The game has 3 modes: Tutorial, Story and Quest. Tutorial is self-explanatory. Story let's you play a short level finishing on a Boss Fight, and Quest mode offers three quests you can play solo with a party of NPCs or Online up to 4 players.
The combat is quite obviously build upon the skeleton that Platinum Games created back when it started development, it has a series of mechanics very reminiscent of their games. You have a dedicated dodge button which allows you to chain up to three dodges, but the third dodge has increased recovery time, and you can cancel almost any action into a dodge. There is a simplified dodge offset mechanic, which works virtually the same as Bayonetta but doesn't require you to hold down the attack button while dodging, and it has a dial-up combo system, though the numbers of combos is, of course, quite smaller compared to a game like Bayonetta. There is also a Lock-on system similar to the Soul series, as besides enemies it also allows you to target body parts of big bosses to hit their weaknesses and, supposedly, break body parts. Adding to this, the combat system has a dedicated block-button, which stops damage but not status effects, debuffs or unbockable attacks, and a skill system similar to Dragon's Dogma, where you can assign up to 4 skills to a combination of R1/RB and the face buttons. You can cancel any regular attack into a skill to allow for higher combo potential. Skill use a cooldown system similar to the original mobile phone, so they cannot be spammed. You also have a limited number of consumables you can use each quest/level to heal yourself or your party, so you also have to manage those and not waste them, specially if you play without healer as damage can be very high. There are also objects in the enviroment like explosive barrels you can pick and throw to damage enemies.
The game has numerous characters each with their own unique mechanic that changes how it plays and what it can do. Gran/Djeeta, the protagonist, can perform numerous combos combining their regular attack with his special attacks, hold the special attack to perform a charge attack and cancel combo finishers into his charge attack to perform it faster. Each time he/she performs a charged attack, finisher or link attack (more on this later) he will increase a level of his skills up to 4, which transforms his R1 skills into stronger versions. Others like Lancelot has a unique dodge that allows him to dodge and buff himself, and an infinite combo that will coat his swords in ice if performed long time enough, or Siegfried that has hyperarmor on his special attacks and so on and so for. Some character have numerous combos while other don't, having simple attacks with resource management. There is quite a lot of variety in gameplay styles. To this, each character has a set of skills that allows for different roles in the party. The protagonist, for example, had offensive skills, a healing spell and a spell that reduced incoming damage up to 70% of the next hit, allowing for a more support oriented playstyle
What I think separates GB Relink from others ARPGs are the numerous mechanics that it takes from the original mobile game that seem to encourage coordination between party members. Namely, the Link Attack System, the SBA system and the numerous support skills. The link attack system allows party members to perform a powerful link attack on the monster once their stun gauge has been filled. The enemy will become momentarily stunned, their attack interrupted and a prompt will appear if you are targeting said enemy to perform the link attack. When all party members perform their link attack, they will increase their Link percentage, and once is at 100%, performing Link attacks allow to activate "Link Time", which is similar to Witch Time in Bayonetta, slowing time, increasing your damage and how fast your skills come out of cooldown. SBAs (Skybound Arts) are super attacks that can be performed once you fill the corresponding gauge by attacking. What makes it interesting is that if 2 or more party members chain their SBA a Burst will occur, inflicting powerful damage to the opponent, so you always want to check how close are your party members to fill their SBA gauge before using yours. Using a SBA also fills their SBA meter too. by 10-15% aprox.
In the demo you fight mostly goblins as regular enemies. They had a surprising amount of variety, with the common and weak fighter goblin, archers and mages which are usually behind other enemies or in high places, and while weak can inflict a relatively decent amount of damage, wolf riders that can dodge and are quick, and big shield bearing hobgoblins that require more effort to kill and are adept fighters. Each one had different elemental affinities (mages were fire, archers Ice, Soldiers Wind) which determine which attacks are effective against them and make certain characters better at dealing with them. A nice amount of variety for what seemed to be a very early level in Story Mode.
