I’ve been a fan of Granblue Fantasy for a long time, but it’s always been hard to sell it to other people. To start, for some reason it has never been officially available outside of specific regions despite having a fantastic English localization. There are some hurdles to jump through if you want to play it. Second, it’s a gacha game, and so understandably some people are going to skip it on principle. There is the Granblue Fantasy Versus series which has brought some broader name recognition, but that is an Arc System Works fighting game with a nice Granblue coat of paint. It doesn’t capture the specific magic of Granblue Fantasy that I want to share.

And so enters Granblue Fantasy: Relink, which seemed like the bridge I’ve been looking for. It’s a “real” video game with no gacha elements, it’s officially released in the USA and other regions, and it’s an action RPG which seems like a natural expansion of the original game’s premise. This could have been the series’ big debut to the rest of the world, a chance for everyone to finally “get” what I’ve been feeling for years. And yet having now finished the story mode and played some of the end game, I don’t think we’re quite there.

To really understand what I’m talking about, I need to explain why I like Granblue Fantasy. When I first started playing back in 2018, it felt like a love letter to my favorite games from my childhood. Granblue Fantasy is heavily inspired by the pre-VII Final Fantasy games and the later games in the Ivalice setting. You are the captain of a crew of skyfarers, sailing around in a giant airship and doing classic JRPG things: looking for crystals, battling elemental beasts, opposing an evil empire, fighting god(s)… it’s all there. We even get some Nobuo Uematsu tracks and he is literally in the game.

Presentation aside, there’s also something mechanically satisfying about those games. Managing and organizing your characters with different job classes, skills, and equipment was more fun to me than most action games. I remember after playing the first Final Fantasy as a kid, I would daydream about creating my own RPGs. I still have old notebooks with drawings of weapon grids I made when I was like 12. That IS Granblue Fantasy, mechanically speaking. There’s no overworld exploration and combat is essentially automatic. Most of your time is spent managing your inventory of characters and weapons, of which there are hundreds at this point. Maybe that doesn’t appeal to everyone, but I love it.

I think both the presentation and the mechanics of Granblue Fantasy are adequately represented in Relink. It’s a beautiful game with some fantastic action set pieces, and there is a wide variety of characters with different play styles to experiment with. Even if I don’t find Relink as mechanically satifsfying, I think the party building elements are a solid interpretation of what you get in the original game. So what is still missing? There’s one more element and it’s the hardest to explain. I guess it’s.. the vibes? Look, I said it was hard to explain, but I’ll do my best.

I believe some unintentional magic happened in the course of Granblue Fantasy’s history. The main storyline, which was never really that interesting, has been supplanted by dozens of side stories that are much more endearing. Many of these are fun slice of life segments or silly parodies. One of my favorites is a take on the Sharknado movies, of all things. These stories always have positive and inclusive messages while rarely feeling too naive or patronizing. There are also more serious events, but even these have more impact because we’ve taken the time to fall in love with this world. In short, Granblue Fantasy is best as a charming fantasy slice of life series, one that is punctuated with occasional big, badass moments. To me, this is what makes the series special.

It’s this feeling, the vibe if you will, that Relink simply does not have time to develop. In fact, they don’t spend any time at all introducing the crew of the Grandcypher and it feels like they’re assuming you played the original game. You dive head first into a cookie cutter plot about an evil priestess trying to destroy the world, while also trying to sell an unlikable, cardboard cutout of a man as the game’s cool anti-hero. The story mode races you through a series of non-stop, high stakes battles and gives you very little reason to care. If you’re just looking at Relink as an action game, this is fine. My point is, it doesn’t fully convey the magic of Granblue Fantasy’s world.

Interestingly, it’s the post-story end game that has the most potential for this. You find yourself taking on small scale odd jobs to help around town. While there are almost no cut scenes or dialogue to support these, the small bits that do exist are more endearing than anything the story mode throws at you. For example, seeing a few seconds of dialogue where the aforementioned anti-hero man helps a little kid with his sword training made me like him a lot more than when he joined me to fight god. Maybe it would have been better to start with these small events and work our way up. Let us get to know this world so later on we are motivated to defend it.

I want to reiterate, this is not a review of Relink. It’s a good game that is worth checking out regardless of your history with the series. As a fan, I Ioved seeing the familiar faces and places tranlsated to the big screen, and as an action game it’s just fun to play. All I’m saying is you may still need to play the original game if you want the full Granblue Fantasy experience, and that makes me feel a little disappointed.