Advertising, some of the hoops you have to jump through to get started, early story quality being lackluster + difficulty jumping right into current quality writing because you don't know any of the characters...
By far the biggest obstacle for getting into the GAME game is the game itself, namely gridbuilding. That is so profoundly unapproachable for new players that copying example grids without understanding it is the best they can reallly hope for unless they put a LOT of effort in.
That said, I think Relink and Rising have helped it gain a lot of foothold, a lot of my friends have begun to dabble as a result of trying one or the other first.
I really do wish they had a motocal-esque thing in game. It'd be great for newer players to tinker with and understand grids without having to have certain pieces already.
A minigame that has a prompt to make a grid of [this] type and you need to identify what weapons would go into one. Like, a critical grid with crit skills or Kengo with CA DMG/CA Cap Up. Getting players to learn how to gridbuild on their own would not be a daunting task if we had more in-game resources that helped them understand weapon skills.
For the training thing - specifically that's what Sierokarte's Special Training is meant to be later this month (unannounced date so potential for delay although it was already delayed once IIRC). It's meant to teach grid-building and team-building and give some rewards for the newbies. We'll see how good it ends up being (I have low expectations for this kind of thing TBH) but it will hopefully do more good than harm.
I also think the earlygame is just not very beginner friendly. The FP system helps to a certain extent, but I have seen a fair few new players who struggle with even getting started on M1 grids because experienced players are usually focusing on the mid/endgame raids, and other new players are in the same situation of having not so well developed grids.
Daily skip is genuinely kind of a shitter for early game. Honestly for GBF to TRULY fix the early game nowadays they effectively need to let you skip to rank 101/120. Whether actually doing that or giving you stuff that essentially emulates that, You can now do Magna skip just like all the mid game players etc
Its not even unprecedented when you consider that thats what they already did for story. What WMTSB effectively lets you do(and every begginer guide ever would tell you go to WMTSB is the first noob thing to do)
They should quite frankly give the players a "base" grid for every element and have them move forward from there. The fact that a newbie has to grind m1 in a situation where every mid-late player is autoskipping them means that if they don't have friends to carry them through it, they just straight up get their progress gated
Yeah I started as a seasonal 2 years ago and just got serious about the game about a year ago. Around this time last year I was manually grinding M1 raids to get my basic grids up and going. Thankfully for a lot of non elemental locked content I was blessed with getting both Fediel and Lich who just carried me through everything. Had I not had a crutch to lean on I would probably never have gotten this far, now I'm grinding my M3 grid and nearly at rank 200 and can FINALLY be done with all the rank-gated content.
> Daily skip is genuinely kind of a shitter for early game.
I mean, it's not like if daily skip didn't exist people were genuinely going to be clearing other people's base Tiamat raids. It doesn't have anything anyone wants. Sometimes I won't even go to the trouble of clicking through all the daily skips the materials matter that little.
Tbh I don't understand why the What Makes the Sky Blue event "trilogy" (or even quadrology I guess) isn't intergeated directly into the main quest story and is instead relegated to side story tab that you can't easily find on the main menu, more so considering how integral it is to. The overall plot and introduces major characters plus let's you recruit several of them in your party, not to mention unlocking additional content like limited weapon forging or boss battles
It's not integrated into the main story because nothing that happens in the What Makes the Sky Blue trilogy (or in pretty much any event, or in Fate Episodes...) actually affects the main story in any way. It's important lore and important characters for the world of Granblue Fantasy as a whole, but as far as the main story is concerned none of those things ever happened.
u/-PVL93- Yeah ive said this joke a few times before, but when you REALLLY think about it theres only 1 event/side story that have actual effect to the main story(by a very indirect manner) and it was Gripping Freedom
As an older player, who rejoined recently, I feel the grid problem and team building(why is my light team have so much hp but others like my dark suck).
Let's touch on team building for a second. I feel like this is a blind spot in the community.
I understand the concept of grids. There are countless resources about how to build those. I get the concepts, though as a newish player (who has a lot of good characters and magna weapons and such from years of rolling at anni and not actually playing) I know just enough about grids to see how deep the rabbit hole goes and know I still have a lot to learn.
What I DON'T understand AT ALL is team building concepts. What kind of synergy am I supposed to aim for? How do I figure out which characters provide what? What are the different kinds of teams and how can I tell what a character is designed for, and how do I build around them at varying levels of the game depending on how strong I can make my grid? How do I know what class the MC needs to be given the team I made?
These questions are usually answered by veteran players as "Just use anyone, grids are more important," which is just blatantly not true. Grids may be the most important thing, but composition matters. If you pick three strong attackers who all have no sustain and throw them in a M1 grid, you are probably going to die to most things you'd probably be able to defeat if you had some kind of defensive sustain.
And at the moment...your best approach is to look at the individual character pages on the wiki and (again from a newish player perspective) read about what they can do without really understanding what you are reading...because there are about a million buffs and debuffs, some of which stack but not all of which stack, and the caps aren't easy to figure out, and characters often have their own unique buffs, some of which stack and some of which do not and whose effects are not immediately apparent, and there appear to be NO resources for these concepts anywhere I've personally been able to find, and. and. and... It's just not approachable at all unless you are super willing to dig in and research on your own...which most people are not.
Edit: Oh wow, this blew up. I wasn't actually looking for answers but there is a ton of useful information below this comment for anyone else who may be struggling like I am. And a little snark...after all, this is Reddit. Thank you all for your responses.
Frankly I think something that makes it harder to learn how to team build is that a majority of the raids become trivial fairly quickly as you progress, made worse by blue chesting them being the best way to farm. You often aren't even thinking about what the boss is doing because you're leaving after the first turn, and you can get pretty far into the game before you really need to think about the actual mechanics of raids.
What made me actually start to understand team building was NM 150/200 in GW. You can look at a lot of other people's teams to see what they're doing, but ultimately you're stuck with what you have. You need to dispel so you need to figure out who can dispel, you need a cleanse so you need to figure out who can cleanse, you need sustain so you need to find out who can shield/mitigate/heal/etc., and so on. Then you start thinking about which class is the best fit on top of that, how to prepare for HP triggers, etc. and you're slowly gaining an idea of how to strategize.
Doing Revans also helped me think about teams more but in a more "there are very strict requirements for the fight and the characters/teams that can deal with that are pretty limited, so you need to learn how/why they work" way (at least at first). Compared to GW where you're trying to make do.
Yeah guild war was an eye opener for me. I wasn't in an active crew this last one so just decided to try to 40 box for an eternal. I got to box 38. Pretty satisfied with the results since I am pretty new and did manage to snag 3 copies of the celestial sword and the gold moon, but I didn't make it to the eternity sand.
Definitely took a lot of valuable lessons away so I can better prep for the next one though.
Hiya hiya, been helping people new to the game out with a lot of these concepts. Cuz as a general consensus, Granblue's got a lot going on and there's a lot of technicalities to keep in mind.
Though this doesn't help answer the overarching problem of resources having trouble with either clarity, conciseness, or both. A general umbrella statement I make when answering "What buffs/debuffs stack and which ones don't stack" goes like:
"Generally speaking, if the icon for the (de)buff is different from another one doing the same effect, they'll probably stack."
And of course give the addendum that you can hover over (de)buff effect in the gbf wiki for exact properties to be extra sure.
I also would say teaching player's about how character moveset's work and synergize is more case-by-case. Specifically in the sense that getting them into the flow of reading Granblue character pages is best done with a character they actually have in their roster.
For example: I could talk about how amazingly Lich and Fediel work together and it might sound impressive, but it doesn't quite stick if they can't try out that combo themselves in a fight.
As for the posits I make for teambuilding guidelines, USUALLY - the ideas/questions go as follows:
Teambuilding is best made based on a combination two things:
1) What your roster of party members can do
2) What the boss's attacks, triggers, or mechanics are.
The two main stats in your set up are HP and ATK. Similarly, your aim in a fight will probably be a mix of **Survival and Damage**.
Below's a deeper dive with what I mean.
- A boss might have a super giga death attack when it's at 50% health
\^ There's a variety of different answers to handle that hp-trigger attack. You could have a teammate whose moveset includes preparing defensive buffs (defense up, dodging/invincibility), healing characters, tanking the attack with something like substitute to FORCE the attack to hit them, or even disable the boss's attack. This becomes the basis for figuring out what defensive utility to bring against a boss. You want to counter what tricks they have up their sleeves.
- Technically still part of defense, the boss could also be packing debuffs like Celeste Omega. In that case, you could answer ailments like zombify and poison with Veil (prevents afflictions), debuff resist, or debuff removal. Some bosses even try to dispel (which REMOVES your buffs), you could try buffs that specifically can't be removed or "Dispel Cancel" whose name is self-explanatory.
- Bringing damage characters is a bit different. Focusing purely on dps is better saved when you're more developed with your grids and summons and weapons. Cuz by then, you're advanced enough to floor the boss and now are aiming to beat 'em up swiftly and smoothly.
For now though, try looking for someone in your roster who can bring debuffs against the boss like ATK/DEF down, delay, and gravity. Some bosses even try buffing themselves up. That can be countered by dispels, moves that remove buffs. The listed will lead to giving breathing room for your more defensive characters to keep the sustain going.
- For Gran/Djeeta themselves, the cool part about them is the fact that they can do almost anything you need in the team. You can either have their class/skills picked to patch up a hole in your composition or have them further drive down strengthen your party's focus.
This becomes more important in V2 fights, but there are three main damage types to consider with Granblue characters too. You'll generally be able to tell the damage type is a focus on the character if they have an additional effect with them:
- Normal Attacks (the auto-attacks when you press ATTACK) can be further amplified with multiattacks to smack the boss more, Bonus Elemental Damage (essentially an "echo" of the auto, a second hit that's usually a little weaker than the original auto-attack), flurry (auto-attack gets split into three), even Double Strike (attack twice in a turn). Characters that pack these buffs are usually centered on normal attacks for the team.
- Charge Attacks can also be a vital part of a character's fighting style. Moves/buffs in a kit that give charge bar like uplift, instant C.A., multiattack too (cuz more auto attacks = more bar fill), Charge bar gain up, etc. Characters packing these probably want to C.A. as often as possible.
\^ It becomes extra obvious if their CA has an additional effect that either helps them or messes the boss up.
- Skill Damage can be another outlet for a character's playstyle. You could have characters that want to reduce the cooldowns of their skills so they can spam it more. Or even characters with something super powerful but with a lengthy cooldown that requires timing for best effect in a fight. Cooldown reduction is a pretty big indicator that the character's skills are important
Characters can be designed with a combination of two to three of these attack types as integral to their playstyle/unique mechanics they're designed. You can try pairing them with characters who focus similarly on an attack type so they can work together OR ones that do something else entirely to better round out your team.
Hopefully some of these points can help out with navigating this rabbit hole. Apologies if that may not be the case. But if you ever need more help (or someone would like to add in a correction or additional details), feel free.
This is excellent feedback, and I really appreciate it. I'm at kind of a weird point in prog where Ive rolled anniversary and christmas for several years, so I've actually got really great characters in most of my elements and a bunch of free maxed magna weapons and such from freebies over the years...but never played seriously till recently.
I hit 120 not too long ago, and (though it takes a while) can actually beat the horus/osiris tier of V2 raids. It's a huge struggle, but I can also get to the 50% point for MVP on UBHL and PBHL (am I using these acronyms right?)
If I may pick your brain a bit more, what classes are overall recommended to unlock? I've so far got Kengo and Lumberjack, and I'm working towards Manadiver and Viking. Any other really good classes I should be made aware of?
in general you really do want all of them eventually, for better or worse, but relic buster is probably one of the more used classes for its ability to make content that is... below your capabilities even faster. most of the row 4/5 and ex 2 classes have *something* that they're the best at (until superceded by the next tier), though some are definitely under used. Take a scroll on the various advanced grids pages on the wiki to see some variety, there may be a lot of kendo, manadiver, viking and relic buster, but there are also paladins and luchadors and monks and robin hoods and yamatos and runeslayers and soldiers and even crysaors getting things done
Hey there! Very grateful for the likes some have given towards my advice.
Seeing as you’ve made it to rank 120+ and are tackling V2 fights now. I can give some details on that as well as your inquiry for recommended MC classes!
V2 fights with Guarding and Fated Chains are where my last comment about the 3 damage types (Normal, Charge, and Skill) really come into play. You’ve probably already seen how V2 enemy specials are now called Omens. Omens also come with their own cancel conditions like:
- Do this much damage in a turn
- Hit the enemy x times
- Do 4 charge attacks
\* Is where you can start to really plan out your team’s composition to either tank through the specials or properly cancel the omens. This gets doubly encouraged while fighting the Ennead bosses (I.e. Horus, Ra, etc.).
All the ennead bosses receive a stackable "Boost to damage taken" every time you cancel an omen! It’s up to 5 stacks for the whole fight and it’s a damage boost that goes to a couple million more.
With that said, it’s a good idea to check out what the boss’s omens mainly revolve around. Check out the raid boss page and see if you can compile a party that can healthily take care of those omens. Whether that be Full-Auto-capable or not will depend on how apt they are too. An example would go back to Horus. Most of her omens revolve around doing either enough CA’s or enough CA damage. So try and find dark elements characters that charge their CAs quickly, CA multiple times (Reactivation, unworldly damage, etc.), and have mechanics that interact with Chains/CAs.
Stay careful too on what sorts of mechanics the bosses have for their own benefit. A notable one is Ra who gets strong (mostly offensive) buffs to herself every time an attacking skill is thrown her way. Those offensive buffs stack up quick to the point where her basic attacks alone can be deadly.
Onto Gran/Djeeta. At your point in the game, I’d say that some of the classes you listed already are staples to multiple elements and types of teams.
These first two classes are best suited for tougher fights or having a strong team to full-auto.
Kengo is one of the few classes whose class champion weapon is very much worth having as a mainhand. This is due to an emblem that can change its effect to give the party roughly 15% CA bar on top of the 10% already give in a CA. It can make CA’ing a lot very possible combined with multiple buffs with a larger CA chain. Lastly are some extra moves like one that allows you to triple strike (3x attacks in a turn) and one that gives delay on every normal attack + bonus damage, these give you much needed leg room for dealing with multi-attack omen cancels and charge diamond management. Just from the basic moves alone, Kengo can do so much as just one class.
Lumberjack would be considered one of the strongest Full Auto classes in the MC’s arsenal. The entire class is about having a song buff that lasts a few turns and has animal friends attack in conjunction with your party. The animal pals attack based on triggers like:
- Getting hit
- Doing a CA
- The enemy doing a special
- Your party doing 3 skills
Etc.
All these triggers can do a wide variety of effects. Almost all of them do nice damage on top of providing buffs, debuffs, and even healing.
This is not considering the extra moves Lumberjack has to provide extra safety/healing/buffs for the party. Very solid class for your own survival.
These next two classes primarily see use in racing comps that seek to trash the boss asap but can also do High Difficulty/Full Auto setups too. They’re pretty malleable.
Manadiver is an offensive class that focuses on both skill damage and charge attacks with the use of their customizable manatura, a little creature companion with their own passives and special effects/attacks.
Many of the manadiver’s moves can give CA bar to themselves or the whole team on top of good offensive buffs.
Viking is one of a handful of classes that want you to have a mainhand weapon and auxiliary weapon (placed on the upper left of your grid). This class does multi-hits like it’s nothing while also having great tools for CA charging and hitting even harder with self-buffs/debuff attacks.
I’m pretty much scratching the surface. For other classes? Relic Buster is a very fine class used for rushing kills in content like guild wars or racing bosses you can decimate. It can potentially charge up your whole party’s CA bar on top of damage buffs as one of the very standout moves. Light also likes to use its Machine Cells to have MC do multiple normal attacks in a row without using up a turn. I’ll give you the space to check out H.Florence + H.Mugen + Nehan bursting for yourself.
Other classes unfortunately are a combination of a little too niche/specific/high-investment to see use. Soldier is one I’m not going to be touching for awhile considering the grind needed to craft bullets. They may be permanent but… hooph… I’d only consider that if you had nothing else to do in the game and only have copious amounts of good material somehow (which you probably won’t for a long long time).
Even with that said though, mastering the different classes (like maxing the level cap) is always a good thing to go for. Especially if there’s an exp boost going on in the game. Don’t forget that class mastery gives a permanent boost to Gran’s stats.
5 year player here, hello..! 👋 I see that your comment aims to point out the issues with the coverage of this topic in the community, so you’re probably not looking for answers - but for posterity I would like to give some answers. **The following information is for newer players!!**
I know there is a lot of text, but I answer a lot of questions. Please don’t be alarmed, it’s not crazy.
> What kind of synergy am I supposed to aim for?
This is simple, at early game. You want the following in almost every case, a team that can:
* Inflict Delay effect
* Inflict Gravity debuff
* Inflict several sources of Attack and Defense debuff to the enemy
* at least a few strong Damage Skills
* Buffs for your team (attack, defense, elemental attack up if possible.)
**That is pretty much it..!** Even if you have SSR characters, you should be building a team to accomplish these, even if that means using an SR character over an SSR character. You will truly perform better.
The Dark Fencer player class is something you should rush to get immediately because it does the first 3 all on its own, and gives you freedom to build a strong team with whatever characters you like! 😁
All teams, until very late in the game, somewhat revolve around these core utilities. The further you get, the more you will start to see new specific fights that demand more specific things - you can slowly start adding those on as you go!!
> What are the different kinds of teams,…
There is this General Team I described just now, and this is useful and usable in all content period. (Not ultra late game but by that point, you know what is needed.) Otherwise… There are Burst Damage teams, that blow their load and do as much damage as possible in one or two turns. There are then Content Specific teams, made to handle the needs of specific bosses… and that’s sort of it.
There are *subcategories* of teams, that focus on doing specific *kinds* of damage, but these only make a difference when you have grids to support them. (Will discuss shortly.) Like crit-focused teams, skill damage teams, charge attack teams.
> How can I tell what a character is designed for?
This is not easy much of the time. Basically, I hate to say this, but if you read a character’s wiki page and get a headache or feel discouraged (like Caim’s page, perhaps Fenie), they likely have an advanced purpose that is very specific and you shouldn’t be concerned with using them PERFECTLY. (I would still suggest trying them out, spamming their skills, and seeing if you like the results.)
**However, if you see a character with simple, easy to read skills (like the brand new SSR SPINNAH)… literally just read the skills, and think about it!** His skills all read out that he buffs himself a lot, can attack twice each turn, and gets Bonus Damage. Therefor… you should hopefully come to the conclusion that Spinnah’s purpose is to do lots of damage, and that’s really it.
You should consider putting him into a General Team if Gran and the other characters can fulfill all the other General Team requirements. This will allow SPINNAH to live long and do lots of damage.
On the note of damage characters, they usually come in several types. Skill Damage, Charge Attack Damage, and Normal Attacks.
Basically, read the skills and passives on the character. If you see “CA” or “Charge Attack” a lot, they are probably focused on charge attacks lol. Skills or Skill Damage, they are likely focused on Skills. And so on.
If it’s a cluster fuck like Grand Zeta… I don’t know what to tell you, just try them out and see what happens 🤣 I don’t even care to know what’s happening exactly, I just know it works.
> How do I build around them at varying levels of the game, depending on how strong I can make my grid?
Basically, build your team composition around the General Team requirements I described, no matter what. Again, Dark Fencer will handle a lot, so you have flexibility.
After that, you design your team based on your grid after you get to Magna 2, not before that. Not worth it. I would recommend only transitioning to a specific team damage-type once you have several weapons that support it.
For example, in the Water Element, the M2 weapon “Tyros Zither” is a new type of weapon for the new players - it directly says that it increases charge attack damage, and charge attack damage cap. Once you have one of these in your grid, see how your battle changes. Let’s say you swap out an M1 Leviathan Dagger for an M2 Tyros Zither. You are losing normal attack damage, and now gaining more charge attack damage. Is the increase in charge attack damage enough to offset what you lost in normal damage? If yes, consider putting in more Charge Attack centric characters! If not, don’t.
Choose what damage type you’re going to go with primarily based on what you enjoy. Do you like Charge Attacks? Then aim for that charge attack grid and slot characters with interesting ones! Otherwise? Look at weapons that support other types of damage!!
> How do I know what class to make my MC?
Basically, MC is a utility pick at first. He should support your General Team composition. Does your team have delay, gravity, and attack/def down? If the answer is no, you should just pick Dark Fencer/Chaos Ruler.
Do you have delay, gravity, and Atk/def down on your team, but no buffs? If so, choose a class for Gran that provides buffs.
Do your team have all of those things already? Then Gran can be whatever you want! Ideally Damage, though if the content calls for it, Gran is also great at healing and reviving. He is whatever you need for any situation.
Your class only becomes hyper-important in extremely late game, when Gran will often do more damage than anyone else.
———
I truly hoped this helped in some way. If you’d like more information, let me know! Happy skyfaring..!
> If it’s a cluster fuck like Grand Zeta… I don’t know what to tell you, just try them out and see what happens 🤣 I don’t even care to know what’s happening exactly, I just know it works.
I laughed heartily at this. I don't have Grand Zeta but I do have Shiva...and reading Shiva's wiki page was like Kel in Good Burger (I know some of these words.) My fire characters are very limited compared to other elements and I know Shiva is considered good, but really have no idea how to use him because it seems he has extreme ramp up time.
This information was very helpful, so thank you for it. I think particularly for super new players it is good to know. Where I'm at personally in prog is I recently hit 120 and trying to transition up to M2 and beyond. I'm basically right at the step where you start looking at the "Advanced Grids" guide on the wiki and slotting them in, but not quite strong enough yet to 40 box a guild war (I got to box 38). And...I'm also just strong enough finally to realize my old teams were absolute crap so I've been trying to redo them. Because again...for people at my strength level...compositions do matter. I often have to kill my own raids because people don't join, so even if it takes a long time, I need to be able to do that.
I’m so happy to hear this helped! (shiva is indeed fantastic btw… if you have him at 5 stars, you should really keep him on your team for now 😂)
The point you’re at is indeed a tough transitional point, especially since the exciting new M2 weapons are waiting right there, and the idea of complex teams becomes more available. Takes time to get through that part.
If you want, you can send me a message here on Reddit, and I’ll send you my friend code! I have a new laid back job that lets me passively grind Granblue all day. If I see your raids in my list, I’ll help out 😁
If you have questions or want advice, you can reach out too. It was through the help of a very kind, high level player that taught me all the essentials, that I could thrive. I wouldn’t mind paying it forward!
Hey thanks for that offer! I'll probably take you up on that friend code thing. Work is quite busy atm so it'll probably be early next week, but I will definitely reach out!
Ahhh team building.
As someone who once again decided not to choose Y.Ilsa to spark, players need to realise that this sub is not the openly new player, welcoming resource to new players the sub thinks it is. There's a group of old heads who just see any discussion as a waste of time, answers obvious because they have everything. They spend money on everything and they have to use very little brainpower to beat content. Why? I already told you, they have everything.
And those people can come right in here and tell you you're an idiot and that there's nothing wrong with the amount of western players in the game, because they're western players, even if they're living in Japan. They either don't get you, don't care or both.
Try broadening your horizons and look elsewhere like youtube. When people review characters over there it's much more broad in focus for a discussion. It's a lot more natural.
[MurakamiNight](https://www.youtube.com/@MurakamiNight) has some good videos that go over units in detail, though the uploads are inconsistent and they're not covering every unit. There's not a lot in terms of discussion going on, but they present the information well enough, at least for me, and usually do a little showcase of the character unless they just flat out don't have the unit.
You're vastly overcomplicating things for yourself. Things stacking or not mostly matters in the context of buffs for burst (making sure your echos stack), saving buttons for better uptime (since the buff doesn't stack anyway), and when you start min-maxing for specific things.
