Trivia / Granblue Fantasy Versus

• Acting for Two:
  • Gran and Lancelot are voiced by Yuki Ono, with Versus as the first work where the two have voiced interactions with each other.
  • In the English dub, Charlotta and Ferry are voiced by Cristina Valenzuela.
  • As of Rising, Kira Buckland now voices both Lyria and 2B. With 2B's inclusion, Kyle McCarley gets to pull double duty as both Gran and 9S.
• Author's Saving Throw: After no announcement was made for rollback netcode at EVO 2022 when most other games got rollback announcements, many players lost hope that the game would ever see an update. In January 2023, Cygames announced the reason said update never came; because they were working on a sequel, Granblue Fantasy Versus: Rising. One that would finally allow for not only rollback implementation, but also crossplay.
• Colbert Bump: The Fighting Game Community took notice of the Granblue franchise once certain known FGC personalities/streamers/players such as Daigo, Fuudo, Justin Wong, Sajam and Maximillian Dood played and commented on GBVS, as well as certain major announcements such as the inclusion of the game in the main EVO 2020 lineup (EVO 2020 unfortunately got cancelled however).
• Content Leak:
  • When the game was updated with Beelzebub and Narmaya on March 3, 2020, some of the Color Pack Set DLCs on the Asian Playstation Stores accidentally leaked the 5th DLC character for Season 1 - Zooey (who was kept in secret and planned to be announced on the 6th Granblue Anniversary Livestream on March 8). It didn't end there, Zooey was leaked again on March 6 when a preview of the Season Pass DLC◊ revealed her GBVS design.
  • Even before Djeeta, Soriz and Zooey are officially released, the Steam port on March 13, 2020 already had DLC preview images for the aforementioned characters' Palette Swaps, alongside fellow DLC characters Beelzebub and Narmaya.
• Dueling Works: With Samurai Shodown, specifically the 2019 installment. It started when this game's beta and the demo for SamSho fell on the same date in late May 2019. And even if Granblue Versus got released a year later, their PC versions were also close. While SamSho came first on the PS4 than GBVS, it's GBVS that received a Steam port on PC first on March 13, 2020. A week later on the same month, Samurai Shodown also received a PC port, but on the Epic Games Store instead.
• #EngineeredHashtag: Prior to the release of the game, the director conducted a poll for both the English and Japanese Granblue fans to choose the acronym which will be used in promoting the game. Results favored "GBVS", and this acronym is later used for the first time in Ladiva's Reveal Trailer and its official tweet. Following this chosen acronym, those who have signed up for the Closed Beta test of the game were encouraged to use a set of specific hashtags to represent the characters they play as.
• Fan Community Nicknames: Official Twitter announcements and promos related to the game would sometimes address players as "Skyfarers".
• Inspiration for the Work: In a Famitsu Interview (translated in English here), the developers mentioned that Versus would be a "ground-based" fighter similar to Street Fighter II.
• Invisible Advertising: Early on, the game was mostly advertised for the Japanese; its early trailers were dubbed only in Japanese, and it was unveiled on 2018 and usually promoted on the Japanese-based livestream events for the main Granblue Fantasy gacha, or through the game's official Japanese YouTube channel. These meant that English-speaking gamers were initially aware of GBVS only if they were already fans of the Granblue gacha, or through word-of-mouth from FGC content creators and the Closed Beta tests on 2019. International English-based advertising only came afterwards, but it's still shorter in comparison to the Japanese advertising; the game is published to the West by XSEED Games and Marvelous, who, despite the Japanese launch date had been already confirmed, still adamantly kept silent about the Western launch dates (March 3, 2020 for PS4 NA by XSEED Games, and March 27, 2020 for PS4 EU by Marvelous Europe) and only revealed them when the game was near its debut time.^note They didn't even delay the game because of the English dub, as Cygames themselves handled everything about localization, and the Asia versions already have the English options available The game was also ported to PC via Steam on March 13, 2020, but it was announced only on Narmaya's reveal trailer (two weeks before its official release), and meant that PC gamers would play it earlier even if the PS4 EU release date was announced first.
• Limited Special Collector's Ultimate Edition: The game's limited edition in JP/Asia and NA/US will include the box to store the contents in, the game itself, an artbook, soundtrack, a DLC code to redeem a PS4 theme and avatars, and color pack DLC. The JP/Asia LE will include the Season 1 pass as a product code, while the NA LE won't have it. Although, the EU/PAL LE has since been cancelled citing time constraints and production issues. The game will still be released in EU/PAL regions physically and in various digital editions.
  • However, purchases of the game will include a product code to redeem 1 of 4 items on the mobile Granblue Fantasy game. (Gold Brick, Sunlight Stone, Sephira Evolite, or 10 Damascus Crystals.)
• Meme Acknowledgement: XSEED Games went along with the "potato" Fan Nickname for Charlotta when they tweeted her during National Tater Tot Day.
• Newbie Boom: Similar to Dragon Ball Fighter Z before it, Arc System Works' attachment to the title, in addition to the success of the former, had people taking a big interest in the Granblue IP, especially in the West. This also caused some fighting game fans to research on what Granblue Fantasy is all about, some even trying out the gacha game itself.
• The Other Darrin:
  • Due to Mark Ishii going on a temporary hiatus, Mitsuhiro Ichiki provided Elsam's new dialogue whenever Lowain's opponent is Belial, Cagliostro, or Yuel. Starting with Anre's inclusion, Ishii returned to the role.
