YMMV / Granblue Fantasy

Entries for the Grand Blues! spin-off can be found here.

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A-B

• Adaptation Displacement: For the West, unless players are hopping over from Shadowverse or were looking through Cygames' other works, they probably don't know that a reasonably large chunk of the cast derives from Rage of Bahamut, including several of the more odd Dub Name Changes (ie. Vampy to Vania, Brodia to Alexiel, etc.) that were Grandfather Clause-d in by the old localization team. It's partially justified by the fact that the global version of RoB has been defunct for several years with the English version of Granblue launching three years after the fact. Rage of Bahamut: Genesis and its sequel series are the only officially exported RoB media still available outside of Japan and it bears very little in common with either RoB or GBF beyond a few plot elements and characters (Azazel, Jeanne d'Arc's fall and subsequent redemption, Hamsa as a summon, Amira plus cam Kaiser in her Fate Episodes).
• Alternate Character Interpretation:
  • Since the addition of the notification on the main screen telling you to continue the story appeared, people have jokingly commented that Lyria is suddenly passive aggressive due to her being the one to say it.
  • The utter lack of Raphael interacting with Grimnir in the game or promotional material has led to the former being interpreted as a deadbeat mentor or utterly exhausted by Grimnir's youthfulness.
  • Some players interpret post-"000" Lucio's behavior toward Sandalphon as being more malicious than was likely intended. After all, outside of the instances in which Sandalphon snaps at Lucio for doing his own thing solely because of him looking like Lucifer, there are quite a few occasions in which his attitude toward Lucio is justified, especially in his summer Fate Episodes where Lucio acts like a Stalker without a Crush (Or with, depending on your interpretation) who has no regard for Sandalphon's feelings or personal space, despite the fact that the latter had been likened to a grieving widow in his own summer Fate Episodes. His later explanation could also be interpreted as him gaslighting and guilt-tripping Sandalphon into accepting him for who he is rather than viewing him as a copy of Lucifer, the sentiment which would have been fine if the audience didn't already know that he has a true form that looks less like Lucifer that he could change into at will as was revealed in "000", as well as the fact that Shalem walks around in her own true form with little issue. And then there's the fact that a lot of the issues between him and Sandalphon could be resolved if he didn't feign ignorance to the reason he and Lucifer look the same and simply explained why they look the same, which he doesn't do for unknown reasons. The innocence of his actions is particularly called into question in the event "Heart of the Sun," when he confesses to Sandalphon that he had hoped to greet him with a "Welcome home" similar to how he would greet Lucifer, simply out of habit since they share a similar appearance. This is especially creepy not only because he had hoped to use his similarity in appearance to Sandalphon’s dead loved one to gain some sort of validation from the man he is essentially stalking, but also because he was long aware aware of the weight of Sandalphon's grief—that he hasn't moved on from, mind you—and pulled this anyway, as if he hadn’t learned anything from their heart-to-heart in his Summer fate episode. Naturally, since every time Lucio does this it’s meant to be Played for Laughs, he once again isn’t called out on how unsettling his behavior is and it’s quickly moved on from.
• Alt-itis: Due to how incredibly easy it is to reroll in this game, many players tend to make more than one account, particularly during celebratory events that introduce free rolls. The practice of rerolling has become so commonplace that players frequently joke that the reason Granblue Fantasy has over 30 million registered accounts is because of how many alts each individual player has.
• Annoying Video Game Helper:
  • Miria Akagi has an ability that she can activate from the back row which buffs the party's attack every once in a while, which is great on paper. The problem comes when she decides that she wants to come to the front lines instead to help, which switches a random character with her, often times a strong attacker or even the MC. Many raids were foiled by this while earning Trust and Bond points because of her passive. Though this skill is now disabled, some players opted for Never Live It Down.
  • If an event has tokens, you'll be hearing characters telling you to spend them if you hold any more than one token. Considering you almost always will, it quickly becomes annoying to always hear those lines over the other, less repetitive ones.
• Anti-Climax Boss:
  • The main story battle against Rackam's darker persona and Tiamat Malice can be easily cleared (and does not even make use of your characters, weapon grids and summons), despite the challenge that Yggdrasil Malice was known for. Leviathan Malice and Mithra Malice from the Boss Rush chapter were also notably difficult for beginners. For a "Malice" boss, she was extremely easier to win against.
  • A number of supposed "unwinnable" in-story story bosses can be this depending on how much you put them off, or even compared to bosses you fought earlier. You can beat them so hard that they're barely able to touch you while you knock off a lot of their health, but the game decides after a set number of turns that the enemy was too tough for you. This even applies to scripted battles, such as Orchid's solo fight against Gilbert (where she's miles stronger than him in combat but is considered to have lost in the story) in the second arc, or the fight against Lucilius with the Captain, Sandalphon, and Lyria, where it's difficult but definitely winnable in "What Makes the Sky Blue: 000".
• Arc Fatigue:
  • Whatever happened to the "Reach Estalucia" Myth Arc that's introduced as early as the prologue. It's the main reason why the Captain decided to embark on a journey after all. But with side story events focusing on other plot points and characters, as well as the slow pace of main story updates around 2018-2019, lore enthusiasts in the fandom would be forgiven if they forgot about this plot point. While this is essentially what a myth arc is by definition, the game has reached its sixth year and in some fans' perspectives, the main crew seems to be barely even halfway their destination.
  • Vyrn's identity or backstory rely mostly on foreshadowing hints that are given at a drip-feeding pace. It's already fanon for the veteran Granblue fans to accept that Vyrn is actually Bahamut due to the game dropping a lot of related hints between the two identities despite not outright confirming it.
  • The third arc of the main story is considered by fans as something that had dragged on for too long, but this is more likely a result of the noticeably slower pace of main story updates around the years 2018-2019 with no conclusion chapters in sight. The fanbase just accepted that this slower pace is a side-effect of the team working on other Granblue works around those years, such as Granblue Fantasy: Relink and Granblue Fantasy Versus.
• Author's Saving Throw:
  • The infamous "Monkeygate" incident in the gacha industry brought about by this game was well-known and controversial enough for gacha veterans since 2016, which led to Cygames making changes to their gacha system, displaying draw rates, refunding the in-game currencies used by the players at that time, and offering a safety net mechanic such as the Cerulean Sparks (which allow players to freely choose an item from the current banner if they saved up enough draws). This was seen as a positive move, to the point that a lot of gacha games have also began implementing their own safety net mechanics. Afterwards, Cygames became more consumer-friendly over the years, particularly in giving tons of freebies on certain occasions.
  • The anime had some criticism for not including Djeeta among the main cast, if not being the protagonist in the first place. Then towards the end of the first season, Djeeta is revealed to have an episode all her own, to many fans' delight.
  • A lot of flak was also thrown the anime's way for focusing on the main story and characters (particularly in the more divisive and bland early parts) instead of introducing the side story characters. Starting from Episode 7, side story characters appeared as guest stars per episode, with both Episode 12 and Djeeta's episode having many fan favorites cameo.
  • The Idolmaster event, "Piña Hazard" allowed players to get every Idol character without having to play Cinderella Girls (which has no English translation).
  • On September 2016, the initial version of Arcarum (an (RTS-like multi-player mode) was criticized to the point where Cygames decided to abort it in less than 48 hours and give compensations to the participating players. By the end of November 2017, Arcarum was re-released as a single-player mode Even if the mode is time-gated, the rewards are generally well-received by the playerbase. The old Arcarum lore concerning a proxy war became an Aborted Arc, as this new version replaces it with a much elaborate arc involving The Inchoate World's plan of overthrowing Bahamut and asking Lyria to join his side.
  • Starting with the Katsugeki/Touken Ranbu event in 2017, players can obtain free SSR characters from crossovers and major story events without having to roll on the gacha nor start an exhaustive grind similar to the Revenant Weapons and Eternals. However, these free event SSRs have some down-sides compared to the gacha SSRs since they're made with the intention of being viable for new players. Mikazuki Munechika is criticized as a forgettable character because his skills make him a Master of None. Sandalphon, the free SSR character from the game's fourth anniversary event, "What Makes the Sky Blue II: Paradise Lost", is the first exception; he has a decent kit and can bring a good amount of utility in Light-advantaged raids. With the inclusion of collab event SSR characters after Sandalphon (such as Joker, Pretty Cure, Aquors Second Years), the game's director and producer are praised by the fandom to be doing better with making new collab characters viable for all players, compared to the earliest collab characters that have extremely niche uses. This was then taken up to eleven with the Princess Connect character Kokkoro, who is considered to be superior to Korwa (her unlimited Wind version at least, due to massive powercrept that she suffers lately), and another one with a certain Rubber-man from "One Piece: RED to BLUE" event, which many players considered as one of the strongest collab character ever released, surpasses even some Grand characters like Mugen and Shiva, the latter especially because Luffy having similar (albeit more selfish) skillset on top of being much faster to stack up, even after Shiva's own 5★ upping his destructive powers even further but still much slower than Luffy, who's already powerful from the start even before hitting turn 10.
