Although Cygames has at all times been a cellular sport developer, the corporate has traditionally been fairly good about supporting its video games with some wonderful console-focused spinoffs. Shadowverse acquired Shadowverse: Champion’s Battle, Battle Champs acquired Little Noah: Scion of Paradise, and Dragalia Misplaced acquired… oh.
Although the corporate’s standard Granblue Fantasy cellular RPG remains to be going sturdy over ten years after its debut, it acquired its personal spinoff in 2024 with Granblue Fantasy: Relink. Now that it’s been reinvigorated with the launch of a shiny new growth, Cygames has ported it to the Change 2 as Granblue Fantasy: Relink – Infinite Ragnarok. I’m happy to report that it suits completely with the moveable {hardware}, combining thrilling motion, tons of replayability, and delightful graphics to make for an RPG journey that I’d recommend choosing up at your earliest comfort.
The story takes place within the Skylands, a set of floating islands drifting amongst an countless sea of clouds, and locations you within the position of a self-insert primary character known as “The Captain”. The Captain fashioned a religious bond known as a life hyperlink with a lady named Lyria who has the highly effective magical skill to seize and summon godlike creatures, and the 2 of you’ve got fashioned a sizeable social gathering of adventurers, nobles, and mercenaries who journey the skies in an airship known as the Grandcypher.
You and your social gathering are finally searching for a legendary place on the finish of the skies known as Estalucia, however you’re rapidly deterred by a spiritual group known as the Pilgrims of Avia who’re after the identical purpose for their very own nefarious causes. In pursuit of this, they rapidly seize Lyria to realize entry to her powers, kicking off a fifteen-hour marketing campaign through which your social gathering pursues the pilgrims to free their good friend and cease the pilgrims.
Admittedly, the narrative is the weakest a part of the full package deal right here, however that’s to not say that it’s dangerous. A part of the issue is that this narrative is canon with and set nicely after the occasions of the cellular sport, and whereas there’s some supplementary flashback and journal content material that helps to clarify all the things that occurred up until this level, it finally offers a newcomer the identical feeling they’d get in the event that they began watching Sport of Thrones in its fifth season. There’s simply numerous backstory and subplots right here that don’t get targeted on very a lot, which may really feel somewhat disorienting.
Past this, the story itself is solely okay. That is the form of sport that likes to lean on many well-worn anime tropes, akin to a loud-mouthed, cute, and foolish aspect character who tags together with the social gathering on their journey or overcoming the egocentric huge dangerous on the finish with the facility of friendship.
Such tropes aren’t essentially executed poorly, however after the preliminary credit roll, it doesn’t really feel like a narrative that amounted to greater than the sum of its elements. All the identical, it’s a brilliantly well-paced journey, with the highlights being the numerous huge set-piece boss fights that swing for the fences with great spectacle.
Many have in contrast the gameplay loop of this launch to Capcom’s famed Monster Hunter franchise and never with out cause. Whereas the story mode is essentially oriented round a linear set of enormous and explorable ranges, the postgame (and the actual meat of all of it) is constructed round a quest counter the place you choose missions from a menu after which dispatch to varied arenas and small locales to kill bosses and enemy hordes for drops and rewards.
Although you’re at all times taking part in as a lead character, you dispatch in a celebration of 4, with the opposite three both being piloted by surprisingly competent AI or crammed in by different gamers you’ll be able to join with on-line or in native wi-fi.
Fight feels a bit like a cross between Kingdom Hearts and Dynasty Warriors, specializing in hack ‘n’ slash gameplay that mixes in expertise and combos in a method that provides a delicate ingredient of shallow technique. Each character has a base package of sunshine and heavy assaults that may be blended collectively for various combo results, whereas a fast menu of cooldown-limited expertise enable for the utilization of extra highly effective assaults, buffs, and different talents.
From time to time, you may as well execute a Hyperlink Assault or Chain Burst to actually convey the ache, working along with your complete social gathering to eradicate enemies with huge display screen nukes. With this arrange, it’s straightforward sufficient for newcomers to get the gist of enemy encounters and to have the ability to choose up new character with relative ease, however that’s solely scratching the floor.
A part of the brilliance of the fight system is present in how every character has a particular playstyle that fully alters the best way you strategy the combos. For those who’re taking part in as Eustace, you struggle from a distance utilizing a reloadable rifle that builds up a meter with every profitable shot—as soon as it fills up, you get entry to a restricted clip of particular ammo that does a ton of injury.
When taking part in as Yodarha, a dual-wielding swordsman, you’ll be able to chain collectively combos a lot quicker than different characters whereas additionally buying ‘marks’ for every combo finisher he executes. These marks can then be spent to amplify expertise with far more highly effective results and injury outputs.
