To say I came into the Granblue Fantasy Versus beta with a lot of scepticism would be an understatement. I dislike majority of ArcSys games and this one seemed to lean closer to the end of their spectrum that is least appealing to me, with Guilty Gear-style graphics and tempo. At the same time it promised to be significantly less complex and less demanding of knowledge and controller proficiency than their staple franchise, but that doesn’t really make the pitch any better. Moreover, a lot of the messaging from producers was further discouraging - talk of making the game simpler so that it can be “less about combos and more about strategic” and “more accessible” and constantly prattling about esports set off all my red flags. And the nail the in the coffin - the cooldown system restricting the use of specials in a variety of ways is something that fighting games have experimented with before (Rising Thunder, League of Fighters), but in general it just doesn’t seem like a good idea. So with that entire premise, how’s GBFV?
It’s ok.
My first point of comparison is probably Street Fighter 4. I usually scoff at calling something an “anime street fighter” as much as every other guy, but the overall pacing and absence of air movement or magic-series chains heavily contributed to my impression, with airblocking and evasive options adding the “anime” flavor. There’s a lot of traditional footsie game, walking back and forth, poking, scoring a knockdown to get a better position or jumping to whiffpunish a mistimed fireball. The generic overhead is slow and only combos on counterhit, throws have a pretty small range but can’t really be broken on reaction. One thing that I didn’t expect to impact my impression as much as it did is the inability to cancel your forward running into block. You can cancel it into jumps, attacks and evasive options, but trying to safely approach the opponent this way will just result in eating lots of pokes. As a result I started instinctively jumping after a run, only to remember that there’s no airdashing so now I’m stuck in the air, at the mercy of my opponent. I think there’s gonna be a lot of mindgames around this, mostly with using spot-dodge, one of the two aforementioned defensive maneuvers - it causes your character to sway back in place and it can be used to dodge enemy attacks, and if they’re long enough then punish afterwards. I expect baiting each other’s long buttons or this dodge to be a staple of matches.
One of the most unintuitive system is the “autocombo”. I’ll try to explain it as clearly as I can: Like many fighting games, Granblue Fantasy Versus has what we call “proximity normals”. When you input any of your standing normal moves (light, medium or heavy), the game will check how close to the opponent you are. If you are within a certain distance, a “close” version of the move will come out - otherwise, a “far” one. You can cancel both versions into a special, super, or an evasive maneuver. However, close standing moves can exclusively be cancelled into a 2-hit target combo, the same one no matter what it’s being chained from and what buttons the player presses. It’s a very simple tool for the player to apply pressure or do a combo once they land that close hit, but because of its limitations it avoids a Dragon Ball Fighterz-like situation where every stray hit can be converted into a long combo or blockstring, and also it solidifies the game as more basic and street-fighter-like, reducing that crazy offense which games like Guilty Gear, Blazblue or UNIST are known for. However, I wish the system was just a little less rigid - for example, let the player chain together any of their close moves in any order they want, only restricting them for one us per chain, instead of this unique set of moves you can only access after landing a close hit.
Another system that makes the game unique are the previously mentioned cooldowns. While your special move is on cooldown, you just can’t use it - it won’t come out when you press its command. But what causes moves to go on cooldown and how long it lasts is a little more complex. Each move can be used with a regular input, and that’s your quarter circles, down-down, shoryuken motions and charges. But at the same time you can also perform an instant command by pressing the special button along with a direction corresponding to the move, as well as an additional button if you want to choose different strength (I believe it always performs the light version by default). The first option for the most part has no cooldown, with some exceptions - for example, projectile cooldowns don’t start until the fireball disappears from screen, which isn’t actually that different from the actual Street Fighter, where it’s common for characters to only be able to have one projectile on the screen at a time. However, performing the easy version will always give you some cooldown, which isn’t big (a few seconds), but might mean that you won’t have access to a move when you need it. Moreover, doing a super will put all your specials on somewhat long cooldowns (but if you get a clean hit with full animation then it should be just long enough for them to finish). And finally, EX moves - the hard version of a special that is almost always strictly superior to light and medium (more damage, safer on block, often allows juggling afterwards), but at an additional cost. Traditionally such moves would use a small part of the same bar that allows you to do supers, but here instead using them results in a longer cooldown for that particular move, meaning that after using an EX, you don’t have access to any version of that move for some time.
