English
5.0
I'll cover some of the features I find enticing in this review, starting with the basics. This will be a very in depth review and covers majority of what I love about this game.
Graphics: Beautiful. Simply beautiful. There are some really intricate illustrations in the story cutscenes as well. There's also an appearance feature where you can change your character's outfit to story art, paid and free costumes, or even the multitude of awakening splash arts from all variants of the same character.
Storyline: This is where the game gets really good. I'll say that in the early stages of the main story, where it was written many years ago, could definitely be better. But the latter was absolutely fantastic, and I can't ask for a more beautiful fantasy setting than a world above the clouds.
Gameplay: Now this is a bit tricky to review. The gameplay is really in depth with many layers of mechanics, but it's not something very accessible to newer players with their limited character lineup and grid. But know that characters are not everything and the tier list is not a gospel that'll fix everything. This game relies extremely heavily on your grid, or in another words, your weapons and their synergy with summons. All essential weapons you need are farmable and you don't need to pay a penny to reach endgame, just a huge amount of grinding. In fact, you'll be able to hit the damage cap with almost any character with a solid grid so although character kit is very important, it's not an entirely a necessity and you can build a team of your favorite characters instead. Overall, the gameplay is really fun and at times, challenging. I'll explain accessibility of characters shortly.
Sound/Music: The sound effects in combat is especially gratifying once you're used to it and able to dish out solid damage. The music is wonderful as well, and there are certain boss fights with their own original soundtrack, some of which has lyrics. There are also outfits, summons and characters you can have in the home screen that changes the background music, as well as charge attacks that changes the bgm in combat.
Characters: Gosh I love this bit. The devs evidently invested a lot of effort in building up every one of their individual characters. From what I've seen so far, the ratio of girls to boys in this game is about equal, that means husbandos and waifus are both plentiful. Apart from the already complex lore, and the multitude of events where even less common characters are featured, characters have fate, and cross-fate episodes, that further elaborate their lore and relationships. Furthermore, every year during occasions like Valentines Day and White Day, every character has special dialogues prepared for you. They add episodes to every character every year and with hundreds of characters to prepare, you can expect the developers to have already planned them out long beforehand. In these events, you can give and receive chocolate from the opposing gender in the respective, appropriate occasions.
Now that I've covered the basics, I'll go into the much less commonly discussed features I find promising.
GACHA: There are only 2 times you should pull in gbf. Flash Gala and Premum Gala, that is held during the mid and end of every month respectively. Why? Because not only are exclusive characters available to the pool then, but also SSR rates are doubled. The characters are consistent and will return without fail, which is why it is recommended to save a total of 300 pulls (includes both crystal draws and ticket draws) to spark a unit of choice. Gacha pools have weapons and summons, with some weapons unlocking their respective characters. Note that gacha weapons won't be used till very end game so it's recommended to not withdraw any gacha items from your crate unless it's absolutely necessary.
The Grind: Be prepared as Granblue Fantasy has a truckload of content and grind waiting for you. The grind is unlike any other game I've played before. In fact, you can expect to be playing GBF as much as a typical mmorpg as the stamina system's practically non-existent with the sheer amount of stamina pots, berries they provide through events and other sources. I'm afraid that describing the amount of grind isn't enough to prepare you for what's to come. By all means, please, experience the feeling of slowing sinking into the abyss yourself.
The primary sources of grinding would be Story Quests, Special Quests, Events, Arcarum, Casino and Raids. Story Quests and Special Quests are basically where you farm for most basic mats, Arcarum is expedition based where you can get exclusive rewards from exploring areas and defeating monsters, casino and raids and pretty self explanatory.
I'll be covering the various Events and very briefly, the Casino here.
Limited Events: The game has been 6 years running thus far. You're probably thinking. "Damn! I missed so many events." Now first of, I'll like to once again bring up the topic, that all essentials to a good grid can be farmed without events. Events are in most cases, just fodders for skill levelling your weapons which is plentiful elsewhere."I don't care! I'm a collector! I want all events" Don't worry. All events will rerun once, before permanently added to side stories. Yes. Even now, events from years ago are still accessible there with all the rewards in stock. You can still get them now and always, and more events you missed will be added to the side stories given enough time. This applies to collabs as well, though not necessarily all of them. These events are not challenging as well, and even newer players would have no problems clearing them with exceptions to Maniac or Nightmare difficulties, which is not necessary in snagging the event rewards. They're just there for the bonus crystals the difficulty provides.
