HIGH Combat, quests and core gameplay.

LOW Enemy variety, difficulty, and lack of story co-op.

WTF Why can’t I play the campaign with my friends in a co-op focused game?

I’ve been anticipating Granblue Fantasy: Relink (Relink for short) since I first got my hands on it for a preview last year. It’s the new realtime Action RPG game by Cygames and it feels like a mix of Final Fantasy XIV and Monster Hunter — yet as much as I want it to, in its current state it doesn’t surpass either. The director, Tetsuya Fukuhara, has worked on several Platinum titles and has nailed the combat that makes each character a joy to play... The fast-paced, yet tactical action kept me engaged well into the endgame hours of questing with friends. However, while GBF:R was a ride I loved, it ultimately left me wanting more of what it could be.

The game’s (short) story picks up suddenly and places the player in the role of Gran or Djeeta as captain of the Grandcypher airship. As a successor to Granblue Fantasy, Relink expected me to be familiar with the cast and story of the original mobile title which has yet to be released outside of Asia. There is an anime – available on Cygames’s YouTube channel for free – for those who want to know the preceding story and characters, though. Having watched part of it myself, it did help somewhat, but isn’t necessary as one can understand the characters and their motivations relatively quickly thanks to Relink’s standard plot.

Frankly, there was barely a single breath of character development throughout the story, and nearly all character beats were relegated to text-based “Fate Episodes”, which I feel should have been seamlessly integrated into the plot. Not having actual conversations between characters during the story was disappointing. Some localization choices made in the style of a Saturday morning cartoon was odd, and didn’t help engage me either.

While Relink’s story never surprised or felt deep, it was charming enough and did entertain until the end of its 10-hour run. At that point, it turns to its real focus — questing. Questing and action setpieces are where Relink shines, and playing with friends felt like how the content was meant to be experienced. Once I realized what the actual goal was, I was more okay with the scant script. The misstep, though, is that the narrative is not co-op. This meant that I was forced to have my friends rush through their own story modes to join me in the ‘postgame’ of Relink, as most content unlocks upon completion.

Each character controls in a snappy and polished way, though I was disappointed that I couldn’t change or remap the controller, and it somehow only shows Xbox controls. This is a small gripe, though, as Relink’s character roster and gameplay gave me enough fast-paced action to last another ten or twenty hours after the credits rolled.

Quests function similarly to Monster Hunter in that they revolve around the player undertaking increasingly powerful foes and boss fights to gain XP and materials to upgrade characters. The game currently hosts 20 playable characters, and more are already planned. Thankfully, the developers skip out on gacha-like random draws to unlock more characters despite its gacha roots. After over 30 hours in, I was able to unlock almost all of them and could have earned the last one had I tried harder to obtain him in my endgame grind.

Speaking of endgame, the quests here are both the best and worst part of Relink. The best because they’re legitimately enjoyable, and fighting bosses with friends was something I wanted more of. The worst, because the enemy variety is severely limited. I only encountered one unique boss that wasn’t in the campaign, and many encounters felt like recycled palette swaps. This trend continued throughout the “difficulty” modes I unlocked in multiplayer, though they never felt like they got harder.

Technically, Relink ran well for me on PC. Outside of crashes while loading endgame quests, I never had any issues, and with some tweaks it ran great, even on my Steamdeck. 

The player base seems to be growing quickly on Steam, but for it to succeed in the long term, I believe it needs to focus on expanding the endgame considerably, with harder difficulty settings and a wider variety of monsters and bosses. I can see some potential as a long term co-op multiplayer experience with raid groups and serious challenges, but whether it will receive that content remains to be seen.

As a nine-year-long passion project of its developers, Granblue Fantasy: Relink oozes promise and style boosted by addictive action gameplay, a large cast and engaging mechanics. However, without more to offer endgame players and perhaps a bit of buffing in the narrative side, it’s likely to fizzle out and be eclipsed by larger titles. I can only hope the developer shows the same labor of love in supporting it, as they have in crafting it.

Addendum: After the original text of this review was written but before it was published, many people — myself included — have found that Granblue Fantasy: Relink has been corrupting, overwriting or otherwise deleting save files. This happened to me after almost 40 hours — suddenly all my saves were simply gone. I contacted support and also attempted to restore the files, but it wasn’t possible from my end. The devs said that they would have no information to share with me, and that they would not make any efforts to restore saves. Losing so much time invested without recourse or support from the dev side just isn’t acceptable.

Until the issue is solved I absolutely can’t recommend this game.

