Game review

I take notes as I play the game for things that I think deserve a mention. If something was not mentioned, it is considered "fine" and not noteworthy in any sense.

Granblue Fantasy: Relink

Pros

• Tales/FF/SC
  The game had a lot of big vibes of what I think of Star Ocean, Tales of and Final Fantasy. In some way felt like confort food even tho it's something completely new. The game also have a obsession about crystals, but it's called "shards" in this game.
  
  
• Bahamut
  
• Dashli island
  
• Cutscene summary
  If you skip a cutscene you get a short summary
• Travel to client
  A overlooked convinience feature to just return when you do a lot of side-missions.
  
  

Neutral

• Pet
  That pet sounded like a vtuber. A new generation of the annoying helper Navi from Ocarina of Time.
  
  
• Big roster
  Huge amount of characters, but there’s no introduction to barely any. No idea who all these people are.
  
  
• Non-cancelling combos
  When you’re trying to stop attacking, or when you finished off an enemy, you have to wait for all combos to finish even tho you’re not attacking anyone, you’re just attacking air
  
  
• Controller scheme
  I wanted something between type A and C, but there wasn't a perfect one for me. Dodge on R2, just unnatural for me.
  
  

Cons

• Bad intro/story pacing
  I was on the edge of quitting around 3 hours in because it was just so bad. Very cliche and at same time there's so many questions everywhere.
  
  Why are we flying into a tornado or wind? why are we flying to the next island? What's the purpose of us travelling? After we rescued some village people the guy said ”we should return to our search” and I’m like… search for what? what quest are we on even. Why is Lyria being captured now? Why we are going to Estalucia?
  
  
• Out of place voice acting
  I'm less then a hour into the game and the main charachter said "I can't believe how long it's been since we first met" or "we have been through a lot"... I'm like, we are still in chapter 1, we just met.
  
  
• Graphics
  For a new PS5 game it really looks like a PS3 game.
  
  
• Radar
  The game have a map, but no mini-map in the UI just a radar which was completely useless where I constantly had to open the map back and forth which take you out of the moment all the time when you're example in a town.
  
  
• No tactics
  When there’s a boss with mobs, there’s no way to tell the other party members to focus on the boss or the mobs. It all seems random what they going to attack, and if it’s a boss where you need to protect someone, they won’t protect anyone and you have to jump between protecting and fighting the boss your self at same time. This was very noticeable with the ice boss "Scramilimite”
  
  
• Chapter Skyward Heart…Ø
  The post game where doing the boss quests to complete the Roman quest, not as fun. Padded health like MMO bosses.
  
  Like after the Ancient dragon on very hard lvl 75 while being around 15 levels underlevelled as I was. It was still doable but it just took forever because I never actually grinded in the game.
  
  You have a time limit on 30min which isn’t an issue, but still, taking 10-12 min?, that’s a lot of me basically mostly spamming triangle.
  
  It's very MMO style with very long battles. Has quite fun mechanics, you don’t die instantly. Then the Overdrive phases is like another level.
  
  When trying to battle the "Extreme Excavator". It was clear, it was a MMO boss. With my level, after getting down to 47%, it was impossible to open the core solo because I couldn’t defeat the pillars fast enough so it would just continuous spawn new ones because I was level 65 while the boss was 85. I never died but kinda sucks when it’s an artificial limitations like that while other bosses can be beaten. It sucks more because it’s part of the ”Extended story”- Saving Rolan, or what some call ”True Ending”. So I watched that cutscene on YouTube. And those YouTube videos people was level 85-100.

Notes

• When navigating the menu, the sound effect sounds like something cut from a Final Fantasy game.
• Gallanza was the first fun boss battle whent he game started to get turned around for the better.
• Rolled credit at 11 hours in.

Final thoughts

The first half of the story of the game was bad, it was really bad for someone like me who's a newcomber to the series, but as the game progressed it got a lot better after the initial hours. This game had really great boss fights and after the first half of the story, it became really fun.