  • Some translation errors (such as misspelled words) were initially unnoticed, but were later fixed by the localization team almost immediately after players pointed them out in online platforms. The event reruns may also undergo some minor dialog updates addressing these issues. For example, Fenrir's dialog in the rerun of "Ranger Sign Bravo" incorrectly spells an idiom as "loose canon◊", but was quickly fixed in the next days◊.
  • The "What Makes The Sky Blue II: Paradise Lost" event has many strong points, but some criticisms were brought up by the players, such as Olivia and Azazel being absent when they could have gotten their spotlight, that "Paradise Lost" was short for an anniversary event, that it didn't feature as much characters compared to WMTSB1, and that others felt how it had many Plot Holes just to create a Sequel Hook (such as missing the chance to elaborate on the backstory of the new villains Belial and Beelzebub). When "What Makes The Sky Blue III: 000" was released on February 2019, these complaints were mostly resolved. WMTSB3 is also seen as one of the game's longest story events, with 9 numbered Story Chapters, not counting the Prologue nor the Ending (The Prologue is very long enough on its own, while the Ending chapter has 5 episodes, which is unprecedented since most Story Endings are just single episodes). There are way more animated sprites and CG Backgrounds compared to "Paradise Lost". There's also an easier-to-navigate user interface introduced alongside this event. With all of these changes, Cygames isn't holding back for the grand finale of the WMTSB trilogy.
  • The wind version of Vira appears to be this in response to Freezie, as she appeared in the gacha at the same time as the third Lowain event, has the Psycho Vira from the Lowain events as a part of her attacks, and even has the same playstyle as Freezie... but isn't an Imagine Spot character at all, instead focusing on her character growth and how she's improved since her introduction. Upon learning what she actually was, fan reaction went from furious at her being used as a joke character again after being neglected for so long to praising the writers for respectfully showing her after her character arc has ended.
  • When the Princess Connect Re:Dive collab event aired, a good number of the fanbase (especially the ones who play that game) were disappointed at the lack of a playable Karyl to go alongside the other main characters, Pecorine and Kokkoro. Four months later, Producer KMR announced that Karyl would be Promoted to Playable once the event is added to the Side Stories.
  • To those who are disappointed at how "A Walk On The Wildside" doesn't completely focus on the Slice of Life aspect of the Grandcypher crew (it relied again on Lowain's imaginations), "No Rain, No Rainbow" is considered a saving-throw as the event focused on that very slice of life aspect with Ladiva helping and giving a listening ear to members in need, minus any complicated or delusional storytelling.
  • Initially, the final quests for 5★ characters were difficult to the point where players compared them to the Omega raid battles. The final 5★ chaaracter quests released from 2018 onwards became Puzzle Boss battles instead, no longer demanding the player to rely on a decent grid.
  • Some character rebalances were seen as solutions to certain fan reactions. The first Light SSR version of Jeanne d'Arc is notable because a vocal portion of the fandom memed or joked at her for not having a Sabre specialty in-game despite being a sword-wielder in the lore. She was later given the Sabre specialty on the June 2019 rebalance patch.
  • Many of Seofon's skill names were Lost in Translation since they were misspelled from their Spanish and Italian words, causing fan debates on whether these are deliberate translations or simply overlooked. For example, Deus Mil Espada was supposed to mean "Ten Thousand Blades" in Spanish, hence the proper term would've been Diez Mil Espadas. An update on June 24, 2019 later fixed these names to proper Spanish and Italian.
  • The V2 battle system was heavily criticized upon initial release, especially because of how unintuitive it could be with Omens appearing unprompted to unprepared players and how the revamped version of Chain Bursts ranged from helpful to utterly useless depending on the element^note Earth's original V2 Chain Burst was particularly derided because it granted a plain 30% damage cut to the party, which was utterly nullified as a buff by Beelzebub's field effect and ignored by the Six Dragon raid altogether because of a unique and unremovable buff that bypasses it. Water’s wasn’t much better either, as it did nothing the majority of the time (removed one debuff, which many characters, especially Lily, do automatically)., and furthermore they effectively crippled any character who relied on V1 versions of a Chain Burst. The August 2020 rebalance reimplemented the V1 Chain Burst to exist alongside the V2 Chain Burst, now renamed "Fatal Burst", changed Fatal Bursts to be usable at the player's will after the gauge was complete instead of it activating after immediately becoming full, and removed the element-dependent effects in favor of a 1-turn debuff that boosts damage during that turn for the first 30 hits. These changes along with additions of a Guard All option^note prior to the addition, players had to manually select Guard for all four characters if they wanted them all to Guard against a charge attack, the ability to use skills and guard instead of those two things being mutually exclusive, and Omens now only activating at the end of a turn after the warning and not immediately once the trigger is hit, made players much more receptive to the V2 system.
  • "Home Sweet Moon" is essentially a gigantic apology letter to all the fans that were disappointed by "Seeds of Redemption", taking the problems seen in the Eternals' event and making them work in the latest Society event. Way too many plotlines either introduced or not particularly liked being the center and not getting enough time to develop? HSM fixes this by splitting the event and focusing on one plotline at a time ^note  Yodarha's fight against Grace/ The issue on how to get to the Moon—->Cassius' rescue—->Isaac's rescue/ The reveal of Diaspora—->The final fight against Diaspora/ Eustace's awakening and the finale of his storyline . Characters, especially new ones, overshadowing others and pushing them to be Demoted to Extra? Each character, both new and old, get a few moments of awesome dedicated to them ^note  Eustace's awakening, Ilsa tearing the head off of an Otherworlder, the Captain and Pyet-A defeating Diaspora, etc. . A lack of sense of urgency due to how little a threat the antagonists pose and overpowered protagonists? The event starts with the Foe in full force and the Moondwellers about to attack with the full intention of killing all life on the planet and, even though every character has plenty of badass moments, the story demonstrates throughout that if they were to take them on one-on-one they'd get stomped.
  • The 2021 Summer Fortune Lottery Campaign can be summed up as a "massive salt pillar" and had received massive backlash from both sides of the playerbase^ExplanationThe prize disparity between each prize tiers were horribly unbalanced, as the Tier 4 prize will gave you at least 2 Gold Moons at best, while a Tier 3 prize gave the winner the equivalent of sparking for a Grand character or unsparkable summons such as Bahamut or Lucifer, and that's not counting on how having a winning Tier 2 ticket allowed you to basically win either certain seasonal characters, Zodiacs or 100,000 Crystals which can be used to draw and spark right away and is probably more worth it than the Tier 1 prize that can win you a Siero Ticket at best (assuming you didn't pick one of the hard-to-get Superlative weapons in the first place). Assuming you had logged in every day when they were handing the tickets out, you were guaranteed to have at the very least 2 winning Tier 4 tickets. Detractors weren't happy that the prize disparity was so goddamn unbalanced, to the point that some crews were disbanded and some major whales and top 100 crews show their outright distate towards by burning all of their hard earned pulls, reducing all of their grids and summons and even quitting the game altogether. Defenders claim that the detractors were going overboard with their rage or being completely delusional for essentially a freebie that won't hamper the overall experience of the game, and is perfectly fine even when they didn't win any prizes from it. A third party was fine with whatever they might have recieved from the lottery, but also acknowledged the disparity and agreed about how horribly unbalanced the prize tiers were. The vitriol gathered from both sides of the pacific was so high that Cygames' parent company Cyberagent's stock plummeted within a week. To alleviate the chaos for a moment, all players were given a Tier 3 prize card as a compensation so that everyone were granted at least one Grand character or an unticketable summon from it. Whether or not people considered that to be a good enough compensation however is up for debate.
• Ass Pull: Several.
  • How the fandom sees Azrael's and Israfel's survival at the end of WMTSB3 since we're led to believe that they were dead after they impaled themselves with the same weapons that permanently killed Lucifer. It's seen as a forced happy ending because Azrael is still confined to the burlap sack and fused with Israfel, but there's a chance for them to become normal again. It gives off the impression that Death Is Cheap for any character that isn't Lucifer, who is agreed to have deserved a happy ending more than anyone else.
  • The "Home Sweet Moon" event has a couple:
    • Gwynne being the little sister of Isaac really came out of nowhere, and it really serves no purpose other than being a revelation that they're related all along.
    • Vaseraga surviving Yama's shot in his Taking You with Me moment with Dex. While Vaseraga has a track record of being absolutely resilient if not downright invincible thanks to Grynoth's pact, the same burst were able to disingerate Dex, an absolute monster that can take on him, Zeta and Beatrix at the same time and still get the upper hand. While it can be justified that the weapon could have been affected with the Chaos Matter, which the moondwellers are weak to, it still can be jarring to some, citing that the weapon was deliberately made to save them at the nick of time. It's even more so after the reveal that the weapon was tested once before in the past, where it destroyed an entire village and killed all inhabitants, which includes Eustace's family.
  • Helel ben Sahar sealing Lucilius and Belial in another dimension toward the end of 000. It was clearly written in to prevent Sandalphon from killing off Lucilius and Belial at the end of the trilogy, ensuring that they could return at a later date to pose a threat to the primarch-aligned characters once again. This asspull is reinforced in The Maydays, as it lets players know that Lucilius and Belial will inevitably be back because of Sariel freeing them.
