Trivia / Granblue Fantasy

Entries for the Grand Blues! spin-off can be found here.

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• Acting for Two:
  • Miyuki Sawashiro voices Katalina and Milla Maxwell as the latter's intro Fate Episode and a few event scenes are entirely centered around the gag of the two being voiced by the same person.
  • Rie Kugimiya voices Vyrn and Vania in the latter's Fate Episodes, and also in the "Fall of the Dragon" event. Vyrn and Kagura as well during the Gintama collab.
  • Nao Tōyama voices Lyria, Mizuki Kawashima, and the Pink Creature in The Idolm@ster crossover events.
  • Aoi Yūki plays all three of the Levin Sisters.
  • Aya Uchida as Andira plays three different characters from The Journey to the West in Andira's dream during "Auld Lang Syne".
  • Emiri Katou plays the twin angels Halluel and Malluel and Sierokarte. The Final Fantasy IX event also adds Lilisette, also voiced by Katou.
  • Marina Inoue plays another pair of angels Azrael and Israfel.
  • Takahiro Sakurai plays Lucifer, Lucilius and Lucio. Between all three What Makes the Sky Blue chapters, he ends up engaging himself in lengthy conversation no less than five times. Interestingly, despite all 3 characters being voiced by the same man, their voices notably have differences to them with Lucio having the softest tone, Lucifer’s voice being a middle ground between the two with a powerful echo behind it and Lucilius having the deepest voice of the three, all while keeping with the theme of having their voices sound at least somewhat similar. Takahiro Sakurai really worked out his voice acting chops.
  • Minori Chihara also gets in on this action when it comes to Orchid, especially in Orchid's Fate Episodes and later content, since naturally Queen Orchis and Orchid have a lot to say to each other and Orchis cares deeply for Orchid. And then there's Zwei in the main story's Wayfaring Astral arc for Orchid...
  • Ai Kakuma voices both the Cidala twins Huang and Bai, along with their guardian Laolao. She also voices La Coiffe, who hasn't interacted with the other three yet.
  • Kappei Yamaguchi voices both Walder and Usopp in the One Piece collab.
• Actor Existence Limbo:
  • Due to Chikao Ohtsuka's death in 2015, Aletheia didn't make any major appearances in events nor receive a 5★ upgrade out of respect for Ohtsuka between 2015 and early 2018. Aletheia did appear in the Glorybringer quest and Yngwie's 5★ quest in 2018, but the audio used for him were purely short voice clips that Ohtsuka had previously recorded. In June 2022, Aletheia's seiyuu has been replaced by his son, Akio Ōtsuka.
  • Miyuki Sawashiro was on a maternity leave around 2018, so Katalina didn't speak much on the main story chapters 119-120 which were released on January 2019. She got more speaking lines for the next story chapters when she returned to the industry.
  • While Hiromi Igarashi is not dead, the passing of Unshō Ishizuka also lead to her role as Ardora to be subsequently unvoiced during that same period. She returns to voicing her once Agielba has been recasted.
  • Due to the Covid-19 pandemic of early 2020, Cygames announced that from April 2020 onwards, all voice acting content would have to be cancelled for the sake of their actors' safety; it would be recorded and patched in after Japan ended its quarantine.
  • Ayumi Fujimura's indefinite hiatus causes all but one of her roles to be written out in some form, with said remaining role, Korwa, only using short voice clips recorded beforehand. With no signs of her coming back to the industry, the aforementioned role is later given to Shizuka Itō in September 2022 for the character's appearance in Jessica's Dark SSR Fate Episodes.
  • Ragazzo is unvoiced in Unbound Asterism for a few days due to Hiroyuki Yoshino being sick with Covid-19 not long before the event's initial run.
• All-Star Cast: One of its selling points is having a veritable who's who of popular Japanese voice acting talent.
• The Cast Showoff:
  • Kissho Taniyama gets to voice the In-universe musician Aoidos, singing the character's "Judgement Night", "Bloody Garden", and "Unfinished Melody" songs. Taniyama is a singer in real-life and a member of the band GRANRODEO.
  • Nao Tōyama gets to show off her singing chops in the game itself by singing a rock remix of "Magic Journal".
• Cash-Cow Franchise: Ever since its release, Granblue is known to be one of the most profitable titles of Cygames in Japan, to the point that:
  • The game annually remains on the Top 10 Most Profitable Mobile Games In Japan for consecutive years. At one point, it managed be the Highest Grossing App for the first time in years during the release of Summer Jeanne.
