Granblue Fantasy Versus: I bought the Premium Battle Pass

I wasn’t really sure what to expect when a Premium Battle Pass for Granblue Fantasy Versus was announced, but as I had already started my blog; I decided that I would buy into it. It’s quite a mixed bag and I am not entirely sure how this mix would bait fence-sitters to buy into this system.

Granblue Fantasy Versus’ Premium Battle Pass

I’ll try to keep this as short as I possibly can, but it’s definitely going to be a longer post today. I did live stream the first day of my battle pass shenanigans, if you can even call it that. I also subsequently uploaded an edited version of that stream for an easier viewing experience (that’s the video you see above). I don’t recommend watching the live stream VOD (eg. the unedited version), although I would be very happy to see you in the chat during my live streams of course. The video above should give you a rough idea about how things work and my thoughts about it. This blog post serves as a more in-depth rundown of my thoughts. You are of course free to decide whichever version you prefer. In a nutshell there are a few good ideas in here, some neat little goodies, a lot of disappointing filler and some really strange decisions when it came to split the free and paid rewards. 

In case you don’t know how a battle pass works, don’t worry— I didn’t really know either until it was announced for Granblue Fantasy Versus; a battle pass consists of loot to be picked up, for doing various tasks within the game. In GBVS’ case the tasks are split up into common challenges, dailies and weeklies. Clearing out those tasks, which you can see on the right of the battle task screen will reward you with points, which in turn reward you with loot whenever you level up. So far it seems that every level requires 4,000 points for a level up. I am level twelve now and it still requires the same 4k points that I needed to level from one to two. 

As for the rewards, they are kind of all over the place. The most attractive ones are of course the colours and weapon skins, but there are also faceplates, RPG mode weapons, lobby avatars, Gacha Tickets (for the RPG mode mind you, not the mobage), trophy titles, Rupie and renown pendant rewards. Each level grants you one reward per tier. So if you’re on the free tier, listed as normal on the actual battle pass screen you will get one reward per level. If you are on the the premium tier, as it’s referred to within the game, you will get two pieces of loot per level. One from the normal tier and the premium one for the same level. So what does this run us in terms of pricing you might ask. I paid 880 yen for the pass itself and that’s it. You also have the option to spend another 550 yen to level boost yourself by an additional 10 levels. I want Yuel’s colour which unlocks at level 30 on the premium tier, but with the exception of Street Fighter V’s character unlocks, I just can’t fork out money for something that I can do within the game anyway. There’s a certain level of illogical behaviour going on in my head at that point. I bought the battle pass to play Granblue Fantasy Versus, why do I try to skip the playing part now by level boosting? If you want to boost yourself though, by all means you do you. It’s a not a pay to win mechanic anyway, it’s just a time saving tool.

Acquiring points to level up

This is actually a very straightforward process, maybe even a little too straight forward and simple. As it stands right now, there is one common challenge, three dailies and four weeklies. The dailies you can literally knock out in about 10 to 15 minutes, depending on how lucky you are in finding matches. The weeklies for the most part I didn’t even pay attention to, but I cleared all of them on the first day as well, by simply playing random matches online.

Common Challenge

The common challenge type in Granblue Fantasy Versus I haven’t actually looked into that much just yet. It did confuse me on the first day, which was my own fault though. I didn’t pay attention to the number and then thought that my Japanese was failing me. I would assume that there’s a cap to the common challenge, but it seems to update as soon as you achieve the tasks it laid out. For example; when I first logged in it asked me to win one ranked match. I won two (eg. a set), checked back in and now it said I won one out of three. As you can see, that would be kind of confusing, especially when you didn’t really remember at the time that it initially only asked you to do one anyway. I received 500 points for doing that and I would be granted an additional 500 points for winning another two. I haven’t tried doing that yet to see if that goes on forever until some sort of server update or reset occurs, but even if it did, you would eventually reach numbers that you wouldn’t be able to hit comfortably anyway. Having said that, if you do play a lot of ranked matches, which outside of Europe might even be possible, you would have a relatively constant supply of points rolling in, at least initially.

Dailies or daily challenges

Granblue Fantasy Versus’ daily challenges I honestly don’t like all that much. So far they have always included two challenges that are pretty much the same, three days in a row. The one that has been identical each day is the one to update your title for… whatever reason. That’s not a challenge, it’s barely even a task.

