I left everything to my full-assist squad and watched the Last Ragnarion fall
I finally picked up Granblue Fantasy: Relink again after a long break.
Before I stopped playing, I'd already beaten Proto Bahamut, gathered a decent set of gear and sigils, and gotten far enough to take on Lucilius. But leave a game alone for a while and you forget the controls. You forget the enemy attack patterns too. For someone coming back after months away, a hard action game is normally a pretty heavy lift.
This time around, though, things were different.
I didn't need to get any better.
After I raised my full-assist characters and CPU allies, this stopped being "a game where I control the character and beat the enemies" and turned into a game where I build the strongest auto-battle squad and watch it work.
And that's how I ended up beating the Last Ragnarion, the final boss.
I'm back after ages, and the CPU is absurdly good
Right after returning, I'd obviously forgotten a lot of the controls.
Lucilius's attacks are flashy, and the screen fills up with things that can kill you. I have zero desire to take Paradise Lost head-on, and the attacks coming from every direction just look like bunches of grapes to me.
They come from above. They come from below. They come from the sides, too.
Try to dodge it all by hand and you can't even tell what's going on.
But full assist dodges it.
While I stare at the screen going "this is brutal, this is brutal," the CPU allies calmly attack, dodge, land link attacks, and fill up the Skybound Art gauge.
I'm not even the party's commander anymore.
I'm just a spectator who happens to be standing on the battlefield.
Paradise Lost first, then The End
Less a final boss, more an examiner
The late-game enemies love giving you tests.
First, Paradise Lost checks whether you can dodge.
Next, The End checks whether you can deal enough damage within the time limit.
After that come the survival test, the positioning test, the mechanic-handling test, and even a sprint section.
At this point it's less a battle and more a practical exam.
And the examiner is dramatic about it, too.
"Can you endure this?" "Then face the next trial." "This is the final trial."
That's how it goes, trial after trial.
I never expected to be made to run in the middle of a fight.
This is supposed to be the final battle for the fate of the world, and suddenly it's "okay, start running from here." There's a cross-country endurance test built into the final boss fight.
But the full-assist squad handles that too.
Every time the examiner proudly sets a problem, the CPU gets it right.
The guy who kept saying "trial" and then just lost
It's pretty funny to look at it from the final boss's side.
He thinks he's an overwhelming being, handing out trial after trial to a mere challenger.
But the challengers clear every single one.
And he still doesn't drop the confident act:
"I can't believe you made it this far." "But how will you handle the next trial?" "This is the final trial."
He keeps on testing them.
And in the end, he just loses.
It's exactly like someone who kept testing a partner's love and abilities over and over, until the partner actually gave up on them.
I barely feel like I'm being tested at all. The CPU passes everything on its own, so the final boss gets hyped up by himself, piles on challenges by himself, and loses by himself.
After Lucilius and Bahamut comes the Last Ragnarion
In terms of sheer stature as an enemy, Lucilius is still the strongest.
The mythic look. The staging that feels like the end of the world. Paradise Lost. The End. Its own music, and an atmosphere fit for a final showdown.
Proto Bahamut gives you a real sense of fighting something enormous, too.
And what showed up after that was Ragnarion.
My first impression was blunt.
Isn't that just a golem, or maybe a beast type?
Look again, and it's a dragon.
After Lucilius and Bahamut, the last boss is a big dragon.
In an RPG, you'd normally beat the dragon first and then go on to fight the god. In Relink, you beat a god and a being on the scale of creation, and then a final dragon turns up.
It just doesn't land.
And the name is "the Last Ragnarion."
It sounds less like "the final enemy" and more like "the one that happened to be left over."
Instead of an absolute evil that will end the world, it has a lonely feeling, like hunting the last surviving member of an endangered species.
The looks and the movements feel familiar too, so it seems less like a brand-new final boss and more like a rebuilt version of an existing big boss.
Having it served up after Lucilius, I can't shake the thought:
"Is this really how it ends?"
Is Fedel smart, or did his horn take all his brainpower?
Late in the game, a seemingly important term, Omnis Zegalis, comes up.
It gives off the feeling of being tied to the root of the world, or to some dangerous power.
Fedel, who handles the explanations, says what a scholar would say.
But the more you listen, the stranger it gets.
He seems to know things, yet never commits.
He talks about grand matters, yet ends on a guess.
Summed up, it sounds like:
They're probably something impressive. No idea, though.
They might be final-boss material. They might be a forbidden thing of the world. They might even be made of Omnis Zegalis.
No idea, though.
I never did figure out whether Fedel is smart or not.
Maybe maintaining that giant horn eats up most of his knowledge and processing power.
Flashy yet light
The technical joy of Relink
Having reached the final trial, I was struck again by how light this game feels.