  • The Granblue in-game codes bundled with the Blu-Ray and DVDs are capable of boosting the sales of other Cygames anime such as Uma Musume and Rage of Bahamut.
  • While the Granblue Fantasy anime became the 3rd Best-Selling Anime of 2017 the moment its first season was aired, it still remains in the Charts for the 2018 Blu-Ray and DVD Sales for Japan. This is despite the fact that there had been no Granblue anime works released on 2018, it's just that the in-game bonuses kept on selling.
  • Of all things, the 2019 Cygames Corporate Introduction Movie previews Granblue first among the company's "Published" and "Anime" sections. Some fans interpret this as Cygames's way to boost awareness for the Relink and Versus games to the Western gaming audience, while others speculate that this is really due to Granblue being the cash-cow of the company.
• Children Voicing Children: In general, Cygames prefers to do this when it comes to casting a VA for a child character, such as Drusilla. At the time of recording, her voice actress was about as old as the character - that is to say, around twelve. One of the few exceptions is Megumi Han who voices Alec.
• Colbert Bump:
  • The Blu-rays and DVDs of the Uma Musume anime sold average at first before doing very well thanks to the Granblue Fantasy in-game bonuses that were added as extras. Some people are not appreciative with the said anime selling largely by the provided extras for an unrelated game instead of by its own merit, calling it an unfair marketing strategy. Others are willing to ignore that, as other franchises have done that too and are excited to see more of the horse girls in the future - Something that may become possible due to the unexpected increase of revenue thanks to the in-game bonuses.
  • Such bonus codes for Granblue also propelled the DVD sales of Rage of Bahamut: Genesis and its sequel. Even the spin-off Mysteria Friends managed to top the charts a week after its season ended. The latter also had bonuses for Shadowverse.
• Content Leak:
  • With the use of data mining, social network sites and community threads, A lot of players already knew that Olivia would become a playable character weeks before Cygames made the official annoucement of her release.
    • Data-miners were also able to leak the skill icons and weapon skills for upcoming characters and weapons respectively on social media platforms. However, Cygames caught up on this act and places warnings on the violators' accounts, essentially to avoid spoiling more unreleased content ahead of their schedule, though this hasn't stopped them from doing it on the same accounts that were warned.
  • An update in March 2018 accidentally opened a free raid quest meant for high-level players. It is playable for a few hours, but had numerous glitches such as untranslated Japanese text, Uriel's art as a placeholder, very few attack scripts and no loot rewards. The raid in question revealed that Shiva would become a raid boss battle. Cygames quickly advised players not to participate in the raid for the risk of player data corruption. It was removed the day after.
• Creator Backlash:
  • According to the late 2018 to early 2019 Famitsu interviews, one of the things that the developers regretted was the manner in which they rolled out all major content updates at once during the 4th Anniversary (Specifically the 6 Omega II raids being released within 2 months, 4 of them on the same date. This includes stuff related to their dropped materials). With so much added content implemented simultaneously, it left players unsure of what to do first (and from the perspective of players, this also caused stagnant months of no new releases to make the veterans engaged aside from event reruns. Even some of the hardcore GBF players were able to clear the "new" contents in a short amount of time). They have since been planning to evenly spread out content updates starting the 5th anniversary, to at least minimize the "content drought" effect (which can be prevalent with live-service mobile games such as gachas) for Granblue.
  • After the release of Dark Opus Weapon Transcendence, Cygames made an announcement apologizing that the timing for it is unfavorable to players who are using the limited Lapis Merits for the Eternals, vowing to prevent a similar issue from occurring and increasing the distribution of them.
• Creator's Favorite:
  • As he reveals in a 2019 Pash! interview, Director Fukuhara's favorite male character is Cassius. Among the female Cygames staff, he mentions that most of them like the Dragon Knights and Eustace, just by looking at their desktop backgrounds.
  • Composer Tsutomu Narita's favorite track is the Auguste theme for being one of the first pieces he ever wrote for Granblue and being written under special circumstances on his trip to Texas.
• Cross-Dressing Voices:
  • Megumi Ogata is known for this talent. In here, she voices Grimnir.
  • Two roles of Megumi Han play the trope straight and subvert it. She voices Alec (a boy) and Jeanne D'Arc (a woman) respectively.
• Defictionalization: The tea cups Lucifer and Sandalphon are shown to drink their coffee out of in the Ain Soph Aur MV and past Merchandise are now purchasable at Granblue Fantasy Extra Fes 2019.
