Granblue Fantasy: Relink – Endless Ragnarok Review

Endless Ragnarok stacks new endgame systems on top of an already great action RPG.

Granblue Fantasy started life back in 2014 as a Japanese mobile and browser gacha game, but it never felt like a throwaway phone title. From day one, it had a genuine pedigree behind it, with composer Nobuo Uematsu and art director Hideo Minaba, both names you'd recognize from Final Fantasy and Lost Odyssey, shaping its sound and look.

Over the years, the series spread out into an anime and into Granblue Fantasy Versus, a fighting game handled by Arc System Works, before finally taking its biggest swing yet with Granblue Fantasy: Relink. That project did not have an easy road.

It started as a joint effort between PlatinumGames and Cygames, but PlatinumGames eventually stepped away, leaving Cygames Osaka to finish the job alone after roughly eight years, several delays, and more than a few doubters wondering if it would ever come out at all.

Despite being delayed until the year 2024, when Relink was finally released, it was a surprisingly slick action RPG title that managed to sell over a million copies in just ten days and went on to sell more than two million copies. Now, two years on, you're getting Granblue Fantasy: Relink – Endless Ragnarok, a full expansion built almost entirely around what happens after you've already beaten the game.

Interestingly, this wasn't part of any original plan. Director Tetsuya Fukuhara has said Granblue Fantasy: Relink – Endless Ragnarok only exists because the community kept playing and kept asking for more, so Cygames built something much bigger than a typical DLC drop in response.

Story-wise, Endless Ragnarok drops you right after you've dealt with the Astral Lilith and saved the Zegagrande Skydom.

So you'll need to have cleared that fight, along with the Proto Bahamut quest and most of the base game's Proud difficulty content, before any of this becomes available to you. Once you're in, strange gateways of chaos start tearing open across the skydom, and out of them come the Ragnalia, monsters whose appearance is basically a warning sign for Ragnarok itself.

You don't have to figure this out alone. The Eternals, a pair of legendary weapon masters named Seofon and Tweyen, track you down in Folca and put you and your crew through a trial before naming you a Fatebreaker and sending you off to deal with the Ragnalia threat, which eventually leads you deeper into a mysterious new area called the Conflux in pursuit of whatever is actually behind all of this.

Compared to the main campaign, this story is noticeably smaller in scope, and it shows in how it's delivered. Instead of getting full story missions with proper cutscenes at regular intervals, you'll pick most of it up through short memory vignettes that pop up at the quest counter after you clear batches of missions.

That's clearly done, so the co-op-focused content doesn't get bogged down by long non-skippable cutscenes, but it also means the plot rarely builds any real momentum, and it ends up feeling more like an epilogue focused on Ragnalia lore and the wider Skydom than time spent with Gran, Djeeta, and the rest of your crew.

You do still get a handful of visual novel-style scenes similar to the base game's Fate Episodes.

The characters remain as likable as ever whenever the game actually slows down for them, but if you came in expecting a story on par with the original campaign, you'll probably walk away thinking Granblue Fantasy: Relink – Endless Ragnarok's story is the weakest part of the whole package. It's not bad, exactly, just thin.

Where Endless Ragnarok earns its keep is in what it hands you to actually do. As you work through the base game for the first time, you'll start picking up new content on a schedule: within your first couple of hours, you can already unlock Beatrix and Eustace through Crewmate Cards, and by the five or six-hour mark, you get your first cycle of the Conflux.

And by fifteen to twenty hours, you're into further Conflux cycles, the characters Gallanza and Maglielle, and new Weapon Awakening side quests. Everything else, including the full new story campaign, Chaos difficulty, the summon system, Master Traits, and the last two characters, Fraux and Fediel, only opens up once you've finished the main story outright.

On top of that, you get proper cross-platform four-player co-op, plus a handy option to save and borrow other players' characters to use as beefed-up AI companions when your friends aren't around, which matters a lot once the difficulty ramps up.

The difficulty does ramp up.

Combat in Granblue Fantasy: Relink – Endless Ragnarok is still built on the same fast, flashy action foundation Relink already had, just with a lot more stacked on top. The headline addition is the summon system: you fill a dedicated gauge in battle, and once it's ready, you can call in almost any enemy in the game, from small monsters up to Primal Beasts like Furycane and Managarmr, and actually take direct control of them for a short window.

While you're piloting a summon, you're basically invincible and hitting like a truck, and each one also hands your whole party a passive bonus, so picking the right summon becomes part of your build planning rather than just a flashy interrupt.

Because the gauge is shared and limited, you can't just spam them, so they end up folding into the normal combat flow instead of feeling like a gimmick bolted on top. Layered on top of that is the new Primal Burst mechanic, which triggers once every party member has used their Skybound Art, letting Lyria call down something as massive as Proto Bahamut for a serious damage spike.

Since Primal Bursts key off Link Attacks, you end up thinking a lot more carefully about when to hold your specials back instead of dumping them the moment they're ready. The new characters give you plenty of reasons to actually use all this.

Six playable characters and a roguelite dungeon crawl anchor the massive endgame.

Beatrix, unlocked early, revolves around her Delta Clock. This lets you rotate between offense, regeneration, and defense stances mid-combo to fill her Ambros Gauge; once it's full, you trigger Devour Causality, which speeds up her combos and boosts whatever stance you're currently in, and she ends up being one of the more flexible characters in the whole roster.

