A curious thing happened as I sat down to write my review for this week. I knew there was a show I’d intended to review, but for the life of me I could not remember what it was. I knew I had to have made note of it somewhere and so I looked, and I saw… Granblue Fantasy?
Granblue Fantasy?
Ah, right! Granblue Fantasy. I
certainly saw a show by that name. It had characters, and a plot,
that much was certain. And, um…
Okay, I’ll cut the comedy routine here. The point is that I didn’t find Granblue Fantasy particularly distinctive or memorable. In many ways it’s actually remarkable how standard it really is, so much so that I could quite easily refer to the characters and moments by the archetypes they evoke or the better characters from other media whose notes they’ve seemingly copied. Yet, at the same time, can I really consider it to be that bad, or worth scorn? Is it like Hundred where the laziness is insulting and noxious, or is it more like Yuuna and the Haunted Hot Springs, where being a largely unremarkable expression of a genre is just that, unremarkable?
To begin with, the story. We start
with a mysterious waif (Lyria) escaping the clutches of an evil
empire. She falls into the hands of a callow youth with a good heart
and great determination (Gran) who, along with the waif’s parental
guardian figure (Katalina) and a cute/annoying mascot critter that
never does anything (Vyrn), will take the waif on a long and
harrowing journey in search of a mysterious magical destiny.
At once, you’re going to be reminded of a better, more unique productions. It’s likely that one will be dominant in your mind. For me, thanks to the “Skyships traveling between islands of rock in a world of open air” theme, it was the game Skies of Arcadia. But you could see in this shades of Star Wars, Lord of the Rings or one of its imitators like the Shannara series, or even hints of Made in Abyss when Gran starts getting worked up about a letter from his missing father promising to meet up at a mythical distant and mysterious location. Which is, oddly enough, a plot thread that pretty much falls by the wayside and is quite tertiary to Gran’s leaving home after general desire to travel and explore, devotion to Lyria, and having his soul literally bound to Lyria’s so there’s a maximum distance that can be between them without croaking (Which also doesn’t get a lot of play). In any case comparisons are freely invited and largely don’t work in Granblue’s favor.
After that, the party travels from the
small village hometown to a thriving yet fairly generic larger town,
where they meet a pilot with a rough exterior but heart of gold
(Rackam) who has a sad back story connecting him to an awesome but
currently unused ship. When one of the evil empire’s fruity
eccentric generals attacks, the pilot teams up with our heroes,
bringing the awesome ship to fly again and fend off the Empire’s
assault with their special power, saving the good people.
After that, the group travels to a new
land with an eccentric and somewhat singularly focused culture (the
Valtz duchy, focused on industry and fire). There, they end up
meeting with a hotheaded youngster with great potential (Io) who they
ultimately help in the face of yet another evil scheme of the empire.
After that, the show pretty much does
the same thing all over again: the party, once again, goes to a new
area with a clear theme (Water, this time). Once again, there’s some
imperial scheme stirring up trouble that’s presaged from arrival and
ultimately comes to head with a big battle. Classic RPG
storytelling: you saved the Gorons by clearing out Dodongo’s Cavern,
now go help the Zoras by fishing Princess Ruto out of Jabu Jabu’s
belly.
In a game, this is pretty expected.
Gameplay is usually predicated on a core loop that’s fun and
fulfilling in a mechanical sense, and even games with a lot of story
tend to make progress in a spiral rather than a line, where you tend
to do the same thing in new ways and for new reasons, because that’s
what’s fun. It’s a structure that breaks down entirely in a single
feature like a novel or a movie, and that’s on thin ice in episodic
media like an anime. For episodic media, you want some degree of
repetition as fits the common theme of the show, but you also have to
have meaningful progress, so that completing an arc doesn’t just
leave your characters right where they were with a new flag. There
are exceptions, but an an anime with plot like Granblue Fantasy,
status quo can’t be god.
What saves the final arc of Granblue
Fantasy, then, is the fact that they actually put some emotional
investment in there with the “stop the evil scheme”. Gran and
Lyria grow closer, and though you can feel the “Kidnap me” sign
on her back in one scene (right before she gets kidnapped) there is
some actual emotional bonding. It’s very basic, but it’s entirely
serviceable. Lyria is faced with the reality of her great power and
the blood that, legitimately or not, she feels is on her hands,
causing her to retreat to a dark place inside her mind from which
Gran has to save her. Again, this is really basic stuff. I compared
this show to Skies of Arcadia, and Fina (the mysterious waif with
otherworldly power) has some much more compelling conflicts despite
that not really being the game’s focus. But, again, it’s a
functional sort of basic, the old workhorse angst that can be trotted
out and do its job when needed.
The episode and a half, though, is pure fanservice. And not Beach Episode fanservice (though they do slip that in), but a sequence and episode that serves purely to appeal to people who are familiar to the game. For the final episode of actual plot, a seemingly endless host of collectible characters show up, show off their one signature move each fighting a horde of monsters, and then vanish into group shots. I assume you can meet all these characters in game and it’s cool to see them if you know who they are, but I never played Granblue Fantasy so they’re just a barrage of these strange and colorful designs that appear, do something kind of cool but not really cool because there’s no investment in it, and then disappear. Azur Lane did something pretty similar. Normally, it was more graceful, simply utilizing a huge cast of incidental characters throughout, but in the final episode when a line-up of everyone whose name had not already been called showed up in their best in-game art, it was even sloppier, so I guess I’ll call that a wash.
More curious is episode thirteen. The
thirteenth episode of this season of Granblue Fantasy isn’t in
continuity with the others. It seems to take place roughly a little
while after episode 12, but Gran has been replaced by the girl
version, Djeeta, presumably so we have an extra pair of breasts for
the swimsuit moments. The episode plays full comedy, with Djeeta and
her larger and more colorful crew being insanely overpowered and the
imperial plan foiled in a vignette being something about stealing
ice. There’s no drama because there’s not meant to be and no
legitimate closure because we’re getting things on a different
timeline where the characters and quest are presumably at least a
little different. It’s a baffling choice, and if you’re not a fan of
the game who wants to see extra characters (like, presumably, Djeeta)
I’d say you could just skip it, even if you want to go on to a second
season that I’m assuming doesn’t just suddenly star Djeeta for cause
not announced. Because, for someone who doesn’t know the game, it’s
a bizarre choice that seems to undermine the conclusion and emotional
stakes of the show as a whole.
And that, really, is all there is to the first season of Granblue Fantasy the Animation. It’s a melting pot of every fantasy epic you know, particularly the video game ones, with functional bits that are time-worn and lackluster but still in good working order. The most interesting bits are the visual ones: they skyships and aeronautical world are fresher than most and the colorful characters in an endless variety of often one-off fantasy races are something that’s newer and different, but even those elements are done better elsewhere, the former in Skies of Arcadia and the latter with even more wild creativity in Tower of God among others.
Yet, for all of that, it’s the good
deal used car of fantasy Anime: the parts all have a lot of miles on
them, but the whole thing runs fine and will get you to your goal
(entertainment), just not in any semblance of style. There’s no real
reason to get mad at Granblue Fantasy or warn against it; it uses its
tropes in effective ways, and even if you feel like you’re honing
your future sight with how predictable it can be, it’s predictable
because it’s following a very simple formula for modest success that
works for good reasons. It’s close to being the Platonic Ideal of a
fantasy story, which would also be the metric for a flat C, dragged
up to a C+ by its few laudable elements of distinctness. There’s
nothing bad here, except arguably the weird off-the-rails fanservice
ending, and there are a couple drops of good. I’ll probably forget
it again soon enough, but I hold it no rancor.