• Demand Overload:
  • Summer Jeanne's release on March 16, 2018 caused a massive server delay for a few hours, in which the players were stuck in the game's loading screens. An emergency server maintenance was quickly started. Players were reportedly hammering at accessing the Draw screen, given that her release was also set to run alongside the free draws event. Not only that, for the duration of her availability in the gacha, Granblue Fantasy was listed as the top grossing mobile game in the Japanese app stores, and "ジャンヌ" (Jeanne) became trending in Twitter on her summer version's release date. Whether or not she is the sole reason for the unexpected server crash, players have already attached Jeanne to this incident and makes jokes about more crashed servers whenever she is in the gacha.
  • In relation to what is stated above, the 4th Anniversary Roulette granted a guaranteed 100 draw on the last day if the players hadn't gotten a 100 draw jackpot on the days before. On its last day, a lot of players experienced connectivity issues when drawing from the gacha, as everyone was redeeming their guaranteed hundred-draws at the same time.
  • There were also connectivity issues experienced during the 2018 April Fools' day, causing the browser version of the game to become inaccessible for more than an hour. Justified or expected, as the event only lasted for 24 hours and the tradable items and character outfits are only obtainable once a year. Players didn't want to miss this opportunity.
  • Some real-life tie-in merchandises would also go out of stock as early as day one, such as the Christmas cakes available for pre-ordering in 2017. When Cygames rolled into Anime Expo 2018 to promote the Shadowverse and GBF collab set and GBF generally (due to its increasing fame), they brought plenty of GBF merch with them... and got 95% cleaned out on the first day.
  • Similar to the Summer Jeanne incident mentioned above, there was yet another server crash that happened on March 18, 2019 when the Summer version of Yuel was released... along with (you guess it) Summer Jeanne again. And due to the stigma that the players have attached to Summer Jeanne since the 2018 incident, there are those who label her as main the cause, along with the new version of Yuel. However, one of the unprecedented moves of Cygames that actually contributed to the sudden influx of simultaneous accesses to the draw screen is, their decision to include Lucifer to the Spark List. Given that he is the most sought-after Light SSR summon due to his strong offensive buff and that multiple copies are needed to uncap him, players didn't want to miss this opportunity to obtain him with at least 300 Draws. It helps that along with that he is one of the most popular male characters, with his popularity boosted due to his presence in WMTSB, the reason why he was added to the spark list in the first place and an ever present Cash cow character from Cygames in general. It is also at this point that (like Summer Jeanne did on March 2018), Lucifer and Yuel become worldwide trending hashtags a few minutes after the servers were put into maintenance.
• Descended Creator: Former producer Koichi Haruta voices wind Primarch Raphael.
• Dueling Works: Specifically for this game's anime adaptations:
  • Rage of Bahamut: Virgin Soul aired alongside the first anime season of Granblue Fantasy in Spring 2017. Both titles are properties of Cygames.
  • The Fall 2019 season presents three anime titles based on gacha games, namely; Azur Lane, Fate/Grand Order - Absolute Demonic Front: Babylonia, and the second season of Granblue Fantasy.
• #EngineeredHashtag: On special occasions, Cygames would encourage the fans to make certain Granblue-related hashtags trend. Freebies are given out as rewards when these milestones are achieved.
• Fan Community Nicknames:
  • The Granblue playerbase generally identifies themselves as "Danchous", based from the Japanese word used by the in-game characters to call the Grandcypher's captain.
  • The "Lucifans" and "Sandalfans" refer to the fan groups of Lucifer and Sandalphon respectively, at least in online English communities.
  • "Seasonals" are players who mostly just join or return to this game during the huge anniversaries and Milestone Celebrations because of the free gacha rolls and livestream rewards, yet would leave afterwards once those events are over.
• Follow the Leader:
  • When it comes to visual presentation, the game is known by gacha veterans as the one that set a standard for the artstyle of RPG gacha games as early as 2014 (compared to the most influential Japanese gacha games of the past years like Monster Strike and Puzzle & Dragons that have designs inspired by Pokémon or Digimon), with Granblue having gorgeous, well-designed Final Fantasy-inspired Anime characters thanks to being designed by Hideo Minaba while also undergoing Art Evolution over the years. Now from 2014 onwards, almost every single gacha game in the mobile market is saturated to feature anime-inspired character designs while also incorporating the medieval fantasy setting resembling JRPGs, whether or not they are actually developed in Japan, with some even implementing new visual or artistic technologies in an attempt to reach or surpass the standard set by this game.