  • Also relating to the Primarch Storyline, anytime Beelzebub frees himself from his punishment to antagonize the crew is this. There shouldn't be any reason why he's able to do this other than to give the players and characters a familiar enemy to face with Belial and Lucilius gone for an indefinite amount of time. Fans have begun to compare him to a cockroach because of how often he keeps coming back despite the efforts made to kill him off for good.
  • The reveal that Zooey is an offshoot of another primal, Cosmos, the original arbitrator, rather than just being the primal-like entity that was born from the wishes of the sky dwellers, is definitely, and unambiguously a ret-con of her character. It had not come up in any of her fate episodes or other appearances, and Cosmos as a character was only mentioned off-handedly by Geo and Zooey in Primal Resonance, which in Primal Pals/Zooey event timeline wise was one event ago, offering little to no set up for it outside of Cosmos' actual debut in Created by the Stars, Loved by the Skies. Not only this, but the reason they give for why this hasn't come up before is that Zooey was incapable of talking about it until it was plot relevant to do so. Needless to say, it pissed a lot of Zooey fans off.
  • Zooey and Geo not fading from existence along with Cosmos at the end of Created by the Stars, Loved by the Skies. Along with the various other contradictions presented by the story at the end of the event, Cosmos said that they would disappear with her once she's defeated, and Zooey reconfirmed this, saying she's willing to die for the sake of the world. From a story perspective, this makes sense, as Zooey and Geo are off-shoots of Cosmos, making her their original body. This is reinforced by the fact that attacking Cosmos in the final battle damages Zooey. However, come the end of the event, Cosmos reassures both Zooey and Geo that they will be fine and fades without them, severing her connection with them so they can be true primals with their own free will. It makes the scene come off as if the writers wanted to employ some last minute fake tension.
    • The above applies to Yuni as well, as they had shown Yuni disappearing with Cosmos in the event proper, and Lyria asks what happened to her. Her Grand unit is released a few days after the update went live, explaining that Yuni didn't disappear and merely went to give Cosmos one last goodbye before she disappears for good.
• Awesome Art: One of the game's selling points thanks to Hideo Minaba, who is popularly known for his works in Final Fantasy IX. Granblue gets praised for its general consistency in character artworks, in contrast to some games having varied, all-over-the-place, outsourced art.
• Awesome Music: Even has its own page.
• Base-Breaking Character:
  • Belial. At least from the English fanbase, there are debates on whether or not he deserves to be Promoted to Playable. Supporters remind that he's very popular, and that he can be profitable if Cygames decides to give in to the wishes of his fans, much like what happened to fellow breakout villain Sandalphon. Being a playable "murderer" is not considered a problem as well when there are playable characters with murderous backstories like Lobelia. Those who disagree remind that Belial has no signs of redemption unlike Sandalphon, and even if Cygames would be Pandering to the Base, it would take a strong Willing Suspension of Disbelief to explain why he would join the heroes. The ending of WMTSB3 is also seen as a proof that Belial is still loyal to Lucilius. Cygames did add more Belial content by making him relevant in the Dark Seraphic weapon quest and giving him a summon version. Supporters saw these as signs of hope that he would become playable, but a counter-argument says that perhaps it's just Cygames's way of throwing Belial fans a bone, but doesn't necessary equate to hints of him becoming playable.
  • Yuel and Societte's sexualities have become this since the release of swimsuit Yuel in wich it can be inferred romantic feelings between the two girls, while this not denies to their Birthday, Valentines, White Day, Christmas lines and Fate episodes where they show just as strong feelings for the captain, the topic has provoked a long number of debates
  • Sandalphon and Lucifer relationship is perhaps one of the most debated pairings in the fanbase.
    • For a majority of the fanbase on both sides of the sea, their relationship was solidified into canon by "000", as their last meeting played out like a sort of reaffirmation of their feelings for each other that felt heavier than if they were supposed to be meant to be Heterosexual Life-Partners. That said, some would argue that it goes back even further than that, as Sandalphon's primary motives for destroying the world at the start of the trilogy was to get Lucifer's attention, as well as have Lucifer love and respect him. It has not helped that Sandalphon was perceived as, and was all but stated to be, a Yandere for Lucifer.
    • For a while, a Vocal Minority claimed that the ship was meant to be viewed as a deep, but platonic bond, though more rarely some would claim that it was meant to be "brotherly" or "father-son" due to Lucifer being Sandalphon's creator. This is despite the fact that Belial was also created by Lucilius, who he is very blatantly sexually and romantically attracted to, which likely suggests that the primals don't perceive their creators as their parents.
    • The debate went even further upon the release of the Ain Sophr Aur MV’s release which depicted Lucifer caressing Sandalphon from behind as he wraps his wings around him, which many fans compared to being a gesture between lovers given the differences in gestures between Japan and the West. The translation of the song lyrics which come off as pining for Lucifer and the Paradise Lost skin description in both English AND Japanese ^note  The English description describes Lucifer as someone Sandalphon loves so dearly while the Japanese description states that he yearns for Lucifer from the bottom of his heart. only furthered the debate. Keeping all this in mind, as with most debates of this nature, this is mostly a western fandom issue. This seemed to have calmed down some post-MV release, however.
    • The release of Sandalphon’s summer alt seems to have officially put a nail in the coffin of the interpretation that their relationship dynamic is meant to be seen as parental, with his fate episodes unsubtly comparing his relationship with Lucifer to that of a couple fighting due to their communication issues, leading to the woman feeling neglected and even more unsubtly, Sandalphon relating to an old woman who lost her husband, painting him to be a widower. The old woman and her husband loved coffee, too.
    • Word of God confirmed in an interview that he wanted to convey many forms of love through Lucifer and Sandalphon's relationship, essentially saying that it encompasses romantic love, familial love, and friendship all at once, which essentially validated everyone's headcanons about their relationship while not deconfirming other interpretations of it.
  • Lowain and his bros. While they're definitely darkhorses among a significant part of the community, there's also a part of it that's tired of their delusion-based antics and how much attention they're getting, especially when other popular character groups (such as the Gun Sisters) hardly get any content in comparison. Detractors also say that Lowain could be more bearable if his events didn't co-star his friends as supporting characters, since they enable and encourage the trait of his that's divisive among fans. This is mostly a Western issue, however, as they seem to have a larger fanbase in Japan than the already significantly large base he has outside it. It just goes to show how those things can be divisive when the "A Walk on the Wild Side" event is praised by some of the same detractors liking the bits where the trio interacted with other people in reality and their interplay with Tyre.
  • Forte and her race; fans of her from Rage of Bahamut are mostly unhappy with her being turned into a Draph and seemingly forgotten in the story, blaming it on the race change. This clashes with others who like the change and think that Forte being largely forgotten was more due to other characters like Narmaya being pushed at the time, and that merely changing her race back wouldn't fix her issue alone compared to actually getting real screen time in an event.
  • The dark seinen backstories of the Evokers are unique compared to what the game usually offers, but among them, Nier and Lobelia are common subjects of debates, usually on the topics of whether or not their tragic circumstances can justify the killings that they did, or how acceptable is it to allow a murderer join the Grandcypher. Nier and Lobelia have fans, but detractors claim that the two have fans simply because they're attractive.
  • Lucio post-"000" has gotten mixed reactions from the fanbase due to his Divergent Character Evolution. Some fans like this new version of him and the dynamic he has with Sandalphon as of The Maydays, while others find him annoying as well as unsympathetic as of his summer Fate Episodes. There have also been accusations of him being changed to prop up Sandalphon, who became the center of "What Makes the Sky Blue" storyline after "Paradise Lost". Regardless of where one stands on him, his loss in popularity has been reflected in his absence from the Valentine's and White Day rankings from 2020 onwards, whereas in the previous rankings he would be in the top 10 with the other Lucifer-faces.
  • While Catura still has a lot of fans even among the large swathe of the Twelve Divine Generals fanbase, most players admit that she's nothing more but a pandering object for the playerbase that has nothing interesting going on with, where most players find her romantic dedication to the Captain borderline one-dimensional and annoying. The fact that her whole character resolution in her 5★ uncap is nothing more but an alternate timeline doesn't help the case. Her high-risk high-reward Bovine Buddy is also lambasted by a good chunk of the playerbase for being counterintuitive with each other and enforces players to choose between using her as a DPS machine (which Wind has already plenty of) or as a Captain-centric support where she's most effective as, with her 5★ uncap didn't fully alleviate the issue.
• Broken Base: The fandom is pretty split on the opinion on who is qualified to receive a Grand unit with some arguing argue that Grands should only go to strong characters, characters who are important to the main story, or the overarching lore of the Granblue Fantasy franchise. While this was the case originally, at least when it applied to making characters who were important to the lore, the developers broke their trend pretty early on, with Word of God saying that they would also promote characters who were popular to Grand status (such as Jeanne, Narmaya, and Lancelot), resulting in fans claiming that characters who are or once were popular becoming Grands would bloat the pools and devalue the Grand title. The arguments only further ignited when newly introduced characters like Mugen, Rei, and Yuni were immediately added to the Grand pool after their debut events despite barely doing anything of note in those events (at least in Rei and Yuni's cases), and also not having the popularity to warrant that promotion due to being too new to be judged.
