Although Cygames has all the time been a cellular recreation developer, the corporate has traditionally been fairly good about supporting its video games with some glorious console-focused spinoffs. Shadowverse bought Shadowverse: Champion’s Battle, Battle Champs bought Little Noah: Scion of Paradise, and Dragalia Misplaced bought… oh.
Although the corporate’s well-liked Granblue Fantasy cellular RPG continues to be going robust over ten years after its debut, it bought 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 Swap 2 as Granblue Fantasy: Relink – Limitless Ragnarok. I’m happy to report that it matches completely with the moveable {hardware}, combining thrilling motion, tons of replayability, and exquisite graphics to make for an RPG journey that I’d counsel choosing up at your earliest comfort.
The story takes place within the Skylands, a set of floating islands drifting amongst an limitless sea of clouds, and locations you within the function of a self-insert foremost character known as “The Captain”. The Captain fashioned a non secular bond known as a life hyperlink with a woman named Lyria who has the highly effective magical potential to seize and summon godlike creatures, and the 2 of you could have 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 in the end searching for a legendary place on the finish of the skies known as Estalucia, however you’re shortly deterred by a non secular group known as the Pilgrims of Avia who’re after the identical objective for their very own nefarious causes. In pursuit of this, they shortly seize Lyria to realize entry to her powers, kicking off a fifteen-hour marketing campaign during 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 whole bundle right here, however that’s to not say that it’s unhealthy. A part of the issue is that this narrative is canon with and set properly after the occasions of the cellular recreation, and whereas there’s some supplementary flashback and journal content material that helps to elucidate every part that occurred up until this level, it in the end provides a newcomer the identical feeling they’d get in the event that they began watching Recreation of Thrones in its fifth season. There’s simply a number of backstory and subplots right here that don’t get targeted on very a lot, which might really feel a bit of disorienting.
Past this, the story itself is just okay. That is the kind of recreation that likes to lean on many well-worn anime tropes, corresponding to a loud-mouthed, cute, and foolish aspect character who tags together with the social gathering on their journey or overcoming the egocentric massive unhealthy on the finish with the ability 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 massive set-piece boss fights that swing for the fences with super spectacle.
Many have in contrast the gameplay loop of this launch to Capcom’s famed Monster Hunter franchise and never with out motive. Whereas the story mode is basically 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 numerous arenas and small locales to kill bosses and enemy hordes for drops and rewards.
Although you’re all the time 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 possibly can 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 means that provides a refined component 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.
Now and again, it’s also possible to execute a Hyperlink Assault or Chain Burst to actually carry the ache, working together with your complete social gathering to eradicate enemies with massive 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 decide 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 way in which you method the combos. If you happen to’re taking part in as Eustace, you battle 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 harm.
When taking part in as Yodarha, a dual-wielding swordsman, you possibly can 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 rather more highly effective results and injury outputs.
There are a number of dozen characters to unlock, every simply as distinctive because the final, which results in tons of mechanical depth to find as you experiment with completely different four-member group compositions for taking down missions and executives effectively. This goes a good distance in bolstering the general replayability; provided that that is the form of recreation the place you’ll be repeatedly grinding completely 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 uninteresting.
However not solely do the additional characters make the fight itself extra fascinating by various your method 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 large a part of the gameplay loop, and Cygames has accomplished an important 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 means you’ll widen your characters’ ability repertoires and stats is thru a easy node-based ability tree.
Although every tree itself is reasonably linear, they go very deep to accommodate the veritable torrent of factors you get showered with. You acquire ability factors from exploration, leveling, and quest rewards, however given that every one characters make the most of the identical factors, you’ll should be picky in whose tree you resolve to funnel your newest factors windfall into.
Past this, your characters will be additional amplified via their weapons, every of which will 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 comfortable ‘construct’ for a personality to raised form the function 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 possibly can later entry a strategy to dismantle ineffective sigils in trade for helpful sources to get significantly 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 all the time one other character who might use a greater weapon, or a selected sigil you’re hoping to search out, and these little objectives assist to make the grind rewarding alongside the way in which as you construct your social gathering as much as tackle more and more tougher content material that may yield even higher rewards.
And whereas the thrill 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 reduce out irritation, corresponding to a ‘wishlist’ that permits you to spotlight enemy drops you’re searching for and kind for quests which might be seemingly to present them to you.
Although the entire recreation is new to Nintendo audiences, the rationale this launch is again in lots of headlines is because of the launch of the all-new Limitless 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—Limitless Ragnarok not solely provides a brand new postgame storyline to observe, however enormously expands the endgame with a brand new issue degree, tons of recent missions, weapons, characters, sigils, and an entire roguelite recreation 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 started working for it a bit, Limitless Ragnarok is properly well worth the wait.
The bottom recreation was already the form of factor during 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 tougher content material to check your well-trained social gathering in opposition to and loads of new methods to energy them up even additional.
Whereas a lot of the growth is just aimed toward providing you with extra, the brand new Conflux mode acts as one thing that’s distinctly new. When you’ve unlocked this, you possibly can drop your social gathering right into a twenty-ish minute gauntlet during which you clear rooms of enemies and executives in trade for unique rewards and a basic roguelite ‘decide 3’ boon alternative.
These randomly generated boons will give you numerous passive buffs that’ll bolster your social gathering only for that run, making successive runs that rather more fascinating as completely different boons encourage you into completely different playstyles.
The bottom recreation was already principally pointed in the direction of operating 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 strategy to catch up characters which have been sitting on the bench for some time and will use a gear tune up and degree enhance, however it serves as its personal separate department of development as you run numerous events via more and more harder ranges of enemy waves. The one downside is that it could at present solely be performed solo, which feels a bit of odd given how a lot the remainder of the content material permits for co-op play.
Visually, this recreation employs an artwork fashion paying homage to one thing like Tales of Come up, with anime graphics which might 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 through the massive Chain Bursts.
Probably the most constant spectacle comes through the fight encounters, the place 4 characters independently triggering every kind 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 a minimum of an choice for 40 FPS, however it’s nonetheless spectacular that there are not any apparent hitches even with all of the particle results and animations taking part in out without delay on display screen.