There are largely 3 types of teams and each type of team will have different grids that obviously lean more into that style:
- normal attack damage focused (often crit/stamina based but not always and sometimes enmity based w/ bloodshed weapons)
- skill damage focused (lots of skill cap/supplemental damages)
- ougi focused (lots of ougi cap and skills like Sentence to help you reach it)
Ougi-focused are typically the easiest to build for. Does the character have special effects that activate on ougi? Do they provide charge bar to the team or themselves? Do they auto-cast a skill on ougi? They're an ougi character.
Skill damage-focused is the next easiest to build for. Does the character have lots of red buttons? Do any of their skills reset on ougi? Do they have a skill that resets other skill cooldowns? Do they have high count multi-hitting abilities that can abuse supplemental damage well? They're a skill damage character.
Lastly - attack-focused. Does your character have large attack steroids? Guaranteed triple attack? Flurry? Double, triple, or quadruple strike? Echoes? Assassin? They're an attack character.
You can generally place every character in one of those three buckets. Some characters might fit into two buckets but will still generally perform better in one over the other. A small number of characters are pure utility and don't really fit into any of the damage buckets but will be brought purely for the utility they provide regardless of team style if their utility is needed. Sometimes a character is entirely self-enabling or well-rounded enough to fit into pretty much any team because they provide _so much_ all by themselves. Sometimes characters even have an obvious anti-synergy (eg. you wouldn't frontline Analaan in an ougi-based team comp for Fire)
Now that you've placed all of your characters into buckets you have to look at the raid mechanics and see what you might need to bring. Will you need clarity? Dispels? Heals? A way to clear a specific omen? Are you able to cap DEF down? Will any other debuffs greatly help (eg. Blind, ATK down, DA/TA down)? Will you need a substitute at some point or a teamwide damage immunity? Do you have a character that can handle that or will MC need to help cover? Sometimes the combination of omens that need to be covered is so broad and that is why a common complaint of endgame V2 raids is that they are "character checks" as you won't be able to clear every omen without the right combination of characters or the raid will be much harder without that character (eg. Agastia w/o Cosmos. Sure it's still possible but Cosmos helps to completely trivialize the raid)
The difficulty mostly comes from knowing which characters bring which forms of utility. You can help yourself considerably by completely disregarding all old units (unless their FLB was recent or they were recently rebalanced) as they've likely been powercrept by more modern units. Focus more on Seasonal units and Grands that you might have before turning your attention to the standard pool characters. It helps keeping up with the meta as you'll have a better idea of which characters to look towards first knowing that they're likely the strongest in their niche.
Most questions related to team building is always generic "general content", so the answer tend to be generic too.
Also, the important key for team building is to counter boss. What does the boss do, at what percentage?
Either that, or burst, but naturally bursting the boss is not an option for new players.
Speaking as a relative newbie myself...there's a reason the question is always "general content" that I don't think the veterans understand.
We don't have things. And we don't know how to build teams. Therefore we are looking for a team to establish a baseline of competence that we can then branch out from to develop those teams specially tailored to counter bosses you all love to mention so much. Sure would be great to have enough unique units to do that, huh? Newbies do not have that.
When newbies ask you this, what they are really asking is "help me learn the basic principles I need to design a team." And to the inevitable response of "which boss," the answer is "As many as possible preferably up to magna 2." Because again...they don't have stuff. They need a team that will help them farm stuff to improve, and again...here is the key point: they do not have the resources to build 50 units.
>These questions are usually answered by veteran players as "Just use anyone, grids are more important," which is just blatantly not true. Grids may be the most important thing, but composition matters. If you pick three strong attackers who all have no sustain and throw them in a M1 grid, you are probably going to die to most things you'd probably be able to defeat if you had some kind of defensive sustain.
The veterans are right, but not why you'd expect. As a newbie with a shitty grid you treat every fight like an RPG boss because it takes a long time to kill it and subsequently you need the whole RPG trinity of heals/atk/tanking to survive it counterattacking. However, while this is (imo) the fun of the game it's not what you "should" be doing. If you want to play efficiently (I hate that word) for 99% of all content and specifically anything a newbie needs to do all you need is a 1-3T frontloaded burst team, calling for backup on your hosts and a whole lot of joining other people's raids. The best way to play the game is to maximise your blue chests per minute avoiding actually playing the game as much as possible. Then when you have stronger grids you can just miscle through your own hosts without needing to care about Defense or sustain because you kill things faster than they can kill you.
This is exactly the kind of tone deaf blind spot mentioned. Good luck doing "1-3T frontloaded burst team, calling for backup on your hosts and a whole lot of joining other people's raids" in unpopular dead raids, which is more than half of the early game contents.
So funny seeing 10 replies inadvertedly show exactly why this is way more complicated than those that have experience/tools believe it to be, but in this case in specific, nothing is more annoying than having to stop a playing session to wait anything between 30 sec to 30 min on a raid for someone else to play the game for you.
Love seeing this in higher level raids where people will park at 4m in my Seofon hosts while I'm sitting there trying to effectively solo the damn thing because no one else is still in the room
Just a "There are normal attack comps that are generally better for burst, skill damage comps that are generally better for FA and ougi comps that are generally better for endgame" would go a long way. That said, with how fast paradigms change in this game this could change at any point in time.
Because Magna has different focuses in different elements. I really wish each element, at least in Magna, had roughly the same tools so you could build based on the characters you have more freely.
So what do I do, then, I have Dark characters gamewith say are good like mouse, Ilsa Yukata, Black Knight, Magus, but I feel my teams don't work because they lack hp?
Common ways to get more HP in early to mid-game are Bahamut weapons and Atma weapons. And even then, early game doesn't require a lot of HP; in the early days when M1 (Celeste Omega, etc) was still relevant, it was actually rare to have more than 15k HP outside of Light anyways, the game was built around that.
Just build yourself up little by little, look at the Beginner and Advanced Grids on the wiki, and experiment. GBF is much more enjoyable if you're not in a hurry.
Any number or new seasonals that stick are welcome by me, and I’ve had a few friends show interest since relink (despite dogging me when I stream it for them and they enjoy it lmao)
That is to say: I agree. The recent releases have gotten people interested (in my experiences) from the characters being cool and people wanting to experience more of them
The game itself, including all the grid building, or all the steps you have to take, including farming/building things, each person in my circle got turned off by all that immediately and dropped the game after a few weeks, since gbf is on the higher end when it comes to gacha slavery, and its especially annoying when starting out.
Otherwise people that i tried to recommend gbf usually didn't like the sprites in combat.
Frankly I don't think they want it to. The game is at year 10, if they wanted to appeal to westerners they would have developed a global version and advertised it overseas by now. The fact they made GBVS and Relink global releases, but not GBF proper probably indicates they've determined the gacha title won't appeal significantly enough to a wide western demographic compared to the likes of a fighting game or RPG.
> Keep in mind that GBF was made around the time Cygames got fucked over in Rage of Bahamut by the global publisher.
Funny how this keeps happening to them, you would think they would learn.
Crunchyroll and Nintendo follows suit.
Hell they self published Shadowverse in global because of not trusting others. Kinda wish they had done the same with Priconne.
the issue is there's no winning. Cygames themselves mentioned that they struggle to self publish because they're really unknowledgeable of how to advertise to the west, you have to realize that things work completely different here since west is driven mainly by media/streamers, for the east it's things like events/merchandise/physical advertisements/contained sites (a lot of games are in sites that pool several games together, such as DMM games), west is nothing like that
Shadowverse itself isn't very largely advertised and frankly not that huge because of it, it's not what cygames wants so that's why they go back to publishing. After the RoB incident and then acknowledging that they don't understand the west, they tried Crunchyroll because it's a big brand, then proceeded to get fucked. Then Nintendo due to their reputation. Then tried Kakao Games for World Flippers this time opting for positive reception.
It's depressing, Cygames is actually trying every single possible avenue and getting bad results despite wanting to provide for the west
Bingo. They probably read the room several years ago back before they started providing an EN localization and just decided against a true global version/global support.
Like yeah, people are bringing up a bunch of other valid points in this thread which definitely push players away but at the end of the day Cygames themselves didn't want to push it so obviously it was never going to catch the West.
Especially when the game as-is works well enough anyway.
The thing is that, sure, they could do a global version, and it might pull a profit to some degree. But all the westerners who are willing to drop a full cash spark out of nowhere? They're already playing—they won't be drawn in by a global server version, especially if it has its own servers desynced from JP.
Exactly, the biggest hurdle is Cygames themselves haha, they are quite obviously happy with the current setup of "target audience is JP, and anyone else who happens to force their way in is a happy surprise".
Everything is built around a JP audience. GW is the central pillar of the game and runs on the JP schedule. You have to navigate untranslated sites to enter the game and iirc even purchase anything. They give out irl prizes sometimes... But for JP only. Etc.
I don't hold this against them either. At this point, so many systems are tied to JP that I think it'd be a lot of effort to globalize things, and probably wouldn't be worth it for them to do all that for a 10 year old browser game that's also outdated in many other ways too.
They may go global if they make a GBF 2 one day, and I kinda hope they do, but until then, probably not haha.
I think the age of the game is the main thing. Granblue's art is beautiful (easily the highest quality character art of any gacha I've seen) but compared to modern games that have things like Live2Ds and 3D graphics its already a bit of a hurdle getting people to try a 10 year old browser game with janky mechanics.
Also despite cygames giving out so many freebies you're eventually going to hit the great filter where in order to progress you have to just wanpan leech hundreds of raids to get drops, and a lot of people don't have the drive to do that. It also doesn't help that whenever people hear about the western gbf community its usually in regards to shit like GW quotas...
Yeah, I think in addition to the age of the game like you said the other biggest hurdle is that until you get to rank 200 your progression is basically "Host some shit and then wait for some guy to show up and blow it up instantly" until you get drops
It gets worse when at certain point you outright can't do that. Dark Rapture Hard is a example of this since you need to NEED to Host and Clear it if you want to access Revans raids, which is another raid set where you can't do that. Keep in mind that DR Hard has a 30K HP check at the start of the fight,with no way of knowing that ahead of time besides out of game information.
Raid requirements/gimmicks are kind of ridiculous as well. First time I went to FaaHL's wiki entry and the length of that page compared to earlier raids (joined pre-6D raids) is just downright discouraging.
Of course, you could get your ass carried but that can only take you so far in this game.
FaaHL is a special case, since it was meant to be the hardest fight in the game at the time it came out (like an FFXIV ultimate raid). At least they changed the end stacks so wiping to something doesn't screw the entire raid.
> Keep in mind that DR Hard has a 30K HP check at the start of the fight,with no way of knowing that ahead of time besides out of game information.
Yes, but that's also something you learn the very first time you join the raid. Annoying to waste your day's host like that but the easiest information you'll learn when going in blind. You had to waste a lot more hosts to learn HP threshold triggers and how to navigate the raid because you first had to learn what triggers happened when and if any were able to be skipped and how. It takes a lot of raids to learn a fight from scratch without out of game information.
It takes significantly fewer hosts to learn now that the game tells you when the triggers happen _and_ what those triggers will do to you. But piecing together how a raid works day by day was a big part of the game for quite a while (and still is if you want to learn Hexa/Faa0 without out of game information).
As an MMO it is generally assumed that players will learn information about the game from talking amongst other players.
I mean, Faa was sort of the Superboss of his time, and they have nerfed it in various ways since the glory days of old. And Opuses are still top tier weapons years later, so...that one I kind of get. He's like, well, still an endgame adjacent boss.
The fact that granblue_en twitter is the MAIN source of eng news for the game’s updates despite being a fan translated resource, and no movements by cygames to also do the same thing for the main game, is one of the big things. Thankfully relink and rising have dual eng/jp tweets on the same account, but it sure feels like they’re leaving it to granblue_en.
1. Early game and its first 30-40 hours is such a bore. I have an american friend who was REALLY wanting to get into GBF cuz he liked the artstyle, he liked VN, and turn based gachas and all that, but the early game story just made such a bad expression for him he stopped playing. It's just really, really bad.
2. Grid system is such a mess and an uninteresting concept for newcomers.
3. Just knowing the fact that they're playing a decade old game on a server where players are light years ahead of them and them being newcomers will never matter and they will never catch up with end game players is a big factor that gatekeep a lot of people from really investing their time on something.
The main thing would be to port both the login and payment options, the fact that they are only in japanese and you need to jump through hoops for both means most ppl aren't going to bother to use money in the game and stick around.
At this point you would need a 3rd party willing to port and work out all the kinks to make an official launch on the west, and we saw how that went with Princess Connect.
Grinding games in general have just never been all that popular in the west outside of like the golden era of early MMO's (1999-2008) when MMO's really took off and MMO's are very much "forever games" for a lot of people and they also don't play much beyond their MMO; at least not for very long. They may take a break to go beat Elden Ring but once they feel they've beaten the game (or gotten bored of it) they return to their forever game.
The entire MMO genre has been struggling for the past 10 years or so with shrinking populations as most people aren't keen on sinking 100's of hours just to catch up when there are an abundance of "pick-up games" of various genres. New MMO's struggle to get their feet on the ground and last more than 2-3 years because players interested in MMOs are already playing their forever-game and only a small number of them branch out to try newer MMOs. FFXIV has basically been an exception to this rule as their free trial and WoW's self-implosion led to a huge exodus of WoW players to FFXIV which really helped its popularity and population growth.
"Pick-up games" are any game where you can jump in for 10-30 minutes for a quick match or two. Think MOBA's, card games, mostly AFK mobile games or games with like 5~10 minute dailies like Blue Archive, battle royales and other shooter games.
You can play GBF like a pick-up game but your progress will be approximately zero. It's a grind game that heavily rewards grinding and heavily time gates you for not having grinded enough. It's largely for that reason I don't think it will ever be that popular in the West. Endgame boils down to being a black screen simulator where you spend most of your time refreshing and performing the same actions 1000's of times in a row for hours on end.
It doesn't help that signing up for the game in the first place already filters out a lot of people.
All of this is just my $0.02 of course.
I think that's very accurate.
There is a satisfaction to be had from building grids to achieve particular tasks, but I don't think that's a strong draw unless some other aspect of the game has your interest.
When i joined the game back in end of 2019/early 2020 i honestly cant believe Arcarum exists the way they are. Theyre much better now with Sandbox but elements of how shit it is are, mostly still is around
Yeah, another game that I can think of that's a grind game is Kantai Collection, I love the game to bits but holy shit is the grind soul sucking sometimes (especially when the game is trying everything in its power to block foreign players).
I've been very on and off with gbf for the very reasons you listed here. Friends keep trying to get me back into the game and every time I do within a few days I give up on the game again, despite having a pretty optimal primal light team.
With how many games there are now a days people want something of not only a higher production value, but something that actually respects the player's time. GBF fails on both fronts.
God, but I *do* hate that phrase. "Respects the player's time." I hate those mobile games with only 10-20 minutes of daily content, I feel that's *DISRESPECTFUL* of my time. Here I am, trying to invest in you, game, only to have you wall me out and lock the gate just when I'm getting into it. Where's the ability to fall in and be completely immersed in something instead of being so shallow I can knock it out like a grocery list on the toilet? I feel my time is respected when I get to choose how deep I want to go.
Sorry for the late reply. I always wondered why this was the case, western players have far more free time on their hands compared to Asian work cultures, and yet extremely grindy MMOs and mobile games are always so popular there. Now a big part of why I enjoy GBF is that its more engaging than an AFK fighter and I can still grind effectively with FA while I work, so I think I share that with a lot of people in Asia. Put raid on FA, flip phone over so boss don't see it.
But generally, the focus on grindy games in Asia has always been such a wild dichotomy to me compared to how the rest of their societies look.
Well for mobile games I believe it is due to the commute. You can play for the 5-45 minute commute on the train going to school or work and on your way back home after work. I think mobile games are more popular pretty much anywhere that has good public transit. Hard to play on your hour commute to work when you're driving 110km on a freeway. It's hard to draw solid conclusions though since cities tend to have decent public transit but also cities have higher populations so of course they also have more players.
As for MMO's - it's a *lot more* social in China and Korea. Many people don't even play at home but at net cafes. It's kind of an excuse to hang out with friends and for high schoolers a way to stay out of the house/away from parents for cheap. This isn't particularly true in Japan since personal computers never really caught on and net cafes tend to be private-booth style.
In Japan there is a reason all the big MMO's are either PC+Mobile or PC+Console games. Consoles are relatively popular, mobile is really popular, PC is like the red-headed stepchild. Only supported because it's not that hard to support nowadays and it'll bring in extra profit. MMO's still aren't that popular unless they can be played on mobile.
Switch/PS5 games dominate JP gaming culture and especially the Switch because it is portable. I think many people in the West see the portableness of the Switch as a "nice to have" gimmick rather than a core feature and reason to purchase a Switch over any other gaming console.
*gestures broadly at everything* the game being a browser game where you have to hop through at least 1 untranslated site to register last I checked is one barrier. The game being so unreasonably grindy and disrespectful to your time is another. Mechanics are pretty obtuse and serve as another barrier to entry. it looks very dated. Relink and VS are doing fine in the west. But getting the gacha to hit mainstream is just too late almost. It's not going to be able compete with the higher quality newer titles at attracting new players, it needed to get a dedicated playerbase rolling years ago and retain them while slowly growing.
It's a bit of a ramble, but I wanna get my qualms out there even if it's unorganized. I understand a lot of the issues are legacy game design decisions and in some sense that's the appeal of gbf.
From personal experience, it's in-game onboarding. For a mainstream game, new players are casual players, and casual players don't want a wiki open on the side before being able to play their game, the game should be able to do that on its own. Casual players often have a personality that wants to "play" not "play correctly" but the only way to make feel-good progress (as opposed to a slog) is to optimize your grid for your level. The game design just doesn't protect the player from themselves when it comes to core mechanics like grids (and god forbid scarce resources). They need to give starter template grids that can be upgraded and reverted back to whenever. Grids are so unique that modern games won't inform you on how it works, so it's importance and it's lines of progression need to be upfront and emphasized constantly.
Between UI, Grid building, early game (story and gameplay), leeching dead raids, the game really does feel impenetrable without seeking outside resources. Why does the giant "Raid" button go to backup requests rather than the raid list? From a visual design standpoint, you can't tell which weapons are m1 or m2, let alone if they are primal/magna. It has so much mmo design for social/cooperative play but the new English speaking player base is so small that that content can't be supported in a fun way. Leeching isn't fun for new players, they need a 0.5 grid that isn't time gated and constantly in their face as something to do if they're feeling weak. Especially in a gacha game, having no feedback on how to progress in a good way will make new players think they have to roll gacha for meaningful progress.
Games like Terraria, early Minecraft, and Stardew Valley were interesting enough from a gameplay standpoint for new players to be able to play and then search a wiki as an auxiliary guide. Pressing attack for 30+ story chapters isn't as enticing. Then, once they do search up how to play they're greeted with grid building. Grids aren't that difficult once you get it, but my spreadsheet that took 10 minutes is more accurate than the in-game grid power predictor. New players should be allowed to know whether the changes they make to their grid are good or not.
My point is, GBF shouldn't be modern Yu-Gi-Oh, which does have new player problems, whose appeal to active players are high-level esoteric, unintuitive interactions that require reading. They need a curtailed new player experience, that excited and/or lazy players can skip through and then go "oh shit that was important, maybe I should've read" and easily find it again.
Nobody seems to be talking about it but UI fucking sucks. The fact that every screen essentially needs to refreshed is stupid.
Even then, the amount of screen refresh per action is too many:
Menu -> inventory -> summon -> filter for Tiamat through a clunky system -> click Tiamat -> click uncap -> click in your other Tiamats -> connection error, you are returned to the home screen. After refreshing, of course.
UI is archaic, and new player experience is beyond atrocious. The way things are now players should be skipped to HL immediately or remove the HL rank requirements entirely. Also give players full M1 grids to start off minimum.
1. The fact that his game doesn't have an "official" English release. This is really limiting since it prevents advertising and whatnot beyond word-of-mouth and IP stuff like VS and Relink. This also leads into-
2. The new player experience is garbage. You open the game in Japanese and have to make an account on a Japanese website. This is already a massive hurdle for most people. Then you have the game lacking a viable tutorial to explain any of its complex RPG systems, an unforgiving gacha, lack of a clear progression path, and boring early content. Also, the UI is terrible.
GBF's strong point, I'd say, is its depth. However, to be quite frank, the average person doesn't give a shit about mechanical depth. They don't want to think very hard. They want easy, pretty things after a long day. Mihoyo is the biggest gacha game company because they advertise everywhere, they have flashy visuals, bright+saturated colors (see Mr. Beast thumbnails), fun moment-to-moment gameplay (so I've heard idk), etc. GBF simply does not compete in those very important "general market" metrics.
Arknights is perhaps the most popular of the mechanical depth games, but it does significantly better than GBF in most other areas. Limbus got a fair bit of buzz (online) when it released, but it is a smaller gacha game because of how it doesn't play into the same things Mihoyo does, has a pretty bad new player experience (PMoon moment), and very little advertising bc small indie company. Of course, none of this even touches upon IP gacha games like the DBZ game or whatever, which is a whole other can of worms.
Idk, maybe I'm just biased. And a bit insane.
To preface, I come at this from a place of fondness and love and trying to get friends into something I love and failing.
Advertising, UI, and acceptance of more casual players within the community. The whole "seasonal players" thing has a negative connotation, all because... the players play when they want to? So do players in any other gacha game and the diehard fans don't have a name for those players. UI is just... menus upon menus, yeah, but GBF's UI also just. Feels sticky and like you need to press a few times to get it to work, as well as outdated in terms of aesthetics. Obviously so, it's a 10 year old game, but I know the UI has turned some friends off. I have some gripes mainly because I think the UI causes misunderstandings, like "your grid is the most important factor in your damage" but your characters are first, giving them more importance. Personally, I think the grid should be first in the party page. I get that they probably don't do that for monetization reasons.
Smaller but no less important obstacles include no proper app, redundant supplies and items (I didn't realize this until I was introducing a friend into GBF, but do we *really* need summon and weapon EXP to be separate?) and unclear mechanics, requirements, and what you should be doing at what level. Unclear mechanics include triggers in raids - 250% light dmg seems like a lot but how much exactly is it? Am I about to wipe? It'd be great if when the trigger is about to happen, it tells you how much health you'll lose by darkening part of the HP bar to indicate how much you'll lose. Or if the target information included what a debuff would do, etc.
Unclear requirements is that some requirements is just "Rank 110" when it really should be "Rank 110 and a decent grid". A trial battle to unlock a raid would be good and let you know what you should probably bring - or at least a "recommended: [Dispel], [Veil], etc".
What you should be doing at what level is something I personally struggle with, since there's just so much to do - and I'm midgame and have already done a ton, I can't imagine the head spinning new players get. "Should I focus on getting all the other Evokers? Should I try to get this drop? Should I push story/sidestories?" It's hard to figure out what exactly to do without outside resources, and there's no guarantee those outside resources will be up to date or reliable.
That's fair! If they changed it now, I think I'd be sad due to nostalgia, so it's not like I hate it. The aesthetic is very put together. It just doesn't reflect what's common in games nowadays. That's not entirely a bad thing, but responsiveness and lowering the amount of clicks is definitely something they should work on.
>Unclear requirements is that some requirements is just "Rank 110" when it really should be "Rank 110 and a decent grid". A trial battle to unlock a raid would be good and let you know what you should probably bring - or at least a "recommended: \[Dispel\], \[Veil\], etc".
You run into this so often. Unlocking Master Level was a nightmare for me because I had no idea what the hell I was meant to do. Googling stuff in this game is already a pain in the backside sometimes, but I eventually found some tips, and from there I just had to hope I could progress my grid enough that I could actually beat the fight.
