Granblue Fantasy Versus review: a great first fighting game

Fighting games are different than other types of video games. A lot of titles — think action games like Control or Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order — are about giving you the feeling of becoming more powerful over the course of the game, or just being powerful from the get-go. However, fighting games and other competitive games instead ask you to practice and work to become stronger. This usually means failing — a lot.

Compared to team-based competitive games like League of Legends or Overwatch, in fighting games you can’t easily pass the buck on who’s to blame for losing. If you lose in a fighting game it’s because you messed up. This is a potentially huge hurdle to overcome mentally before you even begin to approach how to play. And while Granblue Fantasy Versus isn’t necessarily going to help you over that hurdle, if you can get through it, the game does a great job of helping you understand how to get better.

Granblue Fantasy Versus (GBVS) is based on the incredibly popular Japanese mobile / web browser roleplaying game Granblue Fantasy (GBF), which boasts having had more than 25 million players in the game’s six years of life. It’s a game that, despite not being available in the iOS and Android app stores outside of Japan, has amassed a decent-sized English-speaking following thanks to simultaneous English localization by the developers. GBF follows the player’s character, named Gran or Djeeta depending on what gender you choose, who is the captain of an airship in a world of floating islands. Gran / Djeeta is looking to travel to the mythical last island in the sky where their father is.

Along the way, you gather a large crew of adventurers who become entangled in various adventures like defeating evil empires, battling fallen angels bent on destroying the world, and helping the cast of Love Live put on a concert. Knowing anything about the original game’s story isn’t necessary, since the game’s RPG mode does a good enough job of explaining what you need to know. And if you’re planning to play the multiplayer competitive modes, you aren’t going to be engaging with story content anyway. When it comes to competitive play, you’ll need to use the game’s training missions which do a fantastic job of teaching you not just about playing GBVS, but fighting games in general.

So if you are completely new to, or only somewhat familiar with, the genre there are missions that quickly walk you through the basics of attacking, jumping, and dashing, as well as more complicated concepts like cross-ups and cancels. Once you feel like you know what you’re doing, there are missions that teach you each character’s specific moves. These moves work as they do in many fighting games, requiring a specific joystick movement followed by a button press, like making a quarter circle from down to the right then pressing the medium attack button.