Granblue Fantasy: Relink - Endless Ragnarok review

Just as Granblue Fantasy Versus got an enhanced rerelease, so does Relink in the form of Endless Ragnarok. We reviewed the base game of Relink back when it launched in 2024 and had a fantastic time, so here we are again to tackle Ragnarok. Returning are Editors David Flynn and Anthony Shelton with newcomer Henry Viola to save the skies, one grind at a time. 

David Flynn

While I played the original version on PC, this time I opted for the new Switch 2 version. That means I had to speed my way through the main story and post-game to reach the Ragnarok content. (Which took about 3 days of almost constant play. Ow my hands.) This port has some pros and cons to it, with a key one that will probably determine what you choose to play the game on. In the pros column are the visuals, with a crisp resolution and cutscenes that I would swear are pre-rendered if they didn’t reflect my equipment and character outfit choices. The only blemish is some aliasing remaining, though in my experience that’s present no matter what version you play. Whether docked or in handheld, you’ll have your eyeballs blasted with gorgeous combat effects, colorful characters, and stunning environments. It honestly looks the same as PC on decently high settings, though the textures aren’t as crisp.

That visual splendor comes at a cost though, and the game is sadly locked to 30 frames per second on Switch 2. As someone going from PC to Switch 2, you can definitely feel the difference, at least at first. I did get used to it after a while, but I’d still prefer a performance mode that sacrifices a bit of visual fidelity for 60 or even 120 fps. If Ys X: Proud Nordics can hit 120 in handheld mode with a barely noticeable drop in visual quality, I feel like Relink could too. 

That said, the game is a perfect fit for portable play. It's structured a bit like Monster Hunter, with you, along with three NPCs or other players, embarking on quick quests to defeat bosses, take on waves of normal enemies, and more. It’s a ton of fun, and that’s not even going into the single player campaign with its various dungeons and other special battles. As much as I love Relink, I still do want to see a more traditional action RPG set in the Granblue universe, but I digress. 

Completing the story and its post-game is essentially the tutorial for the real gameplay loop, which is farming quests for materials and gear to upgrade your character so you can fight ever stronger foes so you can farm even better materials and gear. It’s an addicting loop that’s supported by some incredibly fun and fluid combat, with each character in the massive roster having completely different playstyles. I like to play as the Captain, for example, and their gimmick is called Arts Level. By performing combo finishers and certain other moves, they can level up their skills temporarily up to level 4, making them much stronger and more effective. Once you use a skill, however, your level is on a brief timer before it resets, so you have to fit as many skills as you can within the window to deal the most damage. This gives them very versatile build opportunities, able to be a damage dealing machine, heal and support the party, or even become a tank. Other characters are just as deep, so you can focus on one or spread the love and learn to play a few. 

Thankfully, Ragnarok makes playing multiple characters a lot easier, both by adding more playable characters and through the new Rifts. This is something of a rogue-lite mode where you proceed through various, randomized challenges and acquire specific buffs with each stage you complete. For example, I trended towards a shield build that would put shields on my characters for dealing damage or Linking, then apply a bunch of attack buffs while the shield was up. Rifts are fairly short, which makes them a great way to grind for specific materials as you get your choice of rewards upon completion. You could pick weapon upgrade materials, Sigils, and a whole host of convenient options. It’s a lot more interesting than farming the same fight over and over hoping you get a specific drop, especially since you have a little agency here. 

Ragnarok does more than just make the grind easier though; it essentially doubles the amount of content in the game. Getting to Ragnarok proper requires you to complete the post-game of the base game, which itself takes about 30 or 40 hours. It feels weird to get opening credits that far into a game, but it feels appropriate given how much work it takes to get there, and how much work it’ll take just to reach the new ending. By the time I hit the “Thank you for playing!” screen, my save file was sitting at 69 (nice) hours, having stuck only to the critical path and some grinding so we could get this out in a reasonable time frame. You’re really getting your money’s worth here for only $30, as that doesn’t even include side stuff and the post-game of the expansion itself.

Make no mistake, this expansion is for absolute sickos - in a good way. You can’t just waltz on through these new quests, casually equipping new sigils and weapons; you absolutely need to have a build in mind and min max it’s potential. This is encouraged by two things: the difficulty (some of these fights are ridiculously hard, and one I even had to use full auto on because I literally could not see attacks and react quickly enough) and the new Master Traits system. By the end of the base post-game, you’ll probably have maxed out your chosen character’s Masteries, along with their level. Master Traits are essentially three new skill trees for each character that focus them further in on a niche. For example, I ended up honing in on the Captain’s Essence: Combat Healer tree. Each tree has a certain amount of perks within, and applying enough perks of a single tree will grant a special bonus for that rank called Style Ranks. Combat Healer gives the Combat Healer buff every time the Captain uses a healing skill, which increases attack, damage cap, and decreases all skill cooldowns while active. You can get the first Style Rank in every tree, but will need to specialize for each successive rank. That doesn’t mean you still can’t diversify though, as you have just a few more points in each rank to cherry pick some bonuses from the other trees. In Style Rank 3 of the Insight: Artfully Adept tree, I picked a trait that allows every combo finisher to increase my Arts Level by two instead of just one, which made it way quicker to get the substantial bonus from constantly being at Arts Level 4, which made my healing more effective and come off of cooldown quicker, which made it easier to keep up the Combat Healer buff. It’s all about connecting the disparate parts of a character and discarding whatever’s left over, making you into a devastating, single-minded machine.