Rating (prior to losing my data) : 7.5 out of 10

Disclosures: This game is developed by Cygames, Platinum Games Inc. and published by Cygames, XSEED Games, and Plaion. It is currently available on PS4/5 and PC. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on the PC. Approximately 37 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was completed. 26 hours of play were spent in multiplayer modes.

Parents: According to the ESRB, this game is rated T and contains Language, Mild Suggestive Themes, and Violence. The official description reads: This is an action role-playing game in which players assume the role of an airship captain battling monsters across a fantasy realm. From a third-person perspective, players control their character and other party members through melee-style fights against various enemies (e.g., wolves, goblins, robots, boss characters). Characters use swords, magic, and guns to kill enemies in fast-paced combat; fighting is highlighted by light and slow-motion effects. Some sequences allow players to control mechanized armor suits in battle; these scenes depict frequent gunfire and explosions. Some female characters are designed with revealing outfits (e.g., deep cleavage); camera angles can focus on characters’ revealing outfits and/or anatomy (i.e., upskirt detailing). The words “sh*t” and “a*shole” appear in the game.           

Colorblind Modes: Colorblind modes are present.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: This game offers subtitles. The subtitles cannot be altered and/or resized. The game can be played entirely without sound, and everything relevant is conveyed through visual cues. This game is fully accessible.

Remappable Controls: Mouse and keyboard are remappable, the controller layout is not.

HIGH Petting the dog! Players must pet the dog.

LOW Spending too much time getting Chaz to the sax in “Crouching Bassline, Hidden Saxophone”.

WTF Why do these people take their instruments everywhere?

Music, like games, is an individual taste. Some people love metal, some love jazz. Backbeat,
a game about a woman who finds her muse in funk, comes with its own unique gameplay
concept. I wanted to join in on the jam, but for me this mashup of puzzler and stealth-strategy
struck a discordant note.

Having lived through the mid-’90s and experienced the mainstream ascendance of R&B and
rap during that time myself, I was somewhat nonplussed by the focus on funk, and even
moreso in the context here. Funk music is intricate, but it’s not a natural stylistic fit for a
cerebral puzzle (better suited to baroque, perhaps) and its in-your-face attitude seems poorly
suited to a stealth title.

The story of Backbeat – a “Battle of the Bands” tale that wouldn’t be out of place in a late-
century teen comedy – doesn’t seem to connect to anything it asks the player to do, either.
And, with few exceptions, the “stealth” requirements of the levels don’t even make sense in
the context of the immediate plot.

That’s typical story/game conflict, though, and easily forgiven if the gameplay offers
something compelling. Backbeat’s levels ask the player to route different characters (who
mostly have different stride lengths and special abilities) around ‘alert’ zones within a certain
number of moves. The characters travel different numbers of tiles per move and use up
different amounts of a timeline in doing so, producing a puzzle of geometry and time.

The player also has to manage resources, most of which go up or down based on when the
characters mark the timeline by changing directions or taking actions. There’s “stagger”,
which depletes when multiple characters mark the timeline simultaneously, and “align”, which
requires the characters to mark the timeline at certain points. Obviously these are in tension.
This is even more so with “solo”, which requires that only one character at a time use an interaction point in the level, and “assist”, which needs certain pairs of characters to use interaction points simultaneously.

Managing these meters along with the awkward movement of the characters and the alert
zones and the finite timeline provides Backbeat‘s challenge, which ramps up very fast and
stays high until to the end. The difficulty is amplified by the almost pathological resistance to
providing the explicit numbers behind what it’s asking the player to manage. Everything is
displayed as bars and radar graphs, leading to a lot of trial and error due to the lack of clarity.
It also seems like (though because of the above, I can’t be sure) the various resources max
out, so for example, one can’t stock up stagger at the start of the level to balance out
simultaneous marks at the end.

Unfortunately, the result is that each level is a grind. The player has to figure the routes right,
then adjust the timing so the resources don’t get depleted, then readjust the routes for the
timing of other characters. The reward is that one can then, finally exhausted, look at a
disappointing level score before entering an overlong dialogue scene. There’s no moment of
delight to reward a good solve, and almost never any moment of excitement in the course of
it.

What I want out of a puzzler is the moment of revelation when a solution becomes clear. What
the characters are getting out of their adventure here is the joy of playing music together, but
the sloggy grind of actually playing Backbeat doesn’t provide the first and can’t mirror the
second. Although the game makes a respectable effort to connect the resources it’s asking
the player to manage to the mechanics of a successful funk session, it never finds the joy
inherent to the music. This is the right game for someone, surely, but not for me.

