Granblue Fantasy Versus: Rising follows the crew of the Grandcypher, an airship with a motley crew of anime stereotypes – and my dream husband, Rackam. After an antagonistic force that the crew thought disbanded attacks a peaceful nation, ship captain Gran and his friends discover that previous allies have not only forgotten them, but are now outright hostile. With a greater threat clearly at large, the Grandcypher sets off to reunite with old friends.
This is the opening of the Story Mode, which plays out as a mixture of 2D beat ’em up, graphic novel and 1-on-1 2D fighting. This continues as episodes, with boss fights and character introductions as you go through. The story is a pretty good, if somewhat typical, anime yarn and fully voice acted in Japanese with English subtitles. Also, as you progress, you unlock Journal entries that explain the different characters, locations and organisations from the universe.
However, this Story Mode is far from flawless. Similarly to my thoughts on the previous game in the series, I don’t feel like the 2D beat ’em up segments work well enough with the core mechanics of the game. As the fighting relies on directional inputs for attacks, you can be attacked from either side, and some of your attacks will miss as you turn in different directions. This cannot occur in the standard fighting as you’re always facing your opponent, making it an annoyance that only rears its head in these sections.
Speaking of the mechanics, the way Rising plays is very similar to the last game, so a lot of your muscle memory will carry over nicely. All of the characters have some auto-combos, four Skills mapped to different combinations of R1 with a direction, and a Skybound Art, the last of which is a devastating attack that uses all of your SBA gauge. This last ability can also become the more powerful Super Skybound Art if your remaining health is 30% or lower.
Each of the Skills have different levels and results if you use one of the attack buttons at the same time, with the cross button using 50% of your SBA gauge to perform the Ultimate version, which also briefly slows down your opponent. All of this combined with the basics of spacing, effective blocking and learning the nuance of your character makes a fairly well balanced fighting game. There’s heaps of tutorials to make this fairly well suited to newcomers to the genre.
That’s all the same as before, but Rising brings a new Bravery system to the table to add more depth. Each player starts a round with three Bravery Points and they are used for the Raging Strike and the Brave Counter. The first of these is an unblockable strike that, if timed correctly, will Guard Crush your opponent leaving them momentarily defenceless. The second will counter an opponent while you’re blocking or in Guard Crush to turn things back in your favour.
When you’re ready to throw down, the game has all the normal fighting game trimmings with Arcade, Training, and Versus all available. There was a pang of sadness in me when I saw that the main menu had a store on it, but thankfully it is mostly for unlocking customisation bits with the in-game currency instead of the standard anime fighting game micro-transactions – there still is some of this nonsense with a link to the Playstation Store on PS5, though.
Then, of course, there’s the Online modes, which are fairly robust. There’s the standard choice of Casual or Ranked matches, complete with the ability to queue for these match types and practice in the Training Mode. The Online Lobbies allow you to jump in with other players in a stylised arcade. Here you can chat using the emotes, leave notes in the visitors book, jump onto arcade cabinets to fight other players, and even play little games of chibi football or try your luck at the crane game.
As well as this, there’s a new mode: Grand Bruise! Where you can enter an online mini-game contests with other players using your lobby avatar in the vein of a kin of Fall Guys-like daft battle royale. Unfortunately, I think that Cygames might have over-estimated the popularity of such a mode as getting matches was difficult. I really enjoyed the games when I got them, but it was often a long wait in the queue to get into matches.
The important question though, is whether the online is any good, and Granblue Fantasy Versus: Rising doesn’t disappoint here. With both cross-play to allow you to play with your friends regardless of platform, and that all important rollback net code, I had very few instances of lag or dropped frame rates. In fact, the only problems I found with the online at all was that the online connection faltering boots you back to the main menu – even if you’re just in Story Mode.
Sadly, because of the smaller install base of anime fighting games in general, the matchmaking online isn’t the most consistent. This isn’t a fault of the game itself, but it’s nonetheless frustrating to be thrown into consecutive matches with players way above your skill level. This is compounded by the fact that accepting a match while in the queue gives you no statistics about your opponent, so it’s luck of the draw to an irritating extent.
Visually, Granblue Fantasy Versus: Rising is absolutely gorgeous, with the eccentric characters being stunningly animated and all of the action flashy, but not overwhelming so. The anime cutscenes in particular look incredible, I just wish there was more of them in the game instead of the visual novel style portraits. Also, the mode that lets you create your own diorama scenes is an excellent little curio that I have spent altogether too much time in.
My only complaints here are that firstly some of the translations are a little off, with some clear and obvious mistakes in the subtitles. Not enough to diminish the experience, but a little jarring nonetheless. The sound mixing is also just bad at some points, with the music being far too loud to hear the characters or other sound effects at times. The music is incredible, sure, but I would prefer to hear the rest of the game alongside it.
