I Am SHOCKED By Granblue Fantasy ENDLESS RAGNAROK on Switch 2

[00:00:00]So, late last night Cygames released a free demo for Granblue Fantasy Relink endless Ragnarok on the PS5, PC, and on Switch, too. I decided on a whim to download it the demo on Switch, too, and try it out having never played the original game on PlayStation. And after a couple of hours, well, this happened.

[00:00:21]Yeah, I I really enjoyed my time with this demo. So, in this video, we're going to go over my thoughts on endless Ragnarok as a newcomer to Granblue. Give you all my thoughts on the Switch 2 performance, all the different characters, the combat, uh the story, not too much to say there, but overall, like I had a great time with this, and I I was very surprised. So, if you are new here and you enjoy RPG videos, content coverage, all that fun stuff, I would appreciate you liking the video, subscribing, and leaving your thoughts in the comments down below. Let's get into it. All righty, folks, welcome back to the channel. So, Granblue Fantasy Relink launched on PS4 and PS5 several years ago at this point, and it wasn't always a game I I kind of wanted to play. In fact, I did buy it on like a Black Friday sale at one point, but I never got around to it.

[00:01:04]To be honest, my understanding of what it was was frankly mistaken. I thought Granblue Fantasy Relink was a very standard story game where you do co-op quests, and and the quests are, you know, just like the story missions, but you're playing them online. Uh this game does have a huge online focus. I didn't realize it was more in the structure of, you know, something more akin to like a Monster Hunter kind of thing where you have a hub and you're running around the hub and you're queuing up for quests, and sometimes those quests might be you going from point A to point B with your teammates, clearing out waves of enemies. But for the most part, at least in this demo, it seems like it's it's mostly boss fights where you're just in a big arena fighting a really cool boss.

[00:01:44]That is exactly what I want, you know?

[00:01:47]Like that was when I found that out, I was like, "Oh, snap, this is way more interesting than I thought. This is way more exciting and more up my alley than I thought." Because for me, like, if if this was just single player or or you know, even just more single-player oriented missions, but you're playing them co-op, like that's cool. Usually that is something that elevates an experience for me. I look at something like Monster Hunter where, you know, even if I'm not playing with friends, just playing with other human beings, or like Wild Hearts or something like that, inherently adds to the experience for me. But no, this is more akin to something I played a couple of years ago and really liked. It's sort of online fractured daydream, random, you know, comparison, where you're just kind of queuing up for missions. You're you're going through and maybe you're getting gear equipment, upgrading your characters, that kind of thing. And the intent is for you to play them over and over, get better scores. There are different criteria you can meet in different challenges you can do. Like one of them had it so that you have to pick up barrels and kill enemies with the explosive barrels. And I couldn't quite do that because I was trying to coordinate with my team, and they were not following following the instructions. You know, they were just killing them before I could kill them with the barrels. But it's basically just, you know, play these missions over and over, grind them out, grind up your characters. And I love that stuff. You know, Granblue is not a series or an IP I am very familiar with. I don't really know much about it, to be honest. And even going through the story section of this demo, it's it's three parts. So there's the tutorial, that's very basic.

[00:03:05]There's the story. And then there is the more online focused quest part of the demo, that's where I spent the most of my time. Doing the story part of it, like I don't know if they were just throwing me in, or if maybe that's how the story actually is. I don't know what was going on.

[00:03:17]>> [laughter] >> I don't know any of these characters. I don't know what the objective is. We were saving some townsfolk from some goblins. And it just felt like I was being thrown into something that's I I probably should have a lot more understanding of beforehand. But it's fine because, you know, the story seems well enough. The characters seem fun and fine and likable, that kind of thing.

[00:03:35]But what I'm really here for is the gameplay, the online part of it. And you know, the gameplay loop of leveling up characters and and trying out the characters. There are so many different characters in this game. I I knew, you know, it's based on Granblue, which I, to my understanding, is a gacha game, all A mobile game. So you have all these characters in here. I honestly expected it to be pretty basic in terms of like, okay, you you play as this guy with a sword, then you play as this other guy with a sword, and they feel very similar. And yeah, you're going to see similarities between move sets and certain abilities that characters have, but I was surprised, you know, trying out each character once, how different they actually feel and how different their mechanics actually are when you are using them.

