For years, I held myself back from playing one of my most anticipated games in recent memory for one simple reason: it felt terribly wrong to play Granblue Fantasy: Relink on a non-Nintendo console. I own the game on both PC and PS5, but I refused to continue playing on either platform. I kept dreaming of having another great action JRPG on my favorite console. Now, I have recently spent more than a dozen hours playing Granblue Fantasy: Relink on Switch 2 specifically to answer that desire. Thankfully, it’s clear that the wait for this port was worth it.
Relink’s Performance on Switch 2
Performance is the first thing you notice, and it held up better than I expected. To my eye, the game runs at what feels like a stable 30 frames per second. More importantly, it appears to maintain that performance when the screen gets busy. Relink loves to fill the frame with enemies, enormous attacks, and layered particle effects. Even during more graphically intensive missions, such as the spectacular Excavallion encounter, I never noticed a drop severe enough to pull me out of the fight.
Keep in mind that this assessment is based entirely on my impressions after more than a dozen hours of intense play. However, nothing during my time with the game suggested significant frame-pacing problems. I also encountered no crashes, severe bugs, or other issues that would make this feel like a fundamentally compromised port.
Visually, the art direction does much of the heavy lifting. Relink‘s anime-inspired presentation survives the move to less powerful hardware remarkably well. This is a game whose appeal was never based solely on raw polygon counts, and that works in the Switch 2’s favor. Combat still looks spectacular. The large, flashy Skybound Arts, crowded encounters, and elaborate particle effects all retain most of their visual identity.
That is not to say that nothing has been scaled back. The compromises are where you would expect them to be. Texture quality, shadows, and level of detail all appear to have taken a slight hit compared with the more powerful versions. During normal gameplay, however, these differences are barely noticeable. I only really began to see them when I stopped playing and deliberately searched for them.
I cannot confirm any specific resolution figures. Judging purely by eye and comparing it with confirmed Switch 2 releases and Tales of Arise, which I reviewed recently, the docked image appears to be below native 4K but comfortably above 1080p—possibly somewhere around 1440p.
The Switch 2’s Convenience
Relink‘s quest-based, largely self-contained structure makes it an almost perfect match for the pick-up-and-play rhythm of a hybrid console. You can complete a mission or two on the go, then continue with another mission away from the television. It also looks surprisingly good in portable mode, where the presentation makes excellent use of the Switch 2’s screen. That impression may partly be influenced by my television, which is a perfectly adequate but non-flagship 4K set, but the handheld image genuinely impressed me. To my eye, it does not appear to drop below full HD.
Load times remained acceptable throughout my playtime and never disrupted the experience. The controls translate naturally to the Switch 2 controller, with no meaningful relearning required. I also did not encounter any troubling issues involving battery life, heat, or resuming the game from sleep mode. Nothing in those areas emerged as a notable problem during my sessions.
On the connectivity side, local wireless multiplayer is a welcome Switch 2-specific addition, while cross-play support is also important. The obvious comparison is the PS5 version. As expected, the Switch 2 release is a step below the more powerful platforms, but during actual gameplay, it rarely felt dramatically inferior to the PS5 version.
For additional context, the PC version I previously tested is demanding to run. That makes the quality of this portable conversion feel more impressive, not less. This is not the most technically pristine way to experience Relink. Those who already own the game on a more powerful platform may not have enough reason to purchase it again unless the hybrid format is a major advantage or they are looking to move away from other platforms, as I am slowly doing with PlayStation.
As a native Switch 2 conversion, however, it feels confident and stable. The portable form factor suits this particular game so well that handheld access may be the entire selling point for many players. I fully expect the game to attract fans of several different types of action games. It remains one of my most anticipated Switch 2 releases, and I look forward to exploring it further beyond these initial impressions.
Granblue Fantasy: Relink – Endless Ragnarok is available now on Nintendo Switch 2, PlayStation 5, and PC. In our 4/5 review, we wrote, “Endless Ragnarok makes a good game better as it brings forth tons of quality-of-life improvements as well as brand new modes and a new story to fight through.”