  • As the resolution to the "Monkeygate" controversy in 2016 required gacha titles to display their draw rates to the players, all other new and old gacha titles followed the implemented rule. Aside from that, Cygames has also implemented the "Sparking System", an Anti-Frustration Feature as a form of apology that allows players to freely choose a featured item in the banner when they accumulate at least 300 draws. Some gacha titles copied that "free-to-pick"/safety net system too, with the same requirement of accumulating a large amount of a currency to trade for one unit of your choice. As years went by, Granblue is remembered as the game that popularized this feature. It has gone to the point wherein a lot of gacha gaming communities and veterans adopted the terms "Spark" and "Sparking System" to refer to any gacha's safety net/pity mechanics. A gaming news website also used this term in an interview segment for Genshin Impact.
  • Some gameplay mechanics such as a weapon grid system, passives provided by elemental summons, and the overall grindy, item-farming JRPG gameplay of Granblue were imitated or cloned by a lot of recent gacha games. For example, even a gacha Idle Game such as Eternal Senia: Hydrangea After The Rain shares numerous similarities to Granblue Fantasy, including the gacha safety net Anti-Frustration Feature.
  • The livestreams seem to have followed the VTuber trend popularized by Kizuna Ai, wherein a 3D model on the screen reacts to or narrates the announcements. Granblue has a model of Lyria made for this purpose.
• Meaningful Release Date:
  • The release dates of Aliza's two SR versions coincide with one another on April 30, but have a 4-year gap in between.^note Her Fire version was released on 2014 while her Water version was on 2018.
  • Gachapin's crossover event began on 12/7. His skills are copied from Anre's first skill, Tweyen's second skill, and Seofon's third skill. Succinctly, they're based on the 1st, 2nd, and 7th Eternal.
• Meme Acknowledgement:
  • At one point in Charlotta's Summer episode, the narration outright calls her a "thoroughly baked potato". "Potato" is the slang Fan Nickname used to refer to the Harvin race, which is widespread in the English-speaking Granblue playerbase. What's more, it also comes as a Woolseyism because the "potato" joke in Charlotta's episode only exists in the English localization of the game, the original Japanese script is noted to have a different interpretation instead.
  • In the first "What Makes The Sky Blue" event, Sandalphon once threw you (the protagonist) off the cliffs saying "Your fingers are delicate". This left a case of Never Live It Down among the fandom, especially during the times when the event's sequel "Paradise Lost" was revealed, the idea of having to throw Sandalphon off the cliffs was brought up once more, especially for Revenge or Laser-Guided Karma. The finale event of the trilogy would then give you several dialogue options to say "Your fingers are delicate" to Sandalphon with the purpose of guilt-tripping him.
  • Medusa is mostly known by the Cygames fandom for her sexy hips and buttocks, which was initially brought about by her official art in Rage of Bahamut showcasing a Boobs-and-Butt Pose. Said "features" are the ones the fandom easily took notice of and emphasize on Medusa when they are making fan arts of her. And when Cygames reused her design importing her into Shadowverse and Granblue Fantasy, even those who haven't played RoB made note of how sexy her hips and posterior are. When her original playable version was released in Granblue, she has an animation of shaking those hips while facing the camera. Later in 2019, her regular playable version on the gacha has an animation where Medusa shakes her hips and sways her butt towards the player's point of view, with some fans seeing this as a Pandering to the Base.
• Milestone Celebration:
  • Most of the third-party Crossover events are essentially these, as they are ran just when the collaborating franchise has a newly-released title or adaptation (like Detective Conan, Persona 5, Attack on Titan, Cardcaptor Sakura, Touken Ranbou or Code Geass), or simply because it's an anniversary for the franchise (like Pretty Cure!).
  • Cygames creates a period that reduces the cost of almost all raid battles and quests, as well as doubling the amounts of EXP, RP, and Journey Drops, plus Daily Login Bonuses, and giveaways as a celebration every time the game achieves another million player accounts.
  • A month-long "Anniversary" event is held yearly in March, and provides the perks similar to the "million players" celebrations stated above, along with freebies consisting of some of the rarest and/or most valuable consumables in the game and more recently, a lot of free gacha draws for bulking out your roster and weapon selection. Anniversaries have also come to be marked by a series of major plot events (prior to 2017, they actually hadn't considered making major story events until it was suggested during developer meetings):
    • "What Makes the Sky Blue" was released to coincide with the game's third anniversary in 2017.
    • Its sequel, "What Makes the Sky Blue II: Paradise Lost", was released in 2018 for the fourth anniversary.
