The creators of incredibly successful in the eastern mobile RPG market Granblue fantasy – Cygames – began expansion to the West and announced two console games at once – Granblue Fantasy Versus and Granblue Fantasy: Relink. The first was developed Arc system workssponsored by Guilty gear and Dragon Ball FighterZalready out on Ps4 in Asia and will soon reach Europe, where it will appear not only on the popular system from Sony, but also on personal computers. We managed to appreciate the fruits of cooperation between the two companies and are in a hurry to share our impressions.
Granblue Fantasy Versus – this is exactly what you expect from the modern Arc System Works project – the corporate identity immediately strikes the eye, in which advanced 3D-graphics are stylized as 2D-animation. With each new work of the studio, it becomes increasingly difficult to distinguish the game from the expensive Japanese cartoon.
Visually, Versus looks great, starting with style and ending with implementation. The scenery looks very atmospheric, the characters are perfectly drawn, and unique techniques in conjunction with the spectacular camera work and good effects add to them even more personality.
You can scold only fairly long loading screens and periodic slowdowns of the menu. Fortunately, everything works perfectly in the battles themselves – we did not find any sagging frame rates.
Each hero has three hits, which can be called weak, medium and strong. They have different animation, speed and radius of destruction. A grip that punches the bottom block from the top and a special technique that is unique to each fighter. It can be a parry, combo attack or capture. Each fighter also has a unique set of techniques, fireballs, teleportation, and so on.
Unlike traditional fighting games, where to perform special hits you need to enter complex combinations of buttons and nothing else, in Versus any such technique can be performed in two ways. The first option was created for a more casual audience – you just press one button, and the hero performs a difficult trick himself – just like in role-playing games. But in this case, the ability will be unavailable for a longer time, and the damage to the opponent will be less.
The second way is traditional manual input. It is more difficult to do this, but the cooldown of abilities will significantly decrease, and attacks will take more health from your opponent.
Such a system simplifies the initial development of the game, while not reducing its depth. At a higher level, the immediate benefits of using the technique can be costly. Otherwise, the combat system resembles Street fighter.
