This article was originally published in the commemorative 12th anniversary of GBF issue of Famitsu. It can be found in its untranslated entirety on the Famitsu website. As usual, all errors are Vibratingsheep’s. Let’s do this
Highlights of the new story and its diverse new people
Famitsu: In the main story quest, the Great Uplift led to huge changes in the world of GBF. What are some highlights of what’s coming up?
Producer: Sandalphon, who’s split off from the rest of the crew, is going to become a key player in the story, so I hope people are excited for that part.
Also, GBF is a story about many different people. The new story features the earthdwellers, who really emphasize that. For now, there are a few races that don’t have a named representative, but there will be more and more of them as time goes on, and it should be fun to see what makes them unique and alive. Another highlight is the rise of the demons as a new type of adversary.
Famitsu: That demon in the main story took over Fylkis’ body and possessed a few others on its rampage, didn’t it.
Producer: The demon from the opening chapters of Earth-Sky Oath was pretty weak as demons go. Stronger demons will appear soon to oppose the crew, similar to how the Black Knight operated in the early chapters of the Estalucia arc.
Famitsu: We’ve already learned the names of the Levleath, Geonoid, Wolvir, and Grockle in main story.
Producer: From the very beginning, GBF has been about many more than just the main Human, Erune, Draph, and Harvin races. We had Vania and Veight the Vampires, or the Crystalians Lily and Erin.
Even though there are fewer of them than the main four races, we didn’t minimize them as a culture, and one of the appeals of GBF is its many characters of all shapes, sizes, and colors. It’s important to us that even though we have so many different races, we’re not confined to just those and can continue to add more.
Famitsu: There are notable rules for each of the races we’ve seen before, like how Erunes won’t have any voiced consonants or P sounds in their names, or how Harvins always have two R/L sounds in their name. Do the new character races have those kinds of rules in place?
(Translator’s note: the rules don’t always carry over in translation, but they are there and consistent in Japanese)
Producer: Yes, those rules were firmly in place during the design stage. It wouldn’t be as fun if I spilled all the beans now, so you can enjoy figuring it out once we have more characters. We announced this during the live stream already, but when Fylkis becomes a playable character, she will be listed as a Levleath and not Other. The Zeonoids, Wolvir, and Grokkle will all come in their own time, so look forward to that.
Famitsu: Will there be any characters who get retconned into being a Levleath or other earthdweller race?
Producer: That’s not in our plans. The only case, and it might be a stretch, would be Abramelin from “Heart of the Sun”, who has a special relationship with one of the earthdweller cultures. That has already been shown in story.
Famitsu: The Estalucia arc ended up taking 11 years to complete, with a huge amount of content. What will happen during the new Earth-Sky Oath arc?
Producer: At the end of the Estalucia arc, there is a preview quest called “Wolf, Moon, Taboos, Wings.” Sandalphon is the wings, Moon refers to Dex… and so on. We hope you’re looking forward to all these stories going forward.
Designs that show you a culture
Famitsu: Players have been talking about Lulou Holou, Constance, and other characters from story events joining the gacha. How do you take in player reactions?
Producer: Put simply, seeing the reactions from skyfarers makes us very happy. GBF puts a lot of thought and care into its characters, and we like having the opportunity to say “We care about this character too” and go back to them and their story. It’s very satisfying.
It’s incredibly difficult to give every character the spotlight, but we plan on making it a regular occurrence for characters from past story events to show up again, as well as for current R and SR characters to reappear at SSR.
Famitsu: It’s fairly common for skyfarers to have fond memories of SR characters who were great for them when they were new, and happy to see them again. And personally, I’m excited to see the self-titled Vice Captain Carren again. She doesn’t have an SSR yet, and she’s pretty cute…
Producer: We get a lot of comments like that about R and SR characters. They’re treasured crewmates and friends, and now that we’ve all reached Estalucia and grown stronger from the experience, it would be great to stand shoulder to shoulder with them again.
