Granblue Fantasy Relink Endless Ragnarok - Co Op Tips From The Devs

With Granblue Fantasy Relink Endless Ragnarok dropping later this year, many new people might be tempted to jump in, or even be persuaded to try out the game by their friends who have already cleared the base game experience. 

Thankfully, for anyone wondering things like, "how do you quickly clear Relink" or "how should I think about co op in Endless Ragnarok", the game's Creative Director Tetsuya Fukuhara and Director Sanshiro Hidaka had quite a bit of advice to share for new Skyfarers. checking out the expansion to Cygames' action RPG.  

Getting to Endless Ragnarok 

One of the big questions would naturally involve accessing Endless Ragnarok. If you're jumping onto the Nintendo Switch 2 version or just joining your friends for the first time, you might be thinking you want to blast through the early content to get to the new stuff.

"We don't have a direct skip feature. New players won't be able to skip straight to endless ragnarok content. However we have rebalanced the base Relink content, we've added new character progression systems and also we're adding Conflux, which provides a lot of material for players to more easily develop their weapons and characters", Hidaka says. 

"For those that played Relink, the hardest difficulties of that game were maniac and proud, so if you play The Conflux that should set you up quite well for taking down Maniac and Proud quests. So if you really want to get to Endless Ragnarok as a completely fresh player, you can just play The Conflux multiple times. That's the fastest way to catch up", he adds.

Of course, if you don't want to spend valuable bossfight time poring over character builds for your whole party, Fukuhara also said they're adding another feature that should be familiar to gacha game players: Backup Characters. 

"Of the characters you have registered, you can search through them and add someone else's developed character directly into your party and use that developed version of the character. 
You can actually borrow an original Relink player's super strong character to help you more easily clear content and make progress with your own characters", he says.

They also shared that those looking to build their hyper specialized parties can also look forward to improved grinding overall. A big part of this is the game's Sigil system- where they promised that sought-after Sigils would be easier to obtain, as well as newer ones coming to the game. 

"We want bosses to challenge players in a more strategic way. So you'll need to find the right sigil setup to tackle different bosses. So they need to be easier to obtain so you can focus on different strategies that you need", Fukuhara says.

"We've taken away the burden of collecting these materials and we're putting the focus on which weapon should I equip, which sigil loadout do I go with, do I build myself for defense, do I build myself for offense, which master traits do I focus on to pick a playstyle, and which characters am I bringing to this fight. That's where I want the players focus to be, not on just simply collecting", he says. 

One advantage of reworking the progression system? Getting to throw in harder bosses. While the devs promised a bossfight on par with Lucillius wasn't waiting in the story, they made no such guarantees for postgame content. 

"If you're asking does this mean we're not including content that's harder than Lucillius, actually there is content harder than Lucillius. That's because we're introducing Master Traits, which makes character even stronger than they were before. You can imagine, if you unlock all of those Master Traits, you could clear Lucillius relatively painlessly.", Fukuhara says. "We've prepared some appropriate challenges for after the credits roll on Endless Ragnarok". 

The two also had one additional piece of advice: although the game did add new sequences to base Relink, they weren't worth starting over. 

"If you're playing from your save data from before, it actually forces you to watch the new sequences. So there's no danger of missing those", Fukuhara says. 

Both directors heavily reiterated  that outside of restarting the game on Nintendo Switch 2, if players wanted to experience Endless Ragnarok to not attempt a new save since there would be immediately new things to do, like the Masteries for characters as well as collecting Summons from the Endless Ragnarok quests. 

Much Ado About Summons

One of the big attractions to Endless Ragnarok is the new Summon system. Each character can equip a Summon, to be deployed when they fill up the shared Summon Gauge. Yet, Fukuhara had some advice on choosing summon loadouts, especially for co-op players. 

"One way to think about summons is like a bomb in a shooting game. If you use a bomb in a shooting game, it completely changes the state of battle in a quick and temporary fashion. That's similar to summons in Endless Ragnarok. Once you use them, they have a powerful effect that changes things drastically.", he says.

Does that mean everyone should be dropping huge nukes? Not entirely. Fukuhara explained that there was an advantage to running a mix of high and low-cost summons. 

"However, let's say I have a really cheap summon. A Summon that only costs one part of the summon gauge. When I use my cheap summon, it will lower the cost of all the player's other summons", he explains. "If I have a cheap summon, a 1-cost summon, and my ally has a 3-cost summon, when I use my 1-cost it will lower their 3-cost into a 2-cost".

If you liked Granblue Fantasy characters but didn't care for the mobile game, Granblue Fantasy Relink sees those systems and gameplay translated into a co op action RPG system. While both Fukuhara and Hidaka have promised that the companion AI have been upgraded to handle the new curveballs thrown by Endless Ragnarok, and if you're interested there's a demo available today to check out.