Granblue Fantasy Versus Rising Review (PS5) – The Granblue Fantasy franchise is slowly making its way to the West. Three years ago, Granblue Fantasy Versus from Arc System Works introduced me to memorable characters and a world I wanted to explore more.
I may have to wait a couple of months for Granblue Fantasy Relink for that, but in the meantime, Rising is yet another excellent fighting game from the masters of 2D fighters.
Granblue Fantasy Versus Rising Review (PS5) – A Great Update To An Already Excellent Fighter
An Excellently Executed Story Mode That Remains Largely Unchanged
Rising isn’t exactly a sequel to 2020’s Versus title but more of an upgraded game expansion. Much like Capcom has released Ultimate additions to their Street Fighter titles, Rising does the same, including all DLC fighters released since its initial launch and adding four new fighters into the fray.
This isn’t just a simple upgrade, though, and it’s brimming with plenty of additions and tweaks to the game’s immaculate combat. Combat, for the most part, remains the same.
Incredibly friendly to newcomers and as complicated as any tournament fighter can be.
The game’s story mode remains unchanged from 2020 and plays identically. It did receive a few new stages to progress through, but for the most, if you’ve experienced it before, there isn’t anything new here. The story provides excellent cutscenes and fun side-scrolling combat.
Finding loot and equipping various artifacts on characters is just as fun and rewarding as in the original release. These artifacts will increase damage or fill up your SBA gauge faster, allowing you to pull off special attacks more often.
Easy To Play, Easy To Master
Special attacks can be performed using combinations of the movement and action buttons, or players can use the R2 button and the direction press to perform these special moves. It’s a welcome feature, allowing everyone to easily pull spectacular moves and attacks.
You can strengthen these special attacks by pressing the Triangle or Circle but with consequences. If you choose to use these stronger versions of the attacks, you will activate a cooldown timer for these abilities.
Each character’s special attacks are displayed with icons under each character’s health bar, giving you a clear view of how long the cooldown will take.
What’s excellent about Rising is that it provides plenty for players to do off and online. If you love going online and testing your skills against others, you’ll be happy to know you may do it in the smoothest way possible. Rising utilizes rollback net code and players as smooth as butter online.
Brand New Grand Brute Mode Is And Entertaining Battle Royal
As with previous Arc System Works filters, you’ll make a chibi avatar and run around a small game hub full of arcades and mini-games. If you want to face off against someone, activate one of the arcades and select an exhibition match or a ranked match.
Again, Arc System Works helps those who want to enjoy the game.
As you start a match, you can select your opponent’s difficulty, and it only puts you against people of your skill level so you never feel overwhelmed and fall out of enjoying the game.
Though the core modes have remained the same, the Grand Brute mode is one of the best additions to Rising. This online mode plays like Fall Guys. Your customer chibi avatar is placed into matches against other players.
These range from obstacle courses full of traps to avoid to see who can make it to the end and others where you have to avoid bombs dropping from the sky and defeat monster waves as quickly as possible while trying to sabotage the other players.
I spent much time in this mode and had an absolute blast. Some states even give unique weapons and attacks like you would find in a Mario Kart game to sabotage and hinder others. I also found that more people were playing in this mode than in the hub world, looking to fight other players.
Plenty Of Unlockables To Chase After
Other additions include buying and earning virtual currency to buy color variants for fighters. You can acquire weapon skins, archaic statues, and backgrounds to create your dioramas and showcase them to your friends.
You’ll also earn EXP and can level up your avatar, allowing you to equip new accessories and customize them to your liking.
Visually, the game is as stunning as it was three years ago. Character models are gorgeous, and animations and attack effects pop out of the screen with vibrant colors. The soundtrack is the same as the original release but still holds up, providing some epic battle tunes.
The voice work, for the most part, is also unchanged from the original release, but some added lines for the new story missions and multiplayer narration are an excellent addition.
Granblue Fantasy Versus Rising is a fantastic upgrade to an already stellar fighter. With over twenty-five characters to choose from and excellent and accessible combat for everyone to enjoy, Rising is easily the sleeper-hit fighting game of the year.
The rollback net code alone is worth the additional price for hardcore players, but the Grand Brute mode is designed to entertain everyone.
Granblue Fantasy Versus Rising is now available on PS5 and PS4.
Review code kindly provided by PR.