Eustace leans in and asks you to think about positioning to get real value out of him. Gallanza, a former antagonist, is slower than most but hits like a truck on every swing, while Maglielle, the other former antagonist turned playable, throws out sweeping waves of blades that make her excellent against groups.

Later on, you get Fraux, a kick-focused melee fighter who swaps between two stances and eventually rewards you with free skill activations once both gauges fill, and Fediel, a teleporting ranged mage who's fun to mess around with even if her playstyle wears a little thin after enough time in the Conflux.

Speaking of which, the Conflux is the other big pillar of Granblue Fantasy: Relink – Endless Ragnarok, and it's specifically there for you if you'd rather tackle the endgame solo instead of hunting for a full co-op party. It's a roguelite dungeon crawl where the paths and encounters shuffle every run, and clearing enemies earns you boons, auras, and other temporary buffs that stack up as you push toward deeper, harder floors for better rewards.

The first couple of cycles play it fairly straight and don't lean too hard into the roguelike identity.

However, from the third cycle onward, it opens up properly, throwing in things like Dexterity Way scenarios where you're catching a runaway slime, spotting differences in a scene, or picking out the right NPC instead of just fighting, which is a welcome break once the later floors start getting genuinely tough.

Outside the mode itself, a separate Resonance upgrade system banks permanent improvements from your runs, so even a rough attempt at the Conflux still moves your account forward. The good part is that the summoning system in Granblue Fantasy: Relink – Endless Ragnarok actually allows for player choice.

Master Traits give you a lot of options in terms of building your character, and the Conflux keeps things fresh when playing solo because of real roguelite randomness instead of replaying missions in a new order. Each character also feels genuinely distinct, which isn't something every action game with a roster this size manages to pull off.

On the rougher side, Chaos difficulty bosses are built as long endurance fights, and even with a maxed-out character on a fully loaded save, some of these encounters run long enough to wear you down rather than thrill you, especially if you're going in with AI companions instead of real players.

It remains intact, as well, even though the addition of new Sigils and passives makes it somewhat flexible.

At the same time, the flexibility is rather limited when you get to the Chaos content stage. In terms of early cycles of the Conflux, there is too much reliance on the same combat routine until the roguelike aspect emerges around cycle three. All of this ties into how character growth and grinding work here, and this is honestly where Granblue Fantasy: Relink – Endless Ragnarok does some of its smartest work.

Master Traits only unlock once a character hits level 100, and from there, you spend Mastery Points, earned from beating enemies and clearing other activities, across three separate Master Styles per character, each with multiple ranks and perks that go well beyond simple stat boosts.

The Captain, for instance, can pick up Combat Healer for extra attack and a damage cap boost every time a healing skill is used, Narmaya can gain her signature Butterflies without switching stance through Paradigm Shift, and Zeta can cut skill cooldowns based on combo length or punish already-afflicted enemies through her own trait options.

Getting these fully online takes real time and points, so there's plenty of long-term investment here for anyone who wants it. What actually softens the traditional grind, though, is the Conflux itself: its first three cycles unlock gradually as you play through the base story, handing out Sigils, weapon-forging materials, level cap removals, and Awakening resources along the way, so you're building toward Chaos-ready characters without pure repetitive farming.

That said, the grind isn't gone entirely.

Ragnalia enemies hit hard enough that you'll still want to hunt down the right Sigils and Knickknack Vouchers through quest drops, or you risk missions dragging past ten minutes or wiping outright, and that pressure eases up a lot more in multiplayer than it does if you're running solo with AI backup.

Visually, Granblue Fantasy: Relink – Endless Ragnarok holds onto everything that made the base game look good. Hideo Minaba's art direction still gives everything a distinct, colorful anime look, even if it doesn't necessarily stand out much against the wave of other anime-styled action RPGs that have come out recently.

What's more impressive is that performance holds up remarkably well even during the busiest fights, when summons, Link Attacks, and Primal Bursts are all going off on screen at once. Things do get visually chaotic enough that tracking your own character can briefly become a challenge, but combat stays readable underneath all the noise, and slowdown is rare even in the most hectic moments.

On the audio side, Granblue Fantasy: Relink – Endless Ragnarok leans on Nobuo Uematsu's score to keep doing a lot of heavy lifting, giving big story beats and boss fights a weight that matches the visuals. In combat, the barks and call-outs your characters shout mid-fight, things like reloading cues, warnings about incoming attacks, and pained yells when things go wrong, do a good job of keeping you oriented when the screen fills up with effects.

The voice work in the quieter Fate Episode-style vignettes holds onto the same charm the base cast had before.

Taken as a whole, Granblue Fantasy: Relink – Endless Ragnarok is clearly aimed at people who have already sunk serious hours into Relink and want a reason to come back. The unlock pacing means newcomers working through the base story will still see a good chunk of this content naturally.

But the deepest stuff, Chaos difficulty, the full summon kit, Master Traits, and the last two characters, is squarely built for players who have already cleared the original game and its toughest quests. There’s an actual, meaningful single-player mode for solo players in Conflux; there are improvements to co-op gameplay and companion characters; and there is improved character progression that actually alters character play style, not just stats. 

The story is the one place Granblue Fantasy: Relink – Endless Ragnarok falls short of the original, feeling thinner and more like an epilogue than a proper continuation, but everything wrapped around it, the combat, the characters, the grind changes, and the new modes, makes a strong case that this is exactly the kind of expansion longtime players were hoping for.