Granblue Fantasy Relink Critique | Part 1

if there's anything that holds the highest value in the game is the gamep playay and how it systems play into it the graphics could be amazing the story exhilarating but the gamep play is what I found myself putting the most stock in now b game can come in variety of forms of course in Skyrim's case the gam play is the exploration World design and freedom in Walking Dead series it's how you flow through the branching storyline in relink it's simpler it's the combat and it's this combat that takes center stage in everything that you do in the game here the game play is King for better in even for Worse what do I mean by even for Worse well let's continue and see if you can catch on firstly you can tell that there's anything they were trying to get right it was the gameplay the combat it's fast-paced action-packed and most of all fun almost every aspect of the moment to moment combat feels satisfying not just Vis weight attacks but also perfect Dodges the perfect guards and berries the game rewards you for every action you take towards the enemy and every one of those actions feels tight fluid and responsive game blue fantasies reings gameplay simply put plays well and to be a good game that's honestly the main thing you really need you can have the graphics art Direction incredible cutscenes but the game playay and how well it plays are what will keep people around for it in realing combat is what you will do in 90% of your play through if it didn't play well then no one will stick around for it on top of playing well the game comes with a surprising variety of characters to play as each one having their own basic combo skills even Mechanics for the roof sets revolve around Catalina for example with her Aries gauge and combo Centric play style plays completely different from pural charge attack and skill focus moat each character feels different to play and they feel rewarding to master and if there is a character you don't like there are plenty more for you to choose from I just wish there was a way you could try and them out before you unlock them but the most interesting thing about the combat for me is that the most rewarding and satisfying moments come from team plays for example the link attack when a stagger meter on the boss or enemy is filled they're open up to a link attack which is coordinated straight from all four party members dealing D massive damage and staggering them for moment watching the fury can get sent herling back from this attack has never really gotten over for me these animations from the bosses only happen during these coordinate strikes on the burst adding to that feel of the most powerful strikes being for when you work as a team that stagger comes with a caveat though some characters such as vazar Raga who has to be stationary to charge attacks might have to cancel out their damage or just straight up Miss fortunately not all bosses are exaggerative and you'll get more hits than you'll miss but I'm sure the ones who main such characters wish they had an alternative for those times that they do anyways each link attack fills the link time gauge over to the right you hit to 100% And you enter link time time is slowed and all attacks are increased along with decreased School cool down region on HP you name it you always want to work together to get this out as often as possible because of the benefits the thing about it is that joining a link time also benefits you on individual level on Catalina join a link attack and you instantly can go into your combo finisher to fill your Aries gauge do so while the gauge is filled and Aries will join you on the attack dealing more damage and allowing you to combo into a coordinat of attacks alongside Aries if you're already in the middle of a combo with Aries or just finish one join a link attack will extend your Aries combo for truly free joining a link attack on pural will give him access to Quick Charge right after giving you the benefits you'd have to use a skill or go through a combo to achieve for free they've made it so that joining these link attacks basically is a net positive in almost every situation for you there's almost never reason for you not to work with your team and join in in fact I would always feel like I made a mistake in missing it there's even the ultimate attack known as the skybound Arts which I will be referring to as SBA from now on each SBA used on a chain can chain into another characters until all are used for final move known as the burst this is another one of those times where the boss will get tossed around by your attacks even more so than even on a link attack even if only two people use SBA this will also result in a team attack for but for lesser damage using SBA even charges others sbas and then there's the coordinated coordination with crowd control skills certain characters can come with CC such as freeze paralyze or slow because of all the emphasis on team play it never feels like a net negative to stop the boss in their tracks to allow your team to get some extra damage in and with proper timing you can chain these together to extend that window of opportunity for damage certain characters can also buff each other and debuff the enemy there's even heals and resurrections that can be brought to the fold as well even with the emphasis on action I never felt myself being discouraged to work with my party as a team in fact as explained you obtain some of the big biggest benefits and satisfaction from doing sty it's actually to the point that I got bored of certain characters because they don't bring much to the table in terms of team play outside of Link attacks and bursts I got spoiled and felt like I was wasn't contributing much outside of just raw damage there were even times when I would put certain party members on my team and forgot they were there because all that was all they contributed it didn't feel like they were there for the team until I reminded during a team burst and I feel like that's the part that made me stick with the game the emphasis on team play after all if I want to just deal damage I just go back to Final Fantasy 16 for a more in-depth combat system geared towards a single fighter even the point system in the game which is honor points you gain throughout the fight isn't centered completely around just damage it also factors in the Buffs you contribute the healing and the other team mechanics I'll be it to a lesser extent there's also the shared critical gauge meter when a party member's down they eat out of this bar which doesn't replenish the critical meter reaching