    • The final chapter of the trilogy, "What Makes The Sky Blue III: 000" was released in 2019 for the fifth anniversary. This also marks the first instance where a story event gets 9 Chapters (excluding the Prologue and Ending), also having the most packed lore unlike its prequels.
• Newbie Boom: Granblue is a niche gacha title whose main audience are the Japanese. But throughout its lifespan, it managed to gain an increased fanbase apart from the Colbert Bump effect from third-party Crossover events:
  • The official English localization around 2016 helped in getting the game into the radars of English-speaking anime fans, but it's mostly, initially from the Southeast Asian regions such as Brunei, Singapore, Hong Kong and Philippines.
  • The announcement and release of additional Granblue media such as the anime, Relink, and Versus further expanded the interest of Granblue outside of Japan and Southeast Asia.
    • Especially since the anime adaptation is the first Granblue media to be officially released in the West.
    • In the case of Versus, the Fighting Game Community took notice of the Granblue franchise once certain known FGC personalities/streamers/players such as Daigo, Fuudo, Justin Wong and Maximillian Dood played and commented on the game, as well as certain major announcements such as the inclusion of Versus in the main EVO 2020 lineup.
  • According to Word of God, the What Makes The Sky Blue events brought in a lot of female players.
  • New players also tend to pour in during the free rolls and milestone celebrations due to how generous they tend to be.
• No Dub for You: Justified, as this game technically hasn't been released outside of Japan yet (the "official" international release is actually an English language patch that still uses the Japanese servers), and doing the English voice lines for the characters will be too costly due to the large cast. The anime, however, has been dubbed, as have the characters from GBF who appear in Shadowverse. There is at least one scene in the game parodying movies like Jaws which has full, surprisingly fluent English voice acting, however.
• No Export for You: Granblue has a unique relationship with this problem, and a unique set-up for how its localized version is handled. To wit:
  • The game is not "officially" available outside of Japan (that is, it does not appear on official app stores), but you can simply manually load the APK either through direct download or a third-party app provider on Android, or a Japan-region iTunes account on iOS, to download the game on a mobile device, or use the browser version available on Safari and Google Chrome on any platform. The English option for the client, after being teased for some time, was finally implemented into the client in April of 2016, and functions on any device version of the game - it's simply a menu option.
  • Even with the implementation of an English client, though, the game can still be very unfriendly to those outside Japan. Many of the promotions which rely on components external to the game ("full" Mobage account registration for 1000 crystals being the most infamous, but also things like Granblue Sky Compass or the real-prize giveaway each summer) are simply not available outside Japan at all, and buying Mobacoins can be difficult due to the various partners Cygames uses for access portals not accepting international credit card or debit purchases (though modern Google Play is able to get around this restriction, and in 2018 Mobage itself began accepting international PayPal transfers). The early English script itself also has a number of problems due to the early chapters having been heavily outsourced, though newer material (from mid-2016 onward) is of a much higher quality from an in-house team.
  • As a fortunate side effect, since there's still only one region of the game, this eliminates the issue of the localized version perpetually trailing the Japanese version in terms of content - new events, characters and such are released in Japanese and English simultaneously, even though the game is still only "available" in Japan.
• The Other Darrin:
  • Eugen's actor from the original game, Keiji Fujiwara, due to taking sick leave, was unable to play his part for the anime adaption, and was replaced by Kazuhiro Yamaji. The game still used Fujiwara's prerecorded lines for any event that took place while he was on leave, and he returned to the game in August of 2017. When Fujiwara died in April 2020, Eugen remained voiceless until July 2020, when he was replaced by Yamaji.
  • Agielba's voice actor, Unshō Ishizuka, has passed away on August 2018. Most of his seasonal lines for that year up to New Year's 2019 were recorded prior to his death, but after January 2019, Cygames has used previously recorded voice clips. In March 2020, he has been replaced with Kouji Ishii for the character's appearance in the Sturm and Drang: A Mercenary's Life event.
  • As of the "Prayers" event in November 2022, Raphael, who was voiced by Granblue's former producer Koichi Haruta, has all of his lines re-voiced by Satoshi Mikami.
  • With Ayaka Imamura retired in 2018 due to health concerns, the role of Robertina is passed on to Ayasa Itō for the character's appearance in the Fiery Soul: Dreamer's Miracle event.
• Production Posse:
  • The anime's second season marks the sixth time Cygames has been a producer while the animator is MAPPA. In the past, the two had worked on Rage of Bahamut: Genesis and its sequel Rage of Bahamut: Virgin Soul, Yuri on Ice, To the Abandoned Sacred Beasts, and Zombie Land Saga.