The screen is extremely flashy.
Huge enemies move, lasers fly, explosions go off, effects pile up, and your whole party uses their ultimate attacks.
And yet, it's surprisingly smooth.
If a Monster Hunter-type game lit up the screen this much, I suspect my setup would start dropping frames.
Relink stays stable despite how showy it is.
I assume it's well optimized, with battle-only stage layouts, careful limits on what gets drawn, and smart handling of effects.
Even when the screen is too flashy for a human to process, the console and the CPU characters don't bat an eye.
Only the player gets left behind, wondering "what is going on?"
Everyone's Skybound Art
But the enemy was already dead after the first one
The Ragnarion felt a little underwhelming as a final boss.
But the way the fight wrapped up was great.
Near the end of the battle, everyone's Skybound Arts chained together.
The first character fires theirs. The second follows. Then the third and fourth join the chain, and finally Proto Bahamut appears.
As a finisher for a final battle, it's perfect.
The only problem is that the enemy was already dead from the very first hit.
The first Skybound Art had already wiped out its HP.
Everything after that is a fully official overkill by the whole party.
Even so, the cutscene doesn't stop.
All my allies slam in their finishers one after another, and at the end Proto Bahamut brings down one huge blow.
In the end, our side's staging made up for the final-boss feel the Ragnarion itself lacked.
It felt less like beating "the Last Ragnarion" and more like disposing of the final enemy with Bahamut and forcibly dragging the story back up to a mythic scale.
Did the player even need to be there?
The clear time is fast.
The rating is high.
The CPU attacks, dodges, and fires off Skybound Arts.
I'm hardly doing anything.
By this point, I seriously think it.
Am I even necessary?
I'd assumed Relink was a game where you control a character yourself.
In the end, it wasn't.
You pick strong CPU allies, sort out their gear, hunt for the right sigils, and refine their ability builds.
Then you just send them out to the battlefield.
In other words, it's closer to a training simulation than an action RPG.
It's faster to raise the CPU's firepower and survivability than to improve your own dodging.
It's easier to build a setup that assist can handle completely than to memorize enemy attack patterns.
The playstyle I ended up with was:
A game about raising full-assist allies.
Is the edge of the world really an "edge"?
After I beat the Ragnarion, the story ended.
One thing stuck with me, though: how big the world is, as Lyria describes it.
We still don't know what the corners of this world look like.
The Granblue world has countless islands floating in the sky, connected by air routes. It isn't necessarily a sphere like the Earth we live on.
If you kept traveling, would you come back from the opposite side?
Or is there really an edge?
There could even be an enormous wall at the end of the sky, where the world itself just stops.
With the sky, islands, other worlds, the Astrals, and the laws of the world all mixed together, the world doesn't have to be built like a real planet.
The Ragnarion fight may be over, but the mystery of the world itself isn't.
If anything, precisely because I played to the end, a question lingers:
"So what exactly is this world?"
The endgame, once it's all over
And then I won.
It was over.
I cleared the trials. I beat the Ragnarion. Proto Bahamut delivered the final blow.
For now, there's nothing left to chase in the story.
What remains is gear hunting, sigil builds, character growth, time attacks, and high-difficulty farming.
It's endgame content through and through.
In my case, though, I'm not going to master the endgame by hand either.
I'll make the CPU even stronger. I'll refine the full-assist builds. I'll see how far I can get by leaving the fights alone. I'll build a squad that can earn an S++ rating even if I do nothing.
Normally, endgame content is where the player's skill gets tested.
But for me, it became
a place to test how far I can make myself unnecessary.
It wasn't me who cleared the final trial.
It was the CPU allies I raised.
And that's fine by me.
Final thoughts
The Ragnarion didn't land, but the ending did
After Lucilius and Bahamut, when a recycled-looking giant dragon showed up as the last boss, I'll be honest: it felt pretty lonely.
The name "the Last Ragnarion" feels more like a last survivor than a final showdown.
Fedel's explanations also sound like "probably impressive, no idea, though."
The final boss spammed trials, even made me run, and then died to the first character's Skybound Art.
Still, everyone's Skybound Arts chained all the way through, and Proto Bahamut closed it out.
Even if the enemy side lacks a bit of stature, our side's firepower and staging can force a finale into existence.
And above all, even a returning player who'd forgotten the controls could make it to the end through full assist and CPU training.
This game isn't only for people who are good at action games.
You don't have to dodge by yourself. It's okay if the enemy's attacks look like nothing but grapes. It's okay if you have no desire to take Paradise Lost head-on.
Build strong allies, then leave the rest to them.
At the very end, Granblue Fantasy: Relink taught me an unexpected answer.
The world can be saved even if the hero doesn't fight.