• Best Known for the Fanservice: Many English-speakers know Granblue due to the fanart and doujins of the various female characters, which highlights their feminine charms more so than the official art. It's only later that they find out it's one of Japan's biggest mobile RPGs. This gradually lessened after the release of the English language option, but the reputation is still there.
• Big-Lipped Alligator Moment: In the 12th Episode of the anime, The Cameo of Silva has her sniping the ocean itself. Sure, the mobs of corrupted fish and Leviathan are all sea-creatures, but all of them float above sea level. Why would Silva shoot a sniper bullet in the water? We never get to see if she was aiming at a specific creature. Was she supposed to make a distraction? Or force the rest of the swimming fish to fly out? Whatever the answer is, the scene is never mentioned nor explained again for the remainder of the episode.

C-D

• Cargo Ship:
  • A few would ship Rackam with the Grandcypher. That's right, shipping a pilot with his own ship. Players have a bit of a lore-wise justification for this because Rackam speaks to the Grandcypher and treats it like a family member.
  • As of "Second Advent", Beatrix/Embrasque is supported in-story, with Bea not only acting like she lost her lover when forced to hand the sword over, but with Embrasque returning the feelings when Bea finally gets it back.
• Casual-Competitive Conflict: The "Direct Playstyle Conflict" point is evident in two ways:
  • The Unite-and-Fight / Guild Wars mode encourages player crews to obtain the higher amount of honors within a given round. The game doesn't really force players to participate in this mode, yet there are distinctions between competitive and casual crews.
    • Competitive crews aim to develop a functioning grid for every element within a shorter amount of time, join multiple raids with the help of their crewmates (commonly on private Co-Op rooms), and arrange play schedules that allow most to benefit from Strike Time. These groups usually require their players to reach a certain Player Rank, or have the capability to contribute substantial amounts Honors in order to advance quickly during Unite-and-Fight.
    • Casual crews play the game at their own pace without worrying about many restrictions. There's no need to rush making end-game grids or following the Metagame, there are no second thoughts on joining public raids, there's no pressure on schedules. These players are content with obtaining the UnF-exclusive items such as Valor Badges and Evolites even if it takes a while to get them. Casual players may also just join crews to benefit from the Strike Time mechanic, and to complete a specific beginner quest that guarantees an SSR ticket.
  • Perpetuity Rings are Too Awesome to Use, so who should players use them on?
    • Casual players give the rings to their favorite characters regardless of utility, meta, or rarity. The "Wedding Ring" Fan Nickname for the Perpetuity Ring comes from this type of players.
    • Competitive players give the rings on the meta-defining characters/Game Breakers so that they could be even more useful with the increased stats and EMP Cap.
• Catharsis Factor: Gilbert's death is mostly seen as a deserved fate because he doesn't have any strong redeeming factors, especially considering what he did to Abel, Pholia, and Echidna. His great lust of power made him hated by the community when the Nalhegrande Arc is still a fresh topic.
• Character Tiers: As expected from an RPG game having a large roster, both the Japanese and English-speaking communities have their own tier listings for the characters within the same element. The Eternals would usually rise to the top of the lists, or have their own separate tier from the gacha-recruitable characters solely for being Purposely Overpowered, especially post 5★ uncap.
• Cliché Storm: The early chapters of the first arc are considered to be generic or predictable by those who have seen a lot of JRPG Fantasy stories. Granblue is usually compared to the earliest Final Fantasy games (which is justifiable since many Cygames employees once worked in some FF titles), while the general plot is summed-up as "The Hero rescues a Damsel in Distress, rides a giant airship, goes through a long adventure towards a specific destination, recruits a Ragtag Bunch of Misfits and collects several Plot Coupon crystals along the way, while being chased by The Empire". This reaction is also common from the anime viewers who point out that Granblue uses a lot of known tropes that are also in other fantasy anime. It seems that the devs are very much aware of this, since Grand Blues! Comic #781 lampshades Lyria's tropes. While the storytelling greatly improves past a certain point in the first arc's climax, or even if the story events from 2017 onwards became more complex, the "cliché" first impression still remains on many players.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome:
  • Players usually make friend requests to those who own any of the Genesis Series summons (Shiva, Alexiel, Grimnir, Europa, Bahamut, and Lucifer) due to the large amount of Elemental Attack boosts that they provide, ranging from 100% to 150%, aside from the fact that they are rare drops from the gacha.
  • The Grand Order summon is also sought by beginners for its 200% attack boost whenever the party's lineup consists of at least 3 elements, something that usually happens when the player's account still lacks complete mono-elemental teams.
  • Plus mark bonuses are commonly applied on staple weapons and summons, especially those that are usually equipped on multiple grids such the Seraphic Weapons, Grand Weapons, Bahamut Weapons, Ultima Weapons, Omega Summons, Genesis Summons, Optimus Summons, and the Arcarum Summons.
  • Gold Bricks have four purposes; to uncap any SSR weapon, to uncap Dark Opus Weapons to 5★, to buy unique items for the "Path to Supremacy" questline, and to unlock an Eternal/Guild Wars character (The player can also use additional 2 Gold Bricks for the "faster" method of uncapping an Eternal to 5★). Almost every player uses them for the Eternals first since they are some of the strongest characters in the game and obtaining gold bricks can take a long time. Weapons can be uncapped by other means but an Eternal cannot be unlocked nor fully uncapped without a gold brick.
  • In the game's earliest years, most players just stick with one element, particularly Wind (easy to get into), Light (quite powerful with enough time/effort), and Dark (potentially powerful to the point of breaking most of the game/filled with some of the more popular characters). The high elemental resistance mechanic was introduced just to shake people out of this complacency.
  • The Bahamut dagger is by far the most crafted Bahamut weapon◊. It's so popular that the Bahamut sword, which is the second in the list, only gets crafted half as much as the Dagger. This is because out of all the Bahamut weapons in their first stage, the Dagger gives the highest attack buff to Human characters, who make up the large majority of playable characters. In its final stage, it also affects Erunes.
  • Among the Guild Wars Revenant Weapons, the Four Sky Blade is the most crafted weapon because its fully-upgraded Charge Attack gives a Multi-attack rate up buff, which is helpful in boosting charge bars. The second most crafted is the Nine Realm Harp for its fully-upgraded Charge Attack that heals allies and because Harps for the popular Superstar and Elysian classes can be difficult to come by.
  • Among the Atma/Ultima weapons, the most popular option is the Sword since these weapons boost stats depending on the characters' weapon specialties. It helps that Sabre is one of the most common specialties, and is present in many of the powerful characters. Atma Fist (for Fire/Dark) and Atma Katana (for Dark/Earth) are in a distant second and third, while the Axe is used by some Earth parties. As for the Atma skills, people usually go for Strife (multi-attack rate up). Ultima skills tend to vary depending on the ease of reaching the damage cap. Ironically, Atma Weapons were made to counteract the complacency of relying on Bahamut Weapons, yet they caused players to create a new meta that relies on the characters' weapon specialty.
  • Many recommend the Dark Fencer as the first Tier III class of beginners because it comes with the insanely useful Miserable Mist subskill (one of the most versatile debuffs in the game), two skills that can delay a boss's charge attacks, a cooldown reduction skill, an increased chance to land debuffs, and a Dagger specialty (allowing the class to use the above-mentioned Four Sky Blade).
  • Miserable Mist is such a versatile skill, players still use it on Tier IV classes unless the class has an "upgraded" version (such as Chaos Ruler's Unpredictable), or when they have a party member with a similar skill (like Altair). It's also ditched only when players know another person will bring it, or when the boss is immune to it (like Ultimate Bahamut). It's known as Mandatory Mist for a reason.
  • The second most popular Tier III class is the Holy Saber because it has Phalanx II, which is an incredible 70% damage cut for one turn that stacks with elemental damage reductions, making it the go-to defensive option against hard-hitting attacks. It's also one of the only two classes that can equip the skill; the other is Spartan, its "direct upgrade" Tier IV class. Even if the other two skills native to the Holy Saber (a nuke that's only good during Overdrive and a sacrifice skill that also cuts damage received by 50%) are underwhelming compared to the other classes, Phalanx II makes it a popular choice.
  • The versatile Mechanic class is generally used for one purpose: Energy Maneuver. The skill lets you exhaust your golem's battery cells to give a 100% charge bar buff to your entire party. While this defeats the whole purpose of the class (using the golem, you can end easy battles immediately and can put a significant dent in harder ones), it comes at the cost of making the Mechanic look useless if the party doesn't kill the target with the full charge bars. Nonetheless, it's still preferable than any other Mechanic build.
  • Most endgame parties have at least one 5★ Eternal because they're Purposely Overpowered; bringing either a lot of utility, versatility, or insane damage. The Ultima Weapons update made the Eternals more popular, yet most of these characters are still used regardless of the Ultima Weapon anyway.
  • Some buffers are so effective that they are used in any party. Previously, it'd be a game-breaking support like Korwa and Summer Zooey. But later on, 5★ uncapped Niyon and Anila are the prime examples.
  • The "Arcarum: The World Beyond" mode can sometimes force the player to use only SR or R characters for the entire stage. When this happens, players mostly rely on SR and R characters who have plenty of damaging (Red border) skills.