None of your Master Trait choices are set in stone, and you can swap them out at your leisure, making builds a lot more fluid here, though they still require a substantial amount of grinding to set up properly, particularly for Mastery Points to spend. I do wish there was a bit more leeway here, like being able to refund Mastery Points to try out another character. In all the time I spent with the game, I only got to build out the Captain and newcomer Fraux, as switching to anyone else would instantly require several hours of grinding to get their weapons, sigils, Mastery, and Mastery Traits up to snuff. By the time you start Ragnarok, you’d better be committed to your character or plan on swapping to one of the new additions, as they come with a bit of a headstart when unlocked through the story. 

You need all that power to even stand a chance in all of these fights, as I said before this is Relink’s hardest content by a wide, wide margin. This usually makes it a ton of fun, but can occasionally get too difficult for its own good, especially since, by the last few fights in the story, you can’t rely on AI party members at all because they won’t do enough damage to kill anything within the quest’s time limit. Unless you want to spend several dozen hours building up a full party of four, you’re basically required to play multiplayer (and then hoping your teammates are actually good at the game instead of getting carried through the expansion). I’ll admit, I was getting pretty frustrated at the sheer wall of difficulty right before the end, but then how cool the final boss was washed all that away. Even now, I’m still eager to jump back in and get to the Chaos++ difficulty and the Defy Infinity mode that just unlocked and further refine my builds. 

I will say though, I wasn’t exactly being pushed along by the story anymore. It gets deep into the weeds of Granblue’s mythology and terminology, forming sentences that are almost impenetrable to all but the most hardcore of fans. It’s somewhat fitting given the nature of this expansion, but I definitely prefer the character driven fare of the base game’s main storyline. Story is also pretty sparse here, letting you go very long periods of time without any cutscenes or dialogue whatsoever. It feels more like it exists to prop up the gameplay and give you an in-universe excuse to do all these new quests.

Really, Relink is just a ton of fun to play, and Endless Ragnarok gives you more of it. It’s more than just that surface level description, but when you get down to it that’s the core of my takeaway. This is going to stay installed on my Switch 2 for a long, long time.

Anthony Shelton

Cygames didn't give a whole lot of time between the time we received our codes and the embargo. Reviewers play a lot of games, so it's by Cygames' own delightful construction of this game that I spent time with Relink in its first year. So, I had a decent Zeta build going on PC before other games dragged me away from Zegegrande. I could have used the save file they gave me that would allow me to jump into the Endless Ragnarok content, which primarily starts with completing a trial, but it was with the default group of four. I didn't use them, and all my Zeta needed was her Terminus weapon, so I decided to stick with my builds. Endless Ragnarok's benefits were immediate.

Introducing The Conflux: a roguelike mode where you blast through enemies and receive rewards that are specific to different types of endgame farms. Need Sigil materials? There's a difficulty tier for that. Need Ascension or Terminus materials? There's a tier for that. Depending on the items you're looking for will determine the difficulty. Eliminating RNG in the right places when farming is becoming more common in loot-based games, and the Conflux helps with that. Terminus weapons are much easier to achieve, though they still require a grind, but are far less reliant on hoping Proto Bahamut drops one, let alone the one you're looking for. Simplifications like this will make getting into Endless Ragnarok much more inviting.

I want to be clear: Endless Ragnarok is ultimately much more endgame, and there's no way to bring characters up to a level or power cap that makes you fit for its new difficulties and rewards. If you didn't make an endgame build that could take on the likes of The Behemoth or Lucilius, you're going to have to build something that will—at the very least.

What I've found most impressive about Endless Ragnarok so far is how Cygames is breaking out weapon potential. By the end of Relink, the only viable weapons for the toughest content were Ascension and Terminus weapons, and even then, Terminus made Proud missions much more palatable. If you wanted to use a Stinger or Defender, you couldn't because it was ridiculously underpowered compared to the Terminus weapons. Ragnarok brings in Transcendence upgrades for non-Ascension and Terminus weapons, and now you can make them as powerful as Ascension and Terminus weapons, complete with two additional attributes. It's a welcome change. All Terminus weapons included Catastrophe, which forced everyone to use extremely limited builds because the upside was too great. Now, if you want to use a weapon that boosts your stun so you can focus your Sigils in different ways, you can do that without being locked into Catastrophe's catastrophic limitations.

