Wccftech recently traveled to San Francisco, CA to get a rundown for the upcoming Granblue Fantasy: Relink amid some of the studio’s first gameplay previews since it was first revealed nearly seven years ago. After a brief demonstration by Cygames America CEO Motohiro Okubo, General Director (on Relink) Tetsuya Fukuhara, and Relink’s Director Yasuyuki Kaji, we were presented with a brief rundown of Cygames’ history and what’s to come in Granblue Fantasy: Relink.
Granblue Fantasy is already approaching its ten-year anniversary, having first launched in 2014 and reaching 35 million registered Skyfarers. Okubo-san highlighted some of their cross-media efforts and accomplishments including fifteen volumes of artbooks and graphical archives and nine full soundtrack albums.
Getting a brief overview of Relink, Yasuyuki Kaji ran through a number of key points including a self-contained story that aims to wrap up neatly without any major cliffhangers. The team at Cygames America recommended watching at least the first season of the Granblue Fantasy anime to become familiar with the lore and characters within. In addition to the single-player experience, Granblue Fantasy: Relink also features four-player co-op with more than 100 quests to play through and a robust amount of post-endgame content to appeal to the more hardcore audience. Along the way, players will have a variety of castmates to customize and collectibles to gather.
Many of the quests will fit into the standard action RPG modes, including Survival, Time Attack, Boss Battles, and more. Players will be able to link up in two different ways: visiting a town and meeting other players face-to-face, or via matchmaking with other players that want to engage in the same type of quest.
Given the focus of Granblue Fantasy: Relink as a party-driven character action game, players will always approach a challenge head-on in a party of four while only one character is controlled by the player at a time; the remainder being CPU-controlled. Through a variety of link and chain attacks, players can integrate all four champions into a given combo and culminate in an ultimate Skybound Art attack. Kaji-san reiterated that the combat was intended to be enjoyed by players of all skill levels. Various assist modes can automate some aspects of the combat, from automatically Healing/Guarding/Dashing up to a full assist mode where elaborate combos can be pulled off with a single button.
Before a given stage, players can customize their characters by unlocking mastery nodes to unlock new skills or power up raw stats. Up to four skills can be assigned at a time and swapped out during the initiation phase. Players can also equip various weapons and sigils that serve as Relink’s accessory options as well.
In the introductory setup for my hands-on time with Granblue Fantasy: Relink, I took an extra moment to check the localization options available to the player., Even during this early hands-on demo of Relink, both an English and Japanese dub was available while subtitles included the typical regions: EFIGS, Japanese, Portuguese, Simplified/Traditional Chinese, and Korean.
For my mission hands-on against a giant undead foe, I went with Siegfried, the giant sword-wielding bruiser that integrated some unique timed mechanics into his attacks. By precisely timing attacks, his slashes will glow red and indicate higher raw damage to each strike. This proved to be a major boon, as the mission held a secret objective. By defeating Gerasene in less than five minutes, a second secret Rock Golem boss would spawn. This boss was a much greater challenge, as it was level 25 while my party of four was only level 20 at the time.
Granblue Fantasy: Relink takes that renowned character action prowess that Platinum Games is largely known for and instills it into a party-based adventure. Players can tag attacks into one another and chain off special attacks, culminating in Link Attacks and ultimately a Full Chain with enough of a team effort. Character skills and attacks operate off of a cooldown rather than MP or resource management, so they can be integrated into regular combos with enough frequency. Both the Guard on L1 and Dodge on R2 can be perfectly timed for Perfect variations of each; the latter providing a brief invulnerability and ‘Witch Time’ for those familiar with the associate slowdown mechanics. As typical for character action games, healing potions are in short supply with only thirteen in total brought along for the mission, one of which being a self revive if the main character gets knocked out.
After our hands-on session wrapped up, we had the opportunity to sit down with the Granblue Fantasy Versus Rising and Relink directors and interpreters in a group session to discuss both titles. Here, we spoke with the development staff specifically about Granblue Fantasy: Relink, and answers are attributed to the staff as a whole rather than individuals.
You’ve talked about the number of quests there are [in Granblue Fantasy: Relink], but can you talk about how long the story mode is in terms of hours or chapters?
Cygames America: To complete the main story, we estimate that it will take a player between 20 and 25 hours from start to credits. There is an additional post-game sequence that will bring that time up to about 30 to 35 hours. For players who want to get more out of the game and grind that content a little bit more, that can stretch anywhere up to 100 or more hours. But for the main game, that will take about 20 hours.
Will there be multiple difficulty levels per quest, and if so, is that included in the total 100+ quests?
It’s not that each quest has its own difficulty level but rather quests are split up by their difficulty levels. That 100-hour figure that I gave you earlier includes if you play through all of the hardest quests.
The one quest that we played today in the hands-on session did have a secret boss if you completed all of the objectives. Will every quest have something of that nature, such as additional content if you clear all objectives?
You can expect secret content like that, but it’s not to say that every quest has something like that.
To challenge the higher-difficulty quests, is there a character or equipment level requirement?
There is no formal character or equipment level to take on [quests]. However, there is a concept in that game that we as an industry are calling the Power Level which includes things like your character level and all of the equipment you’ve leveled up. There are a lot of things that go into that calculation and each quest in the game has a recommended Power Level. That’s not to say that you can’t complete the quest if you don’t meet the Power Level. However, it will be extremely difficult because the game has been balanced around reaching that Power Level, so we strongly recommend players to achieve that Power Level First.
With that Power Level, if a player is primarily playing as Gran or Io and they switch over to Siegfried, is there any progress that carries over for the new character?
Each character has their own Power Level. However, accessories called Sigils, when equipped, also factor into that Power Level. So if you equip those characters with higher level Sigils, that will influence their individual Power Level as well.
So the Sigils aren’t locked to a specific character and any character can equip them?
Yes, you can switch between them.
What content cannot be played with Assist Mode?
After you clear the story, there will be several tiers of quest difficulty, and that very last tier is not playable in Assist Mode.
Last question: Is Granblue Fantasy: Relink intended to be more of a serious story, or will you plan to include any April Fool’s content as well?
[Relink] is mostly serious and there’s not really anything like the April Fool’s content that we can think of.
Thank you for your time.
Early adopters of Granblue Fantasy: Relink (and Versus Rising) will gain an exclusive DLC outfit for Bran/Djeeta in addition to the choice between the Eternals Transcendence or Evokers Domain sets; players can purchase the other title to obtain the remaining DLC kit.
Granblue Fantasy: Relink will be available across PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, and PC on February 1st, 2024.
