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.

How to install granblue fantasy english