When Granblue Fantasy: Relink launched back in February of 2024, Cygames delivered one of the most polished and fun action-RPGs of its generation. Despite the long development time and development troubles, Cygames was able to successfully translate its massively successful Gacha franchise into a tight, Monster Hunter-like cooperative boss battler that stuck the landing with a fun and well-presented story, a big character roster and a motivating endgame.
Over two years later, Cygames returns with Endless Ragnarok, a big expansion that not only adds lots of quality-of-life features to the original game, but also new characters and content and a deeper and more challenging endgame loop.
It’s not only just a handful of new quests, but continues the story, where Relink left off. The new characters are fun to play, the new roguelite solo modus addicting and rewarding, the summons fun to collect and finally the game gets proper crossplay across all platforms to keep the multiplayer alive. After spending an extensive time with the new content, it really gives the feeling of a Monster Hunter like G-Rank or Master Rank expansion.
A Darker Horizon: The Awakening of the Ragnalia
Relinks base campaign was a breezy, cinematic spectacle, throwing the player right into the action and respecting its time. The story followed Gran and the crew to stop the Astral Lilith. Endless Ragnarok takes a more apocalyptic theme. The expansion introduces so called Ragnalia, a new type of monsters heralding the end of the world. Mysterious gateways also open up through the skies of Zegagrande, teleporting the crew to otherworldly realms of chaos.
The story isn’t as dynamic as in Relink and most of the time is presented in cutscenes with characters just talking to another, but it serves as a vehicle to unlock new endgame tier difficulties and content, but also new gameplay mechanics. The mentioned Ragnalia are a step up from the usual enemy patterns of Relink and feature more aggressive enemy behavior. You really need a proper endgame team to start the expansions story with a power level of over 20000.
Expanding the Roster: The New Skyfarers
Thankfully Endless Ragnarok adds quite some exciting new characters to the already big roster of Relink. Each of them bringing something new to the table and have their own individual gameplay style.
Back from Relink, we are finally able to play Maglielle and Gallanza, who served as villains before. Maglielle and her weapons’ summoning playstyle is super fun and agile, while Gallanza serves as a new heavy hitting tank, with impactful hits that are really satisfying. New to the roster and early to unlock in the story are Beatrix and Eustace. While Eustace is a new ranged fighter with grenades and a rifle, Beatrics is a highly agile glass cannon damage dealer.
And once you finish the original story of Relink, you can unlock Fraux and Fediel. Fraux uses fiery attacks and The Devil for devastating combos, while Fediel, makes the battlefield her own and does substantial damage with her dragon powers.
Cygames didn’t cheap out to make the new characters interesting to play and spectacular to look at. Their animations and kits feel fresh and exciting.
The New Gameplay Loop: Conflux and Chaos
Midway through Relinks story, Cygames introduces a new gameplay mode through Endless Ragnarok, the so-called Conflux. The Conflux is a mysterious gateway to another realm that opens and throws you into shifting realms, where the rules of combat are constantly altered. It’s a highly replayable roguelite mode that gets expanded over the course of the story and changes the endgame loop of the game as well, thanks to its rewards.
During a run you delve into randomized realm and fight your way all the way to an endboss. Each time you beat a stage, you can choose where to go next. From different combat stages that require you to kill a certain number of enemies, survive waves or beat elites to dexterity portals, where you need to solve light puzzles to treasure rooms that give you additional rewards.
After each room you get powerful temporary bonuses that alter your attributes and abilities. From enhanced critical strike chance to more damage cap to afflicting status-based effects to enemies or straight up summoning explosions. It is up for you to decide what to pick, with the final boss in sight.
Once you finish a run you can choose from a list of different rewards that will help you level your characters, weapons or unlock new traits and improve things like sigils. Additionally during each run, you earn a currency that enables you to permanently buff your future runs in The Conflux. From simple attribute buffs to more options while choosing temporary bonuses to more variety in general.
It’s a rewarding and fun way to grind for materials and a welcomed alternative to grinding the same quests over and over again for specific items. Sadly, the mode is singleplayer only. This would have been a blast to do in coop. And hopefully this mode gets additional content post launch to make it even more motivating on the long term.
Hand in hand with The Conflux comes the new story and the new quest difficulty. People who found the “Proud” difficulty too easy can be happy that Endless Ragnarok introduces new difficulty levels beginning with Chaos. Chaos does not only introduce stronger versions of familiar bosses with new abilities, but also new bosses with mechanics that require more coordination and the use of the new summon system.