  • Fully crafted Class Champion Weapons are the go-to main weapons for their respective EX II classes since their charge attacks and customizable skills fully complement their skillset, give more buffs, or compensate for some of the EX II classes' drawbacks (e.g. the Lunatic Broom and Ridill help replenish MP/energy required for the Nekomancerr and Glorybringer skills respectively).
  • Speaking of the EX classes, new players should aim for getting the Swordmaster and Mystic classes when they can. While the EX classes are known to be gimmicky and situational, these two classes are sought after for their overall usefulness throughout the early-to-mid game; Swordmaster is useful for Slimeblasting, i.e. using the Awakening Blade skill while wielding certain weapons that let the player expend some health for instant plain damage based on your current post-skill HP multiplied by a certain amount depending on the weapon, while also providing utility depending on your mainhand. Mystic's auto attacks hits all enemies, which is useful for Angel Halo farming, and the Splitting Spirit is an unrestricted skill that's used to convert HP into 3% charge bar gain for every 250 HP spend, which is effective as an enmity enabler and instant charge. Both classes are also less gimmicky and more manageable compared to the other EX-classes.
  • For the Arcarum summons, players mostly crafted the Sun, Hanged Man, or Moon first since they all have damage boosting sub-auras and summon calls with useful effects and no drawbacks for using them. Post-Evoker release, the main Summons crafted are Sun and Hanged Man, which are still both very useful and linked to the powerful Evokers Alanaan and Caim, as well as Death, which was rebalanced so that it's drawback of killing a party member can be controled to target a specific member and is connected to powerful Ensemble Dark Horse Evoker Nier.
  • The above Mechanic Energy Recharge burst has since been power-creep'd by two Tier 4 classes: Chrysaor and Relic Buster.
    • Chrysaor has two powerful Extended Mastery skills: Aurum Flow and Dual Arts. Aurum Flow deals a high ammount of damage and charges the MC's charge bar by 20%, and activates twice if an "auxillary weapon" is set, for a total of 40% charge. Dual Arts gives the MC the C.A. Reactivation buff for two turns, which causes the charge attack to trigger twice whenever it's applied. Combined with the Huanglong summon's aura, this lets the MC launch two charge attacks on the first turn. With either a charge attack or character that can fill other charge bars, this can become a Full Burst. And if the enemy still isn't dead, Huanglong's call instantly charges the entire party's charge bars, allowing them Full Burst again.
    • Relic Buster has Limit Burst, which is a faster version of Energy Manuver that also buffs the party's charge attack damage and damage cap. Plus, it can use both swords and guns as its mainhand weapon, giving the MC a wider array of charge attacks to use.
• Continuity Lockout:
  • Crossover events would usually summarize or condense the third-party franchise's story, but at the cost of giving away late-arrival spoilers to those who haven't seen that franchise yet. This was a common reaction to the Code Geass collab, as that anime series had a lot of revelations and episodes, yet the recap scenes don't tell you everything.
  • Many Granblue characters are actually imported from Rage of Bahamut, but with altered backstories and lore, and some of them (e.g Walfried, Monika, Lecia, Rose Queen, Orchid, Lloyd, Lucifer, Bahamut, Anne, Grea, Albert, Lily, Zooey, Yuel etc.) are relevant to the main story, anniversaries, or limited-time character-specific events. RoB fans can spot the similarities and Mythology Gags that are present here, stuff that GBF-only fans won't immediately notice. This is more apparent with RoB imports who barely have any story content, such as Forte. RoB fans know what she's like in the original game, and are surprised that she was changed into a Draph here. GBF fans with no insight from RoB don't mind the change that much.
  • Those who got into Granblue through the anime were confused on why Episodes 8, 12 and 13 suddenly introduce a lot of "new characters" with little-to-no explanations on who they are, while long-time GBF fans were excited knowing that several Breakout Characters had Continuity Cameos. It got to the point where anime-only viewers even call those cameo episodes, "fanservice episodes".
  • As the game grows older, new story events tend to reference past stories and Fate Episodes, if not outright being a direct continutation of a previous event. The inclusion of the Side Stories menu attempts to avoid this by allowing newcomers to catch up with the story. Problem is, it takes a while for the old events get added there, while some events make Call Backs, Continuity Nods, Brick Jokes or Running Gags to grind-gated story content. The "Seeds of Redemption" event can be confusing if you've just started on 2020, or if you aren't familiar with all of the Eternals' stories, especially when obtaining even one Eternal requires you to fully upgrade a Revenant Weapon.
• Creator's Pet:
  • Some believe the Dark element to be Producer HRT's favorite as Cygames gave powerful and appealing characters in the Dark element roster and set up some very powerful weapons for players, all at the expense of the game's balance and older characters becoming left behind in their respective elements. This has lessened with time when other elements received boosts to bring them closer to Dark's utilities. In 2018, it's seen as the opposite as Dark has been slow in gaining a number of new meta-defining gimmicks with final uncaps having minor effects on the characters in question, but in the subsequent years, Dark once again received powerful tools.
  • Since Producer KMR took the reins, Fire has been accused of this at times, getting the first (and arguably the best) Game-breaking primal elemental summon (Shiva), and later on, getting a number of powerful Sabre-specialty characters after the inclusion of Atma/Ultima weapons. The only "catch" against this is its Eternal's 5★ uncap not doing anything for most of the meta, and its weapons having atrocious base power and needing to have its important weapons be at least 3★ uncapped to be considered passable. It has yet to reach the level of Dark during its heyday.
• Crosses the Line Twice: In-universe, even! One of the weapons in "The Maydays" is a stuffed shark that emits screams when squeezed, which were taken directly from the people who were at Auguste during the event. It's a best-seller among beachgoers.
• Crossover Ship:
  • As of the release of "What Makes The Sky Blue II: Paradise Lost", fan works started having Belial together with Kiara in part of them both being similarly Too Kinky to Torture. This was fueled even further as the reruns of the Fate/Extra CCC event in Fate/Grand Order and "What Makes The Sky Blue II: Paradise Lost" in Granblue Fantasy occurred in a similar time frame in 2019, and then in Summer 2020 when Summer Kiara was announced just a few days after the announcement of Belial being playable in Granblue Fantasy Versus.
  • Sandalphon sometimes gets shipped with the Rage of Bahamut forms of Lucifer, due to Granblue Lucifer's meta Recurring Element status linking his origins back to that character despite their lore being different.
• Demonic Spiders: There are enemies that can attack you even before your first turn, and most of them can be encountered in the Arcarum Expeditions. There's the Gatekeeper that can deal plain damage to all members (it used to deal large amounts of damage before, but was later nerfed), and Bloodhounds that can damage a single party member and increase said member's hostility to enemy attacks.
• Difficulty Spike:
  • For a majority of the early Main Story chapters, players can easily take down the mobs and boss battles using only starting or moderate builds. But come Chapter 40, and the player will face Ygddrasil Malice, the first real challenge of the story mode. Oh, and it gets more difficult from there, as the story's succeeding boss fights will have millions of HP and can pack a punch.
  • This also applies to the final (Level 100) fate episode of characters with 5★ uncaps compared to the easier previous episodes. The battles will either put the party against 5 waves of enemies along with a high-level mob at the end, or a single battle against a tough boss that has millions of HP and can deal a large amount of damage per hit. Justifiable since the materials required to unlock the 5★ uncap of an SSR character, along with the amount of time required to reach level 100 would require a lengthy process of grinding, and the player might have already developed an improved grid at that time of unlocking the final fate episode. Only a few would avert this trope, such as Anila, whose final episode post-5★ only requires you to press all her skills at Turn 1 to get the job done.
• Discredited Meme: The "Katalina? In Smash?" catchphrase (when it was hinted or "leaked" that Katalina of Granblue would be joining the Super Smash Bros. Ultimate roster) ended when the trailer for Granblue Fantasy Versus was revealed, with claims stating that the leaker just misunderstood a "Granblue Fighter" for SSBU, when in reality, it was a fighting game developed by Arc System Works.
• Don't Shoot the Message: Ladiva is a Transgender celebrity whom everyone respectfully refers to as female with no question, and is referred to as such by the story as well; which is set in a setting type that was historically heteronormative in real life and has been in fiction even now; and is in a game made in an infamously-heteronormative culture. However, an argument is often made about her design furthering the stereotype of transgender women being crossdressers or just overly effeminate men, due to her masculine, muscular physique and mannerisms as well as her voice, as well as her canonical disinterest to make herself "pass" for a woman. Whether she is considered good representation of transgender people with a unique story and design that deviates from common tropes of other transgender characters, or a well-intentioned but still offensive caricature of transgender people is a common topic of arguments, much in the same way Poison is.
• Draco in Leather Pants:
  • In the first "What Makes The Sky Blue" event, several players just see Sandalphon as just someone lost and in need of a direction (Plus the fact that he is really attractive). While his reasons are indeed understandable, this reaction ignored all that he had done in WMTSB and his Moral Event Horizon. Cygames initially wanted to treat him as an irredeemable villain at first, but they now treat him like this as well, especially in WMTSB2, most likely due to his popularity. In fact, they confirmed in an interview that "Paradise Lost" was meant to be the event that redeems him in the eyes of people that still had doubts. Belial was created with the explicit purpose of being viewed as worse than Sandalphon (though that didn't quite work out) and Lucifer's death was a tactic to make you feel even more sympathetic toward him, since he loved him and was greatly affected by the loss.
