Granblue Fantasy: Relink completes the JRPG hattrick by cracking a million sales

Originally posted on Video Games on SI | By Marco Wutz | Last updated Feb 13, 2024 4:47 AM ET

It’s a good time to release JRPGs, apparently. More than one million copies of Granblue Fantasy: Relink have been sold in the eleven days since the game launched. This number includes digital and physical sales from all over the globe. It has become the third entry into the genre to crack this important commercial milestone shortly after coming out this year, following the success of Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth and Persona 3 Reload.

"A million thanks to our wonderful community of skyfarers for helping us reach this milestone. We have more updates on the horizon, so stay tuned," the game's social media account posted.

Granblue Fantasy: Relink, which has been developed and published by Cygames, is available on PC, PS4, and PS5. Offering real-time combat and co-op gameplay for up to four players, it’s got enough unique flavor to distinguish it from the competition – and the same can be said for Like a Dragon and Persona. Though they’re all sorted under that JRPG category, each of the three titles offers quite different experiences, so the cannibalization of sales some fans feared would take place due to their close release dates never actually occurred.

Cygames

Granblue Fantasy was originally a mobile and browser game launched in 2014 in Japan that was strongly inspired by the early Final Fantasy games – a fact that was helped by key positions like art director and composer being filled by former Final Fantasy staffers. It became one of Japan’s highest-grossing mobile games in the subsequent years. Famously, Granblue Fantasy’s gacha mechanics led to Japanese authorities imposing tighter restrictions on the industry after a user streamed himself investing around $6,000 USD to pull a certain character.

In 2017 the game got an anime adaptation and in 2020 developer Arc System Works released a successful fighting game spin-off called Granblue Fantasy Versus that got a sequel in 2023. The original game is still exclusive to Japan, which makes the IPs popularity worldwide so interesting.

This article first appeared on Video Games on SI and was syndicated with permission.

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