The Mobage Fighter
Even without any personal experience with the mobage(mobile game)“Granblue Fantasy”, it has been a staple of my twitter timeline for years. Elation at finally pulling that character they’ve wanted or utter despair after spending hundreds of dollars on pulls without much to show for it. It generally came across as a good enough reason to stay away from yet another mobage. However, despite my lack of interest in playing the game, I always appreciated the beautiful illustrations and expert sprite work on display for the title. So, when Arcsys, a name I trust and respect in the world of fighting games, announced that they were working in conjunction with Cygames to make a new fighter, I was more than a little interested to see the results.
MSRP: $59.99 ($29.99 for DLC Character Pass)
Platform: PS4, PC
Played on: PS4 Pro
Language: JPN/ENG
Played: 10~ hours
If it isn’t immediately apparent from the screenshots, this is one gorgeous looking game. It’s no surprise given their last effort, DBFZ is still one of the best looking fighting games on the market. It’s not just in how they look either, as each and every animation has been painstakingly created to match each unique fighter’s style and personality. The graceful knight, Katalina’s measured steps and elegant fencing techniques marks a striking contrast when Lowain breaks out the human pyramid with his squad of boys and starts using moves called, “It’s Lit Bro” and “Flex OnEm”.
It’s clear that there was a lot of love and care that went into the game just from the attention to detail between characters interactions, as well as the lengthy single player campaign with light RPG elements.
As stated before, I have little to no knowledge about Granblue so it’s unclear to me whether or not the single player story retreads familiar plot points told in the themobage, but what’s here is about 5-7 hours of content depending on how much of a completionist the player wants to be. Staring the titular character Gran, it’s up to the captain and his crew to make their way across various regions and uncover a mystery that seems to be rewriting history and turning friends into foes. While I personally didn’t find the story arc to be all that interesting, I was impressed by the production value on hand as there were mode exclusive boss battles and specials not found anywhere else in the game.
Even though I enjoyed some of the bigger boss battles, I didn’t think the 2D fighter’s mechanic was particularly great for a beat-em-up style gameplay and found myself getting bored relatively quickly. It was nice enough to get weapon drops and level up my favorite fighters, I didn’t find it deep or interesting enough to the point I just wanted it to be over so I could unlock the last character in the roster.
As for the meat of the game, the combat engine is quite unlike any other Arcsys fighter I’ve played to date. With a 4 button scheme, I was thinking it would be similar to Blazblue, but it feels closer to Street Fighter in its pacing. Gone are the quick universal air dashing(No, Zeta doesn’t count) and 10 second combos, in are 4 hit mid screen combos and pokes-lots and lots of pokes.
In fact, most of the neutral gameplay felt like a tug of war to see who had the better poke and/or projectile, which is very reminiscent to SF. Not to say that it’s a thing that’s exclusive to SF but more of the feeling I had while playing. There’s of course nothing wrong with that, but as I delved deeper into the mechanics of the combat, I found more elements that weren’t to my tastes. For example, autocombos, the act of pressing one button repeatedly to launch a specific series of attacks, was now mapped to all normal attack buttons instead of just one. This meant that outside of the very first attack, pressing the L, M, H button multiple times would result in the same combo, minus the different first attack.
Given that canceling out of autocombos are restrictive by design, it made for very stiff combo creation, with the vast majority of combos revolving around comboing one special into another while throwing in one or two normals in between. As someone who has just as much fun in training mode creating new combos and setups, this was a major letdown and ultimately led to none of the characters really resonating with me.
Taking the fight online, I was forced into a few test matches to gauge my skill level against a few AI combatants and after that was done, finding matches online was quick and painless. The quality of the netcode set at finding opponents with good connection felt good without any notable issues. I also always appreciate the ability to spend my time in training while waiting for a match so I was happy to see that included as well. Taking things into the virtual lobby, it was very similar to previous games with arcade cabinets waiting for players to jump into, and the avatars were no doubt charming with some hilariously odd animations to go along with them.
Outside of the story, training and offline/online versus modes, there was also an arcade mode with some unlockable CGs for each of the characters but I spent most of my time in training, story and online.
Granblue Fantasy: Versus makes a great first impression with its stellar visual flair but falls a bit short on the gameplay department with simplistic combat mechanics and a story mode that becomes boring a little too quickly.
Fun Tidbit: I ended up settling with Katalina for the character I played the most but no single character really resonated with me despite trying out the full, albeit limited, roster. I think the idea that this might be a good game for fighting game newbies rings true to some degree due to the simplistic combat but I’d recommend Blazblue over this title as I personally find it much more fun and interesting.
Review copy of game provided by publisher.