  • Due to Tsutomu Narita and Nobuo Uematsu's involvement, many of the vocalists like Fubito Endo and Yasuo Sasai that worked with them in their band, Earthbound Papas, were brought in for this game's vocal songs.
• Reality Subtext: An interesting variation is done with the Arcarum Evokers, or at least with Haaselia. Her recruitment Fate Episode states that it's been a few months since the last encounter with her, when you fought Moon and he broke free from The World's control. The time between completing her first Fate Episode and being able to create the item needed to play the recruitment one, assuming you dilligently work towards getting the items required to make it, assuming you don't intentionally put it off or already had the materials? A few months.
• Referenced by...:
  • Akiba's Trip - In the card game episode, the Pot of Greed analogue is called "Exploitative Gatcha", in which the image used is the Summoning Crystal from this game.
  • Gamers! (2015) - The game Keita and Chiaki plays on their phones has a very reminiscent user interface to Granblue Fantasy.
  • Gintama - In The Silver Soul arc, Gintoki points out how last week Shinpachi was playing Granblue Fantasy on the roof, which he denies. (Also an Actor Allusion since Masaki Suda was just announced as Shinpachi's live-action adaptation actor when the Gintama chapter came out, and Suda often stars in the Granblue advertisements.)
  • Grand Blue - When the Grand Blue Manga was released, readers joked about the title of the series being a parallel to the similarly-named video game, wondering if a Crossover would eventually happen. The writer decided to "announce" in Chapter 42.5 an upcoming Spin-Off aptly called "Grand Blue Fantasy".
• Role Reprise: With the exception of Kazuhiro Yamaji temporarily taking the place of Eugen's voice actor Keiji Fujiwara who took a sick leave, everyone else who appeared in the 2017 anime had their voice actors returning to play their lines.
• Schedule Slip:
  • Granblue initially had a planned release date of December 17, 2013 in Japan, but later started service officially on March 10, 2014.
  • Due to popular demand, "What Makes the Sky Blue II: Paradise Lost" was extended to allow the influx of newcomers of the game play through the latest anniversary event and to obtain Sandalphon. All other incoming events that were originally planned to take place after it were not adjusted, but rather ran alongside "Paradise Lost", making one of the rare cases where a non-"Magnafest" event overlaps with a story scenario. Director Yuito Kimura later noted, at the 2018 Granblue Fest that December, that this was an unprecedented measure for the game, but they were seeing such a volume of new people joining the game that they felt they had to extend the event to ensure that new players could get through to the point where they recruited Sandy.
  • The Dawning Sky arc's final chapters (107-110) were postponed and moved to be released on a later date.
  • An earlier statement in the 4th Anniversary event briefly mentions the possibility of the Oracles being released along the lines "before the year 2018 ends". But the statement eventually became vague as subsequent livestreams never mention their actual release dates. With the Cygames Fes set on December 2018, a statement later mentions that they will be delayed to the game's 5th Anniversary event. Finally, they were released on March 10, 2019 and are officially called "Evokers" in the English version.
  • The 5★ uncap of the Aquors Second-Years was supposed to be released alongside the inclusion of the Love Live! Crossover event in the list of Side Stories but was delayed until February 2019.
• Sleeper Hit: The game went by unnoticed globally for two years until the English localization hit. Subsequent word of mouth for its good localization, being up to date with Japan and receiving the same gifts as the JP player base, generous milestone campaigns, its colorful cast and dynamic stories (of which "What Makes The Sky Blue" and its sequels would contribute significantly), and a truly staggering number of crossovers with other popular properties led to its fanbase rapidly expanding to the point the game's current producer frequently bumps into GBF fans whenever travelling to the west.
  • This recognition is also acknowledged by gaming journalists and articles after the announcement of Granblue Fantasy: Relink and Granblue Fantasy Versus, remembering that Granblue is a financially successful gacha title in Japan.
  • Among the anime-viewing communities, no one initially expected that the first season of Granblue Fantasy would manage to perform well in terms of Blu-Ray/DVD sales in Japan, acknowledging the game's ability to boost its sales through in-game codes sought-after by the players, with many now calling Granblue as the Cash-Cow Franchise of Cygames even in the anime industry due to this marketing strategy.
• Spoiled by the Merchandise: This piece of art from a Granblue Fes pamphlet◊ revealed the plot twist that Lucifer and Lucio aren’t the same person long before it was confirmed in What Makes The Sky Blue: 000.