zero means you lose Reviving party members ensures they eat out less of it other than it would otherwise and so you're incentivized to not only revive down party members but also to Aid each other in ways to ensure less Downs occur now I've only I've been sitting here praising a lot of this game for a good reason but there are issues stemming from interesting design decisions to say the least which I'll get into in a moment first I think I need to go over the boss fights they all typically have phases based on a meter under their HP bar which fills based on how much damage they take think of it as working the same way as monsters becom raag in moner on world except you can see when this will happen before that fails they're in their normal phase where they're generally going through their basic move set when that bar fills though that's when they go into overdrive the boss then gains increased defense goes into blood lust before they start doing a series of mechanics unique to them after they get done with their blood lust mechanic alsoo fighting an enraged boss who has increased defense and is far more aggressive dealing more damage depletes this overdrive bar and system into a break stuning for a time and leaving them open for extra damage keeping in mind this bar helps in coordinating how you and your team go about using their abilities that way you can know when what to expect and you don't find yourself wasting critical moments the blood lust States I mentioned come in surprising variety mechanics these can range from berserking combo to a Final Fantasy 14 style raid sequence and can act as transitions to the next phase I was actually surprised by the Vari of mechanics from the bosses these aren't just new types of AOE to avoid they're still there will even be shifts in how you fight the boss entirely and new strategies you can develop as a result I can go on and on about each character on the individual level but the point I'm trying to make is that side games had an emphasis on team based combat and exhilarating encounters and that's where their focus went to side games like I've been saying gamepl is King even with a story you can tell the dev team put together a series of fun exhilarating gameplay moments they want to do and then made a story to fit that all together now I don't want to go thoroughly into the story here I actually want to sa this for a future video as I'm fairly convinced this wasn't always meant to be a 10 to 12 hour story I feel like there were plenty of remnants of content that may have been cut over the time game's lifespan possibly a sacrifice as they narrowed their focus to get this game finally finished and out the door anyways this emphasis on gameplay you spend little time in cut scenes and more in actual dungeons encounters the first cut scene is a short one that immediately puts you into a skirmish with wyverns before ending with an over-the-top boss battle following one more Fantastical animated cut scene you're immedately dropped into a dungeon which also has a boss battle at the end the plot points throughout the story merely serve to push you to the next fight to get see the fun part the story itself does falter in overall writing as a result but I feel that more so the fact that they did not want to commit to anything that would have any real impact on the characters as that will affect the overall Grand Story that's not to say the story is bad like I said I'll go into detail in the future video but it does end up lacking the death you to back from characters that developer from beginning to end instead one of the story's biggest strengths is the pacing as a result of pushing you to the fun Parts some of the best fights in the game in terms of pure spectacle are only playable in the story even even as the first impression before you get into the meat content of the game they wanted you to give you a fun exhilarating experience after all gameplay is King here and it's likely the reason you stick around after the story is complete in fact you will probably get to this point before you've fully interacted with and understood the gearing and other systems in the game and as you get deeper into the game you start to build your character further with sigils and wh Stones which act as gear pieces with effects that increase damage Health Etc there's even effects like the increase to effectiveness of things like link attacks or SBA generation plenty of different sigils and wh stones to build your character to fit your play style as you get further and further you require sigils and wh stones with multiple effects for one based on a RNG but the more I stay from the combat and deeper into the underlying systems the more the interesting design decisions I mentioned before started to rear up let's start off with parts of the combat I didn't mention later into the game attacks start to on-shot you far more frequently a complaint I often see online as a cheap form of difficulty but let's look at the big picture for this remember when I said that some characters can equip healing spells well you can also equip potions everyone has them in fact this on its own is no issue this is something done in most other Fantasy games and turn-based games on top of the resource itself you might it might cost you a turn to use a potion in an action game it might be an animation making you have to find the opportune moment to heal or create one in others it has a cool down ensuring you don't just face tank through all your potions and are actually punished for taking damage too frequently in Final Fantasy 16 for example they have a low Max and need to be bought at vendors but in this game there is no animation no cool down no risk in fact they're instant powerful and can be used at any time if you take attack that deals 70% of your HP and sends you flying you can heal yourself back to full with a button press before you even touch the ground and it's not just a regular heal potion you also have Max HP potions group heal potions and revive potions everyone except the I AI gets them and they refill automatically for each Mission so they aren't even resources you have to buy make or worry about you take damage you press button I think it's fair to say that these aren't actually potions these are the rest of your HP the only decision you're making with them is whether or not you want to have access to that HP and with an item known as potion order which substantially increases the number of potions you get you can further increase that HP with even the number of revive potions from 1 to three on top of that you can acquire s known as