  • Belial, another "What Makes The Sky Blue" villain, later got this treatment ever since he was revealed in "Paradise Lost". Having a sexy design that appeals to the fandom, being voiced by Yoshimasa Hosoya, and speaking in innuendos are the common reasons to why he's liked. Word of God created him with the intent of making him worse than Sandalphon but due to the Misaimed Fandom that made Sandalphon popular in the first place, he also ended up receiving the same treatment within the fandom. There are fanworks that depict him as an ally to the Grandcypher crew, and any battles with him are treated as sparring matches instead. Other fanworks ship Belial with the Captain, a comical trickster, or a Memetic Molester. Even after acknowledging that he borders on being irredeemable in the events of "WMTSB3: 000" until the end where he shows his more sympathetic qualities, people still want him to become playable.
  • Nier is an interesting case because even before the Evokers became playable, she already has dozens of artworks from sites like Twitter and Pixiv, outpacing her fellow Evokers, with fellow Erune Fraux somehow coming second. At that time, the fanbase was mostly focused on the Evokers' designs since there's little to no information on the their stories and characterizations (the constant delays also made players wait longer), yet Nier consistently became the most popular among the group in terms of fanworks. The Evokers finally arrived on the 5th Anniversary Update, yet Nier's fan popularity didn't stop growing when it's revealed that she's a Yandere. Fans still depict her as a troubled shy girl, with some even excusing her actions due her backstory despite it being a Freudian Excuse at best and the fact that she veered into unsympathetic villain territory before she was even contracted by the Death Arcarum.
  • Lobelia more or less gets this treatment in the West, though he's more of a Base-Breaking Character than any other Evoker due to him not having any somewhat sympathetic reasoning for doing what he did, killing people just because it pleases him. It also helps that he's handsome.
  • Lucilius is one of the biggest examples of this in recent Granblue history. Fans tend to severely downplay his evil actions such wanting to destroy the world to spite God and his blatant Lack of Empathy, instead making him out to be a stressed, overworked scientist who is kind of a jerk but more of an Anti-Villain than the outright villain he's portrayed as. As well, his fans tend to play up the Pet the Dog moments he has with Lucifer, making it out to be that he genuinely loves and cared about him despite the fact that it's heavily implied that his affection for Lucifer is purely narcisstic, as he views Lucifer as his greatest masterpiece, and the fact that he betrayed his trust without care.
  • Omega-3's Dex Krak of all people received this treatment. Some part of the fanbase believed that his lack of adrenaline impulses and indescribable calm when he's around Isaac is a genuine indication of him warming up to Isaac rather than the fact that Isaac being part Otherworlder after digesting the Otherworlder meat in "Spaghetti Syndrome", essentially infecting him with the Chaos Matter Moondwellers are weak to. Some lamented his (temporary) passing and decrying that Dex is wasted potential as they wanted him to be explored further, even expecting a Heel–Face Turn or at least an Enemy Mine towards the end of the event.

E-F

• Ensemble Dark Horse: There's a lot of them within the fandom that the work now has it's own page here.
• Epileptic Trees:
  • Connections between the game Rage of Bahamut and Granblue Fantasy as a whole is a massive tree due to all the shared characters, but Vyrn stands out the most because in the main scenario, a silhouette resembling Bahamut appears as Vyrn's powers are unsealed, leading to a possible theory that Vyrn is actually a sealed Bahamut. This only has more support after the prologue chapter was updated with a Shout-Out to Rage of Bahamut. The Persona 5 collaboration event, "Thievery in Blue", also fuels the theory even further with Dantallion referring to Vyrn as Bahamut. This goes along with the dozens of In-Universe clues mentioned in the WMG tab that tend to set up some Foreshadowing.
  • When Kumbhira's art was teased for the first time in a livestream, fans quickly thought that she would be a Gyaru Girl simply because she's tanned, while some expected her to be flirtatious just because of her smile and skin-revealing outfit. When she's added into the game, it turns out Kumbhira doesn't have any of these. Instead, she's a girl with low self-esteem and is just starting to believe in herself. Once the fanbase learned that she's vastly different from the built-up expectations or first impressions, Kumbhira's popularity in the social platforms such as Twitter and Pixiv plummeted quickly, rarely getting fan content for several months afterwards.
  • History repeats with the teaser image of Catura. Fans speculated that she would be a Japanese Delinquent thanks to her scantily-clad outfit like Kumbhira's and sports a smug-looking stare and expression, alongside the fact that she's riding and fighting in a gearcycle, giving the impression that she will be a Fire-elemental General like Anila. After she was released, not only was it revealed that she's vastly different compared to what the fandom predicted (she's a run-of-the-mill Country Mouse with a curious case of Love at First Sight with the Captain, and thinks that she's living in a shoujo-esque romance stories trying to woo on the captain for their affection to no success), she's also a Wind-elemental general. This time however, the community took caution on her beforehand and as such, the popularity downfall is lower compared to Kumbhira's. Though the fanbase is still irritated with the fact that she's not a Fire-elemental as they would have predicted.
  • A Dragon Knights related one started after the event SIEGFRIED in the Japanese fanbase as speculation is run about regarding Merlin and his identity in the present time. Some even go as far to guess that Lamorak, Percival's other older brother, is Merlin in the present as Lamorak is said to be exceptional in magic. "The Savior of Dalmore" event reveals that Lamorak is implied to be working for Merlin.
• Escapist Character: Gran/Djeeta essentially become this for the players, being the most powerful, versatile and unique character of the entire cast. Their unique traits are also pointed out in several stories, they're respected by crew members and foes alike (to an extent), and basically adopting a harem if the Valentines Day and White Day events with increasing numbers of characters of both sexes falling for the captain to ridiculous extremes are counted. Even if they have enough implied characterization to perhaps unintentionally disassociate their self-insert aspect from the player, and even if their limited dialogue options sometimes lead to the same conclusion, it's still easy to project onto them regardless.
• Esoteric Happy Ending: A number of events have this.
  • Most notably is "Together In Song", where it's clear the village didn't learn anything as seen by Arte's paintings still being monsters by the time he was defeated. This is fortunately rectified in the "Song of Strings" event which took place 2 years after "Together in Song".
  • The end of "What Makes The Sky Blue: 000". Lucillius’ plan is foiled, he and Belial get sucked into another dimension by Lucio where they can’t torment the crew anymore, Sandalphon and Lucifer concile and share their feelings with one another, Sariel, Israfel and Azreal are saved and all the Primarchs can live a normal life after ceding their roles to nature. Everyone except Lucifer, who is still dead and trapped, alone in the afterlife away from any contact with another person, if his conversation with Sandalphon is any indication. He reconciles with Sandalphon who initially wanted to stay with him but willed himself to stay with the crew, where he is needed, leaving Lucifer alone until Sandalphon dies, if he ever dies. His monologue after Sandalphon leaves him details how lonely he feels, finally being able to understand how Sandalphon felt. The entire scene is a huge Tear Jerker and Player Punch post realization where everyone gets a happy ending except him, a genuinely good person who has to spend presumably eternity alone with only a notion that Sandalphon might return to him one day. And unlike Sandalphon, his chances of ever coming back are slim since he no longer has a body to return to, it having been sucked into another dimension with Lucillius.
• Estrogen Brigade: The female fanbase is especially notable because Cygames has specifically noted that external merchandise featuring male characters like the Dragon Knights, male Society members like Eustace, the male Elemental Disciples, Lucifer, Sandalphon, and Belial sell by the truckload. While Granblue Fantasy was originally heavily biased in favor of female characters, and it still kind of is, Word of God has taken its female playerbase into consideration and panders to them heavily, usually in the form of events centered around the Dragon Knights and Primarchs, though other male characters have benefited from their popularity as well.
• Evil Is Cool: Why Belial became a Breakout Villain – His artstyle, outfit, voice, trolling personality, memetic face, villainy, innuendos, and especially his fallen angel powers are seen as unique and cool traits wrapped in one package.
• Fan-Disliked Explanation: Following the reveal in Created by the Stars, Loved by the Skies, players, though especially people who were fans of Zooey, did not approve of the Retcon that Zooey is, in essence, a clone, being an off-shoot of the original arbitrator Cosmos, which also serves as an explanation as to why she cannot be considered a true primal. Not only was this not implied in any other Zooey's previous events or fate episodes, which is explained away in the event as Zooey being programmed to not talk about her origins, fans also explained that it diminishes what Zooey was set up to be, a special kind of powerful primal who was born from the wishes of the sky dwellers and not just another creation of the Astrals. Her comparing what she is to Medusiana, Medusa's dragon companion and more of an accessory than an actual character, did not help, with fans joking that she's "Medusiana-tier" now.
• Fandom-Enraging Misconception: Especially in anime-only communities:
  • Saying that you've expected the Granblue anime adaptations to be related to Grand Blue. The two IPs just happen to have similarly-sounding names, they don't have any connection whatsoever. When this happened, GBF fans mostly reminded others to read the names before making such assumptions. Misspelling the title as "GrandBlue Fantasy" is another misconception. The confusion between the two works' names got to the point where the writer of Grand Blue made a reference to Granblue Fantasy in Chapter 42.5 by "announcing" a Grand Blue Fantasy Spin-Off. In simple terms, don't confuse the names.