• Teasing Creator:
  • For a gacha game where the character roster steadily expands on an almost bi-weekly basis, players have wondered what's taking Cygames so long on releasing the Arcarum Oracles. So much so that some players now call it as one part of the game that is in Development Hell.
    • The Inchoate World was teased in 2015 with an event raid against it, revealing the battle music was composed and recorded long before the Oracles and the Arcarum mode would be introduced. There was also a test of proof 360 degrees video made to showcase it against Bahamut.
    • The actual "tease" trend started on September 2016 during the first iteration of "Arcarum: The World Beyond". Three Oracles were introduced - Caim, Geisenborger and Fraux (the latter became the most popular choice for the short duration of the event), and more Oracles were planned for supposed future updates. However, due to an exploitable bug that severely affected the PvP mode, Arcarum was suspended 2 days after its implementation.
    • A livestream a year later showcased a trailer for the Oracles and their respective Arcarum just in time for the mode to be revamped after addressing player concerns with a gameplay overhaul after the disastrous first Arcarum launch which ended prematurely.
    • When the new version of "Arcarum: The World Beyond" was released on November 2017, it was limited to two difficulties and the highly-engaging rewards are the summons themselves, which can be forged to SSR rarity. No additional details regarding the playable Oracles were provided.
    • The hype later resurfaced on March 2018 when Cygames mentioned that Oracles will become recruitable once their corresponding Arcarum summons reach their Final Uncap, along with stating that the Oracles will be implemented "before the year 2018 ends".
    • The only additional Oracle-related details revealed four months later were new artwork for Caim and the Oracle for Empress and her name (Maria Theresa). On top of these, it was announced that Monika will be unlocked from playing through Arcarum and later became playable on October of the same year, with nothing on the Oracles.
    • And with the Cygames Fes 2018 event set for the last month of the year, the Oracles have been delayed until the game's 5th Anniversary event. This invalidated the earlier "before the year 2018 ends" statement mentioned on March. Although, some players already expected this as the biggest game content does get added during the game's anniversary, such as the 5★ uncaps of the Eternals being released on the 3rd anniversary. Fortunately, the livestream revealed the uncap artwork of all ten Oracles, along with their Japanese names... which extends the hype even more.
    • They are finally released on the 5th Anniversary Update on March 10, 2019, officially labeled as "Evokers". And much to the surprise of everyone, they have fully fleshed-out flashbacks to give them enough characterization before they even join the crew!
  • While Cygames has a habit of eventually turning characters in the story into Promoted to Playable status, their scheduling can be somewhat unpredictable leading to the "Playable when?" meme being widespread across the playerbase. For several instances, the aforementioned Ten Evokers were an example for being hyped for more than a year and a half.
    • Cygames initially teased players simply by having alternate or updated artworks for certain characters, only for them to turn into mere outfits or story-only assets instead.
    • But as of 2017 onwards, characters who would eventually become playable will first be teased using an Early-Bird Cameo in a Scripted Battle sequence of story events, before being included in the gacha a month later, like what happened with Anne and Owen in "Lonesome Dragoness" and Baal in "Primal Resonance". Zeta appears to be an outlier, as she received an updated artwork, updated sprite animations as well as a slightly revamped skill-set and her Charge Attack renamed to Sirius Roar during "Second Advent". However, these changes haven't been implemented yet within almost half a year and counting. Fans have speculated that this would be the long-awaited 5★ Upgrade for Zeta's initial SSR version, yet Cygames is still silent on giving answers.
• Trolling Creator: In the April Fools' Day for 2019, a puzzle event titled "Enigma Fantasy", was held where the players were challenged to solve riddles for achievements and prizes, with the fastest one hundred skyfarers getting 10,000 crystals. Cygames even added an in-game note that players should not share the answers online to prevent spoiling the fun. But in a pleasant April Fool's surprise, everyone got the 10,000 crystals for completing all the puzzles, much to the chagrin of the first 100 players who rushed in solving them ahead of everyone. Cue some short-lived memes about getting Trolled by the company.
• Uncredited Role: Jade's voice actor is listed as "???" in Lyria's Journal. It is also quite difficult to identify since the character in question speaks in Auto-Tune by default.
• Unspecified Role Credit: Most Primal Beasts are uncredited and voice modulation makes it more difficult to figure who was voiced by whom.
  • Some actors eventually revealed who they voiced, like Yuki Ono as the voice of Sagittarius.
  • Some actors' roles get revealed when the character they play as get updated versions in Lyria's journal, such as Satomi Moriya voicing "Sylph, Flutterspirit of Purity". She was initially uncredited in the journal entry of Sylph's first summon.