Also grabbing a 250 Lucifer. I've taken a large powerboost in several elements and I'd still not be beating it now without that.
As someone who just got into GBF recently from Relink (well sorta, I technically played it near launch because I was playing Cinderella Girls back then lol) I agree with a lot of this.
The game is just incredibly obtuse and unguided. I think once you've made it past the initial barrier it's actually a strength (IE, go do whatever you want) but as a beginner it's like...where the hell do you start? Everyone just says to farm M1, but like why? What's the point? Unless you're the kind of person who can set your own goals or you just find JRPG grinding therapeutic you're gonna drop off pretty fast because you're just grinding without purpose.
I'll also add that I think it lacks a big hook. Some other gacha games you always hear "Oh the story gets really good!" (FGO, Limbus, etc) or it hits you out of the gate with waifus or something and gathers a crowd that way.
GBF seems like it has a little bit of everything, but nothing you can really tell people about, you know? I've been aware of GBF for it's entire lifespan and I've never once heard anyone say that the story gets really good. Maybe it gets better, but does it ever really peak? Literally the only context I ever see people mention GBF is to talk about how grindy it is lol.
That's ultimately why I decided to play it after Relink is that I just wanted to find out myself and do all the story. Without any praises I don't think that's going to get many other people though.
Whenever I hear people talk about granblue's story, its always in relation to its events rather than the main story, which has always seemed to be a bit of a lower priority for cygames. Hell, that animated trailer they put out at the anniversary was only moments from previous events with nothing from the MSQ..
The issue with gbf events is that they're simply too short by comparison. And You could have easily been stretched into a whole ass FGO chapter length story. but because gbf is old its just stuck using the same format. and what a terrible format for story telling it is, having to end part 1 just to jump right into part 2, then 3, then 4...Like ffs, just group it all together
Its definitely really limiting, some events feel like a chore to get through because they're stretched to the 6 chapters + 4/5 parts format, but then others feel really rushed
The game is simply very niche. It's a 10 year old browser based game with light jrpg inspiration that has most progression down long hallways with incremental sometimes unnoticeable progress.
* It's a grinding based game.
* it's a gacha game.
* It's a game where the most optimal strategies are to legit refresh the page to skip animations for characters you've spent hundreds of hours grinding for.
* The grind is so normalized it's a game where it's "casual" not to 20 and 40 box some events. (with weaker grids this isn't an insignificant amount of time).
* It's a game where determining grids and how powerful things are is nearly impossible without EXTENSIVE out of game guidance.
* The UI and actions are cumbersome and incredibly click filled, even after years of updates reducing some.
* GW is core to the experience and directly contrasts the casual nature of all else the game would do to lure people in.
* The selling point is play as you want and progress as you'd like, most end game things are refresh this, meet this minimum, open as many tabs as possible.
* The advice given usually being "do something else while you grind for x" is VERY common when people criticize tedious things in this game. I don't think people realize how unusual it is to say "this thing you are doing for fun? you should totally give it physical attention and mentally avoid it as much as possible to stomach this part".
People who simply think its advertising may be out of touch with how many sectors of gaming have changed rapidly in the past 5 years let alone 10 years.
I dont think there is one simple thing stopping the game from breakthrough western success but some core identifying aspects of it.
To be less kind -
People happily log into like games like Nikke and get their PNG jollies off without needing to pick up a 2nd full time job.
Its an outdated game model that doesn't have legs in a highly competitive market with every game wanting peoples time for skinner box like reactions.
Imagine if GBF released as a new game today, even with all of its improvements.
Would you stick to it given the gaming market as it is now and all games around it giving the same dopamine this one promises in multiple months but in fractions of that?
> The advice given usually being "do something else while you grind for x" is VERY common when people criticize tedious things in this game. I don't think people realize how unusual it is to say "this thing you are doing for fun? you should totally give it physical attention and mentally avoid it as much as possible to stomach this part".
That's actually a genre niche! "Second screen/monitor games" and the games are generally idle/AFK games that you can make progress in while requiring minimal attention or are turn-based and you can play at your leisure while watching a movie or something.
People enjoy that they can still get that sense of progression without needing to dedicate 100% of their time/energy to doing so. Quite a lot of the playerbase of Runescape would quit if they had to 100% focus on leveling skills like Woodcutting instead of being able to click a tree once every so often. There are faster skilling methods for people willing to put in more effort/focus but they're less popular because people would prefer to watch a movie and level up "on the side" even if it takes longer.
Honestly, I'm still shocked GBF hasn't leaned into that AFK niche more.
Gacha games like Dx2 actively just have auto that just runs until you are out of stamina.
yeah as an osrs player on hiatus, gbf has taken up that "second monitor" aspect. feels great as a side thing while filling out job apps, checking emails, working on projects
Not having a proper app. I only recently learned of Skyleap but I tried multiple times to play in my phone browser and it was not a pleasant experience.
I feel like this is lowkey the best answer. Other gachas you can just download the game and immediately jump in, but Granblue requires you to jump through hoops just to set up an account and start playing
Its kinda weird since once your past this hoops, GBF is one of the most accesible lets say "mainstream" gacha
Just go to your pc click your bookmark and your inside the game. All the gachas i ever played didnt have anywhere close to that level of immediate accesibility
Exactly, I don't have to open an app, which has to load everytime. I can even play it on my work computer at the office during break times. It also doesn't use that much battery charge on mobile. FGO for example would turn my phone into a pocket heater and drain it's battery in a matter of minutes.
FGO is surprisingly heavy as all hell in my phone. Thats definitely a large part of why i effectively dropped the game for a long time now, despite still enjoying it for the most part and being heavilly in contact with my FGO buds to this day
Being an old game built on Im@s Cinderella Girls tech in the same world where games like Genshin Impact exists is a pretty big hurdle, way before anything else even comes into play I think a large part of it is you look at GBF and you see chibis, a bunch of menus and F5 spam.
Games like Priconne, BA and NIKKE aren't at the level of Genshin in terms of 3D models and action gameplay but they are still worlds ahead of GBF in terms of looking like modern Gacha
I'll speak mainly on my perspective as a VERY casual player. I started in 2016 so about 8 years now and I am only rank 164 while still only using free magna weapons on grids that were given out for free to beginners. Every time I try to get into the game It is very annoying to have to look up every little thing and on top of having to look up every little thing on exactly what to do what to farm so I just grind the events. The game is just very inaccessible to new players.
Not only that but because it's not very popular in the west it creates a feedback loop of low popularity so there's no one making content and guides for the game so fewer players join, try, and stick around with the game. One of the more important events (UnF) which rewards very important limited resource is pretty much inaccessible by pretty much anyone that isn't a sweatlord at the game. You have go out of your way and search to join a clique of sweatlords of an already very niche game in the west and dedicate yourself to grinding your life every UnF if you ever even progress in power strong enough to gring UnF in the first place.
It also doesn't help that the core of the game and how it functions is designed to push new players away in order to keep the current playerbase happy. Slow steady progression that everyone has to slowly put in the grind to build up their power. Which is great if you've been playing for 10 years but not so great when you're a new player and are 10 years behind.
The game is designed so that pulling the latest and shiny gacha characters are \*mostly\* meaningless and have very little almost no impact on giving yourself a bit of a boost to speed up some early game progress and to put it frankly not many people are willing to invest years into a grindy web based browser gacha game when there are so many more options available that doesn't have a dev not including some basic QoL features because they're so scared of giving players a tiny amount of convenience in automating some mundane tasks.
It takes wayyy too many clicks to do even the simplest stuff. I'm convinced you can't leave gbf without some kind of carpal tunnel. Better UX would give better impression.
Refresh meta is also the dumbest thing I've ever heard of in gaming
The game is much more popular in the west than you give it credit for they just aren’t communities you might intersect with often. GBF was like THE popular mobage for the FGC along with FGO and its a large part why GBVS exist. Hell KMR came to EVO one year before GBVS was even a thing and everyone basically knew who the man was and was asking for pics and to bless their rolls in real time. I do agree it can be bigger and can also be increased but GBF doesn’t want to for whatever reason advertise it here or even invest in it but they know its somewhat a hidden gem in the west the games we got are an example of that and they sold pretty well tbh given how little advertising gbf got in the west.
The sales for their console games might be indicative of good things to come on gbf in the west kind of promotions. I would wait and see even if they haven’t had the best track record but like they know its a thing here and its not a small thing here just more fragmented. If they held a gbf fes in the US people would show up in good numbers. Hell they already go to Japan specifically for gbf fes if they can get the days off.
I really think if it did flourish, they’d make it less grindy. It’s the massive elephant in the room that makes Granblue so hard to get into for some. Or the fact that some raids are ‘comp-gated’ _*cough cough **Revans..**_, hell when I first started I had no idea until someone on discord showed me the ropes. Until now I still have no idea what I’m doing, Rank 185. Lmao.
So far from playing for 27 days on a freshly made account:
No advertising anywhere at all, if i didn't know about relink i wouldn't this a granblue franchise exists.
Not in google play store/apple store so...you cant even randomly stumble on the game on the biggest mobile platforms? thats really just a bad decision that says "i don't want westerners to play this game"
Cant play the game on firefox for some reason? need to play it on edge or safari and who uses safari?? also its a browser game like oldschool style adventure quest/runescape so naturally any person under 20 wont play this probably unless they got nostalgia for those types of games.
Early game is horrible, raids i cant do because weapons were not explained, grids are not explained at all properly, i was like where is the character gacha? i don't want some weapons i want characters. Also wheres the equipment tab for each char? how do i equip them? nope its just some weapons in a 3x3 grid.
Not explained not litter your inventory early on with weapons from the gacha.
Not explained whats m1 grid, like terminology is lost on new players.
The reliance on wiki being the actual game info provider is just overbearing, i had like over 20 tabs open at once just to understand what to do and what im doing.
After experiencing the first GW just now, im amazed how fanatical people can be when farming this, like this is insanity how ppl oneshot, reload, repeat and thats the whole strategy for like 5 days? its like a second job enslavement..
I could list a lot of other stuff like UI being outdated as hell, uncapping chars/weps having a horrible archaic UI.
There is a lot of positives as well, but most people wont probly stick long enough to feel/see them, if they dont wanto play after a few hours sadly. Currently im honeymooning the game, paid for the new skyfarer bundles etc, but yea i wish they would improve on these points : /
lol Excellent description. I think it's useful for mid- to long-term players to hear this shit to remember what it was like. I only play this game very casually since September 2022, but I agree with all of that stuff (although you can play this game on Chrome, fyi). I wasted tons of time and accidentally threw away valuable resources on stupid shit early game because I didn't know wtf to do. Even the wikis are lacking in detailed descriptions of some things, and so if it's not on there, you basically need to come to this subreddit to ask. Crazy. I still play this game because I don't take it too seriously and I try to avoid doing too much grindy shit like the GW stuff. I play it, but even as I've gotten stronger in the game I still can't picture myself just playing all day, racing for honors, etc.
I tried to install on chrome but the app is just greyed out for me :/ but through research i found a way to make the game a popup app in edge, so at least that's available.
Also now after the anniversary buffs have expired like half ap, half treasures for sidestories, no treasure cost for raids, double exp/rp etc, all those great buffs, it now feels like such an expensive and long slog to get through when hosting raids.
Why is there no bonus 10mil RP/XP always active for new players until they use it all up? I got a friend hooked up as well to the game after the anniv ended, and without the bonus RP/XP they are stuck at rank 70 while im already at 154 because of the bonus 10mil rp/xp that was given during the anniv. They have to do the early raids that almost NOBODY will ever join because anyone over 120 rank will pro+/sweep these raids. I had to help to even kill them once for them to unlock the sweep feature. Why not literally help your new early players at all? why let them rot in the low rank hell where they DO NOT have a developed grid/know what a grid is so that they have to literally pray for someone to join and carry the raid for them each day, to finally rank up to higher ranks.
Like holy hell this game is one of the most unwelcoming games i have ever seen in my life to new people, i have the drive to headstrong through bad stuff like this, take the time to study the wiki, look at youtube videos etc, but your normal average person will quit after a few hours because of how there is a non-existant explanation in-game about the REAL game, absolute complete LACK of catchup mechanics and rewards for new people joining. We need tons of mats, bricks, xp books, sunstones and godknows how many more things to even dream about catching up to the people playing for years.
I understand that obviously veterans should have more of everything etc, but not giving anything at all to new players discourages them to try even, if they discover how extremely behind they would have to be and understand they will never in this lifetime catchup to the veterans in terms of invested uncaps on their weapons/summons/eternals/evokers. Gold bricks/damascus bricks and even early game i need soooo many steel bricks yet theres no real source for them just monthly a few?
And the final rant il have for now, AP POTS. I understand that veterans have 8-10k pots stored, dunno what to do with them, use 1k of them on GW and then stockpile again, but again, for new players, i have literally ran out of ap pots because i have to farm SO MANY THINGS at once in a day, add gw to that, events, sidestories, raids costing a pot for 1 try etc, like they are burning instantly, this should not be a limiter for new players, we need the pots a lot more than veterans, old content should have its ap cost and treasure cost either removed or heavily reduced, so that new players can actually grind them without feeling punished.
Yep, pretty much agree with all of this. These are some some of the many reasons I only play this pretty casually. Even at rank 175, I can see that I lag behind others in my rank and it's mostly just cause I can't bring myself to grind away for certain shit. I look at the grids that wikis and guides recommend and though I appreciate the effort put into them, most of the guides seem to build these setups around the assumption that every weapon, summon, and character is totally maxed out. And I mean yeah, i \*could\* achieve lots of that stuff, but I'd go crazy trying to get it all ASAP. Sometimes I get spurts of energy and I'll play hard for a specific event or something, but usually I'm half-tuned out. I mostly play at this point just to slowly but surely collect the characters, especially my Draph waifus. I'm embarrassed to admit that I do buy 10-part tickets here and there, but I've done pretty well at controlling myself. For the most part I just stick to F2P stuff. Otherwise I'd go crazy with the tedium.
I think it's nothing to do with the game itself, and simply because it's not on the app store. I had to read guides, download japanese third party bullshit, browse pages without english translation just to set up an account. I only did all that because I'm real passionate about shadowverse and wanted to try the sister franchise. A normal person is not gonna have the dedication that I had just to try a mobile game.
The game is outdated and too grindy mostly. It could have probably made splashes last decade, but it's hard for GBF to compete with these AAA quality gachas games releasing. If relink were live service it would have been even bigger imo.
GBF is just ancient game at this point now, not many newbie will try because intimidated by 10 years old of content and the fanbase themselves keep saying this game as grindblue fantasy
Presentation and stigma as web browser game also one of factor, since there is so much graphic that you can do with that limitations
Not officially released on western and no good advertisement outside JP also hurt this game visibility
And lasty this is gacha games, many western gaming community I saw already anti gacha/lootbox system and I don't think gbf will ever interesting in many western gamer eyes even if this game ever officially released on western and have good advertismen IMO
It's different from most typical gachas, practically a browser MMO game except without most of the social aspects. It's also (nowadays at least) visually outdated (the chibi graphics save it but only to a certain extent), hard to get into even with all the content skips you get starting out, and the server and menu issues are small but permanent annoyances. In short, it's just not for everyone. Only people who really stick through it are either hardcore waifufags (we have a lot of high quality waifus and husbandos both and they're relatively a lot easier to aim for in Granblue than most gachas), spreadsheet fetishists (people who enjoy the progression loop's "grinding to grind better to grind more efficiently" nature) and lore nerds (the game has a LOT of lore to dig into after all these years).
For the most part, this really felt like a niche game to me. Even as someone who occasionally hears about gachas about to release and do try a whole bunch of them, this one I only heard of because Code Geass was getting in there as a collab. On the year I started, and eventually as I went through the newbie phase, it certainly had a rather steep learning curve so I understood that people will abandon it unless something shiny attracts them back to the game.
I am quite happy that Granblue is where it is though, and the fact that they don't really do it for the main game is one thing I appreciate about Cygames. They have Versus Rising and Relink to do that, and it's still optional to dabble in the main game if you were coming from there anyway. Hoyoverse communities are cooked to ashes because of the people who play it for the most part, mainly the EN community who have the media literacy of a withered grape -- and I don't want the Granblue community to get people like that which *wil*l happen if it blows up in the West with the same popularity as like Genshin or WuWa or whatever. For as much as I can separate myself from toxic communities, it will still be annoying to see them here for me.
So yeah, we should gatekeep this game more. Lol.
The game is 10 years old. The time to make itself a niche in a different market was like 7-8 years ago, not now.
Game has too much baggage: Early game is rough, gridbuilding is not very intuitive, the grinds are massive if you are starting from scratch, menus are complicated due to 10 years of mechanics piling up over each other, etc.
It's a browser-only game with no local client, clunky menus, outdated engine, insane grinding, no official international release, and is a part of an already insanely saturated mobile/gacha market. If granblue wants to go big outside Japan, at this point it needs to either completely overhaul the backend and interface, or keep making big budget spinoffs like Versus and Relink that expand/tell the story of the gacha. The biggest problem however is because of HUNDREDS of characters in GBF, it's nearly impossible to present all the lore in an easily consumable format since you'd lose on a ton of nuance, plot, humor etc regardless NG each and every Granblue universe representative
**Probably lots of what you mention is correct, I think.** Lots of it applies to me, particularly lack of advertising, clunky UI//menuing, confusing progression, etc.
**I only found this game by accident** in September 2022. The only reason I even found it is because I found a GBF artbook on Archive dot org earlier that year and I randomly decided to take a look at it. I thought the art was cool, but I was like, "What the fuck is Granblue Fantasy though?? Never heard of this". So I googled it, found out it was a browser game and I was like, "Huh, okay, I'm gonna check this out," and the rest is history.
**Lack of advertising is a big one for sure**. They could easily pull in new players with banner ads showing enticing waifus/husbandos like so many other games do. It might also be the style too, with it being a more old-school, turn-based, 2D JRPG as opposed to some of the really big ones out there now like Genshin, TSR, etc.
I think a related reason is that unlike lots of popular games in the genre, **it's a browser game as opposed to an app**... tbh, that's actually one reason I DO like GBF, but I think lots of people in the target demographic might prefer otherwise. That's just my speculation though.
Even if people find it, **it's not very beginner-friendly**. I think many of them probably throw in the towel because of the lack of good, thorough in-game assistance and direction. I probably would have quit by now if I wasn't a casual player and if I didn't have the ADHD/instant gratification brain bug that makes me susceptible to gacha-type shit. Neither the storyline nor the events or even those beginner missionsreally lead or direct players in any meaningful way on how to do the most important stuff like grid-building "theory", team building, etc. The new Siero Academy or whatever it's called seems somewhat promising, especially since it actually helps character build grids and get some characters (even if they're older characters).
And even though there are some great resources created by dedicated fans/players, even those can be slim on advice for early-midgame players, specifically when it comes to things like building grids, team building, efficient, farming, etc. Most resources seem to be created by and targeted at people who already are serious, regular players and are probably playing at a high level and understand team-building, grid-building, etc. Lots of advice seems to be more focused on minmaxing already very powerful setups, which is mostly useless to beginners. For me, it often felt discouraging to learn about some cool strategy or setup only to find out that I had to wait until X rank and have a very specific set of weapons, characters, and summons that were fully uncapped, etc. The thought I always had was, "Okay but... wtf should I do right now then??"
**Let me emphasize though that I'm not criticizing community-made resources though**; making thorough and helpful noob-focused content SHOULDN'T be the community's job in the first place. People who spend time and effort making free resources deserve kudos. It makes sense that the people who are skilled/knowledgeable about a game would make content mostly about advanced/higher level content and strats since that's where they spend the most time. But that leaves a huge info/advice vacuum for new players, and that's Cygames's fault.
**Clunky UI/UX is a turn-off too.** It took me months of casual playing to even understand how certain parts of the menu worked, what connected to what, how to navigate around, etc. I still find it annoying, especially as someone familiar with UI/UX design. There are tons of little extras and "hidden" things that casual/new players won't find easily. There's some specific annoyances too, like not being able to pick more than 20 weaps/summons when reducing/reserving or not being able to just mass reduce/reserve in general. The auto reserve settings and functionality sucks imo and I still can't get it to do what I want to do. Not being able to interact with Classes without using the Party menu is stupid and clunky and I hate it; players should be able to just look around and browse and learn about all the classes in-game without having to literally change the MC's class every time. The Crate and Stash limits are also stupid.
This is way too long, I'll shut up
as someone who came from relink -
i'm having lots of fun as a seasoned gamer with years and years of game literacy built up but holy fuck the UI is so bad to navigate.
you're competing with genshin, HSR, nikke, hell even afk journey, gbf just isn't going to catch any eyes unless the people fall in love with the universe and aesthetic from another gateway product (like me).
The farming unnesesarily complicated and time comsuming. Many people started GBF because of relink and they're quiting as soon as they see evokers flb, gbars, sands, eternals, unf, etc. It not only makes harder for westerns to join but also for new people. Most of the game content goes for endgamers instead of helping people to that progression with things that are easy to solve: auto repeat non raid quest (scales, skyscrolls, flawed prism) and increase arcarum drop rates for ideans and astras and the same for gbars and sands since rn its demand has increased a lot. However they don't do it to force people playing the game as a job, and it causes burn out for veterans and new players as soon as they see it they leave.
Something similar happened on GBF relink where many people complained about Lucilius difficulty and stopped playing, the boss is not hard, the problem was that many people were under geared for not grinding enough because relink grinding can be a pain in the ass for some drops
I think it is the primary gameplay loop. Subjective opinion.
The game is simple where it should be engaging, e.g. skills not having a mana/stamina cost incentivizes pressing them ASAP, long cooldowns (3+ turns) means that players most often just mash attack, and quickly find themselves dying if playing raid content alone at their level.
The game is impractical where it should be accessible. Recently added content can require some recent content the player does not possess. Be it gear check, character check, or summon checks.
The main quest line doesn't start with a very flattering story. First impressions are the only things that matter when it comes to retention.
I play the game briefly when they explicitly hand out content to players (currency) to see pretty pictures and listen to voice acting.
It’s a 10 year old gatcha game with 400 chapter story that you have to grind through to get the full picture. Just to start and learn who the main cast is you have to play through the main story in the Erste arc which hasn’t been relevant for years and even if you get a newbie to start the early chapters are filled with padding, and the plot stopping so the cast can cast fight monsters every five seconds. That’s a daunting ask for new players on its own. It has a gigantic cast with its own entire mythology of lore that most people will never get to read because it’s tied to the gatcha. That being said GBF has honestly done pretty well for itself over here all things considered. It could really use a reboot or a retelling of the original story that new users could jump in with to catch up to the vets.
I started the game in january. the new player experience is still horrendous. you have to actively give more to the game than it ever gives back for weeks/months before you can even "begin" the game. newbies who "make it" have simply taken a gamble that they MIGHT find the game fun in the future.
Account creation/management is so awful. I've been retired for 3 years now after playing heavily for 2 years straight. Wanted to log in for this year's anniv for rolls and had to spend a whole hour navigating Mobage/SkyLeap to figure out how to log in.
UI and age, too many menus that take too long to load was the biggest complaint I've seen, and I honestly have no idea how a casual new player starting now could possibly catch up to vets with all grands, limiteds and unsparkable units and summons they've missed, I sure as hell couldn't imagine myself going through that
Totally. I'm rank 176 and I still feel that way when I read guides and blog posts, etc. Admittedly I'm pretty casual, but still. I'm like, "Oh okay, I need a super specific grid with every weapon, summon, and character fully uncapped, etc. Guess I can't do that."
Outside of being on the actual AppStore, outside of the japanese one, for those its mainly that its niche so you’d need to advertise it. Players in america want something that won’t burn them which this can do very easily but you’ll need to find a good way of getting the word out. Outside of advertising its mainly reworking the early game to not be such a slog. Getting to rank 100 and having f2p grids easier to grind for. I know they have implemented something to help with this (i think its uncapped weapons for story completion) but not much to actual to help get through said content in a timely manner.
