Japanese role-playing games are a funny lot. I sometimes struggle to articulate why I love them and their more esoteric qualities, or how I can overlook their pandering. There are many I don’t care for. But when they get it “right”, there’s no other genre I find quite so gratifying. At their best, they turn the hoary old tropes of the hero’s journey into something both emotional and epic; the mundane reality of battle into super-heroics. They shift radically in tone so seamlessly it leaves you wide-eyed in awe rather than suffering from whiplash. There’s a sense that anything could happen. I want to talk about one of the best examples. You won’t find it on Steam, Uplay, Origin or any other digital storefront. But it has been around for almost five years, with an authorised English translation, even though it never officially launched outside Japan. It’s a (deep breath) free-to-play game, funded by micro-transactions, designed for smartphones but – bear with me – playable in an internet browser. It’s called Granblue Fantasy.
