I want to like this game. I REALLY want to be positive when talking about it. Granblue Fantasy Versus Rising clearly has so much love, detail, and content poured into it that I have to applaud it. However, there are so many issues that prevent me from truly recommending it to anyone who wants to get into fighting games.

Let’s start with the positives: the presentation and content are phenomenal for a fighting game. They took a page out of Xrd's graphical style and perfected it, creating a colorful world that really immerses the player. The voice acting is mostly great in both subbed and dubbed, and the ost is excellent with many well-written and technically impressive tracks. Combat feels fluid and while simple on the surface, has a deceptively high skill ceiling. There are also many collectables and customization options for you to unlock, and it evens brings back the digital figure mode from other arcsys games. You can even purchase the dlc characters and costumes with in-game currency (albiet, a rediculously high amount for each). All of these aspects make it very easy to be drawn towards the game, regardless if you have played the source material or not.

Despite all these positive, however, the flaws keep this game from being one of the best fighting games ever produced. These range from nitpicks, to issues that make the game sometimes extremely irritating to play. An extremely minor nitpick is how the story audio and graphics are desynced by a couple of seconds. Granted, I didn't buy this game for its story, but it's still sort of unacceptable for a triple A game. Another issue is the battle pass. Now, I'm not one of those people who downvote games just for having a battle pass, but my issue is that the game's battle passes just kinda sucks. While it is difficult to make battle pass rewards for a fighting game, the rewards granted are all extremely insignificant with the exception of the very last one, which is a brand new costume for a character. However, they only really make one costume per season, so if your main doesn't get anything cool, then there is really no reason to purchase the battle pass. Next, the game's matchmaking is also screwed up. In ranked, you will often be forced to fight players at the very top of your rank even if you just got into it. In casual matches, you will either be faced against someone way below your skill level, or someone with 6,000 matches on their record. The setting that filters opponents with similar skill levels doesn't seem to work. Additionally, while this isn't really the game's fault, I also wanted to mention how bad this game's community is. Now, every fighting game has its fair share of toxic players, but this game's playerbase mostly consists of drooling simps that are unapologetically obnoxious about how horny they are for their main. It makes someone like me really not want to interact at all with the community, which leaves me out of the loop of a lot of aspects of the game such as counterplay for the meta.

Speaking of the meta, the most egregious issue with the game is its meta. While no characters are unplayable, the game has quite a few horrifically overpowered characters, most of which being either new to Rising or dlc. Characters like Sigfried and Nier have been problematic since day one, and not much has been done to stop their dominance in high level play. Meanwhile, Anila got a million buffs to make her top tier, despite the fact that she wasn't struggling beforehand. And even a seemingly honest character like Djeeta can carry you all the way to the corner off of a single stray hit, while Zeta can obliterated half your health extremely easily anywhere on screen. While we've had a couple of balance patches, the devs seem too afraid to really do anything drastic when it comes to nerfs. Despite all this, the game was still relatively balanced.....until they started to release dlc. 2B and Beatrix were some of the most poorly-designed, brain-dead, and dowright broken characters at launch, with at least 90% of the players using them at their prime. This not only made online play extremely stale as you kept matching against the same character, but it was also detrimental to players' improvement, as they could not really learn other match-ups and could only really improve on fighting that one character. Even after nerfs, 2B and Beatrix still prove to be extremly aggravating to face and pollute a large portion of the matchmaking to this day.

All of these problems are greatly detrimental to the product's overall quality, but ultimately the reason why I believe the game is especially unfriendly to new players is because it's not technically a new game. It's an updated version of the first Granblue Fantasy Versus, with the biggest changes being the broken ex moves and the interesting yet poorly executed brave counter system. This means that new players are at an inherent disadvantage since a large chunk of the playerbase has been honing their skills for years. So unless they literally practice daily, new players will not catch up to the level of veterens. This is heart-breaking to me, as even though I have plenty of fighting game experience, I struggle to get to a level of skill that I am satisfied with when the rest of the playerbase is so knowledgable and skilled at the game. While Granblue is a great fighting game with a quality presentation, it doesn't change the fact that it is the only thing to ever make me consider quitting fighting games entirely.