Interview: Granblue Fantasy Versus: Rising World Tournament’s top players talk about why they play GBVSR and how they selected their mains 

The finals of the ARC WORLD TOUR 2023 (held from March 21 to 23 this year) featured Granblue Fantasy Versus: Rising (GBVSR hereafter), culminating in a fierce competition between eight top-level GBVSR players from around the world.   

With the overall competitive gaming scene heating up, you may be wondering why these players chose GBVSR and how they go about practicing their skills. We had the opportunity to simultaneously interview a whopping seven of the eight players who participated in the GBVSR finals of the ARC WORLD TOUR 2023 and ask them all about the tournament and GBVSR. In this article, we present the full contents of this exclusive Japan-USA-Europe joint interview. We have divided it into two parts due to the sheer volume of interesting answers we received. In this installment, we asked the players why they started playing GBVSR and how they chose the characters they currently main. You can read part two here.

Please note that that this interview was conducted in April, at the time of the patch 1.30. The game’s content may differ in some respects from the current patch 1.41.    

Participants: 

• Takodot (Japan) 
2 years of fighting game experience. Doesn’t like vegetables. 
Mains Nier and Belial. 

• Fukunaga (Japan) 
He started playing Granblue Fantasy Versus as his main game as soon as it was released. Likes the game mechanics of GBVSR.
Mains Lancelot. 

• Xerom (USA) 
Has been playing fighting games for a long time. He also likes RPGs and is a fan of the original Granblue Fantasy. 
Mains Charlotta. 

• Fitizen (Germany) 
Has been playing fighting games since 2013. Has played many titles, and is currently playing GBVSR. 
Mains Siegfried. 

• Zippy (USA) 
Has been playing fighting games for about 4 years. Just graduated from senior high. 
Mains Nier. 

• Sonic-san (France) 
Has been playing fighting games since 2009 and often visits local tournaments. 
Mains Siegfried and Belial. 

 • Kojicoco (USA) 
Speaks Japanese and has interpreted on a few occasions for this interview. His favorite food is sweets. 
Mains Nier and Zooey. 

──GBVSR is still a relatively new game. What made you decide to focus on it? 

Takodot: 

I’ve been playing the previous title, Granblue Fantasy Versus, since its day of release, so I knew from the outset that I had to try the new title in the series. I have played many other fighting games, but I felt that the GBVS series fits me best. I was able to play against many players from the previous title, as well as the newcomers who started from GBVSR, so I believe this title is very promising even though it has only just begun. 

Fukunaga: 

I saw Score and Debagame play GBVSR on YouTube, and got interested because it seemed to be faster than the previous title, so I started playing. It felt pretty good when I actually tried it, especially because of how compatible it is with the gamepad. The one-button specials make it easy to input commands, and being able to press the dash button with my left hand also feels very intuitive for me. The fact that it’s easy to play on a gamepad makes GBVSR easy to play late at night, and I think that’s part of the reason I’ve made it this far in it. 

Xerom: 

Personally, I love Granblue Fantasy in general as an IP. And for GBVSR, it takes two things that I love – Granblue Fantasy and fighting games, and gives me a wonderful and stylish 3D rendition of the world and the characters that I enjoy. So, it’s very good to see something that I’ve grown attached to rendered in 3D and adapted into a fighting game at the same time. 

Fitizen: 

As someone who enjoyed the original GBVS a little bit more than GBVSR, I wasn’t sure if I should play it at first. Of course, there was the free trial version which I could try out, but in the end, what made the difference was how  Cygames provided support right from the start. The Kayane cup was announced in France, which was really close to me, so I decided I would play seriously, go to the tournament and see what I can do. I’ve played the base game since its release, and I realized that I enjoy and like the community in the EU way too much to ever stop playing. Also, I have certain hopes for the game’s future, and I was happy with the recent patch that came out too. In that sense, my decision to keep playing this game was rewarded in the short term. 

Zippy: 

I was originally into Guilty Gear –Strive–, but I wasn’t really a fan of the new patch, which kind of killed my drive for competing in the game. I haven’t really played the old GBVS, but when GBVSR was announced for the first time, I tried it out, like 2 months before the release of GBVSR. I also played the beta, and after that, I kind of started liking fighting games again even though I had quit competing for several months. I also started doing well on some online tournaments, so I decided I’d start taking things seriously, and I have been playing ever since. 

──If you were to recommend GBVSR to someone, what would you emphasize as its main qualities? 

Takodot: 

GBVSR implements a new system called Bravery Points (BP). There are many ways to use BP, and all of them are quite powerful, but the use of BP can vary considerably from person to person. Even players of the same character can have completely different playstyles depending on how they use BP, and I think this is a particularly interesting aspect of this title. 

Fukunaga: 

Personally, I think the most interesting aspect of the game is that you can now take the initiative in attacking. I found the original GBVS to be very defensive. But in GBVSR, you can take the helm in the game with the dash attack. Another attractive point is the game’s compatibility with the gamepad, which I touched on in the previous question. 

One-button specials are also found in other games, but they come with their disadvantages, such as certain moves becoming impossible to perform. In this respect, GBVSR has almost no disadvantages due to the small number of attack buttons, and since technical input can be turned off to prevent abilities from accidentally activating, the game can be played in a stress-free way even with a gamepad. I think this is one of the main reasons why I enjoy playing GBVSR so much. 

