I've played this game for many, many years on mobile, I have a level 295 account, and wanted to check what this version was like; the answer was not very good. It's just as slow, clunky, awkward, and difficult to navigate as ever, so I'm not really sure what they were doing with this version exactly. No improvements to the insanely dated UI have been made, or the overly complex menus. It's technically more accessible I guess? Though it never was hard to make an account before and switch the game language to English, not that I can really recommend playing this game anyway...
Granblue Fantasy has a really engaging and interesting world with many unique locations, races, and loveable characters; there's a reason this game is still going after 12 years and doesn't seem to be stopping any time soon. Gameplay is actually pretty fun, at least I think it is, it's very old school JRPG feeling and I always really liked how full auto is a reward you have to works towards. In a lot of these types of games today, I'm turned away when I see I'm given a full autoplay option right away, as if the gameplay itself is meaningless and I should just let it play itself so I can get back to the real gameplay; gambling. In Granblue, if you full auto you will get your ass handed to you. Auto is a reward for an optimized grid and team that is strong enough to handle things without you. The grid system is pretty unique and satisfying to build up though a bit confusing to learn going in, and there's many excellently written and unique characters, many of whom were so iconic you can see remnants of them in other games. Some personal favourites include Nier, Vikala, and Vajra.
...and that's really where my praises end. Gacha games were a very new concept when this came out, and it would lay many fundamental bricks that are commonplace in this genre today. While most people were introduced to the 'genre' of gacha games 6 years later with Genshin Impact, Granblue was hard at work scamming people for generational wealth years before that. Though I play a few still, I think gacha is abhorent and very bad for people. It's exploitative and manipulative. That being said, I think Granblue is especially egregious. 3% SSR rate with 6% during a gala event isn't all that crazy for a gacha game, but they absolutely flood the SSR pool with weaker units. This is a game with powercreep so bad that we generally rate units out of ten on a tier list, and even units as high as a 9.7 are kinda average, maybe barely useable for end-game content depending on your grid and what you're trying to fight. That's a 9.7 out of 10. Sure these lower tier units are perfectly useable for a lower level player, and you may be thinking well, it's a PvE game, I'll just play who I like anyway; oh how wrong you are.
Granblue Fantasy is not a PvE game, it's PvEvP. You aren't fighting other players directly, rather racing them for rewards. Since the main fighting and grinding you will be doing is raid bosses, you probably will struggle to take some of them out on your own and will want to team up with other players to handle it faster. It is a raid boss after all. One problem with this, rewards are distributed based on contribution percentage towards the total health of the boss. For example, to get even a chance at the weapon you want to drop, and those are tiny, tiny chances, let's say you're doing a boss that requires you to contribute 20% of it's total HP in damage. If someone else who is way ahead of you due to either playing for way longer or the egregious amounts of P2W in the game were to blow up the boss very quickly, made more common by how bad the ping is for non Japanese players allowing those in Japan to act much faster, you get nothing of value. If a large group joins your raid and they quickly kill it before you can get your damage in, nothing for you. You could opt to not open up the raid to the public until you by yourself have done enough damage, but you can only host most raids two to three times a day and you're going to need to do these fights likely hundreds to even thousands of times if you're unlucky.
Granblue Fantasy is not a game that respects your time. You will be doing the same fights hundreds, thousands of times to get that 1% drop rate item. You will be struggling in harder content because they're only really made half accessible by characters you don't have because they're a seasonal limited available to gamble for once a year. The terrible gacha and rates used to be excused more because there were often big freebie events where you could get tons and tons of free pulls but more and more those types of events have been killed off. If you dare to join a crew and participate in the infamous "guild wars" events you will be throwing away hours and hours working the grind like a full time job for crumbs of rewards. Even the UI and menus are designed to waste your time, it's all slow, clunky, unintuitive, and features menus upon menus to do simple actions. To what end? An endless cycle of burning away time and brainpower to spend endless hours getting that hot new weapon for your grid so you can be a tiny bit stronger, and do it all again when the next new raid comes out. I've barely even mentioned how there's an entirely seperate P2W whale ecosystem where you can simply spend enough to feed a family of four for fourty fortnights to become stronger than the sucker who spent seven thousand attempts on the same boss for all four drops he needed. Great art, music, characters, and even solid gameplay are buried under a mountain of inconvenience, dated design, and contempt for you, the player.
If you have any interest in Granblue, the world, the story, the characters, play Granblue Fantasy Relink instead. While it's a bit of a soft reboot of the story featured in the original mobile game, some things are quite different, it's a much better game. Things are presented in a much more appealing, accessible, and less confusing way, and it still retains a lot of DNA from the original game. Grinding is still heavily present but it's optional instead of being the bulk of the game. Characters aren't locked behind spinning a wheel with real money just to get the ones you want to see. I also recommend the Granblue Fantasy Versus games, though less so on the front of wanting to learn about the characters and world and stuff as it sort of assumes you're already somewhat familiar. Even if you must play a gacha game for some reason, I really don't think there's any reason left today that it should be this one.