The second repeating one, with a very slight variation on the requirement each day, is to use one of two specified characters in two online matches. On the first day it was to either use Percival or Zooey, I picked Percy and played two matches to unlock the point rewards. FYI— you’re not required to win, you just need to use the character in an online match. The day after that it was to use either Ferry or… sorry I forgot (I used Ferry to clear this one) and yesterday it was to use either Soriz or Cagliostro. I have a big problem with this type of task in a game like this. You are essentially forcing people to just throw matches, waste time and not play Granblue Fantasy Versus the way they want to be playing, in an environment where it’s already rather difficult to find matches. Do I really want to waste the opportunities to get to play a match, with some random character, one that I have no practice with, no knowledge of and what it really boils down to; one that I would never pick otherwise? I am pretty sure some brainiac came up with the idea thinking “that will get people to try out other characters and have more fun”, except it doesn’t. Most people will just throw matches to get the allotted two matches checked and then switch back to the characters they actually want to be playing. That’s definitely a type of daily which I would like to see changed to something else entirely.

The third daily challenge so far has been something different each day. The first day it was to manage to get a First Attack two times and yesterday to hit over 3k damage with abilities. I would like to see this updated to involve a little bit of effort, as Granblue Fantasy Versus isn’t the most execution heavy game after all. At least this challenge did change every day so to something different so far, which is at least one positive point for it. 

Weeklies or weekly challenges

The weeklies so far, and as it’s only been three days there hasn’t been an update yet, were quite straightforward. As I mentioned earlier I knocked them out pretty much automatically on the first day the battle pass went live. So far they included hitting a combo of seven hits or more, playing ten matches online, finishing a round with an Ougi, eg. Granblue Fantasy Versus’ Japanese name for Skybound Arts (SBA) and a Super Skybound Arts (SSBA) and to land a total of three throws in online matches. It’s pretty straight forward and sets itself just far enough apart from the daily and common challenges that it makes sense to be there. I do actually have more to say on this one, but I’ll save that for the end, as there are a few other points that tie into this as well as it being points that are universal issues with this whole system.

Rewards, loot and segregation (Pt.1)

As with any reward system that is split into two categories, one will always be better than the other. There is simply no way to make two tables look equally as attractive when they have different rewards, especially when one of them requires you to pay money and the other one doesn’t. That’s also where it’s getting a little weird though, as the two tables have some loot types mixed between them. Let’s start this off differently though; character colours and weapon skins are unlocked exclusively via the premium battle pass, for now anyway. The other types of rewards, as I already alluded to are mixed between the two tiers, seemingly without much thought having gone into the distribution process.

As the addition of colours beyond 18 and weapon skins beyond 7 are completely new, it’s not a surprise that these are locked behind a paywall considering how sought after that type of content is. Another thing a lot of people want is to have more customisation options for their faceplates. I say that like I know it, I don’t, I just want more of them myself and considering that these have been the rewards for pretty much every single event so far, I would at least assume that I am not the only one. The event ones have not been anything special, but it’s nice to have exclusive content that cannot be grabbed outside of participating in those events. It’s a nice incentive to keep people playing. Even though that didn’t exactly work out for Granblue Fantasy Versus in the second GBVS:Blitz event. Here’s the weird thing though, they’ve split up the faceplates between free and premium. There’s no real reason logic to the split either, but before I continue in regards to the split itself, I must address what these faceplates actually are.

Rant Intermission: Ougi screenshots as a faceplate

As if it wasn’t bad enough already that the faceplates are split up, it’s the quality of them that bugs me the most. Those faceplates are straight up screenshots of Granblue Fantasy Versus’ Skybound and Super Skybound Art poses. If they were just on the free tier I don’t think I would have given this too much thought and just accepted it, but this is some serious low effort content. We’re talking Top 10 lists on YouTube kind of low, bottom of the barrel type levels of effort.

I am not giving those faceplates a hard time, because I think they suck. I don’t actually think that, it’s a neat idea to just use those poses all things considered. If you are going with a let’s crop a jpg type of approach though, please do not have the audacity to then charge people for it. Alright; rant over.

Rewards, loot and segregation (Pt.2)

So we’ve discussed the quality of those faceplates and hinted at the fact that they maybe shouldn’t be included in Granblue Fantasy Versus’ premium tier. What’s jarring is how they’re just split up for no reason. The first one on the free tier you get is Charlotte, then next on the list after that at level 15 is Cagliostro on the premium tier, then after that Lancelot at level 20 on the free tier, followed by Zeta at level 45 on the premium tier. For a split second, you might have thought that maybe only DLC characters’ faceplates appear on the premium tier, but Zeta immediately dashed that type of sense-making-logic. I said this during the stream as well, but it would make a lot more sense to have these faceplates confined to the free tier and let you choose, which faceplate you want at each of the levels you unlock one. Sure I’ll collect them all anyway, but as a Zeta main, even though I am in the process of making Yuel my main right now, I really don’t care about any of the plates up until Level 45. If you’re a Djeeta main for instance, you are literally not getting anything for the first 50 levels at all. 