But the meat of the game are on the bosses, which have very diverse movesets. As they lose health they will enter a state called Overdrive, which can be compared to the Rage state of MH. Enemies gain new attacks, become more resiliant and deal more damage and usually are the most dangerous part of their fights. This is usually the moment you want to use SBA chains to burst them and provoke a "Break", which stuns the boss and allows you to pummel on it. The bosses's attacks are very dangerous, being able to 1-2 hit your character if you don't build some HP on them. Their attacks can be divided in two types: regular attacks that you have to react to by looking at their animation, and telegraphed attacks which are marked a circles or lines on the ground (think something similar to FF XIV bosses). The first type can be blocked (though not too much or it will break your defense), the second one only dodged, though certain characters parries and skill allows them to nul the damage too. Of course, bosses also have elemental affinities, so planning your party composition is important too. Sometimes they will summon adds to harass your party.
When it comes to character building, Quest mode allowed some customization with level 10 characters. Besides skills and party composition, you can change their weapons, which also affects how much health they had. Each weapon also has a passive trait build. So in the demo, for example, the protagonist has a sword that increased his HP and another that increased his stun power, so you can easily build him to stun the enemy or to be tanky. Zeta, a lancer, had a critical rate up spear, and so on and so for. You could add up to 3 passive effects to each weapon, which ranged from increased attack, shorter cooldowns to more unique effects like increase in power at low or full health, status resistance, surviving mortal hits with 1 hp and more. It allowed for a surprising amount of customization together with skill and characters and I have the feeling there will be more effects in the full game to allow interesting customization. Visually there will be multiple characters skins and colours, nothing to crazy but is fine.
The level on Story Mode was reminiscent to Bayonetta 3; big open level with enemies encounters petered about, some hidden items and chests and some "puzzles" with rewards, like a transparent chest that can only be open by gathering a number of crystals within a time limit, with some light platforming elements. Characters speak with each other as you play and the number of cutscenes was ok, they were few and short so you mostly focus on playing. Quest mode on the other hand are something similar to MH, where there is a hub you can select quest, form parties with other players if you want to and then you are drop onto the quest. The quests on the demo were arena fights, first one against waves of goblins, and the second and third one against bosses, so no real level nor map to explore. I don't know if it will change on the full release. If you are down to 0 HP you will enter a critical state, and must wait to recover, use a one time item to heal yourself or wait for other party members to save you. While a party member is in critical state, the Critical Gauge will start to decrease. Once it reaches 0 is game over for the whole party, so you want to save quickly your critical companions. Quest have also secondary objectives, like beating the quest in a certain amount of time, performing certain actions a number of times or avoiding critical states. At the end the quest you are graded depending on the individual performance of each party member and the amount of objectives you have completed. Grades are from worse to best C, B, A, S, S+ and S++.
My personal opinions, I found the game very fun and addicting. The combat is simple but satisfying, there is a certain degree of experimentation and even a bit of player expression through combos, specially on small enemies. Each character feels quite dinstict and the surprising amount of party builds you can make encourages experimentation. I myself spend a good amount of times trying different combinations to try and reach better grades on the quests. Many skill have interesting effects, like parries, buffs that ranged from your typical "defense/attack up" to other more interesting ones like granting temporary invincibility, health drain or status inmunitty. There is room for smart skill usage to maximaze damage, specially in multiplayer. Using attack buffs when in Link Time or when a Boss is broken can be key to maximize damage, or using invincibility when the boss is going to use a big attack can reduce downtime, allowing to keep the damage going. NPCs were surprisingly skilled, it was very rare for them to get hit and you could even look at what they do to dodge attacks and learn from them. But of course they cannot use skill as intelligently as an human player, so I think once the game is released if you want to get the best grades you will party up with other players.
Bosses were fun and unique, each with different and distinct move sets, with the Golem being the one I liked the most. For example, the Golem had very dangerous and far reaching AoE attacks when on Overdrive, and at that point it will summon adds, Earth Elementals, that will inflict a status effect that immobilize you, which is very dangerous considering the high power of the Golem. And killing those adds allowed you to pick them up and throw them to to boss to inflict significant damage and stun damage. Certain very far reaching attacks you could jump to dodge and that made aerial combo relevant to take out adds safely while giving your back to the boss. The game controls well and the character is very responsive, it shows that Platinum Games were at a point working on it.
