Granblue Fantasy Versus

PC, PS4

Of the relative flood of fighting games that have emerged since Street Fighter IV revived the genre in 2008, only a handful have got tutorials right. Most of them have been made by Arc System Works, but the developer has outdone itself here. It does so almost entirely silently, in contrast to the text-heavy (but brilliant) tutorials of the Blazblue series. Granblue Fantasy Versus’ Mission mode sets a new standard for the genre: it does so not by adding something new, but by rethinking something that was already there.

Mission mode features what is, on first inspection, a genre-standard set of combo trials: five challenges of ascending difficulty for each member of its modestly sized cast. Yet – at last! – these ones are actually useful. It’s certainly possible to take something from other fighting games’ combo trials – a move cancel here, a combo link there, little nuggets of information buried amid a finicky game of Simon Says (‘Sure, that medium punch you just pressed still combos, but we asked for the crouching one’). Yet Granblue Fantasy Versus teaches you things you can, and should, take directly into a match.

The first combo will only involve a couple of moves, but might begin with a normal attack from midscreen, hinting at how you should approach zoning with the character. The next will also be short, but begin closer in and start with a fast light attack, suggesting a way you can interrupt or punish an aggressive opponent. You’ll learn a way of setting up your super, and a fancy, damaging combo that only works when your opponent’s in the corner. Inside five minutes the game wordlessly teaches you not only each character’s moves, but also how best to use them in a match.

Arc isn’t done yet. Knowing how to play a character is only half the battle: you need to understand your opponent, too. Mission mode also contains a dedicated match-ups section, with a couple of tips for how to deal with each character – punishing a certain special move after you block it, perhaps, or interrupting a fake blockstring (where a sequence of attacks contains enough of a gap for you to come out of blockstun and get in a quick hit). It’s a brilliant addition, and something a more optimistic publication might hope to see become a new genre standard. Those of us who know better will just be happy to see it here.

All this is particularly useful given the highly creative character design. Sure, main character Gran is exactly what you’d expect (there are two near-cast-iron guarantees in an Edge fighting-game review: a complaint about the tutorial, and describing one character as ‘the Ryu of the piece’). He has a fireball, dragon punch and horizontal spinkick, and exists in a near-permanent state of frame advantage. But then there’s Lowain, who restores health mid-match by eating corncobs and icecream sundaes, and calls for his pals to charge in and attack. There’s Ferry, who web-slings across the screen to beat you up with the help of ghostly cats and dogs. Metera, an archer, uses only her bow and arrows and provides a fascinating riff on the Dhalsim template. The cast is small – though it will grow over time through DLC – but when fighters are assembled with this level of care and creativity, we’re in no mood to complain.

Granblue Fantasy Versus is a spin-off from the hugely successful (despite never having been released in Europe) mobile RPG Granblue Fantasy. Arc makes a mechanical callback to the source material by putting special moves on cooldowns – the stronger the attack, the longer the wait for it to return. And, mindful that series fans with no genre experience may pick up the game, there’s also an optional simplified input system that lets you perform specials with a shoulder button, albeit at the cost of some damage and a longer cooldown. Both ideas may be ostensibly aimed at relative beginners, but the cooldown idea is transformative for genre veterans too. If Gran, say, burns his heavy dragon punch in a combo, you know you can more safely jump at him for a while, because he’s just lost his invincible anti-air move. It means momentum isn’t just about who’s winning; it’s about which tools each player has available, too.

All this is delivered with the same eye-watering level of visual flair found in Arc’s Guilty Gear Xrd and Dragon Ball FighterZ. While the game runs at 60fps, characters are animated at 15fps to give the game the feel of a classic anime (and the endearingly clunky mobile game). At key moments in a fight the camera can unhook from its moorings and twirl around, segueing into a lavish supermove cinematic or zooming in close for a hard hit or KO. Arc set a new standard for fighting-game visuals with

Xrd; this further cements its position atop the busy pile.

Only once does the studio slip up, and unfortunately it comes in a vitally important part of the game. RPG mode is, to put it politely, one for fans only, a drawn-out procession of quests that repurposes the game as a quite terrible side-on brawler where enemies attack in numbers from both sides, meaning your intended fireball comes out as a hurricane kick in the wrong direction. It borrows the elemental metagame from Granblue Fantasy, plus its weapon-collection and characters, but only devoted fans of the mobile game will get anything out of it.

Everyone else will just have to make do with one of the most creative fighting games of the generation.

Granblue strikes a satisfying balance between the genre fundamentals of Street Fighter and the absurdity of anime fighting games such as Arc’s own Blazblue. Combos are short and satisfying, the cooldown system gives fights a novel sense of flow, and on top of that, it’s a wonderful teacher. In the end, it is only a singleplayer mode away from true greatness – but if we’ve learned one thing from fighting games this generation, it’s that none is ever going to get everything right.

Knowing how to play a character is only half the battle: you also need to understand your opponent