if I had a nickel for every surprise expansion to a game I loved from 2024 announced in 2026, I'd have at least two nickels.
granblue fantasy is, as previously elucidated on, something that wriggled its way into my psyche a literal decade ago now, and I loved the base game of relink when it came out, and in spurts as its player base dwindled over the months afterward. even as this year started, I was thinking about it, doing my best at finding excuses to play with friends, proselytizing its virtues as a standalone introduction to the franchise, you get it.
and then, in february, in a nintendo direct, one of the few places where Gaming News airs in a communally-shared attention pool, an announcement of an expansion landed. it's probably not surprising that I was pumped. if nothing else, this meant the player base would return for a while, and I could see myself finally getting to play with people, maybe get some more friends in, and enjoy the grind some more.
apparently, the producers were shocked at how well the game performed, and wanted to respond to the love the fans had for the game and, in doing so, decided that there was a lot of work to be done in making this expansion. even if we look at it pretty cynically, and assume their decision to make an expansion was only to chase a bunch of money, it's kinda hard to see why they'd do this in particular over investing in the original browser game.
if you'll permit the minor digression: I've played some other gacha games recently. I picked up goddess of victory: nikke (the cover shooter game with an inordinate amount of tits and ass, yes) and have been sticking with that, and I've also dabbled in blue archive and arknights endfield, and plan on getting to the original arknights once the pc client launches in august.
what this dabbling has reminded me is that 3d development is fucking expensive, both in terms of money and of manpower. the modern 3d gacha strain is always going to bottleneck production at the character design process, because while it is easy to design characters that look appealing in a 2d drawing, converting that design to a workable 3d one is an order of magnitude more work, especially designs that players are going to be spending on, seeing, and scrutinizing for endless hours.
endfield, the closest I've gotten to the hoyoverse style of character pacing, has five total minimum-rarity operators. even the next rarity up only has nine, and three of those you can get for playing the story. you will see endless swathes of those Rs/4★ and SRs/5★ while chasing the SSRs/6★, of which there are only currently fourteen, all segregated into their own banners, so you'll never actually see the entire pool anyway.
it might be unfair to compare endfield to nikke, which has been going for three and a half years, but their lack of interest in developing Rs and SRs are shared; the thing is, though, that with the divergence in dimensions, there is a different level of production that can work for nikke that can't work for endfield. nikke is built on live2d, and while the jiggle physics will probably set off an innumerable number of feminists (and I get it), it's clearly a quicker workflow than a full 3d style would allow for.
I think the divide, now that I think about it, is clearly visible when a game doesn't just have character gacha, but a separate weapon gacha to soak up even more of your attention and capacity to tolerate skinner boxes. if you have to gear up your individual characters with RNG-doled weapons, you're creating extra steps for people to spend money on to make up for the fact that your character pool is uninteresting and small.
because, honestly, I think gachas conceptually don't work without a commitment to a large pool of characters. the game will obviously shift into relying on SSRs exclusively when you get deep enough, but if you don't let your Rs and SRs have some real design space to exist, the pool is going to feel miserable. and the best way to have a huge breadth of characters is to exist in a space that can turn around those ideas quickly. I guess what I'm saying is that gacha games should all be 2d to live up to my ideals.
granblue shaped those ideals, obviously. I have 786 characters on my account, and more than a third of those are Rs/SRs, all characters that I've accrued over the years, so many of them beloved in minor ways by the playerbase, acknowledged with SSR versions that represent pieces of their growth over the twelve years this game has now been running. it feels nice to see these characters get SSRs or have their existing SSRs get new uncaps with attached character development.
all of this is to say: I truly appreciate, having played both relink and endfield in the last couple of months, just how much work went into relink, and especially endless ragnarok, in response to the love the audience had for it. it wasn't enough for them to add six new characters (one of whom is my favorite of the six dragons), half of which were fresh to any 3d state. it wasn't enough that they added three major new bosses and tweaked all of the existing ones to have more patterns like any good monster hunter g-rank/master-rank expansion. somehow, they even took all twenty-eight characters and gave them three major playstyles to focus on from the ground up, and then they future-proofed it against the eventual decay of multiplayer options, making it way more accessible and reasonable to play it and do the absurd grinds solo! it's a genuinely insightful amount of work for a game's expansion.
it's funny, in abstract, that they were surprised by the support for the obvious love they had for their project, a project that took seven years to come out from its announcement, that borrowed help from platinum games before continuing to progress on it in-house. there's so much passion in this game. the original browser game, too, is still going strong, somehow. I'm still dabbling in it here and there, it's got an official steam release (with some huge caveats), they had meg and mari get married (happy pride), and it seems a lot more sustainable to develop for a browser-based 2d turn-based game than a 3d action rpg you'd need a beefy-ass phone for. the gacha model is, of course, financially and ethically suspect, but not everything needs to pursue the lofty profits of live service high-fidelity anime action games.
that said, relink will apparently be releasing outfits for characters in the future, and honestly, that's the kind of DLC I don't think I'll mind paying for. they have done so much goddamn work making this expansion, and I might want to make my characters cuter while I defy infinity and chase the end of this "endless" grind.
because, of course, there is an end to this endless ragnarok, and like all things, that's why it is worth loving.