Auto revive and guts guts put you at 1 HP when an attack will otherwise incapacitate you Auto revive will revive you for free when you're in capacitate and doesn't count towards the team's critical gauge you can even cheese don't get down objectives with it you can equip both of these sigils at the same time and they both Repro with the cool down they can trigger multiple times during a fight and so let's view this from the boss's perspective the boss has to first get through your guts preferably with an attack that deals enough damage to oneshot you that way they can bypass your potions which are rest of your HP if they don't oneshot they'll have to get through those 10 plus potions first after they force out your guts that boss will now need to get through your auto Rive before your guts comes back up after it forces out your auto Rive it still has to down you before guts comes back up which is likely coming closer to doing so and it's also now racing against your Auto viive if it does manage to down you before then the boss still needs to get through three revive potions before you even touch your critical gauge bar and again this needs to be done before Auto revive and guts comes back up after all that it now needs to deplete that bar while racing against your auto revive and guts that keeps coming back and it's not just you they need to potentially do this to three other players at the same time this is a 1v4 fight now you're probably thinking well you're obviously sacrificing something for all that survivability well not really potion holder Auto Rive and guts can all Prof on secondary slots on sigils meaning you don't have to sacrifice much of anything for this to happen let's put this into perspective you can have up to 12 equipable sigil slots each of those sigil can have two abilities that means you really have 24 sigil slots and if you upgrade one sigil you upgrade both abilities if you help up a damage sigil that has potion hoarder you get more damage and more potions and if you equip all three of what was mentioned you only use up three out of 24 slots with that in mind is it a wonder that later bosses tend to have attacks at one shot can you even call these one shot attacks developers have to balance these fights with the possibility to roll in with these if the bosses at one-shotting it's not make any real progress in beating you at least not fast enough missions can last on average 5 minutes and under the boss does exactly have all the time in the world to take you down before you take it down this is probably why lucilius the newest fight released recently is designed the way he is his basic attack to do enough damage that even one will warrant a healing potion and there constant and Relentless he needs to burn through all your potions quickly he has to standard one shot abilities he needs to force out your auto revive guts and revive potions quickly his attacks can instill debuffs that lock skills and S Spas he needs to punish you for face tanking any attacks that don't one shot his 12 labers mechanic lowers your max HP if failed he needs to make you more susceptible to one shots to bypass your potions early and get into your critical gauge faster he's designed around all the tools you have for survivability he has to be so now that we have all that out of the way where do those healing spells I mentioned fit in well they don't at least not in the majority of your playr you may find them useful at first as you get used to the game and the story and some of the characters just come with healing spells already equipped but after a while I started to wonder why they even bothered unlike Potions all healing spells do have lengthy cool Downs animations and come some require you to aim and hope you get all who need it grouped up E's healing wins for example is a regen and requires you to stay in his AOE while your health slowly goes up which loses you up time if you're sticking to it when the boss isn't in it so you can try and line up that healing spell on EO just right and have everyone stay in it or one of you can just tap the group heal potion button no animation no cool down and it's party wide that means no need for aiming and like I said everyone has this potion everyone can be a Healer and use AOE heals and if they have that potion hoarder they have multiple that's not to say healing spills are completely useless about halfway through the story line I realized that I had yet to use a single potion this why I deed decided to commit and see how far I can go I would have been I would have healing spells and defense up abilities equipped to my party as replacement I managed to not only complete every mission in the game but also defeat lucilius while I'm undergear doing so I've only had four defeats three of which were from lucilius himself so healing spells are indeed viable in fact the game appears completely playable with them being your main source of healing the thing is potions just work better it make them feel redundant and obsolete with how much better they were honestly I probably wouldn't have lost a single fight had I been using them the game isn't exactly difficult after all my guess is that they wanted to give you something for when online since you cannot be guaranteed someone will join you with The Healing Spell equipped let alone to heal all together but because of how they tackle this this problem they now have to create bosses with this amount survivability in mind to not do so would mean you're not in really real danger of failing and can probably Brute Force you way through the content which is something I see plenty of people doing with just potion order alone and so what makes me curious how they'll handle bosses in the future can we expect fast Combos and one shots as the continue standard there's another part of the character's kids I'd like to go over but before I do I need to mention one of the biggest issues I have with the game the damage cap remember when I said you could build however you want depending on your play style hold on to your juice box because that's not actually the case damage cap does exactly what you think it's a cap to your damage output I remember when I first found my first dig uh damage cap sigil I don't think I was even max level yet but I remember thinking to myself I definitely won't be needing this anytime soon if at all I figured I'd have to be really invested in damage to the point of taking away any defense and going glass Cannon before it hit that cap and that's on top of being max level and maxing out my skill tree known as the masteries in the game and here's the thing