More Sigils have been added that undermine Catastrophe's strength. There's one that buffs your Attack and Damage Cap when your health is above 50,000. That's a direct counter to Catastrophe, but other new Sigils such as Fatebreaker will certainly help diversify builds across the community.

So what do you do with all those Mastery Points that you can't use because you've upgraded all your characters and their weapons? Now there are Mastery Traits. I've only scratched the surface with these, but consider these Borderlands' Overpowered levels. You can use your Mastery Points to dump into distinct styles that further buff your character. As a Zeta main, I can choose a style that allows me to increase the window of time to perform loops and choose buffs that increase the strength of the loops. It seems like no matter the buffs you choose, it will increase your power, but the Style might matter more. But I haven't gotten far enough in this to see how the traits evolve.

If you're struggling to reach Endless Ragnarok content, you can call on the community for help. A new feature allows you to recruit a backup player for solo players. If I enlist my Zeta, you can add my Zeta to your party as a backup and bring her with you into your party. Players who enlist their characters can still use them and reap rewards when people use them. It's a very good way of allowing the community to sherpa other solo players without having to group up. You can only recruit one backup at a time, but outsized power levels will certainly help. So, you're free to recruit my Zeta. It's unclear if backups are platform specific, but if they are and you're playing on PC, I'm happy to serve.

The open beta didn't do Endless Ragnarok justice. There's a lot of meat on this bone and it's falling off.

Ultimately, the game repeats itself in the same way Relink's endgame does, but it also repeats endgame bosses; that feels like a team that ran out of ideas. One of the fights, an important one, just becomes the spammiest version of an already annoying fight—a constant damage check and waiting periods, while excluding more interesting mechanics in the first version. But another fight became one of my favorites in the game. It feels like a fight you'd see in an anime. It's a proper balance of damage checks, blocking and dodging, and survival.

Eventually, weapon transcendence ends the same way Relink's weapon power ends: Terminus will be the strongest weapon in the game. But the changes made to the base weapons still make those viable very deep into some of the toughest quests, just not so much at the toughest difficulty—Defy Infinity. I've come to terms that this is how Cygames designed the game, but it would be nice if there were more build varieties at the tip-top of the difficulty. But I can appreciate that Cygames just builds into the game the reality that all loot-based endgames deal with: only one or two builds will be viable.

Endless Ragnarok is a pleasant surprise. It's an almost perfect addition to what was already an engaging experience. Cygames did a tremendous job with this one.

Henry Viola

I’m the newcomer of the three, so I’m playing this game for the first time with a fresh lens and mindset. First off, I have to echo what David said about the technical performance on Switch 2. There’s no reason why this port doesn’t have a 60 fps performance option when plenty of other action heavy RPGs can achieve that on the same hardware. That being said, I did get used to the 30 fps lock and the game is actually quite smooth elsewise. I’ve run into no bugs or glitches aside from some minor frame stutters here and there. The game plays great on both handheld and docked.

Endless Ragnarok takes up 38.7 GB on the Switch 2, so make sure you have enough room! Load times are alright, taking 10ish seconds to load in from the main menu. A big kudos to Cygames for including an Assist Mode for both accessibility and AFK farming I guess. Sadly, it’s only available on Story or Action difficulty. There’s an assist mode and a full assist mode that does all the combat for you.

I’m not a fan of only being able to save manually in towns or at dedicated Hallowed Grounds, especially when it’s not necessarily clear when the game autosaves. It would have been a nice quality of life update to just allow you to save whenever you want to. There’s plenty of Hallowed Grounds scattered around though, especially before boss fights.

What is new in Endless Ragnarok is the introduction of cross-platform cooperative play, which is a huge win for the longevity of this game, but unfortunately the servers weren’t online during the review period to test this out. But this means players on PC, PlayStation, and Nintendo Switch 2 can all party up together! David on Switch 2 and Anthony on PC were able to team up together to tackle a couple of missions together seamlessly.

As of the embargo time, I was only on Chapter 7 of the base game’s campaign, so I have yet to reach the contents of the DLC, but the game is a blast to play thus far, albeit a bit intimidating with all of its systems. Enemies also feel quite spongy, even on the easiest difficulty. I’ll have to agree yet again with David’s comparison of this game to Monster Hunter, maybe even a little bit of Tales of Arise. I can only imagine how grindy the game will get, going on repeated quests to grind for the material you need to get end-game equipment. 

I’ve now since beaten the main campaign and moved onto Endless Ragnarok content, which took some time given I needed to go through several hoops (Proto Bahamut and Proud difficulty). This expansion is for those who loved and enjoyed the base game. If you found the vanilla experience to be boring or grindy, then this expansion probably won’t change that. For $29.99, I think there’s more than enough content for players!