What this does is create a somewhat new dynamic in fighting game genre. Traditionally, you have to first acquire the meter, and then you can spend it - it’s like having savings. But here it’s the opposite, every time you perform an EX, you take a “loan” and you “work” to repay it by playing without the specials for a short period. As much as it pains me to admit so, it does seem to work in practice - it gives your opponent a little space to breath after you just unleashed a powerful combo on them, but it also means there’s more equality in terms of number of tools no matter how the match went so far. I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily a superior system, but I think it deserves a fair shake. And also this means one more thing I haven’t mentioned about easy inputs before - there are sometimes reasons even a seasoned player would use them. For example, Charlotta is a charge character, meaning she has to hold back and/or down for about 1 second or longer before she’s able to use some of her specials. Or just do the easy input instead - that will let her do it instantly no matter what direction she was holding beforehand, if any. But as a result you won’t have access to that special move for a few seconds afterwards… See what I’m getting at? The system offers plenty of such small tradeoffs.. Heck, doing an anti-air DP after you were walking or blocking is something that even seasoned players have trouble with, but pressing Forward + Special is a much easier task, and while that will punish you with a cooldown that someone with good manual doesn’t have to deal with, it might be better than just never being able to anti-air at all. This actually does the opposite of dumbing the game down, it creates another avenue were differently skilled players can enjoy different advantages and disadvantages depending on proficiency in a particular aspect of playing fighting games (someone with good manual won’t have to worry about cooldowns while someone with worse dexterity can use easy inputs as a crutch and then figure out how to deal with the penalty).
However, there is one overshadowed consequence of this system - that the super bar’s sole use is to perform one of two super arts your character has access to. And honestly these supers felt more like SF4 Ultras than anything else - while you technically build the bar not just by getting hit but also dealing damage and even walking forward, I’ve noticed that in my games both players would get the super around the time they lost half HP, and while it’s technically possible to use that super and then build a second bar, it happened very rarely. Moreover the supers seemed to almost universally have invincible but relatively long startups (meaning it’s easy to do such a meaty that would allow you to block them), but dealt significant damage, making them strong comeback tools. There’s even the mechanic of landing a clean hit to trigger a cinematic and deal more damage compared to when you just barely scrape the opponent. Unlike in SF4 however, most of these supers can be easily comboed into, which means that after a certain point of the match players get a significantly bigger reward for any successful play they make without having to work for it since you get the bar anyway. This may not sound that different from how supers work in lots of games (Tekken’s rage comes to mind), but with how early you get an access to this and with how useful these supers are you’re gonna see 1 or 2 of them in almost every round of every match, which I’m not the biggest fan of, nor of how much it rewards you for finding that one hit in a latter part of the match compared to earlier. Perhaps this isn’t as big of an issue as I’m painting it, but it’s definitely my biggest concern for now.
The other one is whether characters have movesets big and varied enough so as not to get boring after just a few weeks or months of playing. There were definitely points of the beta when every match felt the same, which isn’t a good sign for a new game we just got our hands on. But those 15 hours are definitely not enough to definitely tell how much depth the game has exactly, and whether it’s so shallow that it won’t evolve for months to come (and then go through a revolution after a big patch and new characters being added). For now I’m suprisingly optimistic - after my expectations of a boring trashfire were crushed by an engaging and enjoyable title, I feel like I owe GBFV a little credit of trust going forward, so for now I’ll allow myself to get excited for it.
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