  • Saying that the anime came first or is the "source material" for the franchise will have GBF fans remind you that the gacha game existed before the adaptations. It's understandable why this misconception happens however, since the anime is the first Granblue media to be "officially released" in the West, while the gacha game doesn't have an official app in the English stores.
  • You’re bound to make some fans of the What Makes The Sky Blue trilogy angry if you make any of these mistakes. while Lucio is associated with the primarch-aligned characters after 000, he himself is not an angel. Neither is Lucilius, who at this point is an astral-primal abomination. Of the three "Lucifer"-faces, Lucifer is the only one who is an angel. As well, while this was only recently retconned into his lore, Lucio is not a "Primal", being classified as "Other" after an update in 2019. As well, Lucio and Lucifer are not the same character, being two different characters with differing origins, personalities, relationships, and relationship dynamics when there is cross-over between who they are associated with.
• Fandom Rivalry:
  • Has a subtle one with Rage of Bahamut, Fate/Grand Order, Fire Emblem Heroes and Epic Seven as games.
    • Rage of Bahamut was once known as the most popular and commercially successful title of Cygames during the company's early years. However, due to a Screwed by the Network moment in Rage, the English version was shut down (yet the Japanese services are still active). The Western playerbase thought that it was due to Cygames shifting focus and resources into its now more popular and successful title Granblue. This mentality however, was alleviated when two anime series for Rage of Bahamut were released on 2014 and 2017 (with a third, spin-off Mysteria Friends airing from January 2019), implying that RoB is still a priority. By the time Granblue and Shadowverse received English updates, many English players from RoB turned their attention to these two games, since their favorite characters are now back, but in different titles.
    • Some Granblue players like to mock F/GO in particular due to its less forgiving gacha rates (that is, players who originated from the Granblue community and then try out F/GO are surprised by the lower chances of getting an SSR item, and a lack of a gacha safety net akin to Granblue's "Spark Mechanic". There are those who switched out from F/GO because of the inability to obtain a desired character even after spending a great deal of money in a single draw banner) and slew of oddball mechanics (i.e. using EXP cards to level-up characters instead of earning EXP in battles, and farming materials for increasing individual skill levels to which some find the process of raising the levels of a Servant's three skills to 10 lengthy and costly enough for a single unit, and it could take months or a year to max even one.). You don't see that many F/GO players dissing Granblue, however. These similar topics and debates also apply to Fire Emblem Heroes and Epic Seven as well. Yet, most of the time, any comparisons between these games even allow one player of the franchise to try out the other. Or better yet, spawn players that continue to play both games, leading to the Friendly Fandoms trope below.
  • For the anime:
    • On 2017, the Granblue anime's first season ran alongside the second season of Rage of Bahamut: Genesis. There are two sides arguing which is the better Cygames anime of that season. This is relatively minor however, because both are made by the same company, and RoB is the origin of some popular characters in this game.
    • Like the game-mechanic and gacha-rate focused rivalry with Fate/Grand Order as mentioned above, the second season of Granblue's anime and the Babylonia anime of F/GO appears to brew up into Dueling Works territory for both of them airing on October 2019. However, many fans do not treat this as a real competition by comparing the focus of each anime - the second season of GBF is a seen as a direct continuation of the first, while the anime for F/GO is from a fan-favorite, Signature Series Arc of the game. Many fans who play both games agreed that in order for it to be a real fair-and-square rivalry, Granblue could have focused on adapting its Signature Series Arc - the "What Makes The Sky Blue" trilogy instead.
• Fandom-Specific Plot: The "main" angels connected characters plus Lucio having a familial connection is becoming a popular headcanon in the eastern side of the fandom due to Lucio's line in God's Reverie about viewing Lucilius like a son to him, his acknowledging himself as a "type" of Lucifer and how he dotes on Sandalphon while simultanously seeking his approval. In the headcanoned family line that eventually leads to Sandalphon, Lucio is the great-grandfather and Lucilius is the grandfather with Sandalphon as the grandchild. Lucifer is sometimes acknowledged as Sandalphon's "father" in a way due to having created Sandalphon but if he isn't treated as Sandalphon's "father" or caretaker, he's depicted as his romantic partner due to the canon romantic undertones in their relationship and the fact that Sandalphon and Lucifer don't actually acknowledge each other as if they were parent and child in canon. If Belial is included, he's depicted as the uncle due to having been created by Lucilius, thusly making him Lucifer's "brother" in this interpretation.
• Fandom VIP: granblue_en, which is a collaborative effort between three fans of the game on Twitter, is easily the most well-known part of the Western fandom because of how dedicated they are to translating all kinds of niche Granblue content for non-Japanese speaking fans and providing guides for players to ease into the game. Their contributions are commonly referenced by the similarly-named subreddit, the GBF Wiki, or posted on their dedicated website. They've also organized several Granblue meet-ups for American conventions and managed to conduct exclusive interviews with Cygames staff a few times. It was noted in a Reddit AMA that their notability to Cygames is now high enough that they're given press passes to attend official Granblue events even though they are not official journalists just so they can get firsthand reports on all news live.
• Fan Nickname: So many, now that it has its own page.
• Fanon: Because Dub Name Changes are abundant in this game, some players believe that Sutera's name in the English localization is supposed to be "Stella" but Cygames probably just forgot about it. A Google search for "Granblue Stella" would even show artworks of Sutera in the image results.
• Fanon Discontinuity: The bonus chapter of the "Spaghetti Syndrome" event reveals that Cassius' brain had been extracted by the Moondwellers for research, leaving his body preserved in a tank. Many fans were shocked by this twist, because it would mean that Cassius won't be receiving a new playable version soon, let alone an SSR. This is a separate chapter from the event, so some believe that it's just a non-canon What If?. Considering the anniversary event featuring the society picks up where that chapter left off, it’s unlikely that it’s not canon.
• Fanfic Fuel: In light of "Seeds of Redemption" where Vyrn mentions about what if Seox was brought to Zinkenstill and grow up together with Gran/Djeeta and Vyrn, Childhood Friends AU of between Seox and Gran/Djeeta started popping up left and right within the Japanese fanbase.
  • Amusingly, this was picked up for the 9th Anniversary Event, And You, where in several of the simulations, Seox grows up with the protagonist, trains with them, and accompanies them on their journey.
• Fan-Preferred Couple:
  • You would be hard pressed to find a fanart of Djeeta (Or Gran) that didn't have Percival near them. Gran and Djeeta are also shipped a lot with Seox due to the hinted Generation Xerox between their fathers. On Gran's side of fanarts and doujinshi, he's mostly shipped with either Djeeta, Beatrix, Clarisse, Narmaya and Yuel by a lot. Katalina and Vira also come close to them in Gran's popular pairings.
  • Even if the pairing is all just made up in dreams, some ship Elsam and Yggdrasil mostly because of their adorable dynamic.
  • For Les Yay ships, Societte/Yuel, and Silva/Tweyen pairings are popular even if the game just limits their dynamics into Ship Tease.
  • Lucifer/Sandalphon is working its way up to be this, due to the events of the "What Makes The Sky Blue" trilogy.What appears to be their Declaration Of Love for each other at the end of the event solidified this for the fandom. As of 2019, it is one of the biggest Boys' Love pairs in the fanbase, with the creators seemingly taking note of this and teasing it further with the release of the "Ain Sophr Aur" MV and continued releases of Lucisan merch.
  • Caro/Elta subtly became due to Elta's interactions with Caro in the "Together In Song" event. The end of the event lead to Elta entering the fandom's "Tragic gays/Dead boyfriend" category because of it.
  • Belial/Protagonist is also fairly popular, even though he barely made a pass at them while flirting with everyone else in their event party during his debut.
  • On the Ho Yay end for Belial, mostly due to his Undying Loyalty toward Lucillius, people have taken a liking to shipping the two together with the presentation of WMTSB3. It helps that it’s all but stated that Belial has romantic feelings for his creator, outside of the normal lustful remarks he flings at everyone, carrying out his grand scheme that would bring about the end of the world and resurrecting Lucillius so they could watch it together. Lucillius comes off as the only person Belial is shown to truly care about, despite the fact that Lucillius treats him as coldly as any of his other subordinates (except Lucifer) in return. The event ends with Belial clinging to Lucillius as they are sucked into the void, where they’ll presumably spend eternity together. This is after Belial confirms that his feelings for Lucillius are romantic.
  • For Sariel who gained popularity as of "000", a sizable portion of the fanbase ships him with Belial, not particularly helped by their interactions in "000" with implied Pet the Dog moments from Belial to Sariel. In Sariel’s White Day message, he mentions receiving a black feather from an unknown sender as a Valentine's Day gift. The fandom was quick to assume it was from Belial. In "The Maydays", his feelings for Belial are juxtaposed with Sandalphon's all but officially stated by Word of God to be canonically romantic feelings for Lucifer. This is also heavily implied to be the reason why Sandalphon allows Sariel to find the "rainbow"/dimension rift trapping Belial in the first place. At the end of the event, it's foreshadowed that he will be the one who resurrects Belial and Lucilius in a follow up event in an attempt to see Belial again.
