As someone familiar conceptually/by proxy with but with virtually zero experience playing fighting games, I was both excited and wary of playing Granblue. I’m completely terrible at this type of gameplay, exacerbated by the competitive scene. However, the art and style of Granblue immediately caught my attention, and I like fighting games before hitting the skill wall for many of the reasons they tend to be popular: they’re flashy, fun, and interactive.
Playing the free version, I really wished there were more characters available for rotation. Only 4 are playable, and while I understand game incentive to buy the full game, I think this is a major deterrent to the very crowd Granblue is trying to appeal to: casual games and/or those that are newer to fighting games. If they want to catch a wider demographic, there need to be a good set of free characters for players to try. Most aren’t dumping a whopping $50 on a game just to try it out in full.
Some of the other biggest PvP games like League thrive off of this model, where you have access to or earnable access to all of the roster, and cosmetics bring the money. Or perhaps a better comparison would be to gacha games like Genshin and Honkai Star Rail, where players are very willing to pay for more characters, but bit by bit. In those games, even free-to-play players can enjoy a diverse, good number of free characters, until the game has its hooks in you. Aesthetics are also a big driver for lots of non-fighting casual gamers like myself, so it’s frustrating if you don’t click with a character. The game needs to sink its hooks in deeper first.
This is all just to say, PLEASE let me play Nier!!
Granblue in particular has a really wonderful artistic direction. The characters are generally designed well and have beautiful splash arts, and the fighting game itself looks and feels really smooth. The backgrounds are pretty, the moves feel slick and good to play. The animation is amazing and really adds to breathing life into the characters, although the same ones playing before every fight got a little bit tedious. There could be some quality of life improvements, like that being skippable or updating the interface. The UI felt a bit clunky, though not the worst. A particularly impactful example is having player-labels in matches, not just at the start–fighting the same character with very similar color palettes makes it easy for less-experienced players to lose track of who they’re even controlling!
I did find the tutorial questionable. That is, there isn’t really one unless you go looking for i. There’s no guidance to your first launch of the game, which I figured out from experience, but can see new gamers really struggling with. I went straight to Training to learn how to play. The training tools are a decent user experience as menu items were easy to access and I could quickly flip back and forth through moves. Again, though, I felt this process could really be streamlined, and some information felt both scattered and redundant. Granblue gives you a lot of pieces to put together that aren’t terribly hard to read, but it doesn’t help you learn how to assemble the puzzle efficiently.
I personally think a fighting game for truly new players should walk one through matches. There’s mechanics that will be impossible to simulate in the tool and hard to understand in a PvP match on your own, like effective combos or rapidly blocking different kinds of attacks while launching your own. In this front, I think Granblue has a lot it could improve on and clean up, but considering the high barrier to entry in fighting games as a whole, it’s a step in the right direction. It did still feel overall more accessible and I was pleasantly surprised by my experience. The beautiful art definitely does a lot of heavy lifting for me, and it’s a strength I think Granblue should capitalize on–not lock tightly behind a paywall.
I look forward to playing the game again, which I honestly didn’t expect! I may even buy the full game so I can play as the character I want (love you Nier), but only if I can at least achieve some level of mastery in the free version first–which will depend on if my mechanical journey doesn’t frustrate me before I exhaust my interest in the style.
It sounds like you’ve got a bit of a love-hate relationship with Granblue Fantasy Versus: Rising! It’s great that the game’s artistic style and fluid animation caught your eye—those are definitely big draws for anyone, especially if you’re not traditionally into fighting games. It’s pretty common to get hooked by the visuals before anything else.
Your point about the limited character availability in the free version is spot on. It’s a tricky balance for developers to strike between enticing players to buy the full game and providing enough content to keep them interested without the initial investment. More character options early on might help ease new players like you into the game without feeling pressured to spend money right off the bat.
It sounds frustrating that the game doesn’t offer a comprehensive tutorial right from the start. Jumping straight into training to figure things out isn’t ideal and could definitely be off-putting for newcomers who might not stick around long enough to get the hang of things. A more guided introduction to the game mechanics could really help lower that barrier to entry.
Despite these gripes, it’s cool to hear that you’re considering buying the full game to play as Nier, especially since you weren’t expecting to enjoy playing as much as you did. Hopefully, your continued practice in the free version will build your confidence and skills, making that decision to purchase a bit easier. It seems like Granblue has potential to grow on you, provided the mechanics don’t become too much of a hurdle. Here’s hoping your journey with the game turns out to be as rewarding as it is stylish!