Gameplay Improvements & New Combat Mechanics
Talking about new systems, Cygames doesn’t shy away from introducing new systems to the already system heavy endgame of Granblue Fantasy: Relink. With people already busy maxing out weapons to unlock attributes, grinding the right sigils for their endgame characters and completing their masteries, Cygames introduces even more systems to make characters powerful.
During Endless Ragnarok Lyria gets the ability to channel up to four summons, the player is able to direct control for a short amount of time and use their attacks and abilities. Summons are a great way to mitigate massive damage from party wiping attacks and can interrupt bosses. Depending on their element and ability, they are also able to do massive damage to the bosses and delete large chunks of health from them, while other summons provide party wide buffs or instant attacks dealing massive damage.
Also during Link Time, Lyria can trigger a new extremely powerful chain attack called Primal Burst, which does extreme damage. This new cinematic chain attack overrides the standard Full Burst. It’s up to the player to decided which summons to bring for certain bosses? Do you need more defense or fast clearing attacks? Is this fight about survivability or do you need to avoid insta death attacks? While collecting new summons through beating bosses, it adds a new tactical layer to the endgame grind as well.
Another major addition to the gameplay systems are the new master traits and level. Each character has 3 different master traits which alter their playstyle and give massive passive bonuses, depending on what the player chooses. By spending MSP, you can level up a master trait and choose different bonuses. The more you level a master trait, the more major passive abilities you unlock. So for example Gran by putting a certain amount of levels into one of Grans master traits, he becomes a better offensive character and his normal attack deal additional 10% to 20% damage at the first stage of the trait. Another example would be Eugen, which has Master Traits that can either improve his charge attacks or make him a better grenade throwing debuffer and healer. It is up to the player to decide what gameplay style is best for their party, but the possible synergies are endless and the power gain is massive. Thankfully you are also free to reset the Master Traits at any time, so you can min/max them for specific bosses and can freely try different combinations.
It also shakes up the stale meta of Granblue Fantasy: Relink and gives new life to characters that felt behind in the clearing meta.
Multiplayer, Crossplay and the Nintendo Switch 2
A major issue of the original Granblue Fantasy: Relink was the fragmented player base, which is an issue that remains until today. If you try to play the original game today, you often do not find players to clear the quests with.
Thankfully with Endless Legend we do not only get proper cross platform multiplayer, so the player base is finally united, but with Endless Ragnarok they also introduce the game to the Nintendo Switch 2. During the review, playing in multiplayer felt good and I had barely any issues with connecting to other players. The netcode hold up to the visual spectacle and action.
Another new feature for multiplayer is that you can choose and select Backup Characters. Similar to some mobile games, you can put one of your characters in the Backup slot and people can choose to play with it. While you have the choice to replace one of your characters with the character of another player. So if you are in need of a specific powerful character to beat a boss or enhance your farming experience, check out the list and pick the character you need, if you haven’t levelled it yourself yet.
The Cost of Grind
In times where DLCs can cost as much as full games, it is only fair to point out that the price of the standard version of Endless Ragnarok is only 29.99 Euro, which proves all the new story content, characters and game modes. For newcomers and Switch 2 users the base game and expansion bundled only costs 59.99 Euro.
Given the sheer amount of content, a new campaign, six new and fun characters to play, The Conflux roguelite mode, summon system and an entirely new tier of endgame progression, the expansions’ price feels more than fair. Players will get dozens, if not hundreds of hours of playtime out of it, completing all the content and maxing out all the new characters and master traits.
Verdict:
Granblue Fantasy: Relink – Endless Ragnarok is exactly what you wish from an expansion. While the story presentation remains a bit stale, it doesn’t just add new content for the sake of content into an existing game, but it adds quality of life improvements to an already well rounded base game, adds new content throughout it and enriches the core combat loop with fun new systems, such as the summon system and master traits and much more, while simultaneously addressing some of the community’s biggest requests in shaking up the singleplayer mode with The Conflux and adding much requested crossplay to the game to make the multiplayer healthier.
The new characters are mechanically diverse and fun to master, and it will be exciting to see with what kind of party combinations the community will end up in the new and challenging endgame difficulties.
We would like to thank Cygames for providing us with a copy of the game for review purposes.
Granblue Fantasy: Relink - Endless Ragnarok (PC)
Whether you are a veteran skyfarer returning to optimize your builds and challenge the new content, or a newcomer looking for a fun and mechanically satisfying coop action RPG, Endless Ragnarok is the perfect package for you. Dozens, if not hundreds of hours of playtime await you in the skies of Zegagrande.
