Granblue Fantasy: Relink - Endless Ragnarok Is An Incredible Expansion For A Must-Have JRPG

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The Endless Ragnarok expansion was provided by Cygames for review. Thank you!

Granblue Fantasy: Relink was one of my favorite Action JRPG games when it launched. I loved how flashy the combat was, with little hints of strategy, and a great amount of grinding and ways to get stronger consistently. So, when developer Cygames announced an expansion for the game, Endless Ragnarok, I couldn't have been more excited. Now, it's here, and there's so much to love that fits within the game nicely and gives a great reason to dive back into the game for more grinding.

There’s a ton of new content, which can feel a little overwhelming at times. However, it all integrates into Relink seamlessly and provides a way to get more powerful and grow further without just increasing the level cap and calling it a day. Cygames clearly took a lot of care with the mechanics of how all the new systems work with each other and how they can ultimately make us exponentially more powerful in different ways.

To access most of Endless Ragnarok's new content, we will need to complete the prerequisites. Essentially, we’re going to have to get strong enough to blast through Proud quests and get stronger to do another rank-up quest to access the Chaos difficulties. There are three Chaos difficulties that get harder and harder, and trust me, they can get rough. Coming off of Proud quests, the rank-up quest had me struggling, giving an example of what was to come. However, once I beat it, it immediately opened up a multitude of new ways to enhance ourselves and play the game. A lot of these quests are the usual boss fights, but there are some unique missions thrown in there, like sumo wrestling a crab or fighting a giant fish, so it does break up the boss fights nicely.

In battle, we can now manually summon beasts. We can equip four at any given time, and as we fight, a bar will go up that will allow us to activate the summons. Each one can only be activated once per battle, so using them wisely is going to be necessary. They can deal some huge damage, debuffs, and even provide passive traits to our team based on which one is equipped. It has another layer of strategy in both when to activate them and which ones to activate, and which ones to equip to enhance our team the way we need. We even have a new attack called Primal Burst in our chain, where if we do a full chain burst after link time, a summon will be called to deal some extra damage to our enemies.

On top of that, summons have their own ranking system, so we can get more powerful summons with different, more powerful traits that give us even more damage. As we go through Chaos quests and defeat the new Ragnalia monsters, we will earn more and more to choose from. They all have different effects, whether they be designed for dealing insane damage, supporting us, or debuffing the enemy. Picking and choosing your lineup of four feels like you can change the tide of battle depending on what’s chosen.

However, summons can only be used in certain quests. It makes sense why, especially when they deal a significant amount of damage, but it would’ve been cool to see this mechanic introduced earlier (after the main story) and scale as we get stronger. It would’ve been nice to play around with the new system and add to our repertoire, but after unlocking it, it feels like it’s a mechanic designed only for the newest content.

Then, we have Master Traits, which are more straightforward ways to level up further using tons of mastery points. However, it isn’t as straightforward as getting stat increases. Each character has three extra traits they can unlock, and within these traits are secondary perks that need to be activated before the main trait is active. It sounds a little confusing, but it makes a lot of sense when you’re in the menus and leveling it up. It’s an interesting way to increase our stats and get stronger.

It’s a little crazy to think about all the ways this expansion adds to how we can continue to get stronger. Whether it be the mastery traits, summons with their own passive perks, being able to Transcend weapons and get new Collection nodes to unlock, or even utilizing brand new Chaos-exclusive Sigils, all of it comes together really nicely and gives good reason to come back to the game and get back to grinding. The new Sigils are a mixed bag, with some of them being very helpful, while others only feel helpful for specific content.

Endless Ragnarok also has a new solo mode, which plays a pivotal role in the overall story. It’s essentially a roguelike mode, where you will go through different short battles or minigames to get to the end. Once you do, and depending on how many boons you have, you will get rewards that range from materials that you’ll need to further improve your characters. There are different cycles that each have different themes for their rewards, like Cycle 2 providing Sigil upgrade materials and Cycle 3 providing weapon capping and awakening materials.

I love replayable roguelikes; this ultimately became my favorite addition to the game. The battles were short and sweet, the perks compounded and felt meaningful, and the little mini games were a nice reprieve from the usual fights. There’s a good chunk of variety here, making it enjoyable to fight, then try to catch a slime, then look through a scene twice to see what changed from the first time, and then back to a boss battle. It even has its own progression system that can make you stronger within the specific mode. I like that we can get materials for a multitude of things, but we don’t get any experience or mastery points from fighting enemies in this mode, which was the only part I disliked.

Along with all of the new content, we have six new characters to unlock, level up, and grind with. There’s a lot to love about these characters, and they all have their own unique skill set and abilities to make each of them feel unique. One of the things I love about Relink is that each character feels like they have their own fleshed-out mechanics, and that still rings true with these new ones.

Beatrix and Eustace are most likely the first ones you’ll encounter, since they only cost 1 crewmate card each. Beatrix has her own shadow sword that we can create combos with and a unique system that allows her to gain attack, defense, or healing buffs based on the position of her Delta Clock. With Eustace, we have a gun that can shoot five rounds before it needs to reload, but using the right skills and timing, we can upgrade those shots into more powerful bullets that can deal significantly more damage. I like his focus on range and movement, since he’s able to dodge and move around a lot.

Then, we have the two characters we will meet later on in the story and cost 2 crewmate cards if you want them early: Fraux and Feidel. Fraux is easily my favorite of the two, and she quickly became my favorite character as a whole. Fraux is essentially Bayonetta, with punches and kicks and larger hands coming out of dimensional pockets around her. Obvious similarities aside, I love her mechanics, which can lead to using three skills without any cooldown for free. These can be enhanced further to give buffs to increase our damage cap and skill damage with each one we use, and she is now my go-to damage dealer.

As for Feidel, she is a magician who can throw dark balls and teleport around the map quickly. Range is her game, though she can charge up her dark powers, zoom next to the enemy, and deal some devastating slashing attacks. We can also play as two of the bosses that we had to face off against throughout the main story: Magielle and Gallanza. All of the characters really do offer unique mechanics, though none of them were able to dethrone Fraux as my favorite.

I’m also very pleased with Cygames’ decision to make some of this content available earlier on. Two of the new characters are clearly meant to be used early, but we do have the choice of accessing Fraux and Feidel early. We can also access some early roguelike cycles to get more materials in a different way. The best part of the expansion does come later, but I’m glad there are some aspects that we can access much earlier.

Granblue Fantasy: Relink - Endless Ragnarok - Steam Deck Performance

And of course, I tested all of this on the Steam Deck, and the performance is still around the same as before. We are going to need to play on the lowest settings, Standard, and use the in-game 30 FPS cap. It can hold strong most of the time, but when there are tons of effects on the screen, it will drop a little bit. There isn't much change from the base game. It's still great to play on the Steam Deck, with the framerate drops somewhat blending in with the way combat works, but it will drain a lot and needs the lowest settings to keep the game as stable as possible.

Conclusion

Ultimately, Endless Ragnarok adds more content and more ways to get stronger, which all fit perfectly with Relink’s systems. The roguelike mow. It is a great way to spice up the usual questing we need to do to progress; the new characters feel varied and exciting, and the new gameplay systems not only add some strategy but are just so exciting to use. I do wish the roguelike mode gave experience, and some of the best parts of this expansion won’t be experienced for quite some time if you’re starting from the beginning, but the wait is worth it, and it adds enough to justify returning for another round of grinding.

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