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Each character has from one to four skills on call, any or all of which can be used in a turn if they’re available. A maximum of four characters sit up front, with two in reserve. The battles are your standard line-dancing setup, where you put together a party, then you and your opponents take it in turns to attack. Watching your heroes perform their attacks is frequently every bit as entrancing as the art in Vanillaware’s Odin Sphere, or SNK’s Garou: Mark of the Wolves. The 2D also bears mentioning inasmuch as a great deal of effort has clearly gone into investing these little figures with as much life as the style allows. Uematsu’s score, along with Tsutomu Narita, is a marvel, easily surpassing virtually anything else he’s produced to my ears. For all the technical simplicity of the presentation style (simple 2D sprites, static illustrations, many of them repeated ad infinitum) the art is frequently gorgeous. And yet those PR interviews weren’t just fluff. There’s no exploration, no open world you move from menus to flip-book story scenes to battle sequences and back again. To temper your expectations still further this is a game designed to run on as many low-powered devices as possible, the better to maximise its player numbers. The backdrop of flying ships and islands floating in the sky brings to mind Sega’s cult favourite Skies of Arcadia, as well as the girl’s connection to the enigmatic precursor race who wandered off the stage many years beforehand. There’s an evil empire hot on her tail, because of course there is. A youthful protagonist and their talking animal sidekick, abandoned by a father with a shadowy past, meet-cute with a mysterious girl who saves them from certain death when they step in to help her. They hired composer Nobuo Uematsu, famous for multiple Final Fantasy games, and artist Hideo Minaba, who worked on Final Fantasies V, VI and IX as well as the Xbox 360 exclusive Lost Odyssey.Īnyone who’s got even a passing familiarity with the genre will recognise the basic plot beats. Early interviews see the staff talking about the game as a concerted attempt to capture the glory days of the JRPG genre on a smartphone. Granblue was their first project to seriously take off.

Granblue Fantasy was launched in 2014 by Cygames, a studio best known in the west for the collectible card game they released a couple of years later, Shadowverse. It’s a (deep breath) free-to-play game, funded by micro-transactions, designed for smartphones but – bear with me – playable in an internet browser. But it has been around for almost five years, with an authorised English translation, even though it never officially launched outside Japan. You won't find it on Steam, Uplay, Origin or any other digital storefront.

I want to talk about one of the best examples. There’s a sense that anything could happen. They shift radically in tone so seamlessly it leaves you wide-eyed in awe rather than suffering from whiplash.

At their best, they turn the hoary old tropes of the hero’s journey into something both emotional and epic the mundane reality of battle into super-heroics. But when they get it “right”, there’s no other genre I find quite so gratifying. I sometimes struggle to articulate why I love them and their more esoteric qualities, or how I can overlook their pandering. Japanese role-playing games are a funny lot.