Cleared Granblue Fantasy: Relink and want more? Granblue Fantasy: Relink – Endless Ragnarok is for you. It builds on the original experience, which we highly recommended on release, and delivers both extra content and small improvements to the overall experience.
Depending on your platform, you can either get it as an expansion DLC or a package. Regardless, the Endless Ragnarok content itself is almost entirely focused on the high-difficulty post-game experience.
A Brief Reprise of Relink
If you’re new to Granblue Fantasy: Relink, it’s an action JRPG that works as a side story to Granblue Fantasy, the gacha game. However, this is neither a gacha game, nor do you theoretically need to know anything about it. That said, it does feel like you’re jumping in the middle of a story. The protagonist, your choice of Gran or Djeeta (though usually referred to simply as ‘Captain’ in voiced lines), has already assembled their crew and had quite a few adventures as they travel the skies in their airship. It very quickly rushes through a summary of past events and character introductions to catch the player up.
The story of Granblue Fantasy: Relink is fairly short by JRPG standards and took me approximately 20 hours to complete, even as I took on plenty of optional quests and picked up almost every item I saw along the way. It’s also rather forgettable and lacks impact regarding its narrative, in part because it doesn’t spend time building attachment to the characters before the more dramatic events that affect them. It’s fairly generic fantasy, with a few of the typical anime power-of-friendship moments and an overly forgiving band of heroes. In fact, rather than any plot beats, some of the most memorable moments were the rather epic boss fights against giant enemies.
Rather than the story, what makes Granblue Fantasy: Relink rewarding is the gameplay. It combines fluid combat where you use combo attacks, a customizable selection of special moves on a cooldown, and some interesting mechanics where you build up a meter for large-scale attacks and another to temporarily slow down time. And importantly, you can choose from over 20 characters, each with their own special mechanics and focus. If I feel bored with playing a melee character, I can switch to a mid-range or long-range one, each with their own quirks to differentiate them.
As well as the characters’ differences in playstyle, there’s a satisfying gameplay loop of earning Mastery Points to unlock skills on an incredibly extensive skill tree, forging new weapons, finding sigils to boost stats or add abilities, and upgrading them both. This creates a constant sense of progress, as well as further customization to a certain extent.
The gameplay really is the focus here, which manifests in how much of the content is actually found in the postgame experience, even in the base game. It’s here that you’ll find plenty of quests, higher difficulties, and new mechanics. You can spend your time completing quests from the quest counter (solo or in co-op with crossplay between Nintendo Switch 2, PlayStation 4/5, and Steam, unlike the base game, which lacked crossplay) and optimizing your team.
I’ll keep this to a summary to avoid retreading old ground, but if you’d like to learn more about the base game, I suggest you check out our detailed review.
Endless Ragnarok
So is it worth picking up Granblue Fantasy: Relink – Endless Ragnarok? It depends. If you loved Granblue Fantasy: Relink and never wanted to put it down, then absolutely. If you enjoyed it but dropped off as the credits rolled, then it’s probably not for you.
Endless Ragnarok introduces quite a substantial amount of new content, but the new story is minimal and even more forgettable than the original story. It is really about more difficult quests, a handful of new mechanics, and six new characters, two of whom were involved in the new story segment.
I will say that two of the new characters in particular were very welcome, and they’re all enjoyable to play and feel fairly unique from each other. But at the same time, I find myself less than excited, since there are already so many to choose from.
A new roguelite mode called The Conflux is now included, which has you take on a set of levels, gaining bonuses called ‘Aura’ which stay with you throughout a run. You can choose different paths along the way. While fighting enemies is the norm, you can also find puzzles like “spot the difference” rooms. As you proceed through, you can earn Resonance, which is essentially its own skill tree for the Conflux and allows you to power up further. It’s a useful feature to level up the characters you don’t use as often and a fun mode in itself that you can invest many hours in.
Summoning is a new mechanic and certainly has the cool factor. It allows you to call one of several familiar monsters into battle to help you, which can temporarily be controlled directly in battle (not unlike the golem briefly controlled in the main story) or instead be equipped and provide bonus stats and traits similar to a sigil. They are limited to use in specific quests however.
Master Traits have been added. These add powerful new abilities to a character, letting you change up the playstyle and go beyond the current power level. Weapon Transcendence is another new feature, which allows you to power up and customize your weapon further. These are both particularly helpful for taking on some of the more difficult quests that have been added for Endless Ragnarok.
While there are more small features added, these are the main highlights.
New to Nintendo
With the Endless Ragnarok expansion comes the release on Nintendo Switch 2, as Granblue Fantasy: Relink was previously purely a PC and PlayStation experience. The experience on Switch 2 was reasonably good, but certainly not flawless. Comparing it to the more powerful platform, it does look like some of the textures on the Nintendo Switch 2 are a downgrade, but the game looks fairly good overall. The main concern is the framerate.
I’d estimate that most of the time, Granblue Fantasy: Relink – Endless Ragnarok on Switch 2 ran more or less at 30 FPS. However, occasionally it dipped noticeably. Sometimes this was just running around town, while at other times it was during some of the very hectic battles when attacks were flying around everywhere. This remains the case in docked mode. I didn’t find it affected my experience too much, but I did hope for better.
Verdict
Granblue Fantasy: Relink – Endless Ragnarok is a rather excellent game as a whole package as long as you’re looking for gameplay over story in your JRPG. That said, the Endless Ragnarok content is only really exciting to heavily invested players, who really want to farm the endgame. The new roguelite mode is certainly a standout feature, but you will need to grind those quests for quite a while before unlocking it in full.
GRANBLUE FANTASY: RELINK – ENDLESS RAGNAROK IS RECOMMENDED
If you are looking for another action RPG, you might want to check out our review of Ys X: Proud Nordics. For another game in the Granblue Fantasy world, you could also check out our review of Granblue Fantasy Versus: Rising.
Thank you to Cygames for providing a Nintendo Switch 2 review code for Granblue Fantasy: Relink – Endless Ragnarok.
A gamer since the days of Amstrad and DOS and someone who has dabbled in a variety of professions. He enjoys a wide variety of genres, but has been focusing on visual novels and virtual reality in recent years. Head Editor of NookGaming. Follow him and the website on @NookSite.