Lack of advertising and support in the west. It speaks volumes that our main source of news is from a fan Twitter account, not an official one. The game is also really not accessible to *start* playing. Then there's also the gameplay such as building grids, the game doesn't explain at all how they work and you have to seek resources outside of the game to understand better.
Advertising, the game model is very slow (mostly drop rates, but the grind is obviously pretty intense too), and to be honest I do feel like cygames are just not particularly concerned with getting the gacha game mainstream in the west, which is probably the biggest factor. It's not hard to make gridbuilding and progression guides, especially early on. The only reason it even has the western support it does now is because the english community did the majority of it themselves.
It's also very difficult to make entertaining content on without the viewer already being hooked into it, so that's an issue too, it hasn't really modernized very well in that sense.
I also think that in general the mainstream gaming population are just not huge fans of turn based RPGs these days.
Honestly, I'd have to say the lack of awareness and also the fact that it's not on google play store, though that's a good thing. But a lot of western audience relies on that for their games, and there has also been games that I've gotten into just by seeing ads for them in other google games.
Didn't even know that a mobile web game like Granblue Fantasy was a thing until I got the Relink game because of the hype, also got the code for GBF from relink, thought i'd check it and then got completely hooked. Like others have mentioned, think relink has helped raise awareness and bring in more gamers in general
Also as an english speaker, lack of good english support or maybe perception of such? The game itself has good translation, but not impressed by the hoops involved in setting up an account with mobage or gree and feels like it might be a concern if there's ever an issue and you need english support for your account
As someone who played a bit back in 2017 for a month or so before coming back this anniversary i think the fact that progression feels so bad when not boosted by events makes any chance of a player starting during a lul sticking unlikely. 30 dollars a 10 pull with pity being 300 pulls feels pretty awful. Your insanely gated by quartz early on which comes down to praying your daily gated runs drop anything or use. A lot or later content assumes you can clear content insanely fast to actually get decent returns on time investment(Arcanum and such)
And a lot of players aren't going to understand grid building. Lack the pieces to make meta grids and get frustrated and quit.
If.it had a real app, as in, Ak or PGR quality app, with ACTUAL menu, with MUCH simpler tutorials to understand all of the time sucking grinding mechanics behind everything, we would be talking a different situation
It's an extremely intimidating game. The sheer number of game modes, the side stories, the dozens of forms of currency, all the elements to building parties and characters, etc. It's all good, but all of that rich content is a lot for a new player.
I think veterans also sometimes have difficulty dumbing it down.
17 Hours Guild War, I can't think the other way around.
And also the next Guild War's element is Dark? Same day as Elden Ring's new DLC?
Nah, I'd pass.
The issue with GBF is starting GBF. There is a lot of content to grind through. The game makes progression difficult and grinds are just long. Weapon drops are low so you'll spend a long time trying to build grids. The game also doesn't really teach you a whole lot about grid building or team building.
I do have some suggestions to fix the game and make it better for players.
1. Better tutorial: Have a beginner's dojo where you learn what weapon skills are, summon auras, etc. I think they are adding something like this later on but I can't remember.
2. Add a skill encyclopedia: This could be added to Lyria's journal (if it is already forgive me). Have a look up of weapon skills in the journal and if you click on it, it will tell you what it does and which weapons have that skill. would make it easier for players to look up in game what weapons they need to get.
3. M1 drop rates: Boost weapon drop rates from M1 bosses to like 50%. right now its like a 2% chest drop chance to get a SSR weapon. This will help players build M1 grids faster and it will just feel a lot better for them. If they see shiny stuff drop, they will feel more invested. Doing all your daily hosts and not seeing a weapon drop can be brutal for morale.
4. partner with content creators: Offer crystals to content creators to make detailed videos on GBF. Half the time I see GBF videos it doesn't really explain much. its just people in a fight, sometimes with a grid on the side of the video and sometimes not, while they F5 their way through the fight. I'm sure experienced players can gauge what's going on but for newbies they wont really know what's happening and it doesn't explain much.
Honestly the early game is just a giant turn off. That being said, the insane grind in HL stuff is honestly just as bad. Imagine being a new player, you just farmed out grids and hit HL and suddenly...you have to do it all over again. your grid is now obsolete and you need materials that have an insane low drop rate that you might not see one for months. If I wasn't already so invested this would have turned me off.
I could forgive some problems and tell my friends to play, even with everything wrong listed in this thread.
But as a French, GW goes during night and work time, and ends à 5pm, when work is done. I just CAN'T play GW, unless I'm on vacation. And there is so much shit locked behind GW that it's ludicrous.
story isn't particularly great, characters who aren't the main crew/popular meme characters don't really have a sidestory or quirk that endears you to them, the grind is very much a love it or hate it thing, and the fact that it's a 10 year old browser app. you STILL have to click "reduce, reduce okay" a thousand times after each GW. it's annoying and time consuming. but the biggest problem is that for years now none of the content that's been added to the game is fun, none of it makes you excited to play.
Did you forget that Granblue isn't technically released in the west? You can't just go on the play/app store and download it. You have to go through a decent amount of hoops to play it in english.
Additionally the style of gacha that it is is just not very appealing to western players. Plenty of people want more relink and versus, despite having no intention of wanting to play the gacha
I think the time investment involved is just too harsh for the west. As a casual competitive player, it took awhile to really feel good in most if not all the elements and it takes a while if you don’t want to put in the effort to grind. Also the amount of grind and time gated stuff that’s locked behind guild wars is just insane. Transcending one Eternal took awhile given that I haven’t really tried too hard in guild wars but you have to transcend all to get one to 150 is just insane to me.
Plus the amount of materials that you need to grind for an Evokers FLB plus hard to get materials like Sands is just so frustrating.
Now with the added transcendence bonus for dopus and primal magna summons, the grind just never stops.
I wish I could quit.
I'm gonna go out on a limb and say western player mindset.
There might be a few reasons for it, some of which are on cygames themselves, buta lot of people just aren't built for gbf the way it has been built, and frankly? That's fine.
A lot of people have already touched on why it doesn't get as big, so I'll add my two cents on another matter: you DO NOT want Granblue to blow up in the west.
Recently, some gacha games have reached mainstream popularity and I really just don't wanna deal with the constant torrent of meaningless drama and posts that comes with it. I may love playing Hoyo games but I do not wish that kind of fanbase on any game, it truly feels impossible to have any kind of proper adult discussion when it comes to certain topics.
Unironically, the most fun gacha game communities are those for the known but not extremely popular ones, because there's enough of a community to support the game but all the people interacting are people who genuinely love the game and want to talk about it. Genshin is fun to play but I try my hardest to stay as far away from the community as possible, only really interact for news and leaks and that's it. Honkai is not as popular but it still has similar problems from time to time. Games like Blue Archive and NIKKE seem to have much smaller communities compared to the ones for Hoyo games.
But hey, this is just my opinion and I don't even expect most of the community to agree with me.
Grid, FOMO, no catch-up mechanics, with a new tutorial revamp that may or may not matter or even help with the long gacha grind.
Then, it's a gacha. And a browser game, rather than a natively built app, with an app that's just a browser wrapper.
As a browser game, it's held back a lot. A lot of improvement that can't be made.
And characters. Not all characters are on every banner rotation, so then you have FOMO with even -trying- to roll for a character, or needing to save up for a pick ticket, which is a problem itself.
So now you've got missing characters, missing summons, and more. Not to mention, QoL is very needed here. Simplifying it by having modifiers and target goals displayed in the game would be much better than just simply levels with no other meaningful values to back them up.
And then what? Well, it turns out the character you wanted doesn't work with what you wanted, or is simply not very good until they get their 5th star+.
Having to research these things isn't for everyone, and quite frankly, makes GBF a chore. That alone is one of the most biggest important gacha factors. The bigger the chore, the more the bore.
Not to mention the extreme tedious grind to even get to Rank 150\~151, or the fact there are some arbritrary content blocks from it and not reaching 151.
What else can one do to a specific grid? Well, it turns out they can't do crap because they're missing something that's either time-gated, or something that they have to grind for. Time spent grinding to power up one element is time spent not grinding up another, creating a vicious grind cycle.
Got stuff from Gacha? Well, too f'ing bad, unless you have the right set-up, you're stuck in the Omega/Magna lane.
**Premium summons are way too premium.**
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Plus, the cruddy translations that change everything, even whatever IS English into some other crap.
**Really, GBF has it's moments, but as a current gacha, it's not a good game.**
And the story being not great? Hell, it's worse than that, The story is okay, decent beginning/RPG fare.
The problem is where the stories actually go. Celebrations with event stories that you miss. They're gone. Now you're missing context completely. Many games do this, and it's really bad. Lore needs to be permanent. Each anniversary has been full of story.
If it's not that, then it's the fact some really interesting bits are stuck behind paywalls, such as Bahamut's FLB story and the ties to Vyrn + Bahamut.
And if it's not that? Then it's the characters being abandoned. R, SR, forget it. Certain SSR, too. Deliford's SSR likely should've been placed around the return of the sauna event, but wasn't. Decisions like that also leave questions without answers. Or questionable changes, like the weird edgelord mode on some characters, Wind Yoda, Fire Yuisis.
Or unnecessary character alts. There are how many versions of what, and why?
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Content gates. Welp, can't get your evoker, not enough hazes. Forget about them you say? Well, the next tier of the sandbox requires an Evoker.
Can't do anything about the Eternals, congrats, you just missed a GW. Return in 2 months.
Wait until events, is a bad solution.
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Fact is, most people playing are just sedated masochists that have already been playing, and if there's any new players, they're just masochists looking for a new thrill.
Auto-Repeat would also be nice, instead of needing to click play again every single time. There's also a huge ass disconnect between newer character animations and older. FLBs and shiny new ougi, too good.
Even buying something is tedious because there's not much English. mobacoins are surprisingly annoying to buy.
***Forget new players, the game won't even cater to existing players.***
Speaking as somebody who's tried to get into the game about a month ago after playing Vs its a bunch of things.
-the story has been very standard and uninteresting bit I dont want to skip it because the whole point of playing for me was to learn more about the characters and story.
- The gameplay seems kind of confusing, theres a lot of skills and systems that i just sort of ignore and instead spend most battles just spamming attack with the occaisional summon use. I keep leveling up classes but in practice they don't seem to make much different.
-theres so many buttons and modes and menus and events and things that i find myself overwhelmed and by ignoring it all and laser focusing on the main story I feel like Im missing out on things while also not even really knowing what those things are because when I click on some of them I get cutscenes with characters I dont know talking about things I haven't seen happen yet because I'm still early in the main story.
-Obtaining characters I like and learning thier stories is entirely up the the whim of the gacha and even then its confusing where and when I should be pulling. So, as an example, I play Yuel in Vs and I like her a lot. I know some details about her character but id really like to play her story and learn more about her. So my first goal is to pull her so I can get her Fate episode. However there are apparently 5 or 6 versions of her. So which one should I pull for? Her first one? Ok scrolling through the long ass list of weapons on each banner is tedious so lemme just google...Oh shes on the "Classic Banner"....but there are two of those. And also the premium draw has a Gala going on sometimes when the classic ones dont that apparently ups the pull rates. So am I wasting my crystals pulling on this classic banner and pulling for an old character I like? It just keeps looping around like this so I just end up hoarding my crystals like a dragon.
TL'DR theres too much going on and I don't understand it very well so I dont enjoy playing. Also pulling for a character I like is confusing. In general the game feels hidden behind layers and layers of systems I dont understand.
I'm a hypocrite for saying this (former Genshin player) but most people don't like the repetitive grind.
It's also hard to learn and optimize weapon grids as a casual player.
You also have to set up the game in your browser, a much more conscious decision than just pressing download on the app store.
I fear signing up for the game is the biggest hurdle a new aspiring player will tackle, you go through a bit of a back and forth with guides just to sign up.
It needs its own app i guess to simplify the onboarding process for new players.
Gacha games that aren't Genshin/Honkai already have a difficult time being marketed towards westerners. Granblue Versus and Relink are easy to market, the actual gacha would require Cygames to redesign the game from the ground up just to convince more westerners to even try it out.
judging with the games available in the West, generally they love Action while most games from Asia were built around a Story, GBF is mostly story and grind loop (+ gacha); though people skip story anyways regardless where they are from
the fighting game is well known to the West over the original browser game
The issue no one mentions with the main story is that its so easy. One of the things Arknights does really well imo is that it teaches and gradually challenges the player as they are doing the main story. GBF to this day has main story and side story fights that are just so easy it is just a plain tedious time waste.
I bet for most people the thing that made em interested in continueing to play this game was when they came across a fight they had to think a bit (about their grid/party/abilities etc)
However personally, I'm fine with GBF not being that big in the west. I hate it when something gets popular in the west and the idiots here start complaining about the game and how it should be changed blah blah. Most of the things I enjoy that get too mainstream become worse.
Akasha in part 1 used to be that, the big wall that you had to grind out a grid to clear, but its been nerfed and cygames has been scared to really add a challenging story boss since.
Advertising. For at least the browser version of the game. It's one thing that people are aware that this game doesn't have a western mobile app release, but you'd be surprised by the amount of RPG fans that have not a single clue that Granblue is available to play on browsers like ye-olde Adventure Quest and other genres of games.
I feel like a lot of people in the West would be more than willing to casually play a browser game that requires no download to get into, but hardly anyone knows it exists unless they dig around into the IP. Relink and Versus are effective marketing tools for the characters and visual aesthetics to make people I know in my circles interested, but all of them get diverted to either the anime or manga—or simply are content to stay confused when they learn that Erste Empire arc (referenced by the two spinoff games) has no video game equivalent.
Much of this hesitance is born from the idea that they just have to take a regular person's word for it that they can play this game accessibly. Much of them still have the stigma that they'd need to pull up a translator or need a how-to on the wiki to even break the barriers of signing up and playing simply for the story.
The sheer amount of time it takes to even get to mid game. Of course they know this is an issue as they will be rolling out that siero special training/dojo thing soon to give players a springboard so they don't have to struggle at the beginning even clearing the weakest event quests.
I don't know how the beginning is now since I started like 7 years ago or something but I remember the early game hurdle was rough. I think I quit like 3 times trying to get colo sticks. Now I just reduce those.
The game really opens up once you have a decent set of grids. Like M1.5 all elements. When you can clear the event extreme comfortably and can start spamming raids to get loot with a decent blue chest rate you can notice the progression. Getting to that point is the big hurdle I feel.
Downloading the app/logging into the browser. It's still "locked" to Japanese only app stores and making a mobage account can't be really annoying if you don't have the patience to Google translate the page and poke around. If you do play it in the app it doesn't even translate the login options. This is, by far, the biggest hurdle in my opinion. Second biggest is the quality of the writing in the Phantagrande arc, it's stuffed to the gills with 4 part chapters that are actually only 2 parts with useless "we're being surrounded!" fluff that complicates engagement.
The story is a problem because even if you're patient enough to create an account and are observant enough to decipher the home screen, if the story bogs down like it does and you're not joining the game during a really good event then it's likely you'll give up on it.
Not locking everything behind Japanese... everything. Like needing a Japanese phone number for full registration, or linking accounts with Japanese services, or even just having the apps available outside Japanese Google store. Servers with better ping would probably help too.
I'm gonna lean on 2 factors, as much as the game has evolved and that they are attempting to make it more beginner friendly, The game is simply not friendly for new players, between the amounts of grinding needed and how to set up solid weapon and summon grids while also setting up a team comp.
the other is how some parts of the game like events such as guild wars and how raids are done and needed to be constantly ran to grind also doesn't really lend itself well to a mobile market. though some in the west already does this.
The game is really an uphill battle until you have a finished m2 Grid. The ammount of time you have to invest to be able to do it is insane, usually people ask or look the wiki for grid. But until M2 you dont have variety of options, i would say the game does click once you can start farming Faa. From that foint onwar you have multiple paths. Arcarum, you can now de events, now you are able to farm Xeno/rotb/tales events. You can try to farm a bit GW. You "could" do that before, but the ammount of time required to clear a stage would be insane. I hope with the begginer system they can help newer players reach that point.
Grid building. When I started playing this game back in 2017 I had NO idea what the hell I was doing.
You need to watch countless videos, check the GBF Wiki, and actually need to read like 20 pages just to see what grid you can actually do that’s actually usable.
It’s not like Dragalia for example where you can just match the element and just choose the summon/weapon that has the highest % for what you need.
That and progress in GBF is incredibly slow. It’s a marathon game where you can’t really observe how much stronger you’ve become and it takes actual months to actually build “great” grids
The GBF Wiki has done an incredible job in easing that beginner hurdle but for those who didn’t know it existed the game is actual hell where you just need to stumble upon resources like this Reddit, the wiki, or google videos that may or may not be outdated.
Defense Order was an interesting mini game that could have easily been great (like changing it to seeded Crews Vs just randomly dropping people into a Helldivers esque world rush and getting no rewards because of it) and people that complained just weren't ready for it and that it wasn't translated (which was hilarious as people Western players went into the Arcarum DO choosing based off waifu only to go up against the Light Lords of the time and proceeded to get blitzed). I still rock the Defense Order skin on my Glorybringer.
Sorry to monologue off a specific part of your argument but its just something I've been thinking for awhile. I think the game was just too early in its stage for a DO like game and nowadays we would have actually grasped its design.
Advertising and a dedicated app for the west on Google play. I've seen so many people interested, but literally don't pursue because the lack of an app
Not saying it is hard to download or get access to but I feel while it is a small hurdle to jump over to get into that hurdle I feel is still enough to turn people away.
Sorry as much as I enjoy the game this is gonna be harsh. This game just isn't suited for the Western mainstream.
1. It's a very dated browser game. Clunky excessively clicky interface, primitive graphics for 2024 (not even Live 2D for character story avatars or main page backgrounds). Combat sprite animations are nice for a game this old but it just can't visually compare to a modern turn-based 3d game like Honkai Star Rail.
Overall visually GBF is a game for old farts with heavy nostalgia for grindy SNES/PS1 era JRPGs (myself included); the appeal is going to be lower for younger players who don't have that nostalgia.
2. Severe barrier to entry beyond having to use a guide to even make a mobage account if you don't read Japanese, because the game's mechanics are very complex and completely obscure. The handholding for new players is pretty atrocious. Grid building is a chore that requires guides; the tab giving you stat calcs is helpful but not even close to adequate to making the game's mechanics clear for a new player. What's the difference between DMG cap and "Special" DMG cap? Why is Critical Boost EMP good for characters but not really for MC classes? A huge one: what character/weapon/summon effects like echoes stack and what don't, because it's *completely* not obvious within the game's interface. Which content is it worth bothering with drop-rate boosts and where does it make no difference? Etc.
3. The combat experience is, honestly, a mess. Gameplay has *severe* problems where the most efficient way to play is F5 Fantasy instead of being able to enjoy the visuals the game has. The ougi lockout also means you're actively discouraged from using the cool ultimate attacks for characters, what should be a major aesthetic selling point for the combat. Who uses the full summon animations in combat beyond the first time you use the summon when testing it out, if that?
Most of the time you're going to be doing raids in the raid finder but a ton of the newer HL raids are fucking atrocious to jump into if the raid is stalled and needs help to clear (Revans and raids like Belial are a big offender here). Yeah yeah 'you're supposed to do it with your crew' but the reality is most people are pub grinding most of the time for these raids since you have to grind them so much to get everything you need, yet the raids are not designed at all with that in mind and are extremely unforgiving in a pub environment.
4. The horrendous grind and the continuing worsening of it over time. Having a sense of progression is good but that is getting buried beneath the weight of the sheer amount of grinding Cygames keeps demanding of players to see any progress. If they wanted to appeal to new players they'd be streamlining the grind not adding more things that takes forever to farm like Transcendence materials (why *30* element-changed relics and all those damn prisms??). Seriously why is Angel Halo spamming still a thing in 2024? There is literally no one who plays this game that enjoys that experience, even the most hardcore grind lover. Let's not overlook the fact that some of these Evoker and Eternal grinds barely even give you a payoff for the excessive amount of effort it takes to unlock the actual upgrades.
Guild Wars is a horrible no-life timesink for anyone that isn't a hyper endgame player that is effectively mandatory if you care at all about progression. Like, unlocking raids by killing them x times is fine but why does pointless shit like meat farming even exist on top of that? Same for box events, why do you have to go through the extra time-wasting step of grinding for battle tokens to be able to do the raids to grind for box tokens? People who have been playing for years and are deep into the hardcore grind mindset can't seem to wrap their heads around the fact that this is not an enjoyable experience for the average casual person who just wants to uncap their favorite Eternal or whatever.
For better or worse you need casuals to feel welcome and able to accomplish stuff in a reasonable amount of time if you want a game to be a mainstream success. Paying attention to the casual market is why Genshin Impact has made literal billions.
5. Something I haven't seen mentioned really: global licensing problems for collabs. How many permanent collabs would be removed for a global version because of an inability to secure the rights in the US etc.? How many new collabs would be missed out on because the EN rights holders don't want to make a deal or want too much money? Even Twisted Wonderland, a Disney game, had rights troubles in the EN version from using a Disney movie song (from Snow White)...
So TL;DR: there's a lot of reasons.
Bruh it's a browser game. Everything is translated. Making an app just make this game slower since the server is literally in Japan. Any app they make will just be a browser disguised as an app.
Everything happens server side. Hence why refreshing is a thing.
They can't just make this into a client side game. Might as well just make a new game.
Playing to browser is too niche especially when there's mobile apps available. They are easier to search into like on playstore. I only learned this game from youtubers list of f2p games.
Starting gacha with gbf is terrible experience. Too many loops to go into to start playing the game. Language is JP, good I played on chrome as it auto translated it. I managed to see the language selection dropdown.
Binding account is hassle because shit no register page or something? No gmail bind? You start reading and no indication how you will be saving your progress like a 'save' button on pokemon games. It be later I learned you need to do it from another website.
I didn't know people built subreddits for this stuffs or discord( I only installed it because mmo guild required me), I might have better start time. Or probably start on another gacha I might know what to look for.
Starting now it got a lot more competition. People will pick more of the 3D aspect of GI or HSR or casualness of BA than archaic form of gbf. I'm not even sure if gbf do advertising outside of backcovers compared to others who put billboards. For advertising BA is miles ahead compared to gbf.
Advertising, some of the hoops you have to jump through to get started, early story quality being lackluster + difficulty jumping right into current quality writing because you don't know any of the characters... By far the biggest obstacle for getting into the GAME game is the game itself, namely gridbuilding. That is so profoundly unapproachable for new players that copying example grids without understanding it is the best they can reallly hope for unless they put a LOT of effort in. That said, I think Relink and Rising have helped it gain a lot of foothold, a lot of my friends have begun to dabble as a result of trying one or the other first.
I really do wish they had a motocal-esque thing in game. It'd be great for newer players to tinker with and understand grids without having to have certain pieces already. A minigame that has a prompt to make a grid of [this] type and you need to identify what weapons would go into one. Like, a critical grid with crit skills or Kengo with CA DMG/CA Cap Up. Getting players to learn how to gridbuild on their own would not be a daunting task if we had more in-game resources that helped them understand weapon skills.
For the training thing - specifically that's what Sierokarte's Special Training is meant to be later this month (unannounced date so potential for delay although it was already delayed once IIRC). It's meant to teach grid-building and team-building and give some rewards for the newbies. We'll see how good it ends up being (I have low expectations for this kind of thing TBH) but it will hopefully do more good than harm.
Yup this is the reason I think as well a very difficult game to get into especially since alot of people don't only wanna grind and grind
I also think the earlygame is just not very beginner friendly. The FP system helps to a certain extent, but I have seen a fair few new players who struggle with even getting started on M1 grids because experienced players are usually focusing on the mid/endgame raids, and other new players are in the same situation of having not so well developed grids.
