Granblue Fantasy: Relink Suggestion Compilation, With New Foreword and Afterword

Disclaimer: No, I didn't steal this. Max Depravity is another alias I use. I even took the rare step of posting the Google Doc on Reddit under my usual username.

 

7/10/26: I fixed the Afterword a bit to clarify my points better.

Foreword

 

As I mentioned in my last article, I'm reposting my Granblue Fantasy: Relink suggestion compilation to this blog to better preserve it and I wanted to do it before the upcoming expansion, Endless Ragnarok, releases. I had to paste the content of the entire Google Doc without formatting, then re-add the formatting to properly work with this blog. I fixed some mistakes such as bad grammar and missing words, but the actual suggestions themselves have not been changed. Also, I had the misfortune of learning most header formats don't work properly due to my blog theme, so I'm only using Major Header and resizing text for section and subsection titles like I used to do.

 

As for the suggestions themselves, I think they as a whole are still solid even a couple of years later. However, I should have acknowledged the influence of more games on my suggestions. For example, the Boss Rush suggestion was definitely influenced by Hades and similar roguelite games. Meanwhile, Rogue Mode Exploration and Expeditions also drew inspiration from games such as Risk of Rain 2.

 

What follows is the original contents of my suggestion compilation with the fixes I mentioned. Also, for those who are curious, Cygames was accepting feedback on Relink and I did send them the entire Google Doc as my feedback shortly after posting it on Reddit.

 

Improving Genshin Impact, Master's Thesis Edition

About a year and a half ago, an upcoming game caught my interest due to comparisons being made between it and Breath of the Wild. As someone who liked that game but recognized that it was far from perfect and could be improved upon in many ways, I wondered what this game would be like and how it would improve upon the game that clearly served as its source of inspiration. As I've already made clear in past articles, the fact that the game was releasing on mobile was not an issue for me. Such a concern was also dampened by the fact that the game was also going to be released on PC and as it turns out, the game eventually released on mobile, PC, and PS4.

However, while the game made a solid first impression, I rapidly noticed potential content design issues that made the Warlords of Draenor expansion for World of Warcraft seem good by comparison. Unfortunately, as I progressed through the game, these concerns were sadly confirmed and I became annoyed that yet another game fell into the trap of using what I consider to be flawed game design philosophy since it tries to make player miserable to generate profit more than it tries to make players happy to generate profit. Such concerns, which I will go into more detail on below, were echoed by critics and players alike.

Many months and numerous arguments with fellow players later, it has become apparent that miHoYo, the company behind the game, seems more or less content with how their game is designed. While some meaningful content has been developed and released, much of it is rife with arbitrary limitations. In fact, the repeatable content that the game has to offer, especially for endgame players, has largely remained unchanged and still involves waiting for at least a few hours or the expenditure of money to meaningfully engage in. This factor among others has me worried about this game that I want to like, but clearly needs improvements. Therefore, in this article I will be providing an extensive list of suggestions to resolve what I believe to be problematic about the game.

However, before getting into the meat of the article, I want to address why I'm suddenly writing a Genshin Impact article instead of writing more articles on World of Warcraft. To put it simply, I'm on a break from World of Warcraft and I'm unsure if I'll be playing the game again any time soon. The reasons why are largely similar to the ones I made in the article on why I wouldn't be playing Classic WoW. However, I still have topics I want to write articles on and an article about a game that has content design issues similar to some past iterations of World of Warcraft seems like a good place to start, so without further ado...