About as Good as Most Fighting Game Plots
Going into this anime, my only prior exposure was playing a few rounds of the new Granblue Fantasy Versus game. Some of characters were pretty interesting, some were super generic, like Gran, and I could tell it was going to be some medieval style setting. Ultimately, my hunches proved correct as I watched the show.
The main storyline revolves around Gran, typical anime softboi whose dad left him to travel, and his efforts to help Lyria, waifu with magic powers, and Katalina, who betrayed the empire to protect Lyria. There’s also Gran’s little dragon friend Vyrn, who I found annoying in both the game and show. Lyria has some special power that allows her to talk to “Primal Beasts” which seem like old Gods of this world. The Empire wishes to use that power to subjugate everyone. After Gran dies trying to protect Lyria, she uses her powers to give him half her life force and resurrect him. I did actually like the mechanic this introduces as apparently being too far apart, or the death of either of them, will weaken and/or kill the other. Sadly, this wasn’t explored much in the episodes I watched. The driving force is trying to find the island of the Astrals, which may hold more info on Lyria’s power and where Gran’s dad is supposedly located.
I did quite enjoy the setting. Basically the world is a bunch of isolated islands and travel is done via wind ships. The aesthetic of it all was pretty cool. However, the mast majority of the characters are rather generic, especially Gran. This led to much of the show just being rather average itself as I never really cared much for most of the main cast. Rackam, a gruff veteran pilot, was actually pretty interesting, but everyone else was more anime archetype. Some of the animations for the primal beasts was also not great, got close to Arifuerta levels at points, which was a tad distracting. I hesitate to call it bad because it’s not, but it’s just not good either. It does get the trash tag though because its definitely generic fluff and would likely be better as a story mode in the game than as a full fledged show.
Is it trash? YES
Rathing: ★★☆☆☆