[00:04:16]One like this this higher-level Ruby Golem boss that we'll talk about, like, it actually matters. Like, it's not just a it's not just a reskin. Like, you actually have to pick your character that you like and stick with it because they do feel different enough to the point where it actually matters, which I just wasn't expecting. I I With how many characters I saw on the screen, and I know there's more in the full game, like, I just assumed like, okay, this is going to be a lot of reskins.

[00:04:37]But no, they they actually play differently, which I was immediately impressed by. And that surprise I felt continues into the actual combat, where, once again, I thought it was going to be just very basic action RPG, and it kind of is, but there are so many different layers on top of it, especially in regards to how you cooperate with your teammates. I mean, this game is designed for online play, for sure. So, you have your basic attacks, you know, basic combos, XXXY, XXXY, whatever. You also have, if you press R on the controller, you have some more cool-down abilities that do a little bit more. This is where the different characters really come into play. Some of them have different types, where maybe you hold down the button and you charge up an attack, maybe you summon a ghost or like a you know, some other entity to help fight alongside you, that kind of thing. He was really cool, don't know his name.

[00:05:22]So, you have all of these cool-down attacks, but then you also have your link attacks, which pop up from time to time, and your kind of ultimate, where you press in L3 and R3. And I love the way it is designed for the co-op experience, where with the link attacks, where those are obviously designed for multiplayer, and if you all do the link attack, it like slows down time a little bit, very cool. And then your ultimate attack, if one person does it, you can start initiating like a chain attack, where they will then do their really cool animation and you and you know, each character has like their own kind of intro thing or whatever. And you kind of do all of them and if all four players do it, you get a full burst, I believe it was called, basically triggering something else even cooler to happen on the screen and there's a lot of effects going on on screen. It's all very flashy, it's all very cool, it all feels very satisfying to pull off. You also have you know, your like quick dodge, so right before an enemy attacks, if you manage to press, I think it's ZL or ZR, you'll dodge and get a few seconds of invincibility. There's also blocking, which I didn't do too much. I feel like I was mostly just dodging. Maybe in higher levels of play, blocking is much more required, but for the most part, I was just dodging and that, you know, served me well for the purposes of this demo. And then there's also summoning, which honestly, I I I still don't even know what was going on, because once again, a couple hours in the demo, only you know, a handful of missions. You don't unlock the summoning in this demo until the final mission against the Ruby Golem.

[00:06:44]But basically, you unlock the ability to summon and transform into something that you would see in like Final Fantasy 16.

[00:06:51]So I summoned and transformed into this huge beast dog thing. I don't even know what it was and it was just awesome seeing, you know, I'm up here as a huge, you know, summon fighting this this Golem, but then I can still see my teammates on the ground as, you know, little anime characters fighting against this boss. Like it's really cool.

[00:07:08]There's a lot going on with the combat in this game, which I was not expecting.

[00:07:13]I really thought it was going to be pretty basic action RPG combat with a lot of re-skinned characters and I am so happy I was wrong, because I I was really impressed with what I saw here.

[00:07:23]And I was also happy because it wasn't super easy. Now, the first three missions we we, you know, blew through immediately. Easy bosses doing them first try. There's this really cool like skeleton boss, you know, he's the first one you do. He's easy, but it was still like a cool fight. He summons these skeletons and like these purple orbs that slow you down, that kind of thing.

[00:07:39]And then like this ice dragon wolf thing. He was a little bit tougher, but not too bad. And then there's the Ruby Golem. That's the fourth mission you unlock here. This one took me like four or five attempts. Playing with randoms, maybe playing in a friend group you can coordinate a little bit better, uh, you know, choosing different element, uh, characters, that kind of thing. But it was actually tough. And even when I was actually able to beat it for the first time, you know, we were using all of our healing items. We were, you know, having teammates go down and reviving them. And what's cool is, once again, adding to the whole co-op experience, when you go down in this game, you can hold the button and revive yourself. It just goes much slower, and your teammates can come over and raise you, and that'll make it go faster. But there's like this shared red gauge that slowly goes down whenever one of your teammates is down. And once that is depleted, that's when you get a game over. So it's not like, okay, everybody's down, we we, you know, full wipe, you lose. It's about that gauge and making sure you maintain that as much as possible. So it really is truly designed for the cooperative experience, which is just so cool. I love multiplayer stuff like this. So while the story and and Granblue itself might not be something I'm too familiar with, I don't know if I'll really enjoy the story that much, cuz there is like that whole separate story mode as well.