  • Percival's English voice is done by Mark Whitten for Versus Rising instead of Anthony Sitoy.
• Playing Against Type: Patrick Seitz may be known in most anime/game circles for his deep, manly voices for Dio Brando, Ragna the Bloodege, Scorpion and Cervantes. In Granblue Versus, he voices the effeminate macho wrestler Ladiva.
• Refitted for Sequel: The gacha game's "What Makes The Sky Blue II: Paradise Lost" event didn't provide enough lore or backstory covering Beelzebub, because Belial was the primary antagonist at that time. Granblue Versus finally covered these gaps via the RPG Mode's story.
• Release Date Change:
  • The first promotional trailer showed a 2019 release date window, but an announcement at the Granblue Fantasy Summer Stream later revealed February 6, 2020 as the final release date in Japan.
  • Soriz's gameplay trailer ends by teasing that Djeeta's gameplay trailer would be released on March 31, 2020. However, the latter was revealed a day earlier than that.
  • Rising was supposed to be released on November 30, 2023, but it got pushed back to December 14, 2023 instead. According to Director Fukuhara, additional time was needed to "put the finishing touches on the game", due to the team having to rework the game's mechanics and battle design after the first online beta test was held on July.
• Role Reprise: Those who voiced the English dub for the Granblue characters in the "Brigade of the Sky" expansion of Shadowverse return to voice the characters featured in this game. In addition, every cast member from the anime also returns to their roles.
  • Returning from NieR: Automata, Kira Buckland and Yui Ishikawa reprise their role as 2B in their respective languages. They are joined by Kyle McCarley and Natsuki Hanae as 9S, D.C. Douglas and Hiroki Yasumoto as Pod 042, and Cassandra Lee Morris and Keiko Isobe as Operator 6O.
• She Also Did: Leona Renne, the English voice for Anila in Rising was also the localization director for the Trails Series and a few of the Ys games. Anila marks one of her first few voice acting roles.
• Spoiled by the Merchandise: The Sofmap Bonus Illustration◊ shows Vaseraga with his eyes uncovered, a detail that was only subtly hinted but not outright revealed by his Earth version's artwork in the gacha game.
• Throw It In!:
  • The weapon skin feature was added after they realized they could give Lancelot's sword to Gran for fun, which the developers found to be really neat and decided to expand it into a full-fledged feature for all fighters.
  • Zeno Robinson adlibbed saying "Let's doeth this" for Vane's intro with Grimnir, thinking it would be funny for him to respond to Grimnir's florid dialogue with his own goofy line, and expressed thanks to the recording team for keeping that in the game.
• Troubled Production: The game was published to the West on March 3, 2020 for PS4 NA by XSEED Games, and on March 27, 2020 for PS4 EU by Marvelous Europe. However, Marvelous outright stated "time constraints and production delays" as the reasons why the physical Premium Edition had to be cancelled.
• What Could Have Been:
  • In the first beta, if you unleash any Skybound Art or its "Super" variant, all of your four skills go into cooldown. This would prevent the offensive player from spamming unique skills immediately after a super move. However, later beta builds of the game and also the full game has since changed this mechanic so that using Skybound Arts no longer drain all 4 of your skills.
  • Every character was originally planned to have a Primal Beast they could summon, but since it became too much of a stretch to justify why certain characters had a connection to a Primal Beast lore-wise, it was scrapped with Gran, Katalina, and Lowain as the only remnants of this plan.
  • Cygames planned for Colossus' original version to be a boss, but Arc System Works asked if they could use Colossus Omega instead, since they found the latter to be much cooler and imposing as a boss.
  • Lowain was not originally planned to have his bros as playable characters since H.P.A. was a standard rush attack but they thought it'd be more fun to have them help in the fight.
  • Cygames explained during Anre's reveal that the Eternal candidate to be in the game was narrowed down to be either of the group's two founders, Anre or Seofon. The former was prioritized over the latter for being a Harvin, a rather underrepresented race in Versus.
• Word of God:
  • The director mentions that for deciding on the initial roster, the team prioritized those who would fit more into the common character/playstyle archetypes of the Fighting Game genre before the fan-favorite characters.
  • The Closed Beta Test Matchup of Daigo and Fuudo also contains commentaries from Tetsuya Fukuhara of Cygames and Kazuto Sekine of Arc System Works explaining the design decisions and fighting game archetypes for the initial five characters such as Gran and Katalina being the Shotoclone Skill Gate Characters, Charlotta's crown having a hurtbox, Ferry being the "zoner" archetype, etc.
  • Granblue fans have been scratching their heads wanting to know a reason why the PC/Steam version of GBVS lacks the bonus codes that can be redeemed for items in the original gacha game (thus making them exclusive to the PS4). An interview with Tetsuya Fukuhara said that Sony was instrumental in developing the bonus code system... perhaps a reason to why it is exclusive to PS4.
  • According to a 2020 Famitsu interview, despite Djeeta appearing to be stronger than Gran in the spin-off material, they're actually on the same power level with Djeeta only seemingly having more skill/experience in order to differentiate the two protagonists from each other for fear that them being too similar would be "boring". More in-jokes are also incorporated into her character to separate her from being more of a traditional RPG protagonist like Gran, like Versus giving her powers he doesn't have like conjuring the power of the Eternals or fighting more with rekkas ala a Street Fighter character.