts. I don't need to do this with any games, just the ones like this one as you will soon see why.
Granblue Fantasy Relink is a game that initially appealed to me because of many reasons and that is what I am going to focus on in this first section. These are going to be the "PROS" of playing this game, which I think is worth checking out. We will get to the CONS, the "MEHS" and my final opinion a bit later.
Pro: Great yet simple graphics
I don't require full on realism from my games. I actually really don't like it when studios try to do that and in the meantime they end up skipping out on much more important things such as tight control and actually having a good game. This game looks like an anime and that is precisely what they were going for. I believe we have reached the point of graphical capabilities that making a game bring and cartoonish looking is very easy to do. We haven't quite gotten to the point where we can make things look like real life and I find that it can kind of ruin games when they try (looking at you Final Fantasy)
Fantastic tutorial system
Lately I feel like there are two kinds of games out there: Ones that treat you like you are retarded and over-explain every little thing that exists in the game to the point where it is frustrating to be treated as if you have never seen a game controller before in your life and then 2) there are the kind of games that don't tell you anything and you spend half the game not even knowing there even was an essential "parry system" that was critical to succeeding in the game.
Granblue has a wonderful tutorial that gradually but surely introduces you into all the aspects of the game, including crafting and why certain items are more important than others. I never felt like the game was holding my hand but by the time all of the buttons were introduced to me (and this does use ALL of the buttons) I felt like they were easily remembered and pretty fluid. Well done Sega!
The most brilliant skip dialogue system I have ever seen in a game!
Maybe you guys don't get as irritated as I do by what I consider to be excessive storytelling as I get, but since this is a JRPG I was completely expecting to get a ton of dialogue thrown at me all the time and I was not incorrect about this assumption. It started immediately and it just kept right on flowing.
In most games there is a chance to skip the cutscenes and dialogue but by doing so you emerge on the other side of whatever happened with no idea what happened and sometimes find yourself in a battle or with another crew member and no idea why. In Granblue when you pull up the "skip" option it will put a summary of what the scene is about and you can sit there and read it before confirming that you do in fact want to skip. During non full-motion dialogue scenes you can also skip the dialogue line-by-line and well, this should be the standard in all story games. Just because I don't want to watch the long-winded anime scene doesn't mean I don't want to know ANYTHING about the story, it just means I don't necessarily like being interrupted every 4 minutes for a short film. I'm sure the devs worked really hard on all that animation and I appreciate it, but sometimes I just want to get on with it. Granblue Fantasy: Relink has the most perfect "skip options" i have ever seen in a game and this makes it much more playable in my mind.
Combat is as tough as you want it to be
It really gets under my skin when I am trying to play a game and I'll use Nioh or Mortal Shell as an example, that starts out as hard as the game is going to be at all and then stays that way. I get that there are hardcore players out there but I am not one of them. In Granblue the combat begins in a way that I believe is probably impossible to lose and this is by design. They gradually make the combat more and more difficult as time goes by and the attacks by enemies become faster, less telegraphed and perhaps even more necessary for you to use a block/parry every now and then. At the start you can just stand there and whack whack whack whack and even just take the hits from the Wyverns and you are not going to die. Even the first couple of boss fights are a pushover.
It gets more difficult and possible to die later and well, I feel like that is how a game should be. I don't want to get my ass handed to me in the very first battle and this is why even though I bought it on release date I still haven't even left the first area in Silksong.
Bosses are fantastic and your teammate AI is good
Each big boss that you fight brings about a unique experience. In many games they simply repackage the same bosses over and over and just give them a fresh coat of paint. I have fought a dozen bosses thus far as it is a major part of the game and I haven't noticed any repetition as far as design, attack patterns, or really anything that could be considered lazy. These are all individual things that are very different.
I wouldn't say they are hard, but they certainly have the opportunity to end you if you are just mad button mashing.
While the fights are a bit long and therefore this game starts to feel like a "Monster Hunter" sort of game after just a while, they are never boring. Plus the fact that your teammates require no input from you yet use a rather intelligent attack pattern all on their own, makes the combat pretty fun and easy to handle. Hell, you don't really have to play an active roll if you don't want to. You can just sit back and let them do all the damage if you want. I would imagine that this will change as we move further into the 20 hour story or so.
But they also are very fair, in fact I would say that perhaps they could be a bit more difficult and that is why it is so great that you can change the difficulty at any time which will bring me to my next and last PRO.
The difficulty slider actually changes things
In a lot of games the difficulty slider from story to normal to hard, to legendary or whatever it is that they have, changing it will only change the amount of HP that the enemy has or how much armor it has. This is a boring, lazy, and terrible way of scaling difficulty. Just making a boss take 4 times as long to take down doesn't really make it more difficult, it just makes the game tedious and boring.
In Granblue, when you change the difficulty (which you can do at any idle time) it will change everything about the enemies. It will change how many of them there are, it will change some of their stats and most importantly, it changes how they behave and how quickly they move. It isn't just a bump to their HP pool. On one particular boss that I thought was entirely too easy, I jumped it up to a higher setting to discover that it had 2 more attacks that it wasn't even using on the "easy" setting. This caught me and my AI controlled teammates by surprise and it was a lot more fun.
This is how difficulty selection should be and I hope other developers out there take notice.
It's too early for me to make some sort of overall analysis of this game because I have only experience 2 hours of it, but I have to say that so far anyway, this is a fantastic RPG experience. If anything was different than it is thus far, I don't think I would feel that way and this particularly applies to the absolutely awesome "skip scene" options that exist as a default. Had it not been for this, had i been forced to sit through all of those scenes or to just not know anything about said scenes, I would have left in the first 30 minutes.
I feel as though I will likely play this to the story's end and that is very rare for me with a JRPG.
This game is currently part of the PS-Plus Extra "free" game catalog and if you are a fan of JRPG's, I say give this one a go!