The game looks very beautiful, with kind of a painted style and the character design is very pleasing. The music is fantastic and suits the environments and the combat very well. The effects on attack and spells are very flashy and spectacular, and coupled with the animations it has good "game feel". Voice acting was ok, typical anime stuff. Overall the presentation is very good and it reminds me a bit to something like Tales of Arise in how beautiful it looks at times with that painted feel. Enviroments are also surprisingly detail, with a lot of different assets all around to make it feel like those places are more than just simply levels. Special mention to the hub area which is practically a small town.
Now, despite me liking the game so much, I think probably many codexers will hate it, because it does have certain flaws that can make it or break it for some. The biggest one: visual clarity. The attacks effects are beautiful, but with 4 party members it soon can become a clusterfuck of lights, voices and effects going all at the same time, no to mention damage numbers. It gets a bit of time to get used to it and the game does take some measures so you always know where you are in battle, like having a shilloutte of you character appear if there is a enemy or effect in front of him, but I can see some getting a headache just looking at the screen. After a while it didn't bother me anymore and I didn't have problem following what was happening, but is undeniable a issue of the game.
The second one is that combat is very button "smashy", though of course it also depends on your character. But enemies and bosses have a good amount of health, and many character mechanics encourage the player to be always attacking and performing combos. Not to mention mechanics like Link Time pretty much encourages you to spam all of your skill for maximum damage. So if you hate enemies with a lot of health or combat where you have to smash combos and use a lot of skills, you probably will hate GBF Relink. And of course it has cooldowns in an action combat system. I though they worked pretty well here and is a good adaptatoin of the original game skills, but is clear this will be also a deal breaker for some. Finally Lock-on is kind of fucky, specially with groups of regular enemies where it becomes hard to change target to the enemie you want at times. Thankfully you can play without it for the most part but it is still useful for targeting bosses weak points and securing Link Attacks, so I recommend using it when necessary.
The difficulty so far is kind of low. The only really challenging enemy was the golem in my opinion, and he isn't even hard to defeat, just really hard to get the highest score (I haven't be able to do so, can't kill it in less than 3 minutes, probably someone more skilled and smart than me will). And it worries me because the Golem is level 25 while the party is level 10. Now, to be fair, the two first quests are marked as easy and the golem one as normal, so is entirely possible that they were meant to be easy. I have the feeling the difficulty will be similar to modern MH, were low rank is very easy, high rank is easy to normal depending on the monster and then G rank is hard and the post game is were it becomes very hard and certain fights are hard as balls. So I wouldn't be surprised if the full game it ends up similar.
The anime aesthetics of course can be a deterrent, specially because it is "cutesy" modern anime. While there are some manly characters, the rooster is form mostly by pretty boys and girls, some little girl and some weird halflings. The setting is your typical JRPG fare and so is the writing and humor. Unrelated to this there are two assist modes, one is similar to the "assit" modes in Bayonetta and DMC (characters perform combos automatically and you just have to press one button repeatedly) and a "Full Assist" mode where you only move the character and he fights without any imput. Yeah, is pretty fucking ridiculous, but I guess they have to keep the whales happy that haven't played anything else but the gacha game.
In conclusion, If the game doesn't end up being shit on release, i think it will be a niche ARPG with a dedicated fanbase, if I'm quite honest, even if it ends up selling well. As an adaptaton of the gacha it does a surprisingly good job while still having a competent combat system. The focus on bosses may not be everyone cup of tea and is undeniable that it has a lot of degenerate modern designs (cooldowns, visual markers for attacks), but it makes those elements work surprisingly well and add a degree of coordination and party play that is not usual for many ARPGs. The multiplayer will probably be one of the most interesting parts, with bosses that require intimate knowledge of the fights and good synchronization between players to bring down fast, while still offering a solid option on competent NPC party members. If the difficulty end up being good, I will certainly enjoy the game quite a bit, I was surprised on how much I ended up liking the demo
in all versions of the game by putting shorts underneath the skirts.