Famitsu: While we’re talking about characters, we have now reached 12 Divine Generals to cover the 12 zodiac animals on the new year. Many skyfarers wonder what will happen at the end of this year.
Producer: We like to keep things surprising and exciting for our skyfarers at all times of the year, not just on the new year, so we hope you’re all looking forward to what we have in store.
Famitsu: As in-game content, the Eternals and Evokers have been a big part of the game since they were first added. Do you have any plans to add more characters like these, who are unlocked and empowered via treasure?
Producer: We’ve already announced transcendence for the Evokers. GBF has always been a game with a huge amount of goals and things to do, and we develop our content with the amount of load it will put on players foremost on our minds. We don’t want to put too much on their plate at once.
Famitsu: It feels like when a player starts GBF, the game guides them to recruiting an Eternal and an Evoker. It feels like how far a skyfarer has progressed on each of those goals represents a big milestone in their progress on social media.
Producer: That’s definitely true. I see that on social media a lot. On the other hand, returning players see the Eternal and Evoker recruiting process as a very high hurdle, so we continue to think about how to make the process less intimidating.
Famitsu: The latest story chapters introduced us to Fylkis, Darydara, and a few more. Could you talk about what roles they’ll be playing?
Producer: For Darydara, we wanted a supporting sanmaime role who could keep the story moving. Having too many cool, aloof characters would make it hard to pace, and we wanted someone who could also carry the comedy.
As for Maminas, Miamint, and Jherion, they’re much like Sturm and Drang from the Estalucia arc. Your foils and rivals. We hope that they add a bit of spice to the story.
Famitsu: The earthdwellers feel very different from the skydwellers we’ve met so far.
Producer: Putting aside the fact that they live on floating islands, skydwellers have a culture that’s pretty close to modern Japanese people. Compared to them, earthdwellers have a very different and distinct culture. We designed them with their environment in mind: how would they have developed with such otherworldly conditions?
Famitsu: So you’ve not only designed the earthdweller’s history and world, but also their lifestyle.
Producer: Yes. Hopefully you can get a feel of that from the clothes they wear and how they look as well.
Famitsu: Were there any inspirations for them taken from real world countries or cultures?
Producer: If anything, we took care to avoid any real world inspirations. Our art team, story team, and planning team spent a long time coming up with great designs that would avoid any resemblance to existing “Other” races yet still felt like they belonged in the world of Granblue Fantasy.
The challenge of refreshing a familiar soundtrack
Famitsu: The new main story quest chapters included new music. What was the concept or theme behind the new tracks?
Producer: To start, we gave our composer Narita Tsutomu-san the task of composing the Odious raid music as horror-themed tracks that made your hair stand on end, rather than our usual stirring fantasy music.
The easiest one to hear this in is probably the music for Mortality Verboten: Nihuyvintae. The whole track is starkly creepy, and as you reach the end of the battle, it becomes much more orchestral.
Famitsu: It reminds me of something like the Celeste raid music.
Producer: Right. It’s not a completely new genre of music for us, but hopefully if you listen to the songs long enough you’ll feel a bit of a chill down your spine. On the other side of the ledger, the main story quest’s themes are a very familiar GBF sound.
For a long time, there have been many themes and tracks that play all over GBF like the theme “Pleasant Chat” that plays during everyday conversations. The development team got together and talked about what we should do in the new story chapters, should we keep the old songs? Our decision was to freshen things up by playing new tracks for those familiar situations in the new story arc.
By doing this, then when “Pleasant Chat” plays again, hopefully the players say “Oh, I haven’t heard this in a while!” and are happy to hear it. So don’t worry, just because we’ve updated the soundtrack, it doesn’t mean that we’ve retired all of the old songs.
Famitsu: Interesting. Will you add more songs with lyrics to the soundtrack, too?
Producer: We want to, at points in the story where they really add to the moment and excite you.
Famitsu: The new raids have added Odious weapons to the mix. These weapons come with downsides, so what role did you have in mind for them when you made them?