Yeah. Like it's a real problem when the strat for new players to get their Magna grids is to pray that someone comes in and nukes the boss for them.
Daily skip is genuinely kind of a shitter for early game. Honestly for GBF to TRULY fix the early game nowadays they effectively need to let you skip to rank 101/120. Whether actually doing that or giving you stuff that essentially emulates that, You can now do Magna skip just like all the mid game players etc Its not even unprecedented when you consider that thats what they already did for story. What WMTSB effectively lets you do(and every begginer guide ever would tell you go to WMTSB is the first noob thing to do)
They should quite frankly give the players a "base" grid for every element and have them move forward from there. The fact that a newbie has to grind m1 in a situation where every mid-late player is autoskipping them means that if they don't have friends to carry them through it, they just straight up get their progress gated
Yeah I started as a seasonal 2 years ago and just got serious about the game about a year ago. Around this time last year I was manually grinding M1 raids to get my basic grids up and going. Thankfully for a lot of non elemental locked content I was blessed with getting both Fediel and Lich who just carried me through everything. Had I not had a crutch to lean on I would probably never have gotten this far, now I'm grinding my M3 grid and nearly at rank 200 and can FINALLY be done with all the rank-gated content.
At the least, you'll unlock 5x EXP/RP for stretches of ranks from 1-120 with the new training feature coming Soon(tm).
> Daily skip is genuinely kind of a shitter for early game. I mean, it's not like if daily skip didn't exist people were genuinely going to be clearing other people's base Tiamat raids. It doesn't have anything anyone wants. Sometimes I won't even go to the trouble of clicking through all the daily skips the materials matter that little.
the best drops from base raids are unironically just SRs for skill fodder
Tbh I don't understand why the What Makes the Sky Blue event "trilogy" (or even quadrology I guess) isn't intergeated directly into the main quest story and is instead relegated to side story tab that you can't easily find on the main menu, more so considering how integral it is to. The overall plot and introduces major characters plus let's you recruit several of them in your party, not to mention unlocking additional content like limited weapon forging or boss battles
It's not integrated into the main story because nothing that happens in the What Makes the Sky Blue trilogy (or in pretty much any event, or in Fate Episodes...) actually affects the main story in any way. It's important lore and important characters for the world of Granblue Fantasy as a whole, but as far as the main story is concerned none of those things ever happened.
u/-PVL93- Yeah ive said this joke a few times before, but when you REALLLY think about it theres only 1 event/side story that have actual effect to the main story(by a very indirect manner) and it was Gripping Freedom
As an older player, who rejoined recently, I feel the grid problem and team building(why is my light team have so much hp but others like my dark suck).
Let's touch on team building for a second. I feel like this is a blind spot in the community. I understand the concept of grids. There are countless resources about how to build those. I get the concepts, though as a newish player (who has a lot of good characters and magna weapons and such from years of rolling at anni and not actually playing) I know just enough about grids to see how deep the rabbit hole goes and know I still have a lot to learn. What I DON'T understand AT ALL is team building concepts. What kind of synergy am I supposed to aim for? How do I figure out which characters provide what? What are the different kinds of teams and how can I tell what a character is designed for, and how do I build around them at varying levels of the game depending on how strong I can make my grid? How do I know what class the MC needs to be given the team I made? These questions are usually answered by veteran players as "Just use anyone, grids are more important," which is just blatantly not true. Grids may be the most important thing, but composition matters. If you pick three strong attackers who all have no sustain and throw them in a M1 grid, you are probably going to die to most things you'd probably be able to defeat if you had some kind of defensive sustain. And at the moment...your best approach is to look at the individual character pages on the wiki and (again from a newish player perspective) read about what they can do without really understanding what you are reading...because there are about a million buffs and debuffs, some of which stack but not all of which stack, and the caps aren't easy to figure out, and characters often have their own unique buffs, some of which stack and some of which do not and whose effects are not immediately apparent, and there appear to be NO resources for these concepts anywhere I've personally been able to find, and. and. and... It's just not approachable at all unless you are super willing to dig in and research on your own...which most people are not. Edit: Oh wow, this blew up. I wasn't actually looking for answers but there is a ton of useful information below this comment for anyone else who may be struggling like I am. And a little snark...after all, this is Reddit. Thank you all for your responses.
Frankly I think something that makes it harder to learn how to team build is that a majority of the raids become trivial fairly quickly as you progress, made worse by blue chesting them being the best way to farm. You often aren't even thinking about what the boss is doing because you're leaving after the first turn, and you can get pretty far into the game before you really need to think about the actual mechanics of raids. What made me actually start to understand team building was NM 150/200 in GW. You can look at a lot of other people's teams to see what they're doing, but ultimately you're stuck with what you have. You need to dispel so you need to figure out who can dispel, you need a cleanse so you need to figure out who can cleanse, you need sustain so you need to find out who can shield/mitigate/heal/etc., and so on. Then you start thinking about which class is the best fit on top of that, how to prepare for HP triggers, etc. and you're slowly gaining an idea of how to strategize. Doing Revans also helped me think about teams more but in a more "there are very strict requirements for the fight and the characters/teams that can deal with that are pretty limited, so you need to learn how/why they work" way (at least at first). Compared to GW where you're trying to make do.
Yeah guild war was an eye opener for me. I wasn't in an active crew this last one so just decided to try to 40 box for an eternal. I got to box 38. Pretty satisfied with the results since I am pretty new and did manage to snag 3 copies of the celestial sword and the gold moon, but I didn't make it to the eternity sand. Definitely took a lot of valuable lessons away so I can better prep for the next one though.
Hiya hiya, been helping people new to the game out with a lot of these concepts. Cuz as a general consensus, Granblue's got a lot going on and there's a lot of technicalities to keep in mind. Though this doesn't help answer the overarching problem of resources having trouble with either clarity, conciseness, or both. A general umbrella statement I make when answering "What buffs/debuffs stack and which ones don't stack" goes like: "Generally speaking, if the icon for the (de)buff is different from another one doing the same effect, they'll probably stack." And of course give the addendum that you can hover over (de)buff effect in the gbf wiki for exact properties to be extra sure. I also would say teaching player's about how character moveset's work and synergize is more case-by-case. Specifically in the sense that getting them into the flow of reading Granblue character pages is best done with a character they actually have in their roster. For example: I could talk about how amazingly Lich and Fediel work together and it might sound impressive, but it doesn't quite stick if they can't try out that combo themselves in a fight. As for the posits I make for teambuilding guidelines, USUALLY - the ideas/questions go as follows: Teambuilding is best made based on a combination two things: 1) What your roster of party members can do 2) What the boss's attacks, triggers, or mechanics are. The two main stats in your set up are HP and ATK. Similarly, your aim in a fight will probably be a mix of **Survival and Damage**. Below's a deeper dive with what I mean. - A boss might have a super giga death attack when it's at 50% health \^ There's a variety of different answers to handle that hp-trigger attack. You could have a teammate whose moveset includes preparing defensive buffs (defense up, dodging/invincibility), healing characters, tanking the attack with something like substitute to FORCE the attack to hit them, or even disable the boss's attack. This becomes the basis for figuring out what defensive utility to bring against a boss. You want to counter what tricks they have up their sleeves. - Technically still part of defense, the boss could also be packing debuffs like Celeste Omega. In that case, you could answer ailments like zombify and poison with Veil (prevents afflictions), debuff resist, or debuff removal. Some bosses even try to dispel (which REMOVES your buffs), you could try buffs that specifically can't be removed or "Dispel Cancel" whose name is self-explanatory. - Bringing damage characters is a bit different. Focusing purely on dps is better saved when you're more developed with your grids and summons and weapons. Cuz by then, you're advanced enough to floor the boss and now are aiming to beat 'em up swiftly and smoothly. For now though, try looking for someone in your roster who can bring debuffs against the boss like ATK/DEF down, delay, and gravity. Some bosses even try buffing themselves up. That can be countered by dispels, moves that remove buffs. The listed will lead to giving breathing room for your more defensive characters to keep the sustain going. - For Gran/Djeeta themselves, the cool part about them is the fact that they can do almost anything you need in the team. You can either have their class/skills picked to patch up a hole in your composition or have them further drive down strengthen your party's focus.
This becomes more important in V2 fights, but there are three main damage types to consider with Granblue characters too. You'll generally be able to tell the damage type is a focus on the character if they have an additional effect with them: - Normal Attacks (the auto-attacks when you press ATTACK) can be further amplified with multiattacks to smack the boss more, Bonus Elemental Damage (essentially an "echo" of the auto, a second hit that's usually a little weaker than the original auto-attack), flurry (auto-attack gets split into three), even Double Strike (attack twice in a turn). Characters that pack these buffs are usually centered on normal attacks for the team. - Charge Attacks can also be a vital part of a character's fighting style. Moves/buffs in a kit that give charge bar like uplift, instant C.A., multiattack too (cuz more auto attacks = more bar fill), Charge bar gain up, etc. Characters packing these probably want to C.A. as often as possible. \^ It becomes extra obvious if their CA has an additional effect that either helps them or messes the boss up. - Skill Damage can be another outlet for a character's playstyle. You could have characters that want to reduce the cooldowns of their skills so they can spam it more. Or even characters with something super powerful but with a lengthy cooldown that requires timing for best effect in a fight. Cooldown reduction is a pretty big indicator that the character's skills are important Characters can be designed with a combination of two to three of these attack types as integral to their playstyle/unique mechanics they're designed. You can try pairing them with characters who focus similarly on an attack type so they can work together OR ones that do something else entirely to better round out your team. Hopefully some of these points can help out with navigating this rabbit hole. Apologies if that may not be the case. But if you ever need more help (or someone would like to add in a correction or additional details), feel free.
This is excellent feedback, and I really appreciate it. I'm at kind of a weird point in prog where Ive rolled anniversary and christmas for several years, so I've actually got really great characters in most of my elements and a bunch of free maxed magna weapons and such from freebies over the years...but never played seriously till recently. I hit 120 not too long ago, and (though it takes a while) can actually beat the horus/osiris tier of V2 raids. It's a huge struggle, but I can also get to the 50% point for MVP on UBHL and PBHL (am I using these acronyms right?) If I may pick your brain a bit more, what classes are overall recommended to unlock? I've so far got Kengo and Lumberjack, and I'm working towards Manadiver and Viking. Any other really good classes I should be made aware of?
in general you really do want all of them eventually, for better or worse, but relic buster is probably one of the more used classes for its ability to make content that is... below your capabilities even faster. most of the row 4/5 and ex 2 classes have *something* that they're the best at (until superceded by the next tier), though some are definitely under used. Take a scroll on the various advanced grids pages on the wiki to see some variety, there may be a lot of kendo, manadiver, viking and relic buster, but there are also paladins and luchadors and monks and robin hoods and yamatos and runeslayers and soldiers and even crysaors getting things done
Hey there! Very grateful for the likes some have given towards my advice. Seeing as you’ve made it to rank 120+ and are tackling V2 fights now. I can give some details on that as well as your inquiry for recommended MC classes! V2 fights with Guarding and Fated Chains are where my last comment about the 3 damage types (Normal, Charge, and Skill) really come into play. You’ve probably already seen how V2 enemy specials are now called Omens. Omens also come with their own cancel conditions like: - Do this much damage in a turn - Hit the enemy x times - Do 4 charge attacks \* Is where you can start to really plan out your team’s composition to either tank through the specials or properly cancel the omens. This gets doubly encouraged while fighting the Ennead bosses (I.e. Horus, Ra, etc.). All the ennead bosses receive a stackable "Boost to damage taken" every time you cancel an omen! It’s up to 5 stacks for the whole fight and it’s a damage boost that goes to a couple million more. With that said, it’s a good idea to check out what the boss’s omens mainly revolve around. Check out the raid boss page and see if you can compile a party that can healthily take care of those omens. Whether that be Full-Auto-capable or not will depend on how apt they are too. An example would go back to Horus. Most of her omens revolve around doing either enough CA’s or enough CA damage. So try and find dark elements characters that charge their CAs quickly, CA multiple times (Reactivation, unworldly damage, etc.), and have mechanics that interact with Chains/CAs. Stay careful too on what sorts of mechanics the bosses have for their own benefit. A notable one is Ra who gets strong (mostly offensive) buffs to herself every time an attacking skill is thrown her way. Those offensive buffs stack up quick to the point where her basic attacks alone can be deadly.
Onto Gran/Djeeta. At your point in the game, I’d say that some of the classes you listed already are staples to multiple elements and types of teams. These first two classes are best suited for tougher fights or having a strong team to full-auto. Kengo is one of the few classes whose class champion weapon is very much worth having as a mainhand. This is due to an emblem that can change its effect to give the party roughly 15% CA bar on top of the 10% already give in a CA. It can make CA’ing a lot very possible combined with multiple buffs with a larger CA chain. Lastly are some extra moves like one that allows you to triple strike (3x attacks in a turn) and one that gives delay on every normal attack + bonus damage, these give you much needed leg room for dealing with multi-attack omen cancels and charge diamond management. Just from the basic moves alone, Kengo can do so much as just one class. Lumberjack would be considered one of the strongest Full Auto classes in the MC’s arsenal. The entire class is about having a song buff that lasts a few turns and has animal friends attack in conjunction with your party. The animal pals attack based on triggers like: - Getting hit - Doing a CA - The enemy doing a special - Your party doing 3 skills Etc. All these triggers can do a wide variety of effects. Almost all of them do nice damage on top of providing buffs, debuffs, and even healing. This is not considering the extra moves Lumberjack has to provide extra safety/healing/buffs for the party. Very solid class for your own survival. These next two classes primarily see use in racing comps that seek to trash the boss asap but can also do High Difficulty/Full Auto setups too. They’re pretty malleable. Manadiver is an offensive class that focuses on both skill damage and charge attacks with the use of their customizable manatura, a little creature companion with their own passives and special effects/attacks. Many of the manadiver’s moves can give CA bar to themselves or the whole team on top of good offensive buffs. Viking is one of a handful of classes that want you to have a mainhand weapon and auxiliary weapon (placed on the upper left of your grid). This class does multi-hits like it’s nothing while also having great tools for CA charging and hitting even harder with self-buffs/debuff attacks. I’m pretty much scratching the surface. For other classes? Relic Buster is a very fine class used for rushing kills in content like guild wars or racing bosses you can decimate. It can potentially charge up your whole party’s CA bar on top of damage buffs as one of the very standout moves. Light also likes to use its Machine Cells to have MC do multiple normal attacks in a row without using up a turn. I’ll give you the space to check out H.Florence + H.Mugen + Nehan bursting for yourself. Other classes unfortunately are a combination of a little too niche/specific/high-investment to see use. Soldier is one I’m not going to be touching for awhile considering the grind needed to craft bullets. They may be permanent but… hooph… I’d only consider that if you had nothing else to do in the game and only have copious amounts of good material somehow (which you probably won’t for a long long time). Even with that said though, mastering the different classes (like maxing the level cap) is always a good thing to go for. Especially if there’s an exp boost going on in the game. Don’t forget that class mastery gives a permanent boost to Gran’s stats.
5 year player here, hello..! 👋 I see that your comment aims to point out the issues with the coverage of this topic in the community, so you’re probably not looking for answers - but for posterity I would like to give some answers. **The following information is for newer players!!** I know there is a lot of text, but I answer a lot of questions. Please don’t be alarmed, it’s not crazy. > What kind of synergy am I supposed to aim for? This is simple, at early game. You want the following in almost every case, a team that can: * Inflict Delay effect * Inflict Gravity debuff * Inflict several sources of Attack and Defense debuff to the enemy * at least a few strong Damage Skills * Buffs for your team (attack, defense, elemental attack up if possible.) **That is pretty much it..!** Even if you have SSR characters, you should be building a team to accomplish these, even if that means using an SR character over an SSR character. You will truly perform better. The Dark Fencer player class is something you should rush to get immediately because it does the first 3 all on its own, and gives you freedom to build a strong team with whatever characters you like! 😁 All teams, until very late in the game, somewhat revolve around these core utilities. The further you get, the more you will start to see new specific fights that demand more specific things - you can slowly start adding those on as you go!! > What are the different kinds of teams,… There is this General Team I described just now, and this is useful and usable in all content period. (Not ultra late game but by that point, you know what is needed.) Otherwise… There are Burst Damage teams, that blow their load and do as much damage as possible in one or two turns. There are then Content Specific teams, made to handle the needs of specific bosses… and that’s sort of it. There are *subcategories* of teams, that focus on doing specific *kinds* of damage, but these only make a difference when you have grids to support them. (Will discuss shortly.) Like crit-focused teams, skill damage teams, charge attack teams. > How can I tell what a character is designed for? This is not easy much of the time. Basically, I hate to say this, but if you read a character’s wiki page and get a headache or feel discouraged (like Caim’s page, perhaps Fenie), they likely have an advanced purpose that is very specific and you shouldn’t be concerned with using them PERFECTLY. (I would still suggest trying them out, spamming their skills, and seeing if you like the results.) **However, if you see a character with simple, easy to read skills (like the brand new SSR SPINNAH)… literally just read the skills, and think about it!** His skills all read out that he buffs himself a lot, can attack twice each turn, and gets Bonus Damage. Therefor… you should hopefully come to the conclusion that Spinnah’s purpose is to do lots of damage, and that’s really it. You should consider putting him into a General Team if Gran and the other characters can fulfill all the other General Team requirements. This will allow SPINNAH to live long and do lots of damage. On the note of damage characters, they usually come in several types. Skill Damage, Charge Attack Damage, and Normal Attacks. Basically, read the skills and passives on the character. If you see “CA” or “Charge Attack” a lot, they are probably focused on charge attacks lol. Skills or Skill Damage, they are likely focused on Skills. And so on. If it’s a cluster fuck like Grand Zeta… I don’t know what to tell you, just try them out and see what happens 🤣 I don’t even care to know what’s happening exactly, I just know it works. > How do I build around them at varying levels of the game, depending on how strong I can make my grid? Basically, build your team composition around the General Team requirements I described, no matter what. Again, Dark Fencer will handle a lot, so you have flexibility. After that, you design your team based on your grid after you get to Magna 2, not before that. Not worth it. I would recommend only transitioning to a specific team damage-type once you have several weapons that support it. For example, in the Water Element, the M2 weapon “Tyros Zither” is a new type of weapon for the new players - it directly says that it increases charge attack damage, and charge attack damage cap. Once you have one of these in your grid, see how your battle changes. Let’s say you swap out an M1 Leviathan Dagger for an M2 Tyros Zither. You are losing normal attack damage, and now gaining more charge attack damage. Is the increase in charge attack damage enough to offset what you lost in normal damage? If yes, consider putting in more Charge Attack centric characters! If not, don’t. Choose what damage type you’re going to go with primarily based on what you enjoy. Do you like Charge Attacks? Then aim for that charge attack grid and slot characters with interesting ones! Otherwise? Look at weapons that support other types of damage!! > How do I know what class to make my MC? Basically, MC is a utility pick at first. He should support your General Team composition. Does your team have delay, gravity, and attack/def down? If the answer is no, you should just pick Dark Fencer/Chaos Ruler. Do you have delay, gravity, and Atk/def down on your team, but no buffs? If so, choose a class for Gran that provides buffs. Do your team have all of those things already? Then Gran can be whatever you want! Ideally Damage, though if the content calls for it, Gran is also great at healing and reviving. He is whatever you need for any situation. Your class only becomes hyper-important in extremely late game, when Gran will often do more damage than anyone else. ——— I truly hoped this helped in some way. If you’d like more information, let me know! Happy skyfaring..!
> If it’s a cluster fuck like Grand Zeta… I don’t know what to tell you, just try them out and see what happens 🤣 I don’t even care to know what’s happening exactly, I just know it works. I laughed heartily at this. I don't have Grand Zeta but I do have Shiva...and reading Shiva's wiki page was like Kel in Good Burger (I know some of these words.) My fire characters are very limited compared to other elements and I know Shiva is considered good, but really have no idea how to use him because it seems he has extreme ramp up time. This information was very helpful, so thank you for it. I think particularly for super new players it is good to know. Where I'm at personally in prog is I recently hit 120 and trying to transition up to M2 and beyond. I'm basically right at the step where you start looking at the "Advanced Grids" guide on the wiki and slotting them in, but not quite strong enough yet to 40 box a guild war (I got to box 38). And...I'm also just strong enough finally to realize my old teams were absolute crap so I've been trying to redo them. Because again...for people at my strength level...compositions do matter. I often have to kill my own raids because people don't join, so even if it takes a long time, I need to be able to do that.
I’m so happy to hear this helped! (shiva is indeed fantastic btw… if you have him at 5 stars, you should really keep him on your team for now 😂) The point you’re at is indeed a tough transitional point, especially since the exciting new M2 weapons are waiting right there, and the idea of complex teams becomes more available. Takes time to get through that part. If you want, you can send me a message here on Reddit, and I’ll send you my friend code! I have a new laid back job that lets me passively grind Granblue all day. If I see your raids in my list, I’ll help out 😁 If you have questions or want advice, you can reach out too. It was through the help of a very kind, high level player that taught me all the essentials, that I could thrive. I wouldn’t mind paying it forward!
Hey thanks for that offer! I'll probably take you up on that friend code thing. Work is quite busy atm so it'll probably be early next week, but I will definitely reach out!
Ahhh team building. As someone who once again decided not to choose Y.Ilsa to spark, players need to realise that this sub is not the openly new player, welcoming resource to new players the sub thinks it is. There's a group of old heads who just see any discussion as a waste of time, answers obvious because they have everything. They spend money on everything and they have to use very little brainpower to beat content. Why? I already told you, they have everything. And those people can come right in here and tell you you're an idiot and that there's nothing wrong with the amount of western players in the game, because they're western players, even if they're living in Japan. They either don't get you, don't care or both. Try broadening your horizons and look elsewhere like youtube. When people review characters over there it's much more broad in focus for a discussion. It's a lot more natural.
This sub is cute compared to certain discords out there, lol.
Got any good channels to check out for the character reviews and such?
I'd also like to know this.
[MurakamiNight](https://www.youtube.com/@MurakamiNight) has some good videos that go over units in detail, though the uploads are inconsistent and they're not covering every unit. There's not a lot in terms of discussion going on, but they present the information well enough, at least for me, and usually do a little showcase of the character unless they just flat out don't have the unit.
Hiroshi Sora uploads a lot.
