Granblue Fantasy: Relink – Endless Ragnarok [Preview] Setting sail with new friends and your favorite guy from town

We chat with the team behind the massive game in our preview

Granblue as a series is always growing bigger and to double down on that, Cygames has added an additional title to one of their games with Granblue Fantasy: Relink – Endless Ragnarok. More story, more characters, more modes, more power, and more player choice is at the heart of this new expansion. Creative Director of the Granblue Series, Tetsuya Fukuhara and Director for Granblue Fantasy: Relink – Endless Ragnarok, Sanshiro Hidaka were on hand at Summer Game Fest Play Days to share a little bit of their vision for the expansion and a brief look at the large amount of content coming with it.

Endless Ragnarok was not originally planned during development of the base game, Fukuhara shared. They of course planned to support it with updates after release, culminating in 3 big content updates, but it was the large amount of player engagement even after those updates that encouraged them to support this title instead of moving on to a new one. This isn’t just a coat of polish and a few new missions, players can expect about 1.5 times the amount of content as the original with about double the original playtime. Even the most committed players to the original are going to find around 20-30 hours worth of new content here. New difficulties and remixed experiences will force players to adapt strategies as familiar bosses may have attacks or patterns than they had before.

One of the biggest additions to combat is the new summon system, allowing players to call from any of the game’s NPCs and bosses to aid them in combat. During the presentation, a slide was shown with a quote that was close to ‘from the biggest monsters, to just some guy’ accompanying a photo of the NPCs and monsters from the base game. This photo was used to help convince the development team as the idea was suggested late into development of Endless Ragnarok. Apparently members of the team jumped on the idea of developing unique animations and move sets for their favorite town NPC or boss from the world. I asked Hidaka with the vast amount of summons if they were all truly useful or if some are intended to be more of a goof than anything else. He mentioned that although some aren’t as directly usefully as a strong boss summon, all can only benefit the team when being used. It might not have a strong attack, but all summons make the user invulnerable during their duration and make the cost of other summon uses drop by one, making it possible for an ally to use a much stronger summon faster.

Getting players together to play and synergize in combat is where some of the new quality of life improvements are thankfully found. Endless Ragnarok is now crossplay across all platforms. They have also added new Chaos tier Quests pushing teams of players harder than ever before. That’s not to say that solo players are being left out in the cold. They are getting the Conflux mode, an almost rouge-like experience, where players will take on modified fights and quests with the occasional puzzle tossed in to enhance characters and weapons past their upgrade limits.

Six new playable characters are joining the roster. Maglielle and Gallanza, two of the antagonists from the original game. Beatrix and Eusstace, who fans of Granblue might know from Versus: Rising. And Fraux and Fediel who were hinted at playing a large role in the new games story. Each of these characters have their own different fighting styles, with my demo time spent playing as Maglielle. She is a support who specializes in keeping foes at range while also healing and buffing those around her. The short  time I had still allowed me to find some quick combos to push damage while also keeping myself crew alive in the Chaos quest I experienced.

Granblue Fantasy: Relink – Endless Ragnarok has so much new in it that I’m not sure even a full day to preview and talk with Hidaka and Fukuhara would be enough to discuss everything. With every new piece of content for this series, you can tell the developers love to keep fans invested in the characters they create and the stories they can tell through them. Granblue Fantasy: Relink – Endless Ragnarok releases July 9th on Steam, Nintendo Switch 2, and PlayStation 5 & 4. Owners of Granblue Fantasy: Relink can upgrade their copy with the purchase of an Upgrade kit on Steam or the PlayStation Store