Granblue Fantasy is huge in Japan. Enormous. The game is a smash hit. It’s been downloaded over five million times, and there’s a newly announced anime. Yet, you’ve probably never heard of Granblue Fantasy. Maybe you have!
This free-to-play PC and mobile game has quite a pedigree. It has music from former Final Fantasy composer Nobuo Uematsu and art from former Square Enix art and graphics director Hideo Minaba. No wonder this game has airships.
Cygames developed Granblue Fantasy and at this year’s Tokyo Game Show, the studio has only one game on display: This. And the Granblue Fantasy booth is one of the biggest at the show.
The booth is the same size as Sony’s. And for one game.
In real life, it is not this blurry.
The game is a turn-based RPG set in a Castle in the Sky sort of world where people live on floating islands and travel in airships. Players take on the role of a young protagonist who, through a turn of events, rescues and must travel with a young girl with a connection to an ancient, powerful, long-lost race.
Together, with various other characters, they fly the airship the Gran Cypher from island to island avoiding the pursuing wrath of an evil empire (stop me if you’ve heard this story before). I’m playing, but honestly the jury is still out on whether I really like this game or I’m getting caught up in the hype.
Here is a scaled replica of said airship (They will let you ride it, too!):
Oh, hi massive two-story screen advertising the game. Massive.
Fantasy, huh. I’ve heard that used by another JRPG company. I think.
There’s a giant building behind the screen. It houses a theatre.
Truly one of the most impressive booths at the show.
Coming to Tokyo Game Show by train, the very first sign of the show one will experience starts with walking down the stairs seeing a long line of posters advertising the game.
Many Japanese gamers have the Granblue Fantasy bug, and have it bad.
One of the game’s biggest draws is powerful rare characters, weapons, and summons that can be brought into your party by a random draw called a gacha. For 300 gems, a player can roll a gacha, or for 3000 gems they can roll for ten at a time with at least one guaranteed “super rare” or rarer.
Gems are obtained in the game or they can be purchased for real money, and purchase them people do. Where once my private twitter feed was full of people tweeting about how much they had sunk into THE iDOLM@STER Cinderella Girls, it is now full of people tweeting about how much they have sunk into Granblue Fantasy and the pretty rare characters they have gotten.
Granblue Fantasy is currently available in Japanese for iOS and Android platforms. The game is also playable on PC with Google Chrome.
Comments
3 responses to “The Biggest Game In Japan You’ve Probably Never Heard Of”
I just can’t understand why japanese people are so brainwashed by mobiles. There’s no comparison in quality between console games and mobile games. To me, to have a PC, PS4 or XBox One as the principal platform to play it’s just a natural processes of gaming, a question of logic and feeling.
I can’t accept that the country who most improved the games industry to trade a high performance console, and the confort of their couch for just a single fuc***** cellphone.
No matter how great can be a mobile game, there’s no way that it can surpass a console game.
Obviously because you’re not Japanese and don’t understand Japanese culture.
Japanese people have very busy lives – school, work, clubs, cram school, etc. Many of them don’t have the time nor luxury to sit at home for long periods of time playing games, so they play games during whatever time they can dig up. This is usually on the train when commuting to school or work, or maybe when you’re staying at a hotel or capsule hotel because of work, or even sleeping at the office. Hence mobile gaming and portable consoles form a big part of their gaming routine. They also have mobile games which are exclusive to their phones or carriers, e.g., DoCoMo.
concept sounds a LOT like Final Fantasy Record Keeper