Last night/this morning (it started at 3am local) was the now-annual Granblue Fantasy Summer Extra Festival stream. Had a bunch of voice actors, along with the director and producer of the game. Every player loves these streams, because they provide news about future stuff (there’s also stats about the past, and a variety/game show with the VA’s, but not many people would tune in for that). Big thanks goes to @granblue_en for both doing a live stream translation, and a Twitter translation as well. You can go over there to check out all the news, but I’ll just focus on what I really liked.

First, Re:Link actually had news! I figured it was alive, but I didn’t think it’d be mentioned this time, what with the Vs. hype and all. News wasn’t anything significant, just that there’d be news in the December stream. Pretty much the same exact thing that they said last summer, but it was nice that it was acknowledged.

Vs. actually was kinda exciting. No new character revelation, but rather a whole new mode. I’ll be honest, I was basically planning on skipping the game. I’m not a fighting game fan, and they rarely have enough story to keep me going through even the story mode on Easy (Persona 4 Arena is pretty much the only exception, and even then I never played the sequel). But the big announcement, that’s been hinted at since at least Anime Expo, is that this game has an RPG mode. Looks like a side-scrolling beat-em-up, with enemies, bosses, etc. They demoed it a bit on the stream, with some of the VA’s playing their characters (the VA’s for Charlotte and Ferry looked like they had never touched a FTG in their lives). They got rekt’d, since it was secretly on Hard mode. But it was interesting, and definitely got me thinking hard about buying a PS4. The game comes out next February, so I’ve got some time to think about it.

There was a new class announced (all pictures from @granblue_en):

Some skins/recolors added to the existing classes, and in a complete surprise move, the MC can use existing skins of other characters. There’s also some Arcanum improvements, a new class of weapons, Magna/Omega+, uncaps to the Primal summons, the rest(?) of the summer characters, and some other skins.

The second season of the anime was previewed, with a whole different studio and creative staff behind it. Looks like it will be a continuation of the first season; the producer said that they took fan feedback from the first season into account when they made this one, so hopefully we’ll get something more than following the generic storyline this time. But we did get a shot of Aliza’s boob, which hints that we’ll get at least something like the few good episodes from the first season (like the treasure hunt one).

Good stream. Even though it was quite late, and I had a migraine, I’m still glad I stayed up for it (well, technically, woke up). Unlike some, I do generally enjoy the variety show segments, and the stats. Looking forward to the changes in the game that have been previewed.