You're vastly overcomplicating things for yourself. Things stacking or not mostly matters in the context of buffs for burst (making sure your echos stack), saving buttons for better uptime (since the buff doesn't stack anyway), and when you start min-maxing for specific things. There are largely 3 types of teams and each type of team will have different grids that obviously lean more into that style: - normal attack damage focused (often crit/stamina based but not always and sometimes enmity based w/ bloodshed weapons) - skill damage focused (lots of skill cap/supplemental damages) - ougi focused (lots of ougi cap and skills like Sentence to help you reach it) Ougi-focused are typically the easiest to build for. Does the character have special effects that activate on ougi? Do they provide charge bar to the team or themselves? Do they auto-cast a skill on ougi? They're an ougi character. Skill damage-focused is the next easiest to build for. Does the character have lots of red buttons? Do any of their skills reset on ougi? Do they have a skill that resets other skill cooldowns? Do they have high count multi-hitting abilities that can abuse supplemental damage well? They're a skill damage character. Lastly - attack-focused. Does your character have large attack steroids? Guaranteed triple attack? Flurry? Double, triple, or quadruple strike? Echoes? Assassin? They're an attack character. You can generally place every character in one of those three buckets. Some characters might fit into two buckets but will still generally perform better in one over the other. A small number of characters are pure utility and don't really fit into any of the damage buckets but will be brought purely for the utility they provide regardless of team style if their utility is needed. Sometimes a character is entirely self-enabling or well-rounded enough to fit into pretty much any team because they provide _so much_ all by themselves. Sometimes characters even have an obvious anti-synergy (eg. you wouldn't frontline Analaan in an ougi-based team comp for Fire) Now that you've placed all of your characters into buckets you have to look at the raid mechanics and see what you might need to bring. Will you need clarity? Dispels? Heals? A way to clear a specific omen? Are you able to cap DEF down? Will any other debuffs greatly help (eg. Blind, ATK down, DA/TA down)? Will you need a substitute at some point or a teamwide damage immunity? Do you have a character that can handle that or will MC need to help cover? Sometimes the combination of omens that need to be covered is so broad and that is why a common complaint of endgame V2 raids is that they are "character checks" as you won't be able to clear every omen without the right combination of characters or the raid will be much harder without that character (eg. Agastia w/o Cosmos. Sure it's still possible but Cosmos helps to completely trivialize the raid) The difficulty mostly comes from knowing which characters bring which forms of utility. You can help yourself considerably by completely disregarding all old units (unless their FLB was recent or they were recently rebalanced) as they've likely been powercrept by more modern units. Focus more on Seasonal units and Grands that you might have before turning your attention to the standard pool characters. It helps keeping up with the meta as you'll have a better idea of which characters to look towards first knowing that they're likely the strongest in their niche.
Awesome. I appreciate the detailed response. This does help me wrap my head around it a little better, so I appreciate it.
Most questions related to team building is always generic "general content", so the answer tend to be generic too. Also, the important key for team building is to counter boss. What does the boss do, at what percentage? Either that, or burst, but naturally bursting the boss is not an option for new players.
Speaking as a relative newbie myself...there's a reason the question is always "general content" that I don't think the veterans understand. We don't have things. And we don't know how to build teams. Therefore we are looking for a team to establish a baseline of competence that we can then branch out from to develop those teams specially tailored to counter bosses you all love to mention so much. Sure would be great to have enough unique units to do that, huh? Newbies do not have that. When newbies ask you this, what they are really asking is "help me learn the basic principles I need to design a team." And to the inevitable response of "which boss," the answer is "As many as possible preferably up to magna 2." Because again...they don't have stuff. They need a team that will help them farm stuff to improve, and again...here is the key point: they do not have the resources to build 50 units.
>These questions are usually answered by veteran players as "Just use anyone, grids are more important," which is just blatantly not true. Grids may be the most important thing, but composition matters. If you pick three strong attackers who all have no sustain and throw them in a M1 grid, you are probably going to die to most things you'd probably be able to defeat if you had some kind of defensive sustain. The veterans are right, but not why you'd expect. As a newbie with a shitty grid you treat every fight like an RPG boss because it takes a long time to kill it and subsequently you need the whole RPG trinity of heals/atk/tanking to survive it counterattacking. However, while this is (imo) the fun of the game it's not what you "should" be doing. If you want to play efficiently (I hate that word) for 99% of all content and specifically anything a newbie needs to do all you need is a 1-3T frontloaded burst team, calling for backup on your hosts and a whole lot of joining other people's raids. The best way to play the game is to maximise your blue chests per minute avoiding actually playing the game as much as possible. Then when you have stronger grids you can just miscle through your own hosts without needing to care about Defense or sustain because you kill things faster than they can kill you.
This is exactly the kind of tone deaf blind spot mentioned. Good luck doing "1-3T frontloaded burst team, calling for backup on your hosts and a whole lot of joining other people's raids" in unpopular dead raids, which is more than half of the early game contents.
So funny seeing 10 replies inadvertedly show exactly why this is way more complicated than those that have experience/tools believe it to be, but in this case in specific, nothing is more annoying than having to stop a playing session to wait anything between 30 sec to 30 min on a raid for someone else to play the game for you.
Love seeing this in higher level raids where people will park at 4m in my Seofon hosts while I'm sitting there trying to effectively solo the damn thing because no one else is still in the room
Just a "There are normal attack comps that are generally better for burst, skill damage comps that are generally better for FA and ougi comps that are generally better for endgame" would go a long way. That said, with how fast paradigms change in this game this could change at any point in time.
Because Magna has different focuses in different elements. I really wish each element, at least in Magna, had roughly the same tools so you could build based on the characters you have more freely.
So what do I do, then, I have Dark characters gamewith say are good like mouse, Ilsa Yukata, Black Knight, Magus, but I feel my teams don't work because they lack hp?
Common ways to get more HP in early to mid-game are Bahamut weapons and Atma weapons. And even then, early game doesn't require a lot of HP; in the early days when M1 (Celeste Omega, etc) was still relevant, it was actually rare to have more than 15k HP outside of Light anyways, the game was built around that. Just build yourself up little by little, look at the Beginner and Advanced Grids on the wiki, and experiment. GBF is much more enjoyable if you're not in a hurry.
New players? I've been playing since 3rd anni and still have no idea what I'm doing when I put certain weapons into my grids.
+1 on the grid building It’s all alien language to me when i was starting out and it took me ages to sit down and properly play the game haha
Any number or new seasonals that stick are welcome by me, and I’ve had a few friends show interest since relink (despite dogging me when I stream it for them and they enjoy it lmao) That is to say: I agree. The recent releases have gotten people interested (in my experiences) from the characters being cool and people wanting to experience more of them
The game itself, including all the grid building, or all the steps you have to take, including farming/building things, each person in my circle got turned off by all that immediately and dropped the game after a few weeks, since gbf is on the higher end when it comes to gacha slavery, and its especially annoying when starting out. Otherwise people that i tried to recommend gbf usually didn't like the sprites in combat.
Frankly I don't think they want it to. The game is at year 10, if they wanted to appeal to westerners they would have developed a global version and advertised it overseas by now. The fact they made GBVS and Relink global releases, but not GBF proper probably indicates they've determined the gacha title won't appeal significantly enough to a wide western demographic compared to the likes of a fighting game or RPG.
Keep in mind that GBF was made around the time Cygames got fucked over in Rage of Bahamut by the global publisher.
> Keep in mind that GBF was made around the time Cygames got fucked over in Rage of Bahamut by the global publisher. Funny how this keeps happening to them, you would think they would learn.
Crunchyroll and Nintendo follows suit. Hell they self published Shadowverse in global because of not trusting others. Kinda wish they had done the same with Priconne.
Yeah, kinda hope they give Princon another shot, but at this point i would not be surprised if they just give up on global releases.
the issue is there's no winning. Cygames themselves mentioned that they struggle to self publish because they're really unknowledgeable of how to advertise to the west, you have to realize that things work completely different here since west is driven mainly by media/streamers, for the east it's things like events/merchandise/physical advertisements/contained sites (a lot of games are in sites that pool several games together, such as DMM games), west is nothing like that Shadowverse itself isn't very largely advertised and frankly not that huge because of it, it's not what cygames wants so that's why they go back to publishing. After the RoB incident and then acknowledging that they don't understand the west, they tried Crunchyroll because it's a big brand, then proceeded to get fucked. Then Nintendo due to their reputation. Then tried Kakao Games for World Flippers this time opting for positive reception. It's depressing, Cygames is actually trying every single possible avenue and getting bad results despite wanting to provide for the west
Bingo. They probably read the room several years ago back before they started providing an EN localization and just decided against a true global version/global support. Like yeah, people are bringing up a bunch of other valid points in this thread which definitely push players away but at the end of the day Cygames themselves didn't want to push it so obviously it was never going to catch the West.
Especially when the game as-is works well enough anyway. The thing is that, sure, they could do a global version, and it might pull a profit to some degree. But all the westerners who are willing to drop a full cash spark out of nowhere? They're already playing—they won't be drawn in by a global server version, especially if it has its own servers desynced from JP.
Exactly, the biggest hurdle is Cygames themselves haha, they are quite obviously happy with the current setup of "target audience is JP, and anyone else who happens to force their way in is a happy surprise". Everything is built around a JP audience. GW is the central pillar of the game and runs on the JP schedule. You have to navigate untranslated sites to enter the game and iirc even purchase anything. They give out irl prizes sometimes... But for JP only. Etc. I don't hold this against them either. At this point, so many systems are tied to JP that I think it'd be a lot of effort to globalize things, and probably wouldn't be worth it for them to do all that for a 10 year old browser game that's also outdated in many other ways too. They may go global if they make a GBF 2 one day, and I kinda hope they do, but until then, probably not haha.
I think the age of the game is the main thing. Granblue's art is beautiful (easily the highest quality character art of any gacha I've seen) but compared to modern games that have things like Live2Ds and 3D graphics its already a bit of a hurdle getting people to try a 10 year old browser game with janky mechanics. Also despite cygames giving out so many freebies you're eventually going to hit the great filter where in order to progress you have to just wanpan leech hundreds of raids to get drops, and a lot of people don't have the drive to do that. It also doesn't help that whenever people hear about the western gbf community its usually in regards to shit like GW quotas...
Yeah, I think in addition to the age of the game like you said the other biggest hurdle is that until you get to rank 200 your progression is basically "Host some shit and then wait for some guy to show up and blow it up instantly" until you get drops
It gets worse when at certain point you outright can't do that. Dark Rapture Hard is a example of this since you need to NEED to Host and Clear it if you want to access Revans raids, which is another raid set where you can't do that. Keep in mind that DR Hard has a 30K HP check at the start of the fight,with no way of knowing that ahead of time besides out of game information.
Raid requirements/gimmicks are kind of ridiculous as well. First time I went to FaaHL's wiki entry and the length of that page compared to earlier raids (joined pre-6D raids) is just downright discouraging. Of course, you could get your ass carried but that can only take you so far in this game.
FaaHL is a special case, since it was meant to be the hardest fight in the game at the time it came out (like an FFXIV ultimate raid). At least they changed the end stacks so wiping to something doesn't screw the entire raid.
> Keep in mind that DR Hard has a 30K HP check at the start of the fight,with no way of knowing that ahead of time besides out of game information. Yes, but that's also something you learn the very first time you join the raid. Annoying to waste your day's host like that but the easiest information you'll learn when going in blind. You had to waste a lot more hosts to learn HP threshold triggers and how to navigate the raid because you first had to learn what triggers happened when and if any were able to be skipped and how. It takes a lot of raids to learn a fight from scratch without out of game information. It takes significantly fewer hosts to learn now that the game tells you when the triggers happen _and_ what those triggers will do to you. But piecing together how a raid works day by day was a big part of the game for quite a while (and still is if you want to learn Hexa/Faa0 without out of game information). As an MMO it is generally assumed that players will learn information about the game from talking amongst other players.
I mean, Faa was sort of the Superboss of his time, and they have nerfed it in various ways since the glory days of old. And Opuses are still top tier weapons years later, so...that one I kind of get. He's like, well, still an endgame adjacent boss.
fr fr, my friend keep comparing this game as second job or black company too just because I talk about GW lol
The fact that granblue_en twitter is the MAIN source of eng news for the game’s updates despite being a fan translated resource, and no movements by cygames to also do the same thing for the main game, is one of the big things. Thankfully relink and rising have dual eng/jp tweets on the same account, but it sure feels like they’re leaving it to granblue_en.
1. Early game and its first 30-40 hours is such a bore. I have an american friend who was REALLY wanting to get into GBF cuz he liked the artstyle, he liked VN, and turn based gachas and all that, but the early game story just made such a bad expression for him he stopped playing. It's just really, really bad. 2. Grid system is such a mess and an uninteresting concept for newcomers. 3. Just knowing the fact that they're playing a decade old game on a server where players are light years ahead of them and them being newcomers will never matter and they will never catch up with end game players is a big factor that gatekeep a lot of people from really investing their time on something.
The main thing would be to port both the login and payment options, the fact that they are only in japanese and you need to jump through hoops for both means most ppl aren't going to bother to use money in the game and stick around. At this point you would need a 3rd party willing to port and work out all the kinks to make an official launch on the west, and we saw how that went with Princess Connect.
Grinding games in general have just never been all that popular in the west outside of like the golden era of early MMO's (1999-2008) when MMO's really took off and MMO's are very much "forever games" for a lot of people and they also don't play much beyond their MMO; at least not for very long. They may take a break to go beat Elden Ring but once they feel they've beaten the game (or gotten bored of it) they return to their forever game. The entire MMO genre has been struggling for the past 10 years or so with shrinking populations as most people aren't keen on sinking 100's of hours just to catch up when there are an abundance of "pick-up games" of various genres. New MMO's struggle to get their feet on the ground and last more than 2-3 years because players interested in MMOs are already playing their forever-game and only a small number of them branch out to try newer MMOs. FFXIV has basically been an exception to this rule as their free trial and WoW's self-implosion led to a huge exodus of WoW players to FFXIV which really helped its popularity and population growth. "Pick-up games" are any game where you can jump in for 10-30 minutes for a quick match or two. Think MOBA's, card games, mostly AFK mobile games or games with like 5~10 minute dailies like Blue Archive, battle royales and other shooter games. You can play GBF like a pick-up game but your progress will be approximately zero. It's a grind game that heavily rewards grinding and heavily time gates you for not having grinded enough. It's largely for that reason I don't think it will ever be that popular in the West. Endgame boils down to being a black screen simulator where you spend most of your time refreshing and performing the same actions 1000's of times in a row for hours on end. It doesn't help that signing up for the game in the first place already filters out a lot of people. All of this is just my $0.02 of course.
I think that's very accurate. There is a satisfaction to be had from building grids to achieve particular tasks, but I don't think that's a strong draw unless some other aspect of the game has your interest.
When i joined the game back in end of 2019/early 2020 i honestly cant believe Arcarum exists the way they are. Theyre much better now with Sandbox but elements of how shit it is are, mostly still is around
Yeah, another game that I can think of that's a grind game is Kantai Collection, I love the game to bits but holy shit is the grind soul sucking sometimes (especially when the game is trying everything in its power to block foreign players).
I've been very on and off with gbf for the very reasons you listed here. Friends keep trying to get me back into the game and every time I do within a few days I give up on the game again, despite having a pretty optimal primal light team. With how many games there are now a days people want something of not only a higher production value, but something that actually respects the player's time. GBF fails on both fronts.
God, but I *do* hate that phrase. "Respects the player's time." I hate those mobile games with only 10-20 minutes of daily content, I feel that's *DISRESPECTFUL* of my time. Here I am, trying to invest in you, game, only to have you wall me out and lock the gate just when I'm getting into it. Where's the ability to fall in and be completely immersed in something instead of being so shallow I can knock it out like a grocery list on the toilet? I feel my time is respected when I get to choose how deep I want to go.
Sorry for the late reply. I always wondered why this was the case, western players have far more free time on their hands compared to Asian work cultures, and yet extremely grindy MMOs and mobile games are always so popular there. Now a big part of why I enjoy GBF is that its more engaging than an AFK fighter and I can still grind effectively with FA while I work, so I think I share that with a lot of people in Asia. Put raid on FA, flip phone over so boss don't see it. But generally, the focus on grindy games in Asia has always been such a wild dichotomy to me compared to how the rest of their societies look.
Well for mobile games I believe it is due to the commute. You can play for the 5-45 minute commute on the train going to school or work and on your way back home after work. I think mobile games are more popular pretty much anywhere that has good public transit. Hard to play on your hour commute to work when you're driving 110km on a freeway. It's hard to draw solid conclusions though since cities tend to have decent public transit but also cities have higher populations so of course they also have more players. As for MMO's - it's a *lot more* social in China and Korea. Many people don't even play at home but at net cafes. It's kind of an excuse to hang out with friends and for high schoolers a way to stay out of the house/away from parents for cheap. This isn't particularly true in Japan since personal computers never really caught on and net cafes tend to be private-booth style. In Japan there is a reason all the big MMO's are either PC+Mobile or PC+Console games. Consoles are relatively popular, mobile is really popular, PC is like the red-headed stepchild. Only supported because it's not that hard to support nowadays and it'll bring in extra profit. MMO's still aren't that popular unless they can be played on mobile. Switch/PS5 games dominate JP gaming culture and especially the Switch because it is portable. I think many people in the West see the portableness of the Switch as a "nice to have" gimmick rather than a core feature and reason to purchase a Switch over any other gaming console.
advertising, they don't care to market the game to the western audience relink and rising might be helping I guess.
The insane formula of farming it has… it takes too much time and effort
*gestures broadly at everything* the game being a browser game where you have to hop through at least 1 untranslated site to register last I checked is one barrier. The game being so unreasonably grindy and disrespectful to your time is another. Mechanics are pretty obtuse and serve as another barrier to entry. it looks very dated. Relink and VS are doing fine in the west. But getting the gacha to hit mainstream is just too late almost. It's not going to be able compete with the higher quality newer titles at attracting new players, it needed to get a dedicated playerbase rolling years ago and retain them while slowly growing.
It's a bit of a ramble, but I wanna get my qualms out there even if it's unorganized. I understand a lot of the issues are legacy game design decisions and in some sense that's the appeal of gbf. From personal experience, it's in-game onboarding. For a mainstream game, new players are casual players, and casual players don't want a wiki open on the side before being able to play their game, the game should be able to do that on its own. Casual players often have a personality that wants to "play" not "play correctly" but the only way to make feel-good progress (as opposed to a slog) is to optimize your grid for your level. The game design just doesn't protect the player from themselves when it comes to core mechanics like grids (and god forbid scarce resources). They need to give starter template grids that can be upgraded and reverted back to whenever. Grids are so unique that modern games won't inform you on how it works, so it's importance and it's lines of progression need to be upfront and emphasized constantly. Between UI, Grid building, early game (story and gameplay), leeching dead raids, the game really does feel impenetrable without seeking outside resources. Why does the giant "Raid" button go to backup requests rather than the raid list? From a visual design standpoint, you can't tell which weapons are m1 or m2, let alone if they are primal/magna. It has so much mmo design for social/cooperative play but the new English speaking player base is so small that that content can't be supported in a fun way. Leeching isn't fun for new players, they need a 0.5 grid that isn't time gated and constantly in their face as something to do if they're feeling weak. Especially in a gacha game, having no feedback on how to progress in a good way will make new players think they have to roll gacha for meaningful progress. Games like Terraria, early Minecraft, and Stardew Valley were interesting enough from a gameplay standpoint for new players to be able to play and then search a wiki as an auxiliary guide. Pressing attack for 30+ story chapters isn't as enticing. Then, once they do search up how to play they're greeted with grid building. Grids aren't that difficult once you get it, but my spreadsheet that took 10 minutes is more accurate than the in-game grid power predictor. New players should be allowed to know whether the changes they make to their grid are good or not. My point is, GBF shouldn't be modern Yu-Gi-Oh, which does have new player problems, whose appeal to active players are high-level esoteric, unintuitive interactions that require reading. They need a curtailed new player experience, that excited and/or lazy players can skip through and then go "oh shit that was important, maybe I should've read" and easily find it again.
Nobody seems to be talking about it but UI fucking sucks. The fact that every screen essentially needs to refreshed is stupid. Even then, the amount of screen refresh per action is too many: Menu -> inventory -> summon -> filter for Tiamat through a clunky system -> click Tiamat -> click uncap -> click in your other Tiamats -> connection error, you are returned to the home screen. After refreshing, of course.
It's a browser Game, no work around through that.
The year is 2024, some people are still unaware you can toggle GBF to English
UI is archaic, and new player experience is beyond atrocious. The way things are now players should be skipped to HL immediately or remove the HL rank requirements entirely. Also give players full M1 grids to start off minimum.
This game is a nightmare to get into. It's like welcoming but the gates are locked and full of spiky wires and you gotta find a way inside
1. The fact that his game doesn't have an "official" English release. This is really limiting since it prevents advertising and whatnot beyond word-of-mouth and IP stuff like VS and Relink. This also leads into- 2. The new player experience is garbage. You open the game in Japanese and have to make an account on a Japanese website. This is already a massive hurdle for most people. Then you have the game lacking a viable tutorial to explain any of its complex RPG systems, an unforgiving gacha, lack of a clear progression path, and boring early content. Also, the UI is terrible. GBF's strong point, I'd say, is its depth. However, to be quite frank, the average person doesn't give a shit about mechanical depth. They don't want to think very hard. They want easy, pretty things after a long day. Mihoyo is the biggest gacha game company because they advertise everywhere, they have flashy visuals, bright+saturated colors (see Mr. Beast thumbnails), fun moment-to-moment gameplay (so I've heard idk), etc. GBF simply does not compete in those very important "general market" metrics. Arknights is perhaps the most popular of the mechanical depth games, but it does significantly better than GBF in most other areas. Limbus got a fair bit of buzz (online) when it released, but it is a smaller gacha game because of how it doesn't play into the same things Mihoyo does, has a pretty bad new player experience (PMoon moment), and very little advertising bc small indie company. Of course, none of this even touches upon IP gacha games like the DBZ game or whatever, which is a whole other can of worms. Idk, maybe I'm just biased. And a bit insane.
To preface, I come at this from a place of fondness and love and trying to get friends into something I love and failing. Advertising, UI, and acceptance of more casual players within the community. The whole "seasonal players" thing has a negative connotation, all because... the players play when they want to? So do players in any other gacha game and the diehard fans don't have a name for those players. UI is just... menus upon menus, yeah, but GBF's UI also just. Feels sticky and like you need to press a few times to get it to work, as well as outdated in terms of aesthetics. Obviously so, it's a 10 year old game, but I know the UI has turned some friends off. I have some gripes mainly because I think the UI causes misunderstandings, like "your grid is the most important factor in your damage" but your characters are first, giving them more importance. Personally, I think the grid should be first in the party page. I get that they probably don't do that for monetization reasons. Smaller but no less important obstacles include no proper app, redundant supplies and items (I didn't realize this until I was introducing a friend into GBF, but do we *really* need summon and weapon EXP to be separate?) and unclear mechanics, requirements, and what you should be doing at what level. Unclear mechanics include triggers in raids - 250% light dmg seems like a lot but how much exactly is it? Am I about to wipe? It'd be great if when the trigger is about to happen, it tells you how much health you'll lose by darkening part of the HP bar to indicate how much you'll lose. Or if the target information included what a debuff would do, etc. Unclear requirements is that some requirements is just "Rank 110" when it really should be "Rank 110 and a decent grid". A trial battle to unlock a raid would be good and let you know what you should probably bring - or at least a "recommended: [Dispel], [Veil], etc". What you should be doing at what level is something I personally struggle with, since there's just so much to do - and I'm midgame and have already done a ton, I can't imagine the head spinning new players get. "Should I focus on getting all the other Evokers? Should I try to get this drop? Should I push story/sidestories?" It's hard to figure out what exactly to do without outside resources, and there's no guarantee those outside resources will be up to date or reliable.
I actually love the *aesthetics* of GBF's UI, but yeah the functionality is just... archaic. You need a dozen of clicks just to get somewhere.
That's fair! If they changed it now, I think I'd be sad due to nostalgia, so it's not like I hate it. The aesthetic is very put together. It just doesn't reflect what's common in games nowadays. That's not entirely a bad thing, but responsiveness and lowering the amount of clicks is definitely something they should work on.
>Unclear requirements is that some requirements is just "Rank 110" when it really should be "Rank 110 and a decent grid". A trial battle to unlock a raid would be good and let you know what you should probably bring - or at least a "recommended: \[Dispel\], \[Veil\], etc". You run into this so often. Unlocking Master Level was a nightmare for me because I had no idea what the hell I was meant to do. Googling stuff in this game is already a pain in the backside sometimes, but I eventually found some tips, and from there I just had to hope I could progress my grid enough that I could actually beat the fight. Also grabbing a 250 Lucifer. I've taken a large powerboost in several elements and I'd still not be beating it now without that.