the problem with the damage cap isn't that it exists the problem is that in reality I was probably hitting it even then it's actually absurdly easy to hit that cap in this game and even if I take off all my sigils and use my weakest non-damage Focus weapon I would still be hitting that cap meaning all I have to do to reach the cap for my damage is up and max out my skill tree you just have to do the bare minimum and you're capped even before then and the game doesn't exactly make any effort to communicate this to you you just have to notice it notice you're not dealing your damage isn't moving I actually did another sweep of the tutorial menu to see if this was the ever brought up or you could learn about it in the game itself the answer is no in fact you Pro will likely only find out via third party sources that the gold flash around your damage numbers is the indicator that your damage cap the way I found out is by stumbling Upon A YouTube video in the recommended section now let's get back to the character abilities some characters have skills that buff the damage of the party or even lower defense of the enemy the thing is if your damage are capped which is almost guaranteed then you do not benefit from these abilities your damage will not move and so these abilities become almost useless at least in majority of cases I think that's why the majority of these attacks up attack up abilities also come with defense up they either took this into account or didn't want to have to separate defense up and attack up abilities but it could be both there are other decisions that make it feel like the damage cap being as low as it is is a deliberate decision before I explain that I want to add a final note that the about these character abilities every character besides a captain has eight abilities because of healing and Resurrection spells yes there are even Resurrection spells are redundant and how much survivability you have and attack up Buffs are rendered useless from the damage cap some of these characters don't have eight skills they actually have five or six especially since some of these skills can be pretty Niche now going back to damage cap with how it is you're pretty much obligated to invest in raising it substantially there's no opting out of this otherwise not only you're not dealing more damage as you progress the game some of your character skills just aren't working in fact they probably added supplementary damage to personal attack Buffs to account for this add on to the fact that you need to Max them out to level 65 in total and may still find yourself hitting the cap and these damage cap CS may as well be regular damage sigil but you'll need four maxed out to do this keep track of these sigil as we move forward remember you have 12 equipable slots and the thing about these sigils is that they often do not appear with secondary slots and they do not appear as secondaries like potion hoarder does and so the final weapon you get of course the Terminus weapon also gives you 100% boost to your damage cap on top of the decisions the comy out here is that your HP needs to be 45k or below sounds like a great boost right and it is I saw my damage almost double with no added damage sigils the thing is though when I maxed out the Terminus weapon and unequipped all sigils except the raised damage cap I found my character was still hitting this cap that means the 100% from the termus weapon the 226 from my sigils and another 20% from over masteries wasn't enough for the regular unbuffed damage to not be ca I don't know about you but that sounds a bit absurd to me at least made me work a little bit for it now have you noticed a pattern with damage cap you probably remember when I said they probably made a deliberate decision to have it as low and easy to reach as it is I think what solidified that notion for me is that the newest sigils that dro from the newest fight lucilius aren't even new sigils they're better damage cap sigils yeah they come with a little gag at that when we rank to 15 but do you these even really matter this isn't going to change how you play unless you a shield one you're probably not even going to notice the effect it's as if the damage cap implement the way it is because they are treating it as a de facto progression in your damage and damage is the only thing that matters would have hurt to have something with a bit more utility than it just more damage something to change up how you play as it stands my reward for defeating lucilia several times is that instead of killing him for 3 minutes I kill him in 2 minutes and 45 seconds he's a fun fight but I wish reward was a bit more well less boring if I just wanted to deal more damage like I said I'd just go play Final Fantasy 16 something with more deaf and how I deal that damage on an individual level I think I want to stop with that though when it comes to the systems I think I've made my point there are plenty of designs in the game that appear to just contradict each other you have a huge number of sigils and effects for build diversity and EXP expression but well over half of them just simply don't work due to damage cap you have healing and Resurrection spells in the game but potions and certain sigils render them obsolete you have a combat system emphasizes teamwork but all progression and builds center around personal damage and even personal utility it's something I'm still wrapping my head around even but let's list off some positive again to end on a high note the graphics for starters are stunning beautifully rendered Cuts scenes and environments are regular the animations are flawless the carriages move with Grace and power and all feel distinct from one another add on the wonderful physics and the characters themselves and how they move present just adds to the overall presentation when it comes to the attention to detail this game is a sight even on the smallest things now I think I'll stop right there there's more I want to talk about such as the story incredible music but I want to have that for a future video I also want to talk about individual characters bosses even the grind in general so if you like the video I would it would mean a lot to me if you let the like and subscribed and if you're interested in hearing my thoughts and those future videos be sure to hit the Bell icon so you know when they drop thanks for watching and I'll see you guys next time peace

Channel: Endeavor

Views: 1,241

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Id: 7MP8eu8-QHE

Length: 22min 8sec (1328 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 22 2024