Producer: We wanted Odious grids and parties to be an option alongside Omega grids and Optimus grids. Omega grids, depending on the element, tend to be Normal Attack focused or Charge Attack focused, so these could be a completely different focus, for example. We aimed for these not to be upgrades to Omega grids, but rather something that could exist alongside Omega grids.
Famitsu: So did you envision a grid that mixed Odious and Omega weapons, or Odious and Optimus weapons?
Producer: We think we’ll do an Odious version of the Exalto weapon at some point, and we plan to release 6-player versions of each Odious raid, so this should increase the number of options. We kind of intend for these Odious weapons to be a next step after Omega, and we do not plan for them to be able to go toe-to-toe with the top end Optimus grids.
Famitsu: The Befoulments on Odious weapons make them very unique.
Producer: That’s true. Our vision for them was “In exchange for a downside, the skills on them are very strong.” In addition, there are ways to circumvent the downside or turn them into an upside, like having the Multiattack Down Befoulment and using characters who always triple attack. If you plan just right, you can have all of these strong skills without any downside.
Famitsu: Do you plan on having any summons that boost Odious skills in the gacha?
Producer: We do not have any plan to do that at this time. The summons will only be available as drops.
Famitsu: I see. But it feels like with current summon drop rates, making these grids will take a long time.
Producer: We plan on adding the Odious raids to the Extra Drops and Monthly Skyscope Missions fairly quickly, and giving players more opportunities to get them. There are many ways to look at how strong a boss is, but with Sierokarte’s Knickknack Academy for new players, then making bosses too weak could lead to people joining from backup and one-tapping them. That would turn the process into a chore, so we hope that players will actually play the fights as they work toward making new grids.
Famitsu: Higher difficulty raid battles ask you to be judicious with your artifact picks. Do you plan on adding any more artifacts?
Producer: We currently have no plans for that. Our priority will be to make artifacts easier to acquire, and make it easier to try out a variety of different artifacts.
The importance of difficult quests that test your strength
Famitsu: At the end of 2025, quite a few new skyfarers joined, partially as a result of streaming projects like the Granblue Girls Club and the Nijisanji Vtuber Crew. What does the dev team think about this?
Producer: We feel like it’s the fruit of a lot of hard work from the team’s efforts, but we also have a lot of people to thank. This includes the three Nijisanji members, but especially Yorumi Rena-san, who’s played Granblue Fantasy for so long without any urging from Cygames to do so. This was our first time engaging her for PR, but it wouldn’t have gotten the same reception if she wasn’t already known as a dedicated skyfarer.
When it comes to our goals as a dev team, we wanted to find a new way to approach both audiences who had never seen GBF before and skyfarers who had taken a break from the game. The new story arc provided us a good time to bring in new players and excite our existing players as well.
Because the Nijisanji crew and the Granblue Girls Club had so much fun, they’ve continued to play GBF after our PR engagement ended. I’m grateful for that.
Famitsu: Their enthusiasm was infectious.
Producer: It was. We’re so grateful to them for showing off what makes GBF so fun to such a large audience. Many new skyfarers have started keeping journals that chronicle their experience as a new player as well as their thoughts and reactions, and I read and watch as many as I can to find areas of improvement or player requests that we can improve.
(Translator’s note: We have decent proof that this is true – the December update to Sierokarte’s Knickknack Academy came two days after a new player posted that the missions didn’t give enough anima to uncap all of the Seraphic weapons)
Famitsu: Partially due to this influx of new players, the January 2026 Unite and Fight saw huge increases in the honors rankings and borderlines. How are you thinking about changing the event in the future?
Producer: We always look at how to update and improve Unite and Fight, but we will not do it for a while. We don’t want certain elements to have a different experience from what the other elements did, so we usually wait until 3 or 6 elements have had their turn before making any changes. We’ve been consistent with this for years, so we don’t plan on making any changes in reaction to shifts in player numbers.
Famitsu: We’ve seen many new players who are grateful for Sierokarte’s Knickknack Academy. Do you have any plans to expand on it?