This brings me to the next gripe I have. Granblue Fantasy Versus’ battle pass is all about having online interactions and achieving things in online matches. Well; with the exception of the title change— which by extension at least still does go into the online interactions bucket. So why do I get Rupie and R weapon rewards for the RPG mode? The R weapons are kinda useless as is, but Rupies? By the time you unlock Babyl tower, not to mention once you start farming SSR grids, you will have millions upon millions of Rupies. To waste a levelling slot, especially on the premium tier, is rough. It’s only 3,000 Rupies by the way, a mere pittance, and again you will be swimming in millions. I have no idea what the idea was behind that other than making the loot table look bigger. 

Then we have the trophy titles, which are fine in my opinion. It doesn’t matter which tier they sit on, it just means that there are some exclusives on the premium tier, nothing wrong about that. We are just talking little lines of text after all that say things like “I am Vee” or “A strong guy has shown up”. 

The last type of reward I haven’t touched upon yet are the lobby avatars. So far two have been listed, Io and Societte. Once again, Granblue Fantasy Versus splits these up between the two tiers. You unlock Io at Level 30, which is also the final level for the free tier’s reward system, while Societte is unlocked at Level 40 on the premium tier. Considering how this all has been split up between the two tiers I am not really surprised, but considering that these are literal premium items, which so far always came packaged with new character or stage purchases. These could easily both have gone onto the premium tier. I am not interested in making Cygames or Arc System Works more money, but if you want people to buy something, you need to at least create a demand for it first. I simply don’t see how chopping up the rewards and randomly distributing the pieces across the two tiers is going to do that. You can’t just count on people like myself, who will fork out the cash, little as it maybe in the grand scheme of things, to satiate their curiosity.

Final thoughts

The Battle Pass is a neat idea, yes, but you are pretty much required to buy the premium version if you want any of the worthwhile items. Unless your whole goal in life is to run around as Io in player match rooms and lobbies, I don’t see how you will get much, if anything out of the free tier. If you’re a Charlotte or Lancelot fan, there are at least those screenshots for your faceplate I guess.

As for the challenges that you need to accomplish each day and week; none of them are very demanding and while I don’t mind being able to clear out weeklies in a day, I always did that in Monster Hunter World and Iceborne as well, the amount of effort required just isn’t there right now. I would let the dailies slide, unfun as they are and they do update every day after all; being able to clear them in less than 15 minutes can’t be target-oriented though. Unless I am mistaken and the goal wasn’t to get people to log on and keep playing the game? Weeklies as the name suggests only change once a week, so they should have something to get your teeth stuck in. Theme them and increase the numbers the player is required to hit. Win rounds with more than X amount of seconds left on the clock 20+ times. Punish moves 50+ times, crush moves 15+ times— you know, actual challenges that will have people playing the game for prolonged periods of time. I would even go as far and suggest to lock the challenges behind the ranked matchmaking queue, so that it can get revitalised. I know it would get me to finally use that queue again. With the limited amount of players currently in that queue, the connections tend to be awful, so it’s generally a waste of time to go in there as it stands right now.

I love this game, I think it’s endless amount of fun to play against people, learn the match ups, new concepts setups and have a great time while doing all of that. That’s where Granblue Fantasy Versus shines, the actual fighting game part! The RPG mode is OK, but it’s certainly not great, you can leave Granblue Fantasy Relink to deal with that. Focus your efforts on making people play Granblue Fantasy Versus for now! A battle pass should encourage people to play the game and have worthwhile rewards in them in both tiers. Challenges should also ask more of the players in terms of time investment. Quickly hopping on and being able to instantly clear dailies and weeklies, so that they can log off again, just doesn’t seem like it does anything for the game itself. When I talk about worthwhile rewards I am not asking for the free tier to include premium-premium items, but skins should come in two flavours, for example— SR weapons in the free tier and SSR weapons, as well as joke weapons in the premium tier. Your screenshot faceplates 100% belong in the free tier, but you could make a better version of that available for the premium tier, like an actual piece of artwork in a different style of the same screenshot would be fine as well, at least it would be special.

It’s precisely because I like this game so much that I can pick apart this little addition to hell and back. I think I made my points though and I have rambled on for way too long already. I’d love to hear your thoughts on the whole Battle Pass, both free and Premium. So please; let me know in the comments here or over in the comment section on my YouTube video.