Rating: 4 out of 10

Disclosures: This game is developed and published by Ichigoichie.It is currently available on Linux, Mac, PC, PS4/5, Switch and XBO/X/S. This copy of the game was obtained via publisher and reviewed on a home-built Windows X PC equipped with a AMD Ryzen 2700X processor, an ASRock X470 motherboard, 32 GB RAM , and a single GeForce RTX 3080 graphics card using driver 531.68. Approximately 12 hours of play were devoted to the single-player mode, and the game was not completed. There are no multiplayer modes.

Parents: According to the ESRB, this game is rated E. No content warnings are noted. There are references to violence and alcohol but otherwise I noticed nothing objectionable.

Colorblind Modes: There are no colorblind modes available. Interaction points are linked to their outputs by colored symbols (unfortunately, often green, red, and yellow) and some required interaction points are designated solely by colored symbols and outlines (and not mentioned in the level’s starting information). The timelines are color-coded as well.

Deaf & Hard of Hearing Gamers: All dialogue in the game is in the form of text, although the text cannot be resized. The background of the text can be altered but examples are not shown while choosing. Despite its theme, the game has no essential sound cues, although the level-ending musical overview cannot be skipped.

Remappable Controls: No, this game’s controls are not remappable. On PC, movement and interaction in Backbeat are primarily controlled with the mouse, although sometimes the shift key must be pressed at the same time as a mouse click, and certain hotkeys (space, q, e, c) control actions in the levels. Sometimes button presses are mandatory in the menus as well.

Everyone’s got a game that they’ve played for a long time. Maybe forever.

StarCraft II is one of mine. I play other things too, but recently I’ve found myself spending a lot of time in this familiar place.

Each time I fire it up, I ask myself the same question: “Why this game? What keeps me coming back?”

It’s not just me. I’ve watched more and more of my friends settle into their own ‘forever’ games. One plays Final Fantasy XIV almost exclusively, and most nights you’ll find him sitting in queue for a raid.

Another slid into the comforting groove of World of Warcraft. He has more than a dozen characters at max level.

One joined a clan that plays War Thunder. I almost never see him anymore.

The more I looked around me, the more I saw a pattern — unless there was a special event or they were taking a break to play a single-player title, my friends had their game and played it to the exclusion of everything else. Getting them to try something new was almost impossible. The answer was always “not right now.” Eventually, I learned “not right now” meant “never.”  That was when I realized the industry had a problem.

We have two types of ‘big’ games these days. The first is the big budget single-player title. These are immaculately produced, they push the graphical envelope, they’re well-written and acted and have engaging gameplay that often includes RPG elements like loot, leveling up, and skill trees. They can be shooters, action games, open-world titles, or traditional RPGs, but they all have one thing in common — they end. They may have a ton of content, but eventually credits roll.

The second is the ‘forever’ game. In industry-speak, we call these titles “Games as a Service.” These games don’t end. They are constantly being updated with new content, cosmetics, loot, story elements, and ways to play. And everywhere you look, it feels like the forever game is taking over.

When I tried to gauge player reaction to the ascendence of the forever game, responses were mixed.

One user I polled on Twitter described a recurring cycle where he’d spend weeks blowing through content in Warframe so he could catch up to his friends, only to burn out and stop playing. Eventually, the pressure of being behind kept him away entirely.

Another loved the grind until life wouldn’t let him play enough to keep up, and such a barrier is a problem in a multiplayer game where you rely on your teammates. “I don’t like being the slow one on the team,” he said. “I want to pull my weight, and on the same tip, I hate being pulled through content I wouldn’t otherwise be levelled for.” Combine that with season passes and other content he needed to purchase to stay current, and the math didn’t work out for him anymore. A single-player game he could work through at his own pace made a lot more sense.

Several others cited their desire to move between games without penalty or wanting to simply clear out their backlogs, which seemed impossible while keeping up with a forever game.

I understand both positions, particularly the latter. When a friend asked why I stopped playing World of WarCraft several years ago, my answer was simple — “I could play WoW,” I said, “or I could play everything else.”

Another user summed it up well: “If I’m not there from the start I’m unlikely to ever play. All the years of WoW I’ve missed is the reason I’ll never return to WoW.”

That logic kept me away for a long time, too. When I finally broke down and did go back to World of WarCraft, I found a game with more content than ever and fewer games competing against it.

The MMO genre used to have dozens of high-profile releases. Now your options are WoW, Final Fantasy XIV, or niche games like Eve Online or The Old Republic. The same is true for looter-shooters — it’s either Destiny or The Division. League of Legends and DOTA 2 own the MOBA space. And while there are plenty of battle royale games out there, none really compete with Fortnite.

The rise of the forever game (and the rising cost of AAA development) also means fewer games regardless of genre, as developers adopt more game-as-service tactics.