• Voiced Differently in the Dub: In general, Harvin voices are much squeakier whenever they receive an English dub in comparison to the Japanese dub where actors simply use their normal voice.
• What Could Have Been:
  • The director of the anime wanted to use both Gran and Djeeta as co-protagonists, but Cygames pushed for a "boy meets girl" narrative with Gran and Lyria, so only Gran is in the anime until Djeeta takes over protagonist duties for Gran in the final bonus episode.
  • An artbook reveals that the Tier IV melee class was originally planned to have the protagonist as a Drunken Master.
  • As revealed in Granblue Fantasy Graphic Archives IV, Vajra's design was part of an internal contest held by the Cygames art team and there are a whopping thirty unique designs (some of which even proposed that the character be two individually distinct siblings!) that were nominated before they picked the one that would make it into the game.
  • This also applies to the scrapped concept artworks of various characters as contained in the Graphic Archives. Some of Nene's old concept artworks◊ depict her as a stout curly-haired brunette, while three of Lunalu's don't wear an eyepatch◊.
  • When the character that would become the playable Pholia was first put up for testing as an anonymous Trial Character, the character in question was given an Other typing (which, because of the kit, led many to believe it was in fact a Water Orchid being mooted). In retrospect, it appears the idea was that, since Bai Ze does most of the fighting, the overall character unit would be treated as Primal/Other (similar to Wulf & Renie being Other despite Renie being very much a human). Cygames ultimately decided against this, however, and the released Pholia unit is an Erune, matching her own racial typing.
  • A graphic from 2016 of Katalina with two new poses claimed it would be revealed by the third anniversary, but never actually came to fruition because it was part of a plan to let people change elements for limited characters and made far too many characters outdated.
  • Karyl was supposed to be included as one of the free SSR characters (alongside Pecorine and Kokkoro) in the Princess Connect Re:Dive Crossover event on 2018. But due to time constraints, her playable unit was only added on May 2019, when the event was permanently placed under the Side Stories.
  • In an Anime Expo 2019 Interview, Director FKHR revealed that Veight was originally planned to be released alongside the initial run of the "Fall of the Dragon" event, but he was added when the redux version of the event was taking place.
  • "Wyvern’s Reverie", a challenge quest in "What Makes The Sky Blue", suggested that there was plans to continue the angels story in some way, but with Lucifer being more directly involved with it. However, due to Sandalphon’s popularity, he became the protagonist of the trilogy once it was decided that the stories would be directly continued.
• Word of God: From time to time, the game's director and producer get interviewed by during milestones such as Anniversaries or Expo events that aim to answer some development or lore-related questions about the game.
  • In the 5th Anniversary interview, the team had considered a debate whether or not Granblue would be a native app or a browser game. They chose the latter for the ease of being able to push large amounts of content updates and quick bug-fixes in a faster amount of time. They also noted that data size could be a disadvantage for a native mobile app in a game with fully-voiced lines.
  • The animations and stories of the Ten Evokers took one and a half years to complete. This nearly covers the same timespan between the launch of the revamped Arcarum on 2017 to the Evokers' release date on March 2019. Each of the individual stories alone are long enough to be compared to a full story event.
  • The 2019 Pash! interview also adds in tidbits like how the "What Makes the Sky Blue" trilogy wasn't initially planned as a trilogy but a one-time event... Yet, the producer and director saw how the first part was generally favored by the fanbase, and they decided to make sequels of it.
  • Producer KMR reveals in the 2019 Anime Expo Interview that Cygames's GBF team is indeed aware of the several Fan Nicknames, memes or terms that originate in the English-speaking Granblue fandom. This explains why the game incorporates some Ascended Memes, Woolseyism, or fan nicknames in the localization. However, they also admitted to carefully selecting the memes and jargons to be added, and not just simply include them as-is, since players who are not members of the specific communities might not understand at first glance what those memes represent.
  • The arrival of Grand Jeanne d'Arc on November 2019 was a surprise to many because she didn't have any plot relevance in the main story beforehand, yet she seemingly broke a trend. Director FKHR acknowledged that the Grand series used to be specific to characters who are important to the main story, yet Jeanne received a Grand version simply because she is popular in Granblue Fantasy and Rage of Bahamut.
• Word of Saint Paul: When a fan sent in a letter for the May 3rd episode of Granblue TV asking their thoughts on m/m pairings like Reinhardtzar/Cain, Reinhardtzar's voice actor, Kenichirou Matsuda, approved of the idea.