Monster Hunter-likes have captured the gaming landscape by storm. While the idea of grinding for hours to get specific loot or abilities isn’t a terribly new concept, it’s taken a shape of its own in recent years thanks to the grandiose popularity of 2017’s Monster Hunter World. From Koei Tecmo’s 2023 release Wild Hearts to Bandai Namco’s God Eater series, a surge of games have tried to capture Capcom’s specific flavor of combat, pace, and progression, and spin it into its own, unique flavor of number-crunching goodness.
In this fierce climate enters Cygames’ immensely popular Granblue Fantasy: Relink. Based on the studio’s own 2014 mobile game, Relink is a game with a very curious development history, as it was originally announced back in 2016 and spent years suffering from its fair share of development issues. Despite that, the game manages to capture what makes this genre work by learning from Monster Hunter’s strengths and applying a lot of what makes its mobile predecessor so addicting.
Granblue Is About the Grind
2014’s Granblue Fantasy (“GBF”) is a gacha turn-based RPG about two things: fighting extremely complicated bosses and grinding for weapons to make this process faster and easier, similar in vein to MMOs. Bosses, referred to in-game as “raids,” are fights with a lot of mechanical complexity that require strategy, setup, and, particularly in the endgame, communication between players to actually beat. These fights usually reward materials, be it upgrades or weapons, which players can add to their “grids,” or equipment slots.
Weapons in Granblue Fantasy are particularly important because of the game’s skill system. This system, which determines the viability and general strength of a player’s account, consists of pairing a “main weapon” with nine other weapons to create a full grid. Because players are limited in the number of weapons they can have equipped at once, and because of a lot of funky math behind the scenes, players are encouraged to maximize skill distribution in a number of ways.
For instance, you can raise the soft cap on weapon damage through certain skills, allowing you to deal more damage with other skills and attacks. Enmity gives you a hard damage multiplier as your HP is reduced. Majesty boosts both your maximum HP and Attack, while Voltage boosts your attack based on the number of weapon types in a grid at once. These skills work as passive buffs to your entire party, with some even buffing your attack rate or increasing the odds of critical damage.
In short, a lot of GBF’s progression relies on maximizing damage and utility, and, in the late-game bosses, being able to circumvent or bypass mechanics that require a certain approach or condition to clear.
Similar Grind, Different Feel
Relink takes a similar yet ultimately different approach to progression. On a basic level, the game’s loop is about improving your numbers. Like its mobile predecessor, Relink tasks players with improving various stats—Strength, Health, Defense, Critical Rate, etc.—and building their character in such a way that they hit for so much damage that enemy health bars melt in seconds. Unlike GBF, however, Relink isn’t a live-service game; it isn’t even turn-based. Instead, it’s an action RPG with a definite beginning, middle, and end, meaning there’s a limit on how strong a character can be relative to the strongest endgame encounter you face.
The most important part of Relink is the sigil system. Similar to how the grid system works in 2014’s Granblue Fantasy, in Relink the player has a limited amount of equipable sigils that change the specific character’s stats and provide helpful modifiers. From dealing more damage to gaining more invulnerability frames while dodging, these abilities are immensely useful and help you hone your character in a specific way.
As you play the game, you fight harder bosses that can drop better sigils and more materials with which to upgrade your character. These upgrades afford permanent stat boosts and modifiers, thereby letting you deal more damage and survive harder encounters as you try and reach the top-tier bosses. This loop of finding/forging new gear to fight new bosses that drop even better sigils that’ll let you deal even more damage (and so on) makes the gameplay experience feel all the more rewarding. Instead of “making” a build that will eventually be strong, you’re simply becoming strong.
The key idea here is in the brevity of the process. Granblue Fantasy (2014) is a game that’s measured in weeks’ worth of work, where you’ll be grinding the same bosses again and again for the chance of getting that single piece of the giant puzzle you’re striving toward. Relink, meanwhile, streamlines the process in a way that still feels like Granblue Fantasy but without the time commitment. Different, but still the same.
To me, this was immensely clever. Condensing the core gameplay loop of Granblue Fantasy into something more bite-sized and easy to grasp, yet still complex and rewarding, was nothing but a stroke of genius from the developers. They know their game well enough that they were able to almost effortlessly convert the entire structure of the original game into not only a high-quality console game, but also an action RPG, and on their first try no less.
Final Thoughts
As a longtime player of Granblue Fantasy, this familiar yet new feedback loop entranced me for the duration of my playtime. Grinding for gear never felt like a chore, as I always felt like the next step in breaking the damage cap was on the horizon, waiting for me in the next encounter.
And as I fought through some extremely rough and difficult foes (curse you, double dragon fights!) I realized that Relink really is something special. It’s a game that captures the best parts of the GBF experience without the hassle of farming for minuscule loot drops or having to run boring fights over and over again for a single material I’d need 100 of to complete a weapon.
While I’m a little disappointed that (as of this writing) there’s no DLC or expansion on the horizon, I hope the team at Cygames is able to expand on this system in the future and make something that can truly enrapture the monster-hunting community again.
Granblue Fantasy: Relink is available now on PlayStation 4, PS5, and PC. MSRP: $59.99. It is currently on sale for 40% off, through October 24.