Rather than getting a series of new Halo games, we’ll likely get Halo Infinite and multiple add-ons. Street Fighter is now a once-a-generation series supported by tons of post-release content. Before, it was logical to skip a game if you disliked it and simply wait for the next one in the series. These days? Not so much. Regardless of the title, you’ll probably be waiting a while for the next one.

Having fewer games encourages people to stick with one, and almost everyone I talked to told me that they were happy to have a world they could return to and make progress in. It’s nice to have a world that’s always there for you. After a bad day, you can just log into your favorite forever place and play with your friends. There’s value in that.

One person I spoke to even said that Destiny 2’s mix of new content in a familiar setting helped pull them through COVID lockdown. Millions took refuge in Animal Crossing. People aren’t wrong to want worlds that will always be there to welcome them home.

But that value comes at a cost.

While almost everyone I talked to about forever games told me that they were happy to have a world they could return to and progress in, these games also often felt like chores — keeping up with the Joneses meant playing their chosen game a lot, and often when they didn’t even want to.

Another side effect of the forever game is that we’re already starting to see genres stagnate as publishers pick a lane and stick with it. Ubisoft releases The Ubisoft Game across multiple genres. EA has doubled-down on sports. Activision seems fine releasing little more than the yearly Call of Duty, the odd remaster, and whatever Blizzard is working on. Sony almost exclusively publishes big-budget single-player games.

Even community content has begun to dwindle. Things like custom games and modes are afterthoughts in most modern multiplayer titles. After all, why support something you can’t monetize?

As time goes on, I imagine big releases that everyone plays will become increasingly rare. Communities will get smaller as everyone picks their forever game and sticks with it. The cost of staying in those communities will increase and the expectation to stay current will be more common. We’ll play games longer and we’ll play fewer of them. The forever game is the future.

Or is it?

In many ways, such a road isn’t sustainable and this model just isn’t possible for every developer.

The cost to make a forever game that can compete with established IPs is enormous, which is to say nothing of the time investment required to launch the game and maintain it — even the biggest, most successful forever games deal with content droughts.

And even if you manage to get a game out the door, people only have so much time and money to spend, and they’re more likely to stick with a game they’re already invested in rather than risk falling behind their friends if they try something new.

When I brought this up these observations to my gaming group, one friend said that what I was saying was the point.

“I think people like feeling more powerful than people who haven’t been playing as long. They like getting rewarded for putting in the time. Because if you’re not, why are you playing?”

He’s probably right. Destiny players spend hours getting farming guns with the right stats and perks. The point of raiding in most MMOs is to get the game’s best gear, to complete the hardest challenges, or to try to be in an elite group that can play at the highest level.

The reality is that most people have a game that they could play forever if given the opportunity. In fact, it’s what they want. They like to feel rewarded, and to progress. They like to have the best stuff, to complete all the content, and to know all the tricks.

More importantly, people want to feel comfortable when they play games. Players like knowing what to expect and that their time is well-spent, and in a medium where the average person is not an enthusiast who plays a ton of games each year and probably hates losing, forever games are safe and comfortable while providing enough new content to keep players engaged. The increasing success of the “Games as a Service” model proves this.

The other night, my friends and I got together to play Fall Guys. Our resident FFXIV player declined to join us, and booted his favorite MMO instead. After a while, we asked him what he was doing.

“Nothing,” he said. “I opened the game, and then I realized I didn’t actually want to play it.” We asked him if he wanted to play Fall Guys. “No,” he said. “Not right now.”

After we finished, I went to get a drink. When I returned, he was back on Final Fantasy XIV and everyone on my friends list was back playing their regular forever game.

We used to play together, but now we mostly sit in a chat room while everyone is separated into their own world of choice with little crossover.

I’m never going to play Final Fantasy XIV because I’m too far behind to ever catch up. My friend will never fire up StarCraft because he hates losing and doesn’t want to learn.

We managed to all play Gears 5 for about a day before people starting quitting because the learning curve was too high and they were tired of getting killed.

The places my group can call common are becoming increasingly rare, and maybe that’s that future? All of us together in one way, while enjoying our favorite things alone. Sharing a common hobby, but not enjoying the same parts of it.

It’s a depressing idea. But maybe it shouldn’t be.

Perhaps we should simply be happy that we can spend more time in the worlds we love with the people we care about. As any medium grows, it will inevitably become more fragmented as people migrate to their niche. Even if we’re not enjoying the same games, we’re still occupying the same spaces, talking about the same things.

The forever game seems to be what we want, despite all of the baggage that comes with it.

Let’s hope we’re making the right choice.