There are just a few dozen characters to unlock, every simply as distinctive because the final, which results in tons of mechanical depth to find as you experiment with totally different four-member group compositions for taking down missions and executives effectively. This goes a great distance in bolstering the general replayability; provided that that is the sort of sport the place you’ll be repeatedly grinding totally different bosses and fight encounters for drops and loot, it could possibly be straightforward for restricted playstyles to make the fiftieth run of Quakadile really feel a bit boring.
However not solely do the additional characters make the fight itself extra attention-grabbing by various your strategy to encounters, however in addition they act as an ongoing incentive for the fight rewards as you’re employed to construct your social gathering to the utmost potential.
Character constructing is a big a part of the gameplay loop, and Cygames has finished a terrific job right here of providing you with a wide range of methods for powering up characters with out making issues too overly complicated or summary. Past easy leveling, the principle method you’ll widen your characters’ talent repertoires and stats is thru a easy node-based talent tree.
Although every tree itself is quite linear, they go very deep to accommodate the veritable torrent of factors you get showered with. You acquire talent factors from exploration, leveling, and quest rewards, however given that each one characters make the most of the identical factors, you’ll must be picky in whose tree you determine to funnel your newest factors windfall into.
Past this, your characters could be additional amplified via their weapons, every of which could be cast and refined at a blacksmith to lift stats additional, and thru their sigils. Sigils act as equippable passives that may enhance particular stats and offer you a gentle ‘construct’ for a personality to raised form the position that you really want them to play in your social gathering. You get showered with these sigils as quest rewards, and whereas that is initially a random course of, you’ll be able to later entry a option to dismantle ineffective sigils in alternate for helpful sources to get a lot better ones.
Taken altogether, this results in a gameplay loop the place you’re by no means at a loss for one thing helpful to do subsequent. There’s at all times one other character who might use a greater weapon, or a particular sigil you’re hoping to search out, and these little objectives assist to make the grind rewarding alongside the best way as you construct your social gathering as much as tackle more and more harder content material that may yield even higher rewards.
And whereas the joy of the grind step by step wanes as you push ever deeper into it, the method itself is smoothed fairly a bit via the inclusion of high quality of life options that minimize out irritation, akin to a ‘wishlist’ that allows you to spotlight enemy drops you’re searching for and type for quests which can be seemingly to present them to you.
Although the entire sport is new to Nintendo audiences, the rationale this launch is again in lots of headlines is because of the launch of the all-new Infinite Ragnarok growth. For followers of Monster Hunter, that is analogous to the ‘G-Rank’ expansions that usually come a pair years after the launch of a brand new entry—Infinite Ragnarok not solely provides a brand new postgame storyline to observe, however enormously expands the endgame with a brand new problem stage, tons of recent missions, weapons, characters, sigils, and an entire roguelite sport mode that distills the development loop even additional.
You’ll be able to entry bits and items of the brand new content material early on, however the bulk of it’s accessed after you’ve cleared the comparatively transient story mode and although it’s a bit disappointing that you simply’ve set to work for it a bit, Infinite Ragnarok is nicely well worth the wait.
The bottom sport was already the sort of factor through which it doesn’t actually unfold its wings till you’ve reached the meaty endgame content material, and the growth content material supercharges this additional by providing you with harder content material to check your well-trained social gathering towards and loads of new methods to energy them up even additional.
Whereas a lot of the growth is solely geared toward providing you with extra, the brand new Conflux mode acts as one thing that’s distinctly new. When you’ve unlocked this, you’ll be able to drop your social gathering right into a twenty-ish minute gauntlet through which you clear rooms of enemies and executives in alternate for unique rewards and a basic roguelite ‘choose 3’ boon alternative.
These randomly generated boons will give you varied passive buffs that’ll bolster your social gathering only for that run, making successive runs that rather more attention-grabbing as totally different boons encourage you into totally different playstyles.
The bottom sport was already largely pointed in direction of working via chains of bite-sized missions, so it feels just like the Conflux is a pure match for the general gameplay loop. Not solely can this be an efficient option to catch up characters which have been sitting on the bench for some time and will use a gear tune up and stage enhance, nevertheless it serves as its personal separate department of development as you run varied events via more and more more durable ranges of enemy waves. The one downside is that it could possibly at the moment solely be performed solo, which feels somewhat odd given how a lot the remainder of the content material permits for co-op play.
Visually, this sport employs an artwork fashion paying homage to one thing like Tales of Come up, with anime graphics which can be tempered with only a little bit of realism. Character designs are memorable and distinctive with out being too excessive, whereas animation high quality is impressively advanced, notably throughout the huge Chain Bursts.
Probably the most constant spectacle comes throughout the fight encounters, the place 4 characters independently triggering all types of flashy combos and expertise can result in a display screen awash in rainbow sparks and wonderful fireworks. All this runs at a clean 30 FPS in docked and handheld; some could also be dissatisfied that there’s not not less than an choice for 40 FPS, nevertheless it’s nonetheless spectacular that there aren’t any apparent hitches even with all of the particle results and animations taking part in out directly on display screen.
