As old heads, we’ve seen the competitive landscape of video games change numerous times. The hot trends right now are still Battle Royales and MOBAs, but old favorites like first-person deathmatches and real-time strategy still has a foothold. And, at the very root of the player-vs-player world, grandpa fighting games still hold court.
It’s that last – and first – genre that holds a special place in our hearts. We grew up in arcades, where you’d a quarter up on the marquee to signify that you were next in line to battle whoever was holding dominance over the Street Fighter II or Mortal Kombat machines.
But fighting games have become more and more of a niche interest as the decades passed, for a variety of reasons. Sure, there are still die-hards around the world, and they sell well enough for a few companies to keep making them, but they definitely don’t have the profile of, say, a Fortnite.
However, a new game that hits American consoles this week is already picking up some momentum, because it makes a few interesting choices that could advance the genre into a new era of popularity. It’s called Granblue Fantasy Versus, and this is why you should check it out.
What’s A Granblue?
Released for Android and iOS platforms in 2014, Granblue is a fusion of traditional role-playing adventure, with a party of characters embarking on a quest to save a mysterious girl from an evil empire. Some big names worked on it, most notably legendary JRPG composer Nobuo Uematsu and art director Hideo Minaba, who worked on the classic SNES Final Fantasy games.
But since it’s a free mobile title, Granblue Fantasy isn’t quite as straightforward as those old-school epics. Instead, it keeps players hooked with a gachapon-style system, where to add new characters and equipment to the party you have to buy crystals that serve as loot boxes, and you can – of course – spend real-world money to do so. It’s grind-heavy, but players love it for the rich character design.
And this thing is huge. We’re talking 24 million players worldwide for the mobile game. Fans are devoted, too, with some spending thousands of dollars to unlock characters. It taps into that sweet spot of farming-heavy gacha games, where it’s easy to sink time into it because it always dangles a carrot just out of reach.
Granblue has already seen a spin-off anime series debut to great success, and full-fledged console action-RPG Granblue Fantasy Relink is in the hopper for future release. But for now, publisher Cygames is looking to let devotees experience their game world in a more intimate setting.
Why A Fighting Game?
This isn’t the first time that a popular role-playing series has ventured into the one-on-one brawling world. Persona has the Arena spin-off franchise, and Square heroes like Cloud Strife have shown up in games like Super Smash Bros. It makes sense – RPG characters both engage in hand-to-hand combat and can trigger flashy special attacks, much like fighting game combatants.
Granblue‘s world of knights and magicians, each with colorful and distinct personalities and abilities, lends itself perfectly to fighting games. The whole hook of the mobile game is about recruiting these characters, so fans already are emotionally attached. But in the mobile title, all you get from them is boxes of text and a few static pieces of artwork. The rich, expressive animation of a fighting game is a way to distill all of that personality into something visual and responsive.
Arc Systems Works were the studio to make it happen. The Japanese studio has established themselves as the most dynamic and progressive company making fighting games, with the huge success of Dragon Ball FighterZ showing they can take an existing franchise with a huge cast and turn it into an exciting, well-balanced fighting game that appeals to both casual and hardcore audiences.
Mechanical Animals
One of the biggest barriers to the popularity of fighting games for quite some time has been the issue of execution. Ever since Street Fighter II, getting the most out of your characters means being able to memorize and perform arcane combinations of joystick motions and button presses.
Unlike first-person shooters, where the skill curve is relatively gentle – most people can move around and aim in 3D space, with varying levels of speed and accuracy – fighting games take a more binary success-failure approach. If you can’t do the 360 degree circle to snap off Zangief’s spinning piledriver, you’re simply not going to be able to play the character with any success. There are no half measures.
That’s why Granblue Fantasy Versus‘s approach to special moves is so fascinating. Underneath each character’s life bar during play, you’ll see four icons, each of which corresponds to a special move. Pressing the S button and a direction on the stick activates it, after which it goes into a “cooldown” period where it can’t be used again.
If this looks familiar, it should – it’s the same UI style that’s been used for special abilities in games since World of Warcraft, and is standard across the MOBA landscape. Using your specials – or “Skybound Arts”, as they’re called in Granblue – becomes more about timing and strategy than dexterity.
Fighting games have had “easy modes” before with one-button controls for special moves, but those were more typically seen as training wheels for casuals, not an integral part of the game’s mechanics. Granblue Vs. changes that, folding in a system that nearly every game player will be familiar with by now to build a bridge between today’s popular genres and the fighting game world. And players can choose to use traditional inputs as well, which has the advantage of diminishing those cooldowns.
More Information
It’s hard to learn fighting games, because figuring out what’s happening at 60 frames a second while also battling for your right to survive is more than the average human mind can process. Most fighting games now come with tutorials and training modes, but Arc has brought those elements to a new level of professionalism and detail. In Granblue Fantasy Versus, not only do you have robust move lists, but the tutorial mode goes deep into aspects of the game that might be common knowledge to diehards but totally new to beginners.
One great example is matchups – in any competitive game where characters have different attributes and abilities, some fights are going to be skewed to one side or another. Granblue touches on that in its robust training mode, giving tips and hints for tackling some of those tougher fights. For beginners who might be frustrated when an opponent seems to have all the answers, this is a useful way to get inside their head and make them think more deeply about how they approach the next fight.
Even more interestingly, the game even has a “glossary” section that goes into great detail about the myriad arcane terms that fighting games use. This is, to our knowledge, a first, and it’s a great example of how Granblue Vs. is working to pull people from outside the FGC into the game through education.
Flying Solo
One of the biggest criticisms against many fighting games is that they’re developed with multiplayer almost exclusively in mind. Most games let you work through a ladder of AI opponents of escalating cheapness, but that’s often all you get. Granblue Fantasy Versus, in keeping with the franchise’s role-playing origins, delivers a single-player experience that is remarkably robust and entertaining.
In it, you travel through an island archipelago engaging in combat with AI-controlled foes in a mode that pushes the game more towards the Double Dragon end of the fighting world, smashing through hordes of underpowered mooks on the way to boss battles at the end of each stage. Computer-controlled companions, leveling and equipment let you further customize your character in this mode.
This all isn’t to say that Granblue Fantasy Versus is the perfect fighting game – the roster seems pretty slim at just 11 playable characters, with five more coming through DLC. But it’s perfectly poised to tap into the massive audience that the mobile franchise has built. If MOBA-style specials, a rich single-player experience. and a devoted fan community come together, we could see a new golden age of fighters.
Granblue Fantasy Versus releases on PS4 on March 3 and on Steam on March 13.
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