Sometimes it can feel like you’ve missed your shot at enjoying a game. For a game like Granblue Fantasy Relink, missing out on the earlier days of grinding can make it seem impossible to leap into the boss-stacked endgame. Thankfully, the new Endless Ragnarok DLC has a solution for this. There’s never been a better time to leap into this genuinely awesome RPG and, if we’re lucky, more games will learn to make catching up this easy.
I first played Granblue Fantasy Relink on console, a practice I don’t stick with often these days. The arrival of Endless Ragnarok, a DLC adding tons of new fights and playable characters, felt like a good excuse to start over again on PC. The catch is that Relink is a few “kinds” of RPG at once. While it starts as an action-packed narrative romp, that eventually gives way to a Monster Hunter format of taking on jobs, grinding your character’s strength, and getting rarer loot from difficult (and gorgeously designed) boss fights against dragons, gods, and killer robots. How can a new player, or someone starting over like me, ever manage to gather the various drops, upgrades, and powers needed to play the DLC? Well, that’s where the Conflux comes in.
Cygames, Inc.
It can take a lot of raw materials to upgrade your character in Relink, and originally this meant selecting specific fights to gamble on specific drops you might need. The Conflux, a short rogue-lite side mode introduced in Endless Ragnarok, cuts out that kind of highly specific and time-consuming grinding and replaces it with a brisk, easy-to-understand process. Different tiers of Conflux are introduced as you work through the game’s initial story (which will take about 10-15 hours to finish) and the post-game options expand to offer all kinds of rewards.
The important part is this: your rewards aren’t entirely random. Each tier has a variety of options to choose from and, provided you complete a run through Conflux’s monster-jammed, puzzle-packed corridors, you can simply choose the reward you want. It’s that easy! Are you looking for upgrade materials for your special Ascension weapon? Select this option here and you’ll get an entire box set of knick-knacks. Do you feel weak and need a little boost? Run through the Conflux and select the curated pack of stat-altering sigils as your reward.
Endless Ragnarok is a beefy DLC that injects new life into a great game
On paper, this might sound a bit silly. It theoretically sands down a process that can be pretty gratifying. Learning a boss, mastering the moves, grinding out runs until you get what you need. That’s a pretty good gameplay loop. In Relink, this had the potential to get pretty intense. Okay, you upgraded your Ascension weapon, but have you picked up your Bahamut weapon yet? How are your sigils looking? Do you have War Elemental yet? Okay, time to grind battle against Lucilius until you get the additional sigils you want. Hope you have a group of reliable friends.
Do you really want to go through this process for many characters? Well, you’re shit out of luck. Okay, that’s not entirely true but it can take a lot of time to build a team. You work through tiers of weapons because upgrading them all grants permanent stat boosts; you roll for sigils at the Knickknack Shack in attempts to get the rarest, strongest variation. This was one of Relink’s appeals for a long time; progress wasn’t “hard” but it was work and that made the process very satisfying. Now, as Endless Ragnarok drops, that slow and steady climb is actually a liability for player retention; people don’t want to grind 60 hours to be “ready” for an expansion. Relink could have stubbornly refused any changes to onboarding. Instead, correctly, it decided the best thing to do would be to respect player time while not entirely changing the gameplay loop.
The net benefit of this decision feels hard to overstate. Endless Ragnarok isn’t a small bit of post-game patch content. Six new characters have been added and they all kick a lot of ass; it would completely suck if leveling up these new pals layered excess grind on top of things. Because Endless Ragnarok doesn’t get rid of the the big endgame grind! It displaces it, adding new progression systems and challenges. But that old stuff? It’s old stuff and the developers know it. The Conflux challenges crack Relink wide open. It was enough to get me to swap to PC, it’s enough that my Monster Hunter friend who skipped launch actually messaged me the other day to ask about Granblue. Conflux has injected tons of life into Relink among my friends.
Games are faltering in the middle of a rapidly shifting attention economy. They don’t just compete with films or television anymore; video games are jockeying against gambling services, social media, and tons of other activities (some legit and cool, many evil and soul-stealing) that demand focus. Granblue is a long-running franchise now, and while diehards might be fine booting up the gacha and grinding another primal battle for rare drops, that’s harder to ask of casual players. Even so, they shouldn’t be left behind. A system like Conflux might feel too accommodating. I used to constantly farm “Slimpede” for gold and mastery points. I ran so, so many Bahamut runs! And now you can just choose whatever reward you want as a prize?
Shouldn’t my friend also have to do all that bullshit? Well, no. I don’t think he should. We’re in the year 2026! That’s basically the future! And Relink’s decision to reimagine the initial portion of leveling up and building out a character is a surprisingly modern one. I also think it should be a standard-setting decision. If we’re living in the world of patches and updates, games can afford to be reactive and attentive to player needs. Do it right and it’ll actually keep your game alive and energized far beyond the norm. Do it right and you’ll make an impression. I’m only so far into Ragnarok’s initial hours (my last week was spent replaying the story and running Conflux) but the fact that I could restart without issue is huge. The fact my friend will be able to join me in the expansion with only a little bit of work is amazing. Every other RPG should be taking notes.