[00:08:48]The multiplayer, the gameplay, the mechanics, the bosses, like I'm so into it. Playing it on Switch too, you know, it is 30 FPS, and the resolution didn't seem like it was that high. But I mean, it certainly didn't look bad or anything, and it wasn't really dropping below 30 as well. Something great about this, uh, Endless Ragnarok expansion that they're adding onto it is that they're adding crossplay. So before it was PS4, PS5 locked together, and then PC, which meant that PC, from my understanding, was more or less dead. If you wanted to play this game, you had to play it on PS4 and PS5 for for, you know, matchmaking purposes. Now it's crossplay with everything, Switch too and PC are part of that player pool with one PS5 now, which is awesome and and huge for the longevity of a game like this. I am disappointed in something though, and that is the lack of cross save and cross progression. Now, when I loaded up the demo, I got excited because I thought there would be because there's an option to link your Cygames ID. Now, maybe that's just for like bonuses if you play the mobile game or something, but I was hoping for cross save because, well, maybe this isn't going to be a very specific use case, not many people would do it. With how much I enjoyed this demo, I could have seen it getting to the point where I might have wanted to buy it on multiple consoles. So, you know, the Switch 2 version runs good for what it is. I'm going to check out the PS5 demo tomorrow and see how that is, but you know, I could I could have seen a scenario where I want to play it on PS5 you know, sitting down on the couch and I want to have that 60 FPS 4K all that, you know, bells and whistles, but then maybe buy the Switch 2 version as well and play it there when something else is on the TV grinding out missions or playing it in bed, whatever the case is. Like, cross save for a game like this would have been so, I feel like easy to add since you already have your Cygames ID, and it would have been something that actually, I think, would have gotten me to double dip on a game like this. Now, maybe I would wait for a sale or something for that second version, but it seems like a missed opportunity. You're going all in on cross play, you know, you're introducing the Switch 2 as a new platform for this game. Cross save, I think, would have been a really smart addition for the people that were already playing it on PS5 and PC that maybe want to have this handheld version. I don't know. I I feel like most games should just have cross progression in this one, especially multiplayer games though that have cross play. But overall, I really did enjoy my time with the demo for Endless Ragnarok.

[00:10:54]I cannot wait to get my hands on the full release. Technically, I could go play more on PS5 because I have the base game, but I'm going to stick with with Switch 2, I think, for this one even if it does run a little bit worse. It's a stable 30, you know, it looks good enough. Um, but I I I once again, I do wish there was the the cross save. It's it's hard for me because this is already like a really busy time for games. It feels almost like a mistake that I even introduced this game to myself right now because we have Elliot coming out today when I'm posting this video. Cannot wait to go pick up my copy of Elliot. I'm currently 10 or 15 hours into Xenoblade 1 replaying that with the Switch 2 version. Later in July, we're getting the you know, the Switch 2 version of Xenoblade 2, which I'm going to 100% cannot wait for that. Like there's just so much going on right now in terms of of JRPGs, action RPGs, whatever, that it's uh it feels like a buffet, frankly.

[00:11:40]Then there's just so much like Granblue Fantasy comes out I think July 9th on Switch, too. So, I guess it is kind of in the middle of everything. Hopefully, I can finish up Alliance and Xenoblade before then and then dedicate, you know, at least a week to Granblue Fantasy, a week or two. Cuz then you also have stuff like Rhythm Heaven and Splatoon in there, not RPGs, but stuff I am interested in. There's a lot going on right now. A lot to play and I probably did not need to introduce Granblue Fantasy to to my my backlog because well, it's going to be a lot of game, I think.

[00:12:08]And I I imagine it's going to be a game that you put, you know, at least 70 hours in. So, uh yeah, there's a lot of stuff going on right now. A lot of games coming out. I I feel like every day I go on Twitter, I see people talking about oh, there's not enough games coming out.

[00:12:19]I'm like, oh my god. I wish I lived in your reality to give myself a break because there's just so much that I want to play, but let me know your thoughts in the comments down below. How are you feeling about Granblue Fantasy Endless Ragnarok? Uh maybe you played the base game back when it came out on PS5. Maybe you're jumping in for the first time with this demo or the Switch 2 release or also on PC and PS5 cuz it is on there as well. Uh but yeah, overall very impressed. Cannot wait to pick up this on day one now. Definitely a pleasant surprise for me. Subscribe here for more RPG content, coverage, news, reviews, all that fun stuff. I'll probably do a video on the full game once it releases next month. And until next time, folks.

[00:12:51]Peace.