Granblue Fantasy Relink beaten on normal difficulty:

There's still some after story content I can waste time with, but the credits have already rolled and the last boss has already been beaten.  It was a great game, to be precise the 40th best game franchise in my video game hall of fame.  But it wasn't as compelling or unique or good looking as 13 Sentinels Aegis Rim, much less truly emotional epics like Xenoblade 3 or Fire Emblem Engage.

To make room in my hall of fame for Granblue I kicked out Uncharted Waters, an old NES game about controlling a merchant fleet and getting rich by sailing the world.  It's easy to reach my hall of fame as a PS5 game when you're still competing with NES games.

I really enjoyed this game's music, but it was mostly composed by Tsutomo Narita rather than Uematsu, which puts an asterisk on it.  The game was a little short and felt boss-heavy, like I was just fighting one big boss after another and there was nothing inbetween.  It also didn't make much sense to have all these extra playable characters when only 4 can fight in your group and none of them show up in the storyline.  In Fire Emblem Engage all your characters are real and exist in the real world and are vital to the main story.  But I did love playing as Zeta, the scantily clad female dragoon voiced by Kana Hanazawa with blonde hair and green eyes.  She was beautiful, fun and strong.  So I don't object to the giant list of extra characters, I just think they could have been handled better.

The hardest battle I conquered in the game was when Io had to singlehandedly defeat a Goblin Lord with a giant shield that usually blocked all her attacks.  Boy was that fight frustrating.  The summoned minions I could deal with but when he went berserk and did a nonstop flurry of sword attacks it reminded me of Yuffie's battle with Ramuh -- I barely ever got a chance to attack between all the dodges and blocks I had to do.  But I won so all's well that ends well.

The best part of this game was the stellar voice acting cast.  Pretty much every heavyweight in the business had a role.  Rie Kugimiya, Kana Hanazawa, Yukari Tamura, Nao Toyama, Miyuki Sawashiro, Hisako Kanemoto, Kenjiro Tsuda, Hiroaki Hirota, Hiroshi Kamiya, Kaori Nazuka, Sakura Tange. . .

This game really felt like FF16 with more likable characters, and just more characters in general.  FF16 done right.  It's no wonder given that Granblue Fantasy as a franchise is an attempt to recapture the magic of Final Fantasy before it went astray. (ie, everything after FF10).

The 3rd season of Legend of El Cid is right around the corner, coming to Amazon Prime video on February 7th.  I've been waiting for this.  My tenth favorite tv series deserves more episodes and now it's finally getting them.