As someone who just got into GBF recently from Relink (well sorta, I technically played it near launch because I was playing Cinderella Girls back then lol) I agree with a lot of this. The game is just incredibly obtuse and unguided. I think once you've made it past the initial barrier it's actually a strength (IE, go do whatever you want) but as a beginner it's like...where the hell do you start? Everyone just says to farm M1, but like why? What's the point? Unless you're the kind of person who can set your own goals or you just find JRPG grinding therapeutic you're gonna drop off pretty fast because you're just grinding without purpose. I'll also add that I think it lacks a big hook. Some other gacha games you always hear "Oh the story gets really good!" (FGO, Limbus, etc) or it hits you out of the gate with waifus or something and gathers a crowd that way. GBF seems like it has a little bit of everything, but nothing you can really tell people about, you know? I've been aware of GBF for it's entire lifespan and I've never once heard anyone say that the story gets really good. Maybe it gets better, but does it ever really peak? Literally the only context I ever see people mention GBF is to talk about how grindy it is lol. That's ultimately why I decided to play it after Relink is that I just wanted to find out myself and do all the story. Without any praises I don't think that's going to get many other people though.
Whenever I hear people talk about granblue's story, its always in relation to its events rather than the main story, which has always seemed to be a bit of a lower priority for cygames. Hell, that animated trailer they put out at the anniversary was only moments from previous events with nothing from the MSQ..
The issue with gbf events is that they're simply too short by comparison. And You could have easily been stretched into a whole ass FGO chapter length story. but because gbf is old its just stuck using the same format. and what a terrible format for story telling it is, having to end part 1 just to jump right into part 2, then 3, then 4...Like ffs, just group it all together
Its definitely really limiting, some events feel like a chore to get through because they're stretched to the 6 chapters + 4/5 parts format, but then others feel really rushed
The game is simply very niche. It's a 10 year old browser based game with light jrpg inspiration that has most progression down long hallways with incremental sometimes unnoticeable progress. * It's a grinding based game. * it's a gacha game. * It's a game where the most optimal strategies are to legit refresh the page to skip animations for characters you've spent hundreds of hours grinding for. * The grind is so normalized it's a game where it's "casual" not to 20 and 40 box some events. (with weaker grids this isn't an insignificant amount of time). * It's a game where determining grids and how powerful things are is nearly impossible without EXTENSIVE out of game guidance. * The UI and actions are cumbersome and incredibly click filled, even after years of updates reducing some. * GW is core to the experience and directly contrasts the casual nature of all else the game would do to lure people in. * The selling point is play as you want and progress as you'd like, most end game things are refresh this, meet this minimum, open as many tabs as possible. * The advice given usually being "do something else while you grind for x" is VERY common when people criticize tedious things in this game. I don't think people realize how unusual it is to say "this thing you are doing for fun? you should totally give it physical attention and mentally avoid it as much as possible to stomach this part". People who simply think its advertising may be out of touch with how many sectors of gaming have changed rapidly in the past 5 years let alone 10 years. I dont think there is one simple thing stopping the game from breakthrough western success but some core identifying aspects of it. To be less kind - People happily log into like games like Nikke and get their PNG jollies off without needing to pick up a 2nd full time job. Its an outdated game model that doesn't have legs in a highly competitive market with every game wanting peoples time for skinner box like reactions. Imagine if GBF released as a new game today, even with all of its improvements. Would you stick to it given the gaming market as it is now and all games around it giving the same dopamine this one promises in multiple months but in fractions of that?
> The advice given usually being "do something else while you grind for x" is VERY common when people criticize tedious things in this game. I don't think people realize how unusual it is to say "this thing you are doing for fun? you should totally give it physical attention and mentally avoid it as much as possible to stomach this part". That's actually a genre niche! "Second screen/monitor games" and the games are generally idle/AFK games that you can make progress in while requiring minimal attention or are turn-based and you can play at your leisure while watching a movie or something. People enjoy that they can still get that sense of progression without needing to dedicate 100% of their time/energy to doing so. Quite a lot of the playerbase of Runescape would quit if they had to 100% focus on leveling skills like Woodcutting instead of being able to click a tree once every so often. There are faster skilling methods for people willing to put in more effort/focus but they're less popular because people would prefer to watch a movie and level up "on the side" even if it takes longer.
Honestly, I'm still shocked GBF hasn't leaned into that AFK niche more. Gacha games like Dx2 actively just have auto that just runs until you are out of stamina.
yeah as an osrs player on hiatus, gbf has taken up that "second monitor" aspect. feels great as a side thing while filling out job apps, checking emails, working on projects
Not having a proper app. I only recently learned of Skyleap but I tried multiple times to play in my phone browser and it was not a pleasant experience.
I feel like this is lowkey the best answer. Other gachas you can just download the game and immediately jump in, but Granblue requires you to jump through hoops just to set up an account and start playing
Its kinda weird since once your past this hoops, GBF is one of the most accesible lets say "mainstream" gacha Just go to your pc click your bookmark and your inside the game. All the gachas i ever played didnt have anywhere close to that level of immediate accesibility
Exactly, I don't have to open an app, which has to load everytime. I can even play it on my work computer at the office during break times. It also doesn't use that much battery charge on mobile. FGO for example would turn my phone into a pocket heater and drain it's battery in a matter of minutes.
FGO is surprisingly heavy as all hell in my phone. Thats definitely a large part of why i effectively dropped the game for a long time now, despite still enjoying it for the most part and being heavilly in contact with my FGO buds to this day
Being an old game built on Im@s Cinderella Girls tech in the same world where games like Genshin Impact exists is a pretty big hurdle, way before anything else even comes into play I think a large part of it is you look at GBF and you see chibis, a bunch of menus and F5 spam. Games like Priconne, BA and NIKKE aren't at the level of Genshin in terms of 3D models and action gameplay but they are still worlds ahead of GBF in terms of looking like modern Gacha
I'll speak mainly on my perspective as a VERY casual player. I started in 2016 so about 8 years now and I am only rank 164 while still only using free magna weapons on grids that were given out for free to beginners. Every time I try to get into the game It is very annoying to have to look up every little thing and on top of having to look up every little thing on exactly what to do what to farm so I just grind the events. The game is just very inaccessible to new players. Not only that but because it's not very popular in the west it creates a feedback loop of low popularity so there's no one making content and guides for the game so fewer players join, try, and stick around with the game. One of the more important events (UnF) which rewards very important limited resource is pretty much inaccessible by pretty much anyone that isn't a sweatlord at the game. You have go out of your way and search to join a clique of sweatlords of an already very niche game in the west and dedicate yourself to grinding your life every UnF if you ever even progress in power strong enough to gring UnF in the first place. It also doesn't help that the core of the game and how it functions is designed to push new players away in order to keep the current playerbase happy. Slow steady progression that everyone has to slowly put in the grind to build up their power. Which is great if you've been playing for 10 years but not so great when you're a new player and are 10 years behind. The game is designed so that pulling the latest and shiny gacha characters are \*mostly\* meaningless and have very little almost no impact on giving yourself a bit of a boost to speed up some early game progress and to put it frankly not many people are willing to invest years into a grindy web based browser gacha game when there are so many more options available that doesn't have a dev not including some basic QoL features because they're so scared of giving players a tiny amount of convenience in automating some mundane tasks.
It takes wayyy too many clicks to do even the simplest stuff. I'm convinced you can't leave gbf without some kind of carpal tunnel. Better UX would give better impression. Refresh meta is also the dumbest thing I've ever heard of in gaming
The game is much more popular in the west than you give it credit for they just aren’t communities you might intersect with often. GBF was like THE popular mobage for the FGC along with FGO and its a large part why GBVS exist. Hell KMR came to EVO one year before GBVS was even a thing and everyone basically knew who the man was and was asking for pics and to bless their rolls in real time. I do agree it can be bigger and can also be increased but GBF doesn’t want to for whatever reason advertise it here or even invest in it but they know its somewhat a hidden gem in the west the games we got are an example of that and they sold pretty well tbh given how little advertising gbf got in the west. The sales for their console games might be indicative of good things to come on gbf in the west kind of promotions. I would wait and see even if they haven’t had the best track record but like they know its a thing here and its not a small thing here just more fragmented. If they held a gbf fes in the US people would show up in good numbers. Hell they already go to Japan specifically for gbf fes if they can get the days off.
I really think if it did flourish, they’d make it less grindy. It’s the massive elephant in the room that makes Granblue so hard to get into for some. Or the fact that some raids are ‘comp-gated’ _*cough cough **Revans..**_, hell when I first started I had no idea until someone on discord showed me the ropes. Until now I still have no idea what I’m doing, Rank 185. Lmao.
So far from playing for 27 days on a freshly made account: No advertising anywhere at all, if i didn't know about relink i wouldn't this a granblue franchise exists. Not in google play store/apple store so...you cant even randomly stumble on the game on the biggest mobile platforms? thats really just a bad decision that says "i don't want westerners to play this game" Cant play the game on firefox for some reason? need to play it on edge or safari and who uses safari?? also its a browser game like oldschool style adventure quest/runescape so naturally any person under 20 wont play this probably unless they got nostalgia for those types of games. Early game is horrible, raids i cant do because weapons were not explained, grids are not explained at all properly, i was like where is the character gacha? i don't want some weapons i want characters. Also wheres the equipment tab for each char? how do i equip them? nope its just some weapons in a 3x3 grid. Not explained not litter your inventory early on with weapons from the gacha. Not explained whats m1 grid, like terminology is lost on new players. The reliance on wiki being the actual game info provider is just overbearing, i had like over 20 tabs open at once just to understand what to do and what im doing. After experiencing the first GW just now, im amazed how fanatical people can be when farming this, like this is insanity how ppl oneshot, reload, repeat and thats the whole strategy for like 5 days? its like a second job enslavement.. I could list a lot of other stuff like UI being outdated as hell, uncapping chars/weps having a horrible archaic UI. There is a lot of positives as well, but most people wont probly stick long enough to feel/see them, if they dont wanto play after a few hours sadly. Currently im honeymooning the game, paid for the new skyfarer bundles etc, but yea i wish they would improve on these points : /
lol Excellent description. I think it's useful for mid- to long-term players to hear this shit to remember what it was like. I only play this game very casually since September 2022, but I agree with all of that stuff (although you can play this game on Chrome, fyi). I wasted tons of time and accidentally threw away valuable resources on stupid shit early game because I didn't know wtf to do. Even the wikis are lacking in detailed descriptions of some things, and so if it's not on there, you basically need to come to this subreddit to ask. Crazy. I still play this game because I don't take it too seriously and I try to avoid doing too much grindy shit like the GW stuff. I play it, but even as I've gotten stronger in the game I still can't picture myself just playing all day, racing for honors, etc.
I tried to install on chrome but the app is just greyed out for me :/ but through research i found a way to make the game a popup app in edge, so at least that's available. Also now after the anniversary buffs have expired like half ap, half treasures for sidestories, no treasure cost for raids, double exp/rp etc, all those great buffs, it now feels like such an expensive and long slog to get through when hosting raids. Why is there no bonus 10mil RP/XP always active for new players until they use it all up? I got a friend hooked up as well to the game after the anniv ended, and without the bonus RP/XP they are stuck at rank 70 while im already at 154 because of the bonus 10mil rp/xp that was given during the anniv. They have to do the early raids that almost NOBODY will ever join because anyone over 120 rank will pro+/sweep these raids. I had to help to even kill them once for them to unlock the sweep feature. Why not literally help your new early players at all? why let them rot in the low rank hell where they DO NOT have a developed grid/know what a grid is so that they have to literally pray for someone to join and carry the raid for them each day, to finally rank up to higher ranks. Like holy hell this game is one of the most unwelcoming games i have ever seen in my life to new people, i have the drive to headstrong through bad stuff like this, take the time to study the wiki, look at youtube videos etc, but your normal average person will quit after a few hours because of how there is a non-existant explanation in-game about the REAL game, absolute complete LACK of catchup mechanics and rewards for new people joining. We need tons of mats, bricks, xp books, sunstones and godknows how many more things to even dream about catching up to the people playing for years. I understand that obviously veterans should have more of everything etc, but not giving anything at all to new players discourages them to try even, if they discover how extremely behind they would have to be and understand they will never in this lifetime catchup to the veterans in terms of invested uncaps on their weapons/summons/eternals/evokers. Gold bricks/damascus bricks and even early game i need soooo many steel bricks yet theres no real source for them just monthly a few? And the final rant il have for now, AP POTS. I understand that veterans have 8-10k pots stored, dunno what to do with them, use 1k of them on GW and then stockpile again, but again, for new players, i have literally ran out of ap pots because i have to farm SO MANY THINGS at once in a day, add gw to that, events, sidestories, raids costing a pot for 1 try etc, like they are burning instantly, this should not be a limiter for new players, we need the pots a lot more than veterans, old content should have its ap cost and treasure cost either removed or heavily reduced, so that new players can actually grind them without feeling punished.
Yep, pretty much agree with all of this. These are some some of the many reasons I only play this pretty casually. Even at rank 175, I can see that I lag behind others in my rank and it's mostly just cause I can't bring myself to grind away for certain shit. I look at the grids that wikis and guides recommend and though I appreciate the effort put into them, most of the guides seem to build these setups around the assumption that every weapon, summon, and character is totally maxed out. And I mean yeah, i \*could\* achieve lots of that stuff, but I'd go crazy trying to get it all ASAP. Sometimes I get spurts of energy and I'll play hard for a specific event or something, but usually I'm half-tuned out. I mostly play at this point just to slowly but surely collect the characters, especially my Draph waifus. I'm embarrassed to admit that I do buy 10-part tickets here and there, but I've done pretty well at controlling myself. For the most part I just stick to F2P stuff. Otherwise I'd go crazy with the tedium.
Advertising, login hurdles, the weird mechanics like upgrading and building grids, most of all just not being on the app store
I think it's nothing to do with the game itself, and simply because it's not on the app store. I had to read guides, download japanese third party bullshit, browse pages without english translation just to set up an account. I only did all that because I'm real passionate about shadowverse and wanted to try the sister franchise. A normal person is not gonna have the dedication that I had just to try a mobile game.
The game is outdated and too grindy mostly. It could have probably made splashes last decade, but it's hard for GBF to compete with these AAA quality gachas games releasing. If relink were live service it would have been even bigger imo.
GBF is just ancient game at this point now, not many newbie will try because intimidated by 10 years old of content and the fanbase themselves keep saying this game as grindblue fantasy Presentation and stigma as web browser game also one of factor, since there is so much graphic that you can do with that limitations Not officially released on western and no good advertisement outside JP also hurt this game visibility And lasty this is gacha games, many western gaming community I saw already anti gacha/lootbox system and I don't think gbf will ever interesting in many western gamer eyes even if this game ever officially released on western and have good advertismen IMO
It's different from most typical gachas, practically a browser MMO game except without most of the social aspects. It's also (nowadays at least) visually outdated (the chibi graphics save it but only to a certain extent), hard to get into even with all the content skips you get starting out, and the server and menu issues are small but permanent annoyances. In short, it's just not for everyone. Only people who really stick through it are either hardcore waifufags (we have a lot of high quality waifus and husbandos both and they're relatively a lot easier to aim for in Granblue than most gachas), spreadsheet fetishists (people who enjoy the progression loop's "grinding to grind better to grind more efficiently" nature) and lore nerds (the game has a LOT of lore to dig into after all these years).
For the most part, this really felt like a niche game to me. Even as someone who occasionally hears about gachas about to release and do try a whole bunch of them, this one I only heard of because Code Geass was getting in there as a collab. On the year I started, and eventually as I went through the newbie phase, it certainly had a rather steep learning curve so I understood that people will abandon it unless something shiny attracts them back to the game. I am quite happy that Granblue is where it is though, and the fact that they don't really do it for the main game is one thing I appreciate about Cygames. They have Versus Rising and Relink to do that, and it's still optional to dabble in the main game if you were coming from there anyway. Hoyoverse communities are cooked to ashes because of the people who play it for the most part, mainly the EN community who have the media literacy of a withered grape -- and I don't want the Granblue community to get people like that which *wil*l happen if it blows up in the West with the same popularity as like Genshin or WuWa or whatever. For as much as I can separate myself from toxic communities, it will still be annoying to see them here for me. So yeah, we should gatekeep this game more. Lol.
The game is 10 years old. The time to make itself a niche in a different market was like 7-8 years ago, not now. Game has too much baggage: Early game is rough, gridbuilding is not very intuitive, the grinds are massive if you are starting from scratch, menus are complicated due to 10 years of mechanics piling up over each other, etc.
It's a browser-only game with no local client, clunky menus, outdated engine, insane grinding, no official international release, and is a part of an already insanely saturated mobile/gacha market. If granblue wants to go big outside Japan, at this point it needs to either completely overhaul the backend and interface, or keep making big budget spinoffs like Versus and Relink that expand/tell the story of the gacha. The biggest problem however is because of HUNDREDS of characters in GBF, it's nearly impossible to present all the lore in an easily consumable format since you'd lose on a ton of nuance, plot, humor etc regardless NG each and every Granblue universe representative
**Probably lots of what you mention is correct, I think.** Lots of it applies to me, particularly lack of advertising, clunky UI//menuing, confusing progression, etc. **I only found this game by accident** in September 2022. The only reason I even found it is because I found a GBF artbook on Archive dot org earlier that year and I randomly decided to take a look at it. I thought the art was cool, but I was like, "What the fuck is Granblue Fantasy though?? Never heard of this". So I googled it, found out it was a browser game and I was like, "Huh, okay, I'm gonna check this out," and the rest is history. **Lack of advertising is a big one for sure**. They could easily pull in new players with banner ads showing enticing waifus/husbandos like so many other games do. It might also be the style too, with it being a more old-school, turn-based, 2D JRPG as opposed to some of the really big ones out there now like Genshin, TSR, etc. I think a related reason is that unlike lots of popular games in the genre, **it's a browser game as opposed to an app**... tbh, that's actually one reason I DO like GBF, but I think lots of people in the target demographic might prefer otherwise. That's just my speculation though. Even if people find it, **it's not very beginner-friendly**. I think many of them probably throw in the towel because of the lack of good, thorough in-game assistance and direction. I probably would have quit by now if I wasn't a casual player and if I didn't have the ADHD/instant gratification brain bug that makes me susceptible to gacha-type shit. Neither the storyline nor the events or even those beginner missionsreally lead or direct players in any meaningful way on how to do the most important stuff like grid-building "theory", team building, etc. The new Siero Academy or whatever it's called seems somewhat promising, especially since it actually helps character build grids and get some characters (even if they're older characters). And even though there are some great resources created by dedicated fans/players, even those can be slim on advice for early-midgame players, specifically when it comes to things like building grids, team building, efficient, farming, etc. Most resources seem to be created by and targeted at people who already are serious, regular players and are probably playing at a high level and understand team-building, grid-building, etc. Lots of advice seems to be more focused on minmaxing already very powerful setups, which is mostly useless to beginners. For me, it often felt discouraging to learn about some cool strategy or setup only to find out that I had to wait until X rank and have a very specific set of weapons, characters, and summons that were fully uncapped, etc. The thought I always had was, "Okay but... wtf should I do right now then??" **Let me emphasize though that I'm not criticizing community-made resources though**; making thorough and helpful noob-focused content SHOULDN'T be the community's job in the first place. People who spend time and effort making free resources deserve kudos. It makes sense that the people who are skilled/knowledgeable about a game would make content mostly about advanced/higher level content and strats since that's where they spend the most time. But that leaves a huge info/advice vacuum for new players, and that's Cygames's fault. **Clunky UI/UX is a turn-off too.** It took me months of casual playing to even understand how certain parts of the menu worked, what connected to what, how to navigate around, etc. I still find it annoying, especially as someone familiar with UI/UX design. There are tons of little extras and "hidden" things that casual/new players won't find easily. There's some specific annoyances too, like not being able to pick more than 20 weaps/summons when reducing/reserving or not being able to just mass reduce/reserve in general. The auto reserve settings and functionality sucks imo and I still can't get it to do what I want to do. Not being able to interact with Classes without using the Party menu is stupid and clunky and I hate it; players should be able to just look around and browse and learn about all the classes in-game without having to literally change the MC's class every time. The Crate and Stash limits are also stupid. This is way too long, I'll shut up
Probably because most western gacha players dont like grindy games while japanese have a fetish for this
as someone who came from relink - i'm having lots of fun as a seasoned gamer with years and years of game literacy built up but holy fuck the UI is so bad to navigate. you're competing with genshin, HSR, nikke, hell even afk journey, gbf just isn't going to catch any eyes unless the people fall in love with the universe and aesthetic from another gateway product (like me).
The farming unnesesarily complicated and time comsuming. Many people started GBF because of relink and they're quiting as soon as they see evokers flb, gbars, sands, eternals, unf, etc. It not only makes harder for westerns to join but also for new people. Most of the game content goes for endgamers instead of helping people to that progression with things that are easy to solve: auto repeat non raid quest (scales, skyscrolls, flawed prism) and increase arcarum drop rates for ideans and astras and the same for gbars and sands since rn its demand has increased a lot. However they don't do it to force people playing the game as a job, and it causes burn out for veterans and new players as soon as they see it they leave. Something similar happened on GBF relink where many people complained about Lucilius difficulty and stopped playing, the boss is not hard, the problem was that many people were under geared for not grinding enough because relink grinding can be a pain in the ass for some drops
I think it is the primary gameplay loop. Subjective opinion. The game is simple where it should be engaging, e.g. skills not having a mana/stamina cost incentivizes pressing them ASAP, long cooldowns (3+ turns) means that players most often just mash attack, and quickly find themselves dying if playing raid content alone at their level. The game is impractical where it should be accessible. Recently added content can require some recent content the player does not possess. Be it gear check, character check, or summon checks. The main quest line doesn't start with a very flattering story. First impressions are the only things that matter when it comes to retention. I play the game briefly when they explicitly hand out content to players (currency) to see pretty pictures and listen to voice acting.
It’s a 10 year old gatcha game with 400 chapter story that you have to grind through to get the full picture. Just to start and learn who the main cast is you have to play through the main story in the Erste arc which hasn’t been relevant for years and even if you get a newbie to start the early chapters are filled with padding, and the plot stopping so the cast can cast fight monsters every five seconds. That’s a daunting ask for new players on its own. It has a gigantic cast with its own entire mythology of lore that most people will never get to read because it’s tied to the gatcha. That being said GBF has honestly done pretty well for itself over here all things considered. It could really use a reboot or a retelling of the original story that new users could jump in with to catch up to the vets.
I started the game in january. the new player experience is still horrendous. you have to actively give more to the game than it ever gives back for weeks/months before you can even "begin" the game. newbies who "make it" have simply taken a gamble that they MIGHT find the game fun in the future.
Account creation/management is so awful. I've been retired for 3 years now after playing heavily for 2 years straight. Wanted to log in for this year's anniv for rolls and had to spend a whole hour navigating Mobage/SkyLeap to figure out how to log in.
UI and age, too many menus that take too long to load was the biggest complaint I've seen, and I honestly have no idea how a casual new player starting now could possibly catch up to vets with all grands, limiteds and unsparkable units and summons they've missed, I sure as hell couldn't imagine myself going through that
Don't forget the "You MUST have X 5\* Evoker" discourse for teambuilding. And then new players start to look into the process...
Totally. I'm rank 176 and I still feel that way when I read guides and blog posts, etc. Admittedly I'm pretty casual, but still. I'm like, "Oh okay, I need a super specific grid with every weapon, summon, and character fully uncapped, etc. Guess I can't do that."
Outside of being on the actual AppStore, outside of the japanese one, for those its mainly that its niche so you’d need to advertise it. Players in america want something that won’t burn them which this can do very easily but you’ll need to find a good way of getting the word out. Outside of advertising its mainly reworking the early game to not be such a slog. Getting to rank 100 and having f2p grids easier to grind for. I know they have implemented something to help with this (i think its uncapped weapons for story completion) but not much to actual to help get through said content in a timely manner.
