Granblue Beta Random Thoughts

The beta for Granblue Fantasy Versus finished up this past weekend. It took me a little while to warm up to it, but after it shut down, I was (surprised) to find myself thinking, “That was a lot of fun!” I've been thinking a lot about the game and thought it'd be a fun exercise to try and articulate why.

The Bad

I only have a few complaints, so let’s get those out of the way first. In addition to traditional special move inputs and holding back to block, Arc System Works added the ability to do these with dedicated skill and guard buttons.

I’ve always been interested in the attempts at simplified control schemes and other design elements aimed at making fighting games more approachable. I love traditional fighting games, but I’m glad experiments like Divekick and Fantasy Strike exist. I don’t think either of those games is perfect or can quite scratch the same itch as traditional fighters, but they absolutely accomplish their goal of allowing just about anybody to have a taste of what the genre is really about.

In Granblue, my issue with the skill and guard buttons is that they actually complicate things rather than simplify them, turning a four button game into a six button game. Doing traditional inputs for specials lowers their cooldown, so sometimes you should do them that way. On the other hand, using the skill button is faster to input, so in a reaction situation, it could be better to go that route. Blocking is the same: whether the traditional input or the dedicated button is better depends on the situation. Players using only the simplified method or only the traditional method don’t have access to the real game. Playing properly will mean Frankensteining together the two.

The Good

Plenty of fighting game developers exist, and it’s always baffled me how everybody just kind of lets Capcom corner the market on the 2D slower paced ground-based fundamentals-heavy fighting game subgenre. People have compared Granblue to Super Street Fighter II Turbo (ST) and I don’t think that’s really that accurate, but there’s no arguing the game feels Street Fighter-ish in a lot of ways. While I already explained why I think the simplified control stuff is kind of a red herring in terms of approachability, I do think the slower, more deliberate pace of the game does make it easier to follow and learn. There’s definitely room for more of this type of game, and I’m happy another dev is giving it a shot.

The powered-up heavy versions of specials put that special on an extra long cooldown. This is a super interesting design decision! Traditionally, moves like this (EX moves) use a portion of your super meter. This often causes a problem where 95% of the time, it’s either optimal to use the meter for supers or optimal to use the meter for EX moves, so there isn’t really any meaningful strategic choice to be made. During the beta, I really found myself weighing whether the EX moves were worth it, and it was also fun to see how the match changed once an opponent used one of their own EX moves and temporarily lost access to it. I was initially skeptical of the whole cooldown idea, but I think it works really well.

I like when zoning is a legitimate playstyle, so I was also happy that chip damage was very real and anti-airs are strong and can lead to big damage. Fighting game have been slowly weakening long-range play for years, so seeing it return is a breath of fresh air. For a few years now, I’ve hated that you have to actually ask “Can chip kill in this game?” but the answer here is a resounding “YES!”  I hope they don’t alter this aspect of the game at all.

Another one of those weird things about this era of fighting games is finding yourself thinking, “This game has no comeback mechanics….?!” Fighting games don’t usually need explicit comeback mechanics because they avoid having the kind of slippery slope you see in other game genres. When you lose a piece in chess, you lose access to a tool, but no matter how much damage you take in a fighting game, you can still throw a fireball. One of the best and most beautiful traits of 1v1 fighting games is that “it’s not over ‘til it’s over” is baked into their DNA. Adding comeback mechanics is often solving a problem that doesn’t exist.

Every character’s movelist has an explanation of the move’s properties and how it’s intended to be used. It’s not the first game to have this (I first saw it in Fantasy Strike), but it really helps you get past the “What is this move even for?” phase quickly and begin to use moves thoughtfully. This should be in every fighting game. The in-match tooltips go hand-in-hand with this, flashing messages like “Invincible” to let you know the move has that property and “Punish” to let you know you overcommitted and it wasn’t possible to block. It helps the players immediately understand why a given interaction played out as it did.

In any fighting game, one of the toughest challenges is making characters meaningfully different from one another while also making them intuitive enough to use that it’s easy to experiment with different members of the cast. In the past, Arc System Works has gone to crazy extremes in both directions. Guilty Gear has some of the most unique characters ever, but playing multiple characters at a high level is basically unheard of. Dragonball FighterZ makes it really easy to play tons of different characters, but any given character shares 90% of their DNA with everybody else, so the characters feel very samey. I think Granblue strikes a really nice balance between making characters feel unique while also making them relatively easy to pick up. This is helped by having certain moves serve similar functions regardless of which character you’re playing. No matter who you pick, cr.H is generally an anti-air, and st.M is probably a mid-range poke. Having a button philosophy like this makes it easy to experiment.

Conclusion

I really like the game so far. If they do another beta, give it a shot!