Rotation Events: So unlike most events, these events have weapons that are actually relevant to empowering your grid, except they come back regularly in rotation. Every 2 months or so, Proving Grounds, Xeno Clashes, Rise of the Beast and Unite & Fight (Aka Guild War), will come back with rotating rewards. There's nothing exclusive that only comes out once, you'll just have to wait for it to come back again.
Collaborations: Granblue Fantasy did it right. Collabs are to start of, although may or may not have interesting character kits, are never meta tier. But that won't stop you from using them once you get a solid grid as mentioned earlier under Gameplay. All Collabs are given to players for free upon playing their respective events. You will never need to Gacha for collab characters. Story-wise is subjective. There are some for example, that are really good and non-canon, that would lead to a different ending in their anime counterparts. The older collabs might have questionable loop holes due to the time it was written. Nonetheless, they are all refreshing reads.
Challenge Quests: These quests may appear in Premium Friday, Side Stories or Events. You will be given a fixed pre-determined party and you'll have to defeat the boss under specific conditions. Contrary to how it sounds, it's usually very easy and can be won simply by following the suggestions in the character's dialogue.
Casino: Now this is a twist. Tired of grinding 24/7? Come to the casino! Gamble your fortune away and make big bucks. Play games like Poker, Bingo and earn enough chips to get exclusive characters, costumes, weapons, summons and mats. All you need to get em all is your time and sanity.
Anniversary Events: So due to their consistency in hosting the anniversary events, I'll briefly describe what you can expect every year around March. They'll have a roulette where you can spin for a guaranteed 10, 20, 30, 50, or 100 gacha pulls for the current banner, with the last day guaranteed to get 100 pulls. This is really f2p and I thought it'll be nice to point that out.
Woohoo! I've covered most of the content. Now it's time for some of the more exclusive features.
Real Life Events: Yes, there are real life events and merchandises you can get that provides serial codes to exclusive promotional items in game. Like outfits, summons and promo characters. This isn't accessible to most outside of Japan but you can still get from from online shopping websites at a reasonable price. Note that every promotional item is not meta and really just for collection purposes.
Longetivity: It's been 6 years, won't the servers terminate anytime soon? With how overwhelmingly popular and busy the game is, I highly doubt it. Raid rooms are flooded end game and theres literally hundreds and thousands of people in guild war ranking. I myself was ranked around 300k despite grinding 4-5 hours a day during the guild war 'Unite & Fight', although it might also be due to the fact that my grid is still rather basic. Furthermore, the devs has announced 12 Zodiacs, one to be released every year. Since 2014, about 6 has been released now and 6 more still pending. You can expect at least 6 more years and even more after that.
1 Server: There's only 1 server and it's the Japanese server with the option to change to English. This means you'll be on the same page as the Japanese and you'll never know what's coming next. I personally dislike games with multiple servers with the global server being consistently behind content. It generally feels like the global version will always be a shadow of a game.
Browser Access: You don't have to download this app to play granblue fantasy. You can play it straight out of your phone or desktop browser without any 3rd party extensions. Just go to game.granbluefantasy.jp
Now I've mentioned a bunch of plus. But is there any downside to this game? Well yeah. Surely there is. Though everything I said above is true, there might be some who disagree or dislikes said plus. So ultimately, it's subjective. I hope you don't take this review and every point I gave to be a good thing. It's based on your preferences. Give it a look and see for yourself if the game's right for you. Also, one more thing. Game eats up your mobile data faster than pac man so be warned.
More Reviews of This Game More
Panji Sulaksono
5.0Once you enter this hell, you won't be able to get out
Natalie Vaughn
4.6I downloaded this app specifically for this game. Here are my first impressions: The English version is great! It's far better than a simple machine translation. In fact, it's better quality than some global games I've played. That's good, because there is a *lot* of text. Whoever translated and localized it knows what they're doing. The Japanese voice acting, for the most part, is high quality and there is a ton of it. It's a shame there's no official western release, though, and I doubt there will ever be, considering the game is five years old. The UI is dated and there are load times everywhere, but the art is gorgeous. Character designs are pretty good, if you liked Final Fantasy 9 and 12's characters, you'll find more of that here. I'd go on longer but apparently there is a 1000 letter limit.