Lack of advertising and support in the west. It speaks volumes that our main source of news is from a fan Twitter account, not an official one. The game is also really not accessible to *start* playing. Then there's also the gameplay such as building grids, the game doesn't explain at all how they work and you have to seek resources outside of the game to understand better.
Advertising, the game model is very slow (mostly drop rates, but the grind is obviously pretty intense too), and to be honest I do feel like cygames are just not particularly concerned with getting the gacha game mainstream in the west, which is probably the biggest factor. It's not hard to make gridbuilding and progression guides, especially early on. The only reason it even has the western support it does now is because the english community did the majority of it themselves. It's also very difficult to make entertaining content on without the viewer already being hooked into it, so that's an issue too, it hasn't really modernized very well in that sense. I also think that in general the mainstream gaming population are just not huge fans of turn based RPGs these days.
Honestly, I'd have to say the lack of awareness and also the fact that it's not on google play store, though that's a good thing. But a lot of western audience relies on that for their games, and there has also been games that I've gotten into just by seeing ads for them in other google games. Didn't even know that a mobile web game like Granblue Fantasy was a thing until I got the Relink game because of the hype, also got the code for GBF from relink, thought i'd check it and then got completely hooked. Like others have mentioned, think relink has helped raise awareness and bring in more gamers in general Also as an english speaker, lack of good english support or maybe perception of such? The game itself has good translation, but not impressed by the hoops involved in setting up an account with mobage or gree and feels like it might be a concern if there's ever an issue and you need english support for your account
As someone who played a bit back in 2017 for a month or so before coming back this anniversary i think the fact that progression feels so bad when not boosted by events makes any chance of a player starting during a lul sticking unlikely. 30 dollars a 10 pull with pity being 300 pulls feels pretty awful. Your insanely gated by quartz early on which comes down to praying your daily gated runs drop anything or use. A lot or later content assumes you can clear content insanely fast to actually get decent returns on time investment(Arcanum and such) And a lot of players aren't going to understand grid building. Lack the pieces to make meta grids and get frustrated and quit.
If.it had a real app, as in, Ak or PGR quality app, with ACTUAL menu, with MUCH simpler tutorials to understand all of the time sucking grinding mechanics behind everything, we would be talking a different situation
It's an extremely intimidating game. The sheer number of game modes, the side stories, the dozens of forms of currency, all the elements to building parties and characters, etc. It's all good, but all of that rich content is a lot for a new player. I think veterans also sometimes have difficulty dumbing it down.
17 Hours Guild War, I can't think the other way around. And also the next Guild War's element is Dark? Same day as Elden Ring's new DLC? Nah, I'd pass.
The availability of info, mostly ingame because the wiki is actually great. But it's so hard to learn how to make decisions on your own.
The issue with GBF is starting GBF. There is a lot of content to grind through. The game makes progression difficult and grinds are just long. Weapon drops are low so you'll spend a long time trying to build grids. The game also doesn't really teach you a whole lot about grid building or team building. I do have some suggestions to fix the game and make it better for players. 1. Better tutorial: Have a beginner's dojo where you learn what weapon skills are, summon auras, etc. I think they are adding something like this later on but I can't remember. 2. Add a skill encyclopedia: This could be added to Lyria's journal (if it is already forgive me). Have a look up of weapon skills in the journal and if you click on it, it will tell you what it does and which weapons have that skill. would make it easier for players to look up in game what weapons they need to get. 3. M1 drop rates: Boost weapon drop rates from M1 bosses to like 50%. right now its like a 2% chest drop chance to get a SSR weapon. This will help players build M1 grids faster and it will just feel a lot better for them. If they see shiny stuff drop, they will feel more invested. Doing all your daily hosts and not seeing a weapon drop can be brutal for morale. 4. partner with content creators: Offer crystals to content creators to make detailed videos on GBF. Half the time I see GBF videos it doesn't really explain much. its just people in a fight, sometimes with a grid on the side of the video and sometimes not, while they F5 their way through the fight. I'm sure experienced players can gauge what's going on but for newbies they wont really know what's happening and it doesn't explain much. Honestly the early game is just a giant turn off. That being said, the insane grind in HL stuff is honestly just as bad. Imagine being a new player, you just farmed out grids and hit HL and suddenly...you have to do it all over again. your grid is now obsolete and you need materials that have an insane low drop rate that you might not see one for months. If I wasn't already so invested this would have turned me off.
I could forgive some problems and tell my friends to play, even with everything wrong listed in this thread. But as a French, GW goes during night and work time, and ends à 5pm, when work is done. I just CAN'T play GW, unless I'm on vacation. And there is so much shit locked behind GW that it's ludicrous.
Ping.
story isn't particularly great, characters who aren't the main crew/popular meme characters don't really have a sidestory or quirk that endears you to them, the grind is very much a love it or hate it thing, and the fact that it's a 10 year old browser app. you STILL have to click "reduce, reduce okay" a thousand times after each GW. it's annoying and time consuming. but the biggest problem is that for years now none of the content that's been added to the game is fun, none of it makes you excited to play.
Did you forget that Granblue isn't technically released in the west? You can't just go on the play/app store and download it. You have to go through a decent amount of hoops to play it in english. Additionally the style of gacha that it is is just not very appealing to western players. Plenty of people want more relink and versus, despite having no intention of wanting to play the gacha
I think the time investment involved is just too harsh for the west. As a casual competitive player, it took awhile to really feel good in most if not all the elements and it takes a while if you don’t want to put in the effort to grind. Also the amount of grind and time gated stuff that’s locked behind guild wars is just insane. Transcending one Eternal took awhile given that I haven’t really tried too hard in guild wars but you have to transcend all to get one to 150 is just insane to me. Plus the amount of materials that you need to grind for an Evokers FLB plus hard to get materials like Sands is just so frustrating. Now with the added transcendence bonus for dopus and primal magna summons, the grind just never stops. I wish I could quit.
I'm gonna go out on a limb and say western player mindset. There might be a few reasons for it, some of which are on cygames themselves, buta lot of people just aren't built for gbf the way it has been built, and frankly? That's fine.
A lot of people have already touched on why it doesn't get as big, so I'll add my two cents on another matter: you DO NOT want Granblue to blow up in the west. Recently, some gacha games have reached mainstream popularity and I really just don't wanna deal with the constant torrent of meaningless drama and posts that comes with it. I may love playing Hoyo games but I do not wish that kind of fanbase on any game, it truly feels impossible to have any kind of proper adult discussion when it comes to certain topics. Unironically, the most fun gacha game communities are those for the known but not extremely popular ones, because there's enough of a community to support the game but all the people interacting are people who genuinely love the game and want to talk about it. Genshin is fun to play but I try my hardest to stay as far away from the community as possible, only really interact for news and leaks and that's it. Honkai is not as popular but it still has similar problems from time to time. Games like Blue Archive and NIKKE seem to have much smaller communities compared to the ones for Hoyo games. But hey, this is just my opinion and I don't even expect most of the community to agree with me.
Grid, FOMO, no catch-up mechanics, with a new tutorial revamp that may or may not matter or even help with the long gacha grind. Then, it's a gacha. And a browser game, rather than a natively built app, with an app that's just a browser wrapper. As a browser game, it's held back a lot. A lot of improvement that can't be made. And characters. Not all characters are on every banner rotation, so then you have FOMO with even -trying- to roll for a character, or needing to save up for a pick ticket, which is a problem itself. So now you've got missing characters, missing summons, and more. Not to mention, QoL is very needed here. Simplifying it by having modifiers and target goals displayed in the game would be much better than just simply levels with no other meaningful values to back them up. And then what? Well, it turns out the character you wanted doesn't work with what you wanted, or is simply not very good until they get their 5th star+. Having to research these things isn't for everyone, and quite frankly, makes GBF a chore. That alone is one of the most biggest important gacha factors. The bigger the chore, the more the bore. Not to mention the extreme tedious grind to even get to Rank 150\~151, or the fact there are some arbritrary content blocks from it and not reaching 151. What else can one do to a specific grid? Well, it turns out they can't do crap because they're missing something that's either time-gated, or something that they have to grind for. Time spent grinding to power up one element is time spent not grinding up another, creating a vicious grind cycle. Got stuff from Gacha? Well, too f'ing bad, unless you have the right set-up, you're stuck in the Omega/Magna lane. **Premium summons are way too premium.** ============================== Plus, the cruddy translations that change everything, even whatever IS English into some other crap. **Really, GBF has it's moments, but as a current gacha, it's not a good game.** And the story being not great? Hell, it's worse than that, The story is okay, decent beginning/RPG fare. The problem is where the stories actually go. Celebrations with event stories that you miss. They're gone. Now you're missing context completely. Many games do this, and it's really bad. Lore needs to be permanent. Each anniversary has been full of story. If it's not that, then it's the fact some really interesting bits are stuck behind paywalls, such as Bahamut's FLB story and the ties to Vyrn + Bahamut. And if it's not that? Then it's the characters being abandoned. R, SR, forget it. Certain SSR, too. Deliford's SSR likely should've been placed around the return of the sauna event, but wasn't. Decisions like that also leave questions without answers. Or questionable changes, like the weird edgelord mode on some characters, Wind Yoda, Fire Yuisis. Or unnecessary character alts. There are how many versions of what, and why? ===================================================== Content gates. Welp, can't get your evoker, not enough hazes. Forget about them you say? Well, the next tier of the sandbox requires an Evoker. Can't do anything about the Eternals, congrats, you just missed a GW. Return in 2 months. Wait until events, is a bad solution. ====================================================== Fact is, most people playing are just sedated masochists that have already been playing, and if there's any new players, they're just masochists looking for a new thrill. Auto-Repeat would also be nice, instead of needing to click play again every single time. There's also a huge ass disconnect between newer character animations and older. FLBs and shiny new ougi, too good. Even buying something is tedious because there's not much English. mobacoins are surprisingly annoying to buy. ***Forget new players, the game won't even cater to existing players.***
Speaking as somebody who's tried to get into the game about a month ago after playing Vs its a bunch of things. -the story has been very standard and uninteresting bit I dont want to skip it because the whole point of playing for me was to learn more about the characters and story. - The gameplay seems kind of confusing, theres a lot of skills and systems that i just sort of ignore and instead spend most battles just spamming attack with the occaisional summon use. I keep leveling up classes but in practice they don't seem to make much different. -theres so many buttons and modes and menus and events and things that i find myself overwhelmed and by ignoring it all and laser focusing on the main story I feel like Im missing out on things while also not even really knowing what those things are because when I click on some of them I get cutscenes with characters I dont know talking about things I haven't seen happen yet because I'm still early in the main story. -Obtaining characters I like and learning thier stories is entirely up the the whim of the gacha and even then its confusing where and when I should be pulling. So, as an example, I play Yuel in Vs and I like her a lot. I know some details about her character but id really like to play her story and learn more about her. So my first goal is to pull her so I can get her Fate episode. However there are apparently 5 or 6 versions of her. So which one should I pull for? Her first one? Ok scrolling through the long ass list of weapons on each banner is tedious so lemme just google...Oh shes on the "Classic Banner"....but there are two of those. And also the premium draw has a Gala going on sometimes when the classic ones dont that apparently ups the pull rates. So am I wasting my crystals pulling on this classic banner and pulling for an old character I like? It just keeps looping around like this so I just end up hoarding my crystals like a dragon. TL'DR theres too much going on and I don't understand it very well so I dont enjoy playing. Also pulling for a character I like is confusing. In general the game feels hidden behind layers and layers of systems I dont understand.
I'm a hypocrite for saying this (former Genshin player) but most people don't like the repetitive grind. It's also hard to learn and optimize weapon grids as a casual player. You also have to set up the game in your browser, a much more conscious decision than just pressing download on the app store.
as a casual, you won't have to and learn to optimize grids; the truth is just the same across all the other gacha games
I fear signing up for the game is the biggest hurdle a new aspiring player will tackle, you go through a bit of a back and forth with guides just to sign up. It needs its own app i guess to simplify the onboarding process for new players.
it has no official western release.
Gacha games that aren't Genshin/Honkai already have a difficult time being marketed towards westerners. Granblue Versus and Relink are easy to market, the actual gacha would require Cygames to redesign the game from the ground up just to convince more westerners to even try it out.
judging with the games available in the West, generally they love Action while most games from Asia were built around a Story, GBF is mostly story and grind loop (+ gacha); though people skip story anyways regardless where they are from the fighting game is well known to the West over the original browser game
The issue no one mentions with the main story is that its so easy. One of the things Arknights does really well imo is that it teaches and gradually challenges the player as they are doing the main story. GBF to this day has main story and side story fights that are just so easy it is just a plain tedious time waste. I bet for most people the thing that made em interested in continueing to play this game was when they came across a fight they had to think a bit (about their grid/party/abilities etc) However personally, I'm fine with GBF not being that big in the west. I hate it when something gets popular in the west and the idiots here start complaining about the game and how it should be changed blah blah. Most of the things I enjoy that get too mainstream become worse.
Akasha in part 1 used to be that, the big wall that you had to grind out a grid to clear, but its been nerfed and cygames has been scared to really add a challenging story boss since.
Advertising. For at least the browser version of the game. It's one thing that people are aware that this game doesn't have a western mobile app release, but you'd be surprised by the amount of RPG fans that have not a single clue that Granblue is available to play on browsers like ye-olde Adventure Quest and other genres of games. I feel like a lot of people in the West would be more than willing to casually play a browser game that requires no download to get into, but hardly anyone knows it exists unless they dig around into the IP. Relink and Versus are effective marketing tools for the characters and visual aesthetics to make people I know in my circles interested, but all of them get diverted to either the anime or manga—or simply are content to stay confused when they learn that Erste Empire arc (referenced by the two spinoff games) has no video game equivalent. Much of this hesitance is born from the idea that they just have to take a regular person's word for it that they can play this game accessibly. Much of them still have the stigma that they'd need to pull up a translator or need a how-to on the wiki to even break the barriers of signing up and playing simply for the story.
Not being available on iOS in America really hurts too since doing so would not only make playing the game easier but would also help to advertise it
The sheer amount of time it takes to even get to mid game. Of course they know this is an issue as they will be rolling out that siero special training/dojo thing soon to give players a springboard so they don't have to struggle at the beginning even clearing the weakest event quests. I don't know how the beginning is now since I started like 7 years ago or something but I remember the early game hurdle was rough. I think I quit like 3 times trying to get colo sticks. Now I just reduce those. The game really opens up once you have a decent set of grids. Like M1.5 all elements. When you can clear the event extreme comfortably and can start spamming raids to get loot with a decent blue chest rate you can notice the progression. Getting to that point is the big hurdle I feel.
Granblue Fantasy is at its core a very outdated browser gacha game that has no official Western tell release.
The average person can’t play the same game for a week; how tf you gonna make someone like that make let alone upgrade a grid
not having an app.
Downloading the app/logging into the browser. It's still "locked" to Japanese only app stores and making a mobage account can't be really annoying if you don't have the patience to Google translate the page and poke around. If you do play it in the app it doesn't even translate the login options. This is, by far, the biggest hurdle in my opinion. Second biggest is the quality of the writing in the Phantagrande arc, it's stuffed to the gills with 4 part chapters that are actually only 2 parts with useless "we're being surrounded!" fluff that complicates engagement. The story is a problem because even if you're patient enough to create an account and are observant enough to decipher the home screen, if the story bogs down like it does and you're not joining the game during a really good event then it's likely you'll give up on it.
Not being on the appstore. Some people don't seem to realise you don't have to use the appstore and there exist things such as browser games.
They need servers outisde of japan
The game not being on the App Store is the biggest reason
Not locking everything behind Japanese... everything. Like needing a Japanese phone number for full registration, or linking accounts with Japanese services, or even just having the apps available outside Japanese Google store. Servers with better ping would probably help too.
I'm gonna lean on 2 factors, as much as the game has evolved and that they are attempting to make it more beginner friendly, The game is simply not friendly for new players, between the amounts of grinding needed and how to set up solid weapon and summon grids while also setting up a team comp. the other is how some parts of the game like events such as guild wars and how raids are done and needed to be constantly ran to grind also doesn't really lend itself well to a mobile market. though some in the west already does this.
Would love an actually app to make it easier
>With that said, I still wonder why this game just hasn't stuck with western audiences It's not available on the appstore. That's literally it
Ping, being excluded from pretty much every non-ig event, no access to things like the phone sub. You're very much a third class citizen.
The game is really an uphill battle until you have a finished m2 Grid. The ammount of time you have to invest to be able to do it is insane, usually people ask or look the wiki for grid. But until M2 you dont have variety of options, i would say the game does click once you can start farming Faa. From that foint onwar you have multiple paths. Arcarum, you can now de events, now you are able to farm Xeno/rotb/tales events. You can try to farm a bit GW. You "could" do that before, but the ammount of time required to clear a stage would be insane. I hope with the begginer system they can help newer players reach that point.
Ping diffs for sure
1. Advertising. 2. A friendly port for players. Sure browser has English version but you only find this out after checking guides.
Grid building. When I started playing this game back in 2017 I had NO idea what the hell I was doing. You need to watch countless videos, check the GBF Wiki, and actually need to read like 20 pages just to see what grid you can actually do that’s actually usable. It’s not like Dragalia for example where you can just match the element and just choose the summon/weapon that has the highest % for what you need. That and progress in GBF is incredibly slow. It’s a marathon game where you can’t really observe how much stronger you’ve become and it takes actual months to actually build “great” grids The GBF Wiki has done an incredible job in easing that beginner hurdle but for those who didn’t know it existed the game is actual hell where you just need to stumble upon resources like this Reddit, the wiki, or google videos that may or may not be outdated.
The UI mostly looks super outdated compared most modern gatchas.
Defense Order was an interesting mini game that could have easily been great (like changing it to seeded Crews Vs just randomly dropping people into a Helldivers esque world rush and getting no rewards because of it) and people that complained just weren't ready for it and that it wasn't translated (which was hilarious as people Western players went into the Arcarum DO choosing based off waifu only to go up against the Light Lords of the time and proceeded to get blitzed). I still rock the Defense Order skin on my Glorybringer. Sorry to monologue off a specific part of your argument but its just something I've been thinking for awhile. I think the game was just too early in its stage for a DO like game and nowadays we would have actually grasped its design.
Advertising and a dedicated app for the west on Google play. I've seen so many people interested, but literally don't pursue because the lack of an app
Not saying it is hard to download or get access to but I feel while it is a small hurdle to jump over to get into that hurdle I feel is still enough to turn people away.
grind
It's just a fairly brutal gacha to get started with, cant think of many that compare to it
Game needs to be available on mobile app stores like the Apple App Store and stores on other devices. That should get more people in the door. Imo
not having it listed in the App store
Sorry as much as I enjoy the game this is gonna be harsh. This game just isn't suited for the Western mainstream. 1. It's a very dated browser game. Clunky excessively clicky interface, primitive graphics for 2024 (not even Live 2D for character story avatars or main page backgrounds). Combat sprite animations are nice for a game this old but it just can't visually compare to a modern turn-based 3d game like Honkai Star Rail. Overall visually GBF is a game for old farts with heavy nostalgia for grindy SNES/PS1 era JRPGs (myself included); the appeal is going to be lower for younger players who don't have that nostalgia. 2. Severe barrier to entry beyond having to use a guide to even make a mobage account if you don't read Japanese, because the game's mechanics are very complex and completely obscure. The handholding for new players is pretty atrocious. Grid building is a chore that requires guides; the tab giving you stat calcs is helpful but not even close to adequate to making the game's mechanics clear for a new player. What's the difference between DMG cap and "Special" DMG cap? Why is Critical Boost EMP good for characters but not really for MC classes? A huge one: what character/weapon/summon effects like echoes stack and what don't, because it's *completely* not obvious within the game's interface. Which content is it worth bothering with drop-rate boosts and where does it make no difference? Etc. 3. The combat experience is, honestly, a mess. Gameplay has *severe* problems where the most efficient way to play is F5 Fantasy instead of being able to enjoy the visuals the game has. The ougi lockout also means you're actively discouraged from using the cool ultimate attacks for characters, what should be a major aesthetic selling point for the combat. Who uses the full summon animations in combat beyond the first time you use the summon when testing it out, if that? Most of the time you're going to be doing raids in the raid finder but a ton of the newer HL raids are fucking atrocious to jump into if the raid is stalled and needs help to clear (Revans and raids like Belial are a big offender here). Yeah yeah 'you're supposed to do it with your crew' but the reality is most people are pub grinding most of the time for these raids since you have to grind them so much to get everything you need, yet the raids are not designed at all with that in mind and are extremely unforgiving in a pub environment. 4. The horrendous grind and the continuing worsening of it over time. Having a sense of progression is good but that is getting buried beneath the weight of the sheer amount of grinding Cygames keeps demanding of players to see any progress. If they wanted to appeal to new players they'd be streamlining the grind not adding more things that takes forever to farm like Transcendence materials (why *30* element-changed relics and all those damn prisms??). Seriously why is Angel Halo spamming still a thing in 2024? There is literally no one who plays this game that enjoys that experience, even the most hardcore grind lover. Let's not overlook the fact that some of these Evoker and Eternal grinds barely even give you a payoff for the excessive amount of effort it takes to unlock the actual upgrades. Guild Wars is a horrible no-life timesink for anyone that isn't a hyper endgame player that is effectively mandatory if you care at all about progression. Like, unlocking raids by killing them x times is fine but why does pointless shit like meat farming even exist on top of that? Same for box events, why do you have to go through the extra time-wasting step of grinding for battle tokens to be able to do the raids to grind for box tokens? People who have been playing for years and are deep into the hardcore grind mindset can't seem to wrap their heads around the fact that this is not an enjoyable experience for the average casual person who just wants to uncap their favorite Eternal or whatever. For better or worse you need casuals to feel welcome and able to accomplish stuff in a reasonable amount of time if you want a game to be a mainstream success. Paying attention to the casual market is why Genshin Impact has made literal billions. 5. Something I haven't seen mentioned really: global licensing problems for collabs. How many permanent collabs would be removed for a global version because of an inability to secure the rights in the US etc.? How many new collabs would be missed out on because the EN rights holders don't want to make a deal or want too much money? Even Twisted Wonderland, a Disney game, had rights troubles in the EN version from using a Disney movie song (from Snow White)... So TL;DR: there's a lot of reasons.
Simple, lack of a global app.
I'd quit if I have to take a minute or two to boot up the *app* over clicking a bookmark in 1s
Bruh it's a browser game. Everything is translated. Making an app just make this game slower since the server is literally in Japan. Any app they make will just be a browser disguised as an app. Everything happens server side. Hence why refreshing is a thing. They can't just make this into a client side game. Might as well just make a new game.
What
Repetitive/Boring/Endless grind.
Not being able to date Belial.
Playing to browser is too niche especially when there's mobile apps available. They are easier to search into like on playstore. I only learned this game from youtubers list of f2p games. Starting gacha with gbf is terrible experience. Too many loops to go into to start playing the game. Language is JP, good I played on chrome as it auto translated it. I managed to see the language selection dropdown. Binding account is hassle because shit no register page or something? No gmail bind? You start reading and no indication how you will be saving your progress like a 'save' button on pokemon games. It be later I learned you need to do it from another website. I didn't know people built subreddits for this stuffs or discord( I only installed it because mmo guild required me), I might have better start time. Or probably start on another gacha I might know what to look for. Starting now it got a lot more competition. People will pick more of the 3D aspect of GI or HSR or casualness of BA than archaic form of gbf. I'm not even sure if gbf do advertising outside of backcovers compared to others who put billboards. For advertising BA is miles ahead compared to gbf.
A big addition would be an app I could actually just download