In the last video on this channel, we spoke about Granblue Fantasy, the mobile game that’s
transcended its medium to become anime, manga, and console games.
Now, I’d like to talk about one of those console games, Granblue Fantasy Versus, which
released worldwide in March, and has now released the full roster of its first season pass.
Here are five things you need to know about this fighting game’s production.
There are many directions that Granblue could’ve gone in, but a fighting game was the first
selection.
The belief here is that they can make an impact outside of the general Granblue audience thanks
to the prevalence of eSports communities.
Fighting games are also a way for players to become more familiar with the characters
and players would hopefully want to play the mobage to learn more about them.
As the game’s director Tetsuya Fukuhara notes, there are a lot of world-class fighting
game companies they could’ve asked in Japan, but ultimately they approached Arc System
Works.
The reasoning was that with Guilty Gear and Blazblue, Arc were specifically capable of
replicating the aesthetic appeal of Granblue.
While Fukuhara wasn’t involved in this decision, he was thrilled, as he was a huge fan of Guilty
Gear when he was younger.
Similarly, there were plenty of staff at Arc System Works who played Granblue, so this
was a team-up everyone was happy with.
I mentioned that Arc System Works could capture the appeal of Granblue, but what they hadn’t
noted is that a lot of Granblue designs aren’t exactly animation-friendly.
Fukuhara felt guilty when the characters were being turned into 3D, realising that the characters
have a load of unnecessary equipment like belts and flaps that would make an animator
go mad.
The anime had a similar issue where, while it had a great animation team, it appeared
to struggle to keep complex designs moving.
But animation is important.
In fact, Granblue Fantasy Versus is designed to be just as fun to watch, as it is to play.
The reason it’s particularly difficult for Granblue to handle all these extra details
is because, unlike other games, there’s no physics simulations here.
Nothing happens automatically.
In fact, all of the characters are individually hand-animated, in the same way as an anime
would be created.
So that random flap that Fukuhara was feeling guilty about?
An animator needs to figure out how that should move for every single action.
The staff have been frequently asked costumes, since while there’s weapon skins and very
slight changes you can make to some character outfits, all you can really do generally is
change the colours.
Their response to new costumes has been clear.
They can’t.
Since it’s hand-animated, you can’t just replace one costume with another.
Instead, they’ve said that if they really wanted to add a new costume, they’d just
make a new version of the character entirely.
The Arc System Works pipeline is immensely interesting and their animation philosophy
is largely based on anime production.
This is why they’ve been a perfect fit for properties like Dragon Ball FighterZ, Persona
4 Arena, and of course, Granblue.
Part of this philosophy is obvious, and one is hidden.
The hidden part is that while the game will run at 60fps, meaning you get responsive actions,
the actual animations will run at way less than this with a varying frame rate between
12 and 8 frames per second, depending on the motion.
This is limited animation, a cornerstone of the anime aesthetic and dropping frames in
3D motions to mimic this style is common in 3D anime.
The other part of their philosophy is toon-shading.
Making sure, that even though these are 3D characters, they always look flat.
In fact, they refer to this as a search and destroy mission where they’ll go through
every object and character, and destroy anything that looks like it might be 3D.
The Granblue mobage is an ongoing experience with new stories and characters popping up
all the time.
In this way, they can truly explore the world and fans can get to know their favourite characters.
But the staff thought it would be strange if Versus’ main villain, Beezlebub just
appeared out of nowhere.
So he was added into the main game ahead of time as the “Hooded Figure”.
He was created due to a request from Arc System Works to have the strongest boss figure they
could make.
The main title then served as a way of building up this villain and establishing some of his
core moves during development of Versus.
Hopefully we’ll see more of these sorts of integrations with ReLink and any future
original Granblue stories.