Granblue Fantasy: Relink is a shockingly good game. When people talk about this game the grind is mentioned a lot but I just want to make it clear that you don't really have to engage with the grind that much, you can just play the story and leave it at that, and you'll already have gotten plenty out of the game, you only really engage with the grind if you really enjoy playing the game and/or have friends to play with.
So here I'd rather focus on the rest of the game. Why am I saying this is shockingly good? Well Cygames doesn't really have a portfolio for this type of game. Cygames has mostly made fighting games (allegedly competent ones, but I don't play fighting games), small games and gachas. With that in mind, it would be normal for Granblue Fantasy: Relink to be a bit clunky.
But it's not. It's incredibly competent and complete. They nailed the visuals, the gameplay, the scene direction, the UI and UX (the game is full of QoL features, some of which I wouldn't even really have thought about if they were missing).... The game is simply pleasant to play all around. There's a lot of attention to details and a lot of love put into this game.
To give you an idea: The game has a fairly large cast of characters. The actual party size is limited to 4, but you can mostly put anybody out of ~20 characters in your party during the story. Every single character has voiced dialogue as you go through the story. For every single chapter. Even for characters they've just added with the DLC. Even for characters you can unlock [b]after[/b] those chapters. [b]All[/b] the characters have voiced banter with each other during combat, depending on who is in your party.
I was genuinely shocked when replaying a chapter with a character you unlock much later in the story when she started commenting on the events of the chapter. It's practically unreasonable for that character to have dialogue there, but the devs did it anyway.
Similarly, until the DLC where they found a way to reuse it (even then though, it's barely reused), there was a 2-minutes section during the story where you got to play as a mech, and they made it feel so good and complete that it felt like playing Armored Core 6! It was genuinely good enough they could have made a whole chapter out of it, but no, they had done all that work on that mech gameplay just for a *2-minutes section* of a chapter!!
All in all, this game would have been my personal pick for GOTY in 2024. Everything it needed to get right, it did, everything that would have been a nice bonus, it also did, I'd have to try hard to find things to complain about. If you're not sure this is your type of game, I encourage you to try the demo to get a feel for it!
