Granblue Fantasy: Relink is the result of a Duke Nukem Forever-tier long development cycle, and quite unlike DNF, Relink actually bears all the polish one could expect of a game honed in development for over a decade. Relink is based off the Granblue Fantasy franchise, initially created in the fighting game franchise Granblue Fantasy Versus, and popularized primarily through pixiv pictures of the attractive females leading to a spinoff webgame that nobody plays (As a reminder, like all high tier video game sites, TMDvidya does not allow comments.). You do not need to know any of that, the developers are well aware this will likely be most players' first exposure to the franchise as nobody played the fighter either. All you really need to know is this is a fantasy world of airships, sky islands, and ancient dragons. You play as Gran (or Djeeta, the alternate female version of Gran, if your lust for her design outweighs the common sense idea that a protagonist who leads a crew and would risk everything to protect a loli's smile obviously has to be a dude. Reasonable to be sure but I am calling the protagonist Gran from here out.) on a conveniently episodic adventure completely localized to a single sky island archipelago and the issues therein, but can at any point switch out to any of the game's dozen other characters, all members of Gran's crew.
After a brief but action-packed opening, you are soon dropped into the action. Platinum's DNA shines through in the combat (They were involved in the development at some point, but I am unaware of how much they worked on the final product.), and the polish of the game is obvious in the many beautiful environments you run through. Every character has combos, air combos, cooldown activated abilities, a Bayonetta-style dodge offset, timed dodges, timed parries. The full suite of modern action game design is on display here, and at all times you have your character and three teammates running along chopping up baddies at the same time. The end point of all this is Monster Hunter, so rather than having some of the more involved DMC style command moves or NG style combos, every character has a different kit for dealing bigger damage. There are too many engines to describe here, but most of them involve completing combos to build up a meter and then cashing it in with a heavy attack, but others work off of parries and uninterrupted chain attacks. Other characters specialized in ranged combat and throwing bombs from a distance. One transforms entirely, TWICE, as part of iterating through his kit, multiple times in a fight. There are over a dozen characters with unique abilities to work with here, and the way this game manages to bridge character action and MonHun style design is truly a work of exceptional game design talent.
The MonHun stuff comes later though. The entire story loop through the game is a series of linear levels, all with a great deal of variety and some top notch boss design. The AI never gets in your way, never botches these fights, never trivializes them, and always contributes meaningfully. You bounce between ice caverns, exploring deserts, a daring airship battle that seamlessly has you leaping from ships you just destroyed to other ships as naturally as if you were making the jumps yourself. No Platinum game... hell, no action game period in recent memory managed set pieces as elaborate as this keeping the action totally smooth and in-engine. One of the game's better set pieces involves a giant stone ancient magitech golem boss, as big as any Shadow of the Collossus boss, set up with a whole fleet of your allies flying in airships overhead. Totally in engine, you can watch them fly around, the boss swatting one of them down to a flaming wreck while the others fire at him, while the airships drop cannons to give you something to do. Every inch of this game is similar drawn, animated, and filled out to perfection. The budget NEVER runs out. From the alleys of the hub towns to the most generic mining caves, every boss, every character, even the soundtrack and so, so much incidental dialogue for every possible combination you could play, everything is beautifully crafted into an exquisite experience. (One of my favorite bits of soulful design: If you are playing with a team of only the cuter girl characters and you all fire your ultimate team attack, the girls will shout in a proper idol fashion "Sei no!" before shouting the name of the attack while having even one more serious girl or male character will have the gang shout a more approriate sky pirate exclamation.) There is not a bad level or set piece in the campaign and even the human bosses do a great job of attacking areas and being designed such that a furball of 4 people attacking 1 person does not turn to an unreadable mess.
If you just bought the game for the campaign, you would almost certainly get your money's worth, but the systems at play are meant to eventually serve MonHun style boss fighting, and once you clear the story, that half of the game opens up. Of course, they leave a cliffhanger at the end to try to guilt you into staying for the post-game "Man we saved the whole world! That is great guys. Just... uh... shame about that one guy we couldn't save. Maybe if we do all that MonHun bullshit... eh, who knows?" But honestly you should not need the incentive, the game is certainly good enough to keep playing and the bosses all deserve refighting. At this point you have to engage with the game's growth systems seriously. You cannot really replay the story, you have leveled entirely out of it, at least until you get through the story part of the post-game at which point, mercifully, the game will unlock a max level story difficulty. The game opens up several grind systems taken from the webgame. The one weakness I could charge this game with is precisely that it takes so much from the webgame. You amass scores of equippable sigils and every character needs a full set, but the game throws so many non-decisions at you in this system: Do you equip "More damage" or "Resist a status effect only one boss in the entire game applies?" So everyone basically wants a duplicate set of the same sigils. A half dozen weapons to craft per character that all give passive bonuses so you need even the ones you would never touch leveled. The grind here becomes endless, almost gacha-tier in the amount you have to do. Now you can actually bring friends along through online co-op for any of these fights, but even if you do not, the AI do not fail you even as the bosses get harder. You do have four mouths to feed instead of just one using them though. And if you want to change characters, the cost of raising up another is enormous. This would be the second major crime I could charge this game with: The bosses in this game are easily good enough for 30-50 replays, but you need about three times that many to see the end of your grind ambition realized, and that does not even count some of the mook fights that really are not worth more than a dozen replays before you start getting bored but you still need the drops so... get grinding buddy.
I lambasted the MonHun half of the game quite a lot, but that is because I put a LOT of hours into it. It really is that good, and it is the sort of game you will definitely say "This fucking SUCKS" while you queue up for another run at the same boss. The top shelf gameplay still holds up, and a great game with obnoxious grind is still, at the end of the day, a great game you can keep playing over and over forever and always make some level of progress. There is quite a lot of variety on offer in the bosses, each setting the pace and demanding different play styles. Even the giant magitech boss I mentioned earlier shows up in the MonHun half with all the scripted segments totally removed focusing on the actual combat. The second ending comes well before the grind peters out, so if you just want to save the last friend, you just need to knock out most of the rematches and the unique post-game bosses and the game finally lets go of the leash and you can take it easy or keep pushing into the post-game challenge bosses (And you have to if you want the post-released patched in extra characters, just get all 30 of the grind drops from these bosses!). All the way up to even the toughest boss in the game with several phases of precise dodging and demanding scripting, the AI will still serve you, so even if the playerbase trickles to nothing, you can still play this game totally solo and not miss out. The marriage of character action and Monster Hunter is what really makes this game unique and memorable. Nothing can replace Capcom's seminal series in that niche, but Granblue Fantasy: Relink makes one of the best showings of taking aim at the crown we have ever seen, and managed to deliver a game that is on every level worth the decade long wait.