Kojicoco: 

I think the biggest thing for me is how cool the characters are. In terms of GBVSR’s characteristics as a fighting game, as Takodot was saying, the decision-making really varies depending on the player, so at the top level, you see a lot of diversity in the way people play the game and use their characters. But yeah, most of all, I think it’s just about the coolness of each character that you can feel when you play. 

Sonic-san: 

As a long-time fighting game player, I think GBVSR is very easy to pick up. It is easy to find the optimal combos, and you don’t have to play a lot to learn the basics of the game. Essentially, you just have to play a lot against other players online, rather than spending a lot of time in the training mode labbing. Also, GBVSR’s graphics are really great. 

Zippy: 

What I really like about GBVSR is how simple the interactions are. When you learn it once, you don’t have to deal with a lot of nuances about how an interaction goes. For other games, when there’s one big interaction, there are a lot of mechanics that get involved and turn things into a three-way guess. But for GBVSR, once you learn the interaction, you kind of know the result every time. There are not a lot of variances between what comes out of a certain situation. It makes things a lot more simplified, so you can kind of go in the lab, learn an interaction in 10 minutes and never have to deal with it again. Or you can simply just play against the character for an hour and learn things naturally, mostly by hitting your face into a wall. That’s what I like about the game, it’s very simple in that regard. 

──What is the reason you chose your current main? What are their strengths? 

Takodot: 

One of my favorite characters in the original Granblue Fantasy is Vikala. Among the characters added to GBVSR, Nier had a color scheme inspired by Vikala, so that was the deciding factor in my choice of character. As for the character’s strengths, Nier has a particularly high combo firepower, and I think her ability to generate high firepower in any situation in a relatively stable way is her selling point and strength. 

Fukunaga: 

At first, I couldn’t decide between Lancelot, Nier, and Siegfried. I thought I was most likely to win with these three characters as far as I could tell from the training mode. Of the three, Lancelot was the most appealing because I had used him in GBVS and he had the okizeme attack where he fires a projectile, which I like. His Ultimate Abilities are all interesting, especially U-Wogenstrom, which can slow down an opponent’s movement for a certain amount of time. Lancelot has many unique characteristics and quirks, and I chose him because of these. 

Xerom: 

I first chose Charlotta because she was the character that introduced me to Granblue Fantasy as a franchise, and that’s when I kind of fell in love with the series. I’m generally a big fan of the Harvin characters as well, and I look forward to seeing them being implemented in 3D. As for Charlotta’s strengths, I think they come from her speed and her size. Also, she has the fast jump that lets her close in on her opponent and stick to them very easily, and her playstyle isn’t too complicated or intricate either. All of this allows you to kind of just go in and mash buttons and pressure your opponent with her. 

Kojicoco: 

When I started playing GBVSR, I pretty much knew I was going to play Zooey because I think she’s the coolest character in the game. But then, I realized I had to deal with characters like Seox and Siegfried which were a pretty tough match for Zooey, so I randomly started playing Nier. Then, I gradually started liking her, especially when I found out about the 50/50 setup. You can do it in all sorts of situations, and I found it to be really strong. I felt like Nier really clicked with me, and I was able to find a lot of strong strategies, which made me want to stick to the character. 

Fitizen: 

Initially, I played Percival, Djeeta and Seox in the base game. When GBVSR came out, I first tried out Percival and Djeeta, but Siegfried was very popular in Europe, so I kept facing him. I felt like he had the upper hand in matchups against my characters, so I thought for a while about which character I should play against him. I considered Seox at first, but then I came to the realization that I should just be playing as Siegfried too, rather than trying to beat him. He can play a lot like Percival did in the base game before he got nerfed, and I think he’s possibly the strongest character in the game, especially after the recent patch. His Nelah Nav is very strong and can normalize the way you play against most of the cast, meaning you don’t have to engage everyone on their own terms, you can just use that as the core to engage with. Especially now that DashL is nerfed, I think it’s even stronger, because before, 66L was one of the main counterplays to 236H. His Messager is also very powerful in that it has a lot of horizontal range, which is strong against zoning and a lot of special cancels. For example, against Nier – if she cancels into a Death special after 2M, you can go through it with his Messager and that’s a privilege that other characters don’t have. These strengths are why I ended up sticking with him in the end. 

Sonic-san: 

Most of the reasons why I play Siegfried are the same as Fitizen’s. Also, I generally like to play standard characters in fighting games, so Siegfried with fireball and DP was good for me in that regard too. I used to play Gran and Belial in the base game, but I found Siegfried to be much stronger than these two. There’s a bit of a resemblance with Gran too, where you do a big chunk of damage with few hits. I don’t really like long combos in fighting games, it’s more satisfying for me to get a big chunk of damage with just a medium into a super or something like that. Siegfried was appealing to me in that sense too. 

Zippy: 

I was originally going to play Siegfried because Nier did not look that good to me when the beta footage came out. The puppet was always active, and you could hit it at any time. But when the game came out, they removed that whole interaction, so you can’t just hit the puppet whenever you want. I decided to try her out, and after like a week, I realized that she was a really strong character. After that, I just kept on playing her because I wanted to win, I thought she was the strongest character in the game. 

Continues in Part 2.