Trivia / Granblue Fantasy: Relink

• Colbert Bump: Relink has been teased for a long time (its first trailer was shown in 2016), but it received more widespread attention from 2023 onwards, especially when a demo was made available for the Playstation before its official release on February 2024 and various Let's Players and Vtubers (such as those from hololive and Nijisanji) livestreamed it. It's also partly an intentional advertising move, as a stream may outright state that it's sponsored by Cygames.
• Creator Backlash: In a January 2020 interview, Director Fukuhara admitted that Relink was announced way too early, and it isn't good to make players wait for a long time.
• Creator-Driven Successor: Though it's a Granblue Fantasy spin-off and has many gameplay concepts derived from its source material, Relink has also drawn a lot of comparisons to fellow Cygames title Dragalia Lost (both have fantasy settings, their boss fights have an Overdrive and Break Gauge where they're more aggressive and vulnerable respectively, and you get to play multiple characters with their own unique playstyle), so much so that fans of both games consider Relink to be a higher-quality console version of Dragalia Lost (as the latter was only available for smartphones and is no longer playable by normal means).
• Dueling Works: Even though Granblue Fantasy: Relink has a real-time action gameplay while Persona 3 Reload is turn-based, they are both 3D anime RPGs that released just almost a day apart on February 1 and 2, 2024. It was inevitable that there are comparisons and choices on which game would be focused on first if the gamer can't play both of them at launch.
• Milestone Celebration: The game finally released in 2024, the year of Granblue Fantasy's 10th anniversary.
• Playing Against Type: Robbie Daymond's wheelhouse typically entails voicing youthful heroes. While Id is close in age to Gran/Djeeta, his deep and gravely voice is more evocative of Kenshiro than most of his other characters.
• Posthumous Credit: This game marks Kiyoyuki Yanada's (Ghandagoza's Japanese voice actor) last role as he passed away in 2022.
• Release Date Change: Due to the game's very early announcement in development, it frequently had to push back its release date.
  • The 2016 Djeeta Reveal Trailer and an interview from the director reveals that Relink was originally supposed to have a release window in 2018, but was delayed because its scope expanded (a common cause for Troubled Production) and Cygames not wanting to rush the project just to meet the initial deadline.
  • A livestream presentation on December 12th 2020 revealed the game was be slated for release sometime in 2022. The build that was shown there was still in the alpha phase of development.
  • The game was pushed back again to 2023 stating that more time was needed for debugging, balancing, and polishing.
  • Then it was delayed again to Q1 2024 (likely to avoid cannibalising sales from its sister Granblue spin-off Granblue Fantasy Versus: Rising), with February 1, 2024 as its final release date.
• Troubled Production: PlatinumGames had originally signed on to co-develop the game with Cygames in 2016, but they left the project entirely in February 2019, leaving Cygames to handle the rest of development (on a platform most of the developers now involved had little experience with), with a publicly-released statement mentioning that their contract for the game has ended; Platinum's branding and logo were also removed around this time, which was regarded as a surprising move. There was also an apparent shift in the game's plot around this time (gameplay footage from 2018 on showed Gran being playable, when him/the Captain overall being out of action was a core plot conceit of the original pitch, which in 2016/17 was going to focus a bit more on the then otherwise-neglected "main" crew). Cygames also moved its release date multiple times, and a 2019 interview had a director admitting the game's scope expanded significantly during development as Granblue overall continued to evolve.
• What Could Have Been:
  • A December 2020 livestream revealed that there originally would've been a new protagonist named "Blue" as the lead character of Relink who has a design based on Djeeta, only for her to be scrapped after it was determined that Gran/Djeeta could lead a game as their own character. Elements of her design were eventually incorporated into the unique costume that Gran/Djeeta obtain over the course of Relink's main plot (as Blue looked a heck of a lot like Djeeta in the first place).
  • The 2016 Djeeta Blue trailer showcased a very early version of the prologue and Chapters 1 and 2, where a cavern map was shown in several scenes of the trailer, but said cavern map does not appear in the game. In the final game, a forest map takes the place of Chapter 1.
  • Early development screenshots of Metera◊ being in the game have existed since 2017, though she is notably absent from the game at launch.
• Word of God: After it was announced that PlatinumGames' contract on the game has ended on February 2019, there was a looming worry on the state of Relink, with fans wondering if Cygames would start over from scratch. A Famitsu interview on March 2019 and statements from the producer confirmed that Cygames has inherited the leftover progress from the collaboration with Platinum^note On top of the game project itself, director Yasuyuki Kaji and an unnumbered amount of staff were transferred over from Platinum to work fulltime for Cygames, and won't make any drastic changes from it on top of hiring more staff to catch up with the development's pace. Given how the game came out five years later, however, it's not entirely clear how much of the original Platinum work survives in the game as printed.
• Working Title: The game was initially titled Granblue Fantasy Project Re:Link. It was only until November 2018 when Cygames trademarked the game's final title, dropping the word "Project" and normalizing "Re:Link" into a single word. The logo was also updated◊ and no longer contained the game's Japanese title as compared to the original version◊.
• You Sound Familiar: Some of the voice cast for Granblue Fantasy Versus and its sequel Rising have roles here:
  • Sean Chiplock, who played Lucillus in Rising, plays Rolan.
  • Laura Post, who voiced Zooey in Versus and Rising, voices Historiah.

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