Producer: Around six years ago, the plan to create a training ground for new players came up, and the team was split. Some thought that we should use our resources on content for current players, while others thought that we should focus development on creating content for future players who were going to join the game.
The Knickknack Academy wasn’t meant for active skyfarers, and right after we released it, the reception wasn’t entirely positive. However, the reactions from new players among the Nijisanji crew and the Granblue Girls Club, along with those who started the game thanks to those PR efforts, were positive and I think our work on it was part of that.
We do want to expand it, but we face the dilemma of weighing the resource allocation required to develop it further against development time for new content and features.
Famitsu: From the new free quests to balance changes in the raids themselves, both Dark Rapture Zero and the Hexachromatic Hierarch have felt more approachable. What’s your current philosophy on high difficulty content, including the newer Versusia Genesis?
Producer: We always have to have hard content to work toward. GBF is essentially a hack and slash game, so we have to give our skyfarers the place to use the parties they’ve worked so hard on. We also need an extra-hard level of content that makes people excited and gives them the feeling of accomplishment that comes with being one of an exclusive group of people who can clear that difficulty.
However, it’s also true that at some point, we need to make our game content accessible to all players. So that means when harder content comes out, we make sure that players can get stronger and some of the older content gets easier, and continue the cycle. One of the great joys of GBF is trying out new teams and strategies, and one major bottleneck is the fear of making a mistake and getting yelled at by other players..
Famitsu: That’s one of the highest hurdles to hard content. Failing and feeling bad about it is painful.
Producer: We believed that one of the elements that made the barrier so high was the limit of of one host per day, so that’s why we implemented the Heart of the Conqueror difficulty and the Vote to Disband function. Skyfarers can use the Heart of the Conqueror mode to get used to a boss’ mechanics, and even if they do make a mistake they can disband the raid, so the mental hurdles are much lower than they’ve been in the past.
After we implemented those updates, the number of skyfarers who have Draconic Weapons Provenance and Transcended Dark Opus weapons has gone up a great deal. This isn’t the end of our plans, and tackling this problem is something we always have to think about as a game team.
Famitsu: Previous quests have received the Ascendant Prayer difficulty so that it would be much easier to clear them. Is that an option to make these quests easier?
Producer: That’s an option. We don’t plan on it in the near future, but we’ll look at it again when the time is right.
Famitsu: Granblue Fantasy Fest 2025 seemed to be a big hit. How are you approaching the next Granblue Fantasy Fes?
Producer: Granblue Fest was conceived as a big offline event and it’s in its 10th year this year. We think a lot of people associate GBF with Granblue Fest now, and thanks to all of the fans, last year’s show had the largest two-day attendance we’ve had yet. As long as the skyfarers enjoy it, we will keep on going.
Famitsu: When Granblue Fest first started, GBVS and Relink hadn’t released yet. Fest was one of the best ways to experience the world of Granblue Fantasy.
Producer: That’s true. Granblue Fest started as an idea for people to meet the characters as they existed in their imaginations, and that’s also a driving principle behind the Official Cast performances as well.
Another big reason for the event is to give skyfarers a place to come together and feel like they share the game with so many other people. The development team isn’t exempt from this either, and it’s a place where we can go to remind ourselves of just how many people play the game.
Famitsu: It sounds like a great motivator.
Producer: It is. We want Granblue Fest to be a place for skyfarers to reunite, to rediscover, and more. That said, we’ve been doing this for 10 years and the bar keeps going up for our skyfarers, and it gets harder for us to keep making attractions and exhibits that will keep the skyfarers’ interest… and because 2026 is our 10th Fest, our whole staff is working to make it the biggest and best one yet.
Famitsu: We’re excited to see what’s next for GBF! Please give the skyfarers one last message about what they have to look forward to.
Producer: I don’t think many skyfarers believed they would ever see the story reach Estalucia. One major story came to an end, but the journey continues, and it will get even bigger in scale than before. We’re so happy that so many skyfarers have come with us on this journey, and the game teams are all working hard to make sure that you will always be glad that you embarked on that journey with us.