Granblue Fantasy: Relink Shows Other Action RPGs How Combat Should Be Done
Spectacular combat makes this RPG shine.
Adapting a long-running game series in a new form presents a lot of challenges. You need to bring new players up to speed without boring series fans and balance the gameplay to feel true to the series without just rehashing what you’ve done before. At least, that’s one way to do it. Now on PlayStation Plus, Granblue Fantasy: Relink does almost no work to get new players caught up on the story while completely changing its gameplay from its gacha roots — and as strange as those choices are, it results in a phenomenal action RPG nonetheless.
Granblue Fantasy dates back to a 2014 mobile gacha game that’s had a lot of success in Japan but remains relatively obscure elsewhere. That makes it a bit odd that both the fighting game Granblue Fantasy: Versus and Granblue Fantasy: Relink got a worldwide release in 2020 and 2024, respectively, and even more surprising how well they both turned out. And while neither game has much in common with the original mobile Granblue Fantasy, both draw on its biggest strength as a gacha game — its enormous roster of characters.
Granblue Fantasy: Relink is a visually stunning action RPG with some of the most varied combat in the genre.
Granblue Fantasy: Relink revolves around a central cast of just a few party members, but once you get deep enough into the game, you’ll have more than 20 characters available to join your crew. As with games like Tales of Arise and Final Fantasy VII Remake, you head out into the world with a party of four, and the characters you’re not controlling act on their own.
The key to what makes Granblue Fantasy: Relink so outrageously fun to play is just how different those characters are from each other. Most use some form of melee combat, but the variety in their combat styles and strategies is staggering. Some act as support units, planting flowers on the battlefield to attack enemies while buffing allies. Others use a mix of close and long-range magic to hit foes from any distance or use highly rhythmic attacks to jump in and out of striking range, building up power with each successful strike. Each time you gain a new character, it comes with a whole new control scheme to master, adding a lot of longevity to Granblue Fantasy: Relink.
It becomes even more replayable when you factor in multiplayer. While the main story is a single-player affair, Granblue Fantasy: Relink is also packed with repeatable missions you can play either with AI-controlled companions or with other players. These range in difficulty from encounters you can sleepwalk through to boss fights that are vastly harder than anything in the campaign, resembling endgame raids in massively multiplayer online games. The better you do at these fights, the better rewards you’ll receive, letting you upgrade your gear to take on successively tougher challenges. Most of these missions are extremely brief as well, making Granblue Fantasy: Relink an easy game to jump into for a few quick rounds of combat when time is short.
Tackling boss fights with other players online is a highlight of Granblue Fantasy: Relink.
Battles in Granblue Fantasy: Relink are so good they make up for the game’s biggest shortcoming: its story. It’s not spectacularly bad — just boring. Party member Lyria is the secret key the bad guys need to realize their evil plan, so they’re here to take her from you by any means necessary. That’s pretty much it. Normally, such a dull story would sink an RPG, but in this case, everything else around it is so good, it’s hard to care much that it’s just window dressing.
That’s not to say that Granblue Fantasy: Relink is nothing more than a series of fights, though. Between main missions, you’ll visit a handful of towns that are surprisingly well realized. From the rural village of Folca to the sprawling metropolis of Seedhollow, these settlements are bursting with detail and gorgeous art, and built in a way that makes them feel unexpectedly real. There’s not much to do there besides stock up for your next quest, but they remain some of my favorite video game towns.
Granblue Fantasy: Relink might not be the grandest adventure you ever go on in an RPG, but it’s got some of the best combat in the genre. Since release, it’s even got a handful of updates building on its strengths by adding new characters and multiplayer quests, making it an even better game than when it was released in early 2024.
