Granblue Fantasy: Versus

I respect what Granblue Fantasy: Versus set out to do when it launched in March 2020, but I'd be lying if I said the timing and the tech didn't gut it. This is a 2D fighter built by Arc System Works, the studio behind Guilty Gear and Dragon Ball FighterZ, and it shows in every frame of animation and every character silhouette. The problem was that it launched with delay-based netcode, and then a global pandemic wiped out the locals and majors that could have kept it breathing. A genuinely good game got quietly shelved by a player population that had nowhere to play it properly. The core mechanics are worth understanding before you write it off. Basic offense runs through four buttons: Light, Medium, Heavy, and a Unique Action that changes per character. Gran, the game's Ryu equivalent, holds his Unique Action to charge a sword strike. The system's real hook is the cooldown on special moves. You can throw a fireball or execute an uppercut with a single button press, but doing so locks that move out for longer than if you'd used the traditional quarter-circle input. That dual-input design is genuinely clever: newcomers can play immediately, but there is a clear and tangible mechanical reward for learning proper inputs. The pacing is slower than most anime fighters, more deliberate, closer to Street Fighter than to BlazBlue, and that will either suit you or it won't. Character variety is real, though. Close-quarters rushdown, zoners, grapplers, and a handful of characters with genuinely odd unique actions round out the roster. No two characters feel like reskins. The RPG Mode is the other selling point the box leads with, and it is a mixed bag. It drops the core fighting game controls into a side-scrolling beat-em-up structure with an original story set after the anime's first season. Enemy elemental weaknesses and weapon customization add a light RPG layer on top, but the fighting game movement, designed for one-on-one matchups, feels stiff when you are fighting crowds from two directions. Running is on a cooldown, missions are short, and loading times on the original release were longer than the missions deserved. It works well enough as a way to learn the characters and get context for the Granblue universe, but go in with calibrated expectations. Here is the context you need for the buying decision right now: the original Granblue Fantasy: Versus had delay-based netcode, and the community never forgave it. A follow-up, Granblue Fantasy Versus: Rising, released in late 2023 with rollback netcode and crossplay baked in, and that is where the competitive population moved. If you are buying the original specifically to play ranked online against strangers, the lobby population reflects a game that the FGC largely abandoned when Rising arrived. If you want the campaign, local versus, or just want to understand the game before potentially moving to Rising, the original's fundamentals are solid, the tutorial system goes deeper than most fighters (character-specific matchup guides, punish tips, situational coaching), and the visual style remains one of the cleaner examples of Arc's watercolor-to-3D pipeline.

Fred · Scout Team

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