  • Gawain and Lennah are shipped together by a group of fans for the Brooding Boy, Gentle Girl dynamic they share, especially in their cross-fate episode.
  • Shipping the Disciples (Europa, Alexiel, Shiva and Grimnir) with their respective teachers (Gabriel, Uriel, Michael and Raphael) or with each other is fairly popular in the fandom.
• Fanwork-Only Fans: Some fans recognize the Granblue IP from the various doujins and artworks posted online. As well, there are a lot of artists who will simply become interested in some of the character designs and make fan art of them, while not actually looking into the game itself.
• Friendly Fandoms:
  • Ironically, despite also having a fairly intense rivalry, a lot of Fate/Grand Order players also play Granblue, and the "rivalry" is more like that of friendly sports rivals than anything, as both are loved due to the characters, stories, and the inclusion of popular voice actors. Players only tend to make comparisons regarding both games' mechanics (such as what is listed in the Fandom Rivalry. Others even discuss some favored gameplay mechanics of Granblue that would make F/GO better, and vice versa) or compare similarly-named characters (i.e. Scathacha, Gawain, Lancelot, or Jeanne d'Arc), yet both fandoms still respect the other side's choice of game, to the point that any further comparisons to the gacha rates are treated as an overused Running Gag by both fandoms, telling the offenders to cut it out and avoid more aimless debates.
    • The friendliness of both fandoms to each other can be evidenced with some fan artists making Crossover Ships between GBF and F/GO characters like Belial-Kiara as mentioned above in Crossover Ship), or giving Nasuverse-related Fan Nicknames to GBF characters like Saber to Charlotta, Emiya to Seofon and Sakura Matou for Nier.
  • In the English-speaking fanbase, quite a few Fire Emblem Heroes players also play Granblue and are friendly with those who play GBF exclusively. The two games being in fairly different genres but still hitting some of the same conceptual notes helps.
  • Such debates also allowed other players to try out their supposed "rival" title in a similar way to F/GO and FEH. As a result, some GBF players also try out Epic Seven for the sake of curiosity.
  • Although the fandoms would also tend to compare their games' mechanics, the relationship between Granblue players and those from Final Fantasy Brave Exvius still turn out to be generally positive as both sides remember the fact that a lot of Cygames employees used to work for Final Fantasy titles in the past, and that both games are bound to have similar art and music styles because of this. It also helps that Granblue is itself a Genre Throwback to the older 2D Final Fantasy titles that the players try both games out of nostalgia.
  • Recently the GBF fandom also builds this relationship with the Onmyōji (2016) fandom. Lately, quite a lot of Granblue players have branched out on playing Onmyōji due to their similar gameplay and both games are full of beautiful character designs, Ms. Fanservice and Mr. Fanservice designs alike.
  • For being franchises developed by Cygames, players of Granblue also try out Shadowverse and Dragalia Lost. And given the trend of Cygames to reuse characters across their franchises, players of one game may be encouraged to try out the other when their favorite characters also make appearances there.
  • Granblue has developed an overlapping fanbase with pretty much any franchise it has collaborated with, due to players and viewers alike initially coming over to the game for said collab characters and staying for the love of art and story.
  • Granblue fans are generally friendly with fans of Princess Connect Redive, after acknowledging that both IPs are considered as Cash Cow Franchises of the same company.
  • There's an overlapping playerbase with the Arknights fandom. Or to be specific, it's those players who wanted to play a side game along with GBF as their main game... Or simply to have another game to play while waiting for their Energy/Stamina resource to refresh here. Lastly, it includes the players who are just looking for something to help ease and shift away attention from the grind.
  • Many Genshin Impact players have also previously, or still currently, play Granblue Fantasy making them this trope.
• Foe Yay Shipping:
  • Lucifer/Lucilius and Lucilius/Lucio aka Helel ben Sahar. Also qualifies as Screw Yourself in Lucio/Lucilius' case, as Lucilius was directly cloned by from Lucio by the Astral God.
  • Sandalphon/Belial has also picked up steam as well, though it helps that Belial has come onto Sandalphon several times in canon.

G-H

• Game-Breaker: See this page.
• Genius Bonus:
  • There's plenty of Religious and Mythological Theme Naming here. The characters in question have some similarities with their mythological namesakes, yet are mostly subtle enough to rely on research or Fridge Brilliance as listed here.
  • Hamsa is named after a Southeast Asian bird.
  • The Four Primarches overseeing each element is sourced from medieval occultism by the likes of Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa, though the Virtues in the Bible are also described as having governance over nature.
    • In general, the High primarchs (Lucifer, Michael, Gabriel, Uriel, and Raphael) embody various types of angels described in the bible, particularly the Dominions (Regulated the duties of lower tier angels), Virtues (They assisted in governance over nature), and the Powers (Kept evil forces from doing harm, basically warrior angels). They may also take some aspects from the Seraphim, due to having six wings and being the highest tier of angel. And of course, archangels and normal angels. Halluel and Malluel most likely take inspiration from the lowest order of angels who serve as messengers of God (or previously, the Astrals until Lucifer and company took over). They are also notably are subordinate to Miichael and the other High Primarchs, further lending to this idea.
  • The Cherub, an archangel weapon which was first fought in "What Makes The Sky Blue: 000" and later became a Pride Ascendant battle, resembles what Cherubim were originally described to look like; a six winged, four faced entity with those faces being the face of man, an eagle, an ox, and a lion. Angels that resemble Putto show up as well but their existences aren't explained.
  • Uriel being The Baby of the Bunch of the tetra-primarchs makes sense when you remember that original archangel Uriel was the latest introduced in noncanon lore, making him the youngest of the main four archangels as well.
  • Helel ben Sahar's namesake serves as a reference to the bible passage Isaiah 14:12-15 which built up the hubris of the king of Babylon. From this passage came not only Satan being known as "Helel" before his fall, as well as the idea that Satan used to be a proper archangel, the translation of this passage lead to his more commonly known and accepted name prior to becoming a Fallen Angel, "Lucifer". As well, after the introduction of Helel ben Shalem, Sahar now has ties to the Canaanite God of Dawn, Shahar.
  • Even without the "Helel ben" attachment to Helel ben Shalem's name, one familiar with Canaanite mythology knows that Shalem (or Shalim) is the twin brother god of Shahar, and the god of dusk.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff:
  • Granblue Fantasy in general is this over in the west. While it's not nearly as big in the west as it is in it's home country, it has a small, but dedicated fanbase that Word of God has taken notice of. It helps that the game has an official English language setting implemented into the game and is easily accessible to overseas players through it's browser version.
  • In his home country, Lucio is the least popular of the "Lucifer"-faces despite being the only one that's playable. In the west, he seems to have amassed a small following, usually being liked above or equally to Lucifer and Lucilius.
  • Beelzebub is a villain who was greatly overshadowed by Belial in his debut event and then Lucilius in the event that followed, causing him lag behind as the eastern player base focused on them. Comparatively however, he has a slightly bigger fanbase in the west, though he’s still considerably less popular than Belial and Lucilius over here, too.
• Goddamned Boss:
  • Luminiera Omega and Celeste Omega if you're unprepared:
    • The former has a buff that blocks 90% damage and heals itself for 65,000 HP per turn. While it can be easily dispelled, every time another player joins the raid and attacks Luminiera while it has above 50% HP, it will redeploy the buff, forcing you to dispel it again. This boss basically forces you to bring a Dispel skill, otherwise it will take a long time to beat it with brute force.
    • Celeste Omega can easily bombard all players with the Zombified status if an attack buff is deployed to the raid. Not only do heals become ineffective, it will also chain the Putrefied, Cursed, and Skill Sealed status effects. If no one brought a Clear skill to remove the debuffs, expect the party members' HP to continuously drop every turn.
  • Even for advanced players, Xeno Vohu Manah can be irritating due to the "Halberd of Earth" debuff that its mini-boss inflicts. It causes the players' attacks to heal the boss instead of damaging it. Players tend to avoid using their offensive skills while this debuff is active, but it becomes difficult to manage if it's not dispelled early, as other players can unwillingly heal Xeno Vohu back to full HP, wasting the efforts of others who damaged it beforehand.
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • An update in September 2017 accidentally increased the drop rate of SSR weapons in Tier 2 raids by a significant amount (from the initial 1% drop rate to a whopping 10-15%) for around 2-3 days. This allowed many players to easily accumulate several end-game SSR weapons for both Omega and Primal grids. This issue was unnoticed at first, but spread through online platforms before Cygames patched it. Among the six raids affected, Baal was the most sought since it drops SSR weapons that are commonly used in F2P Earth Primal element grids. Players even jokingly called this bug the "Baalfest" event.
  • When uncapping characters, there's a chance for the uncap art to be replaced by Walder's artwork.
  • While it's considered a pleasant surprise if the player obtains SSR items from SR Amber Crystals when drawing from the gacha, there have been rare instances of visual bugs where the Draw screen presents an SSR Rainbow Crystal that actually contains nothing but R items. Similarly, an SSR Rainbow crystal can immediately turn into a Blue R crystal◊. These may shatter expectations, but are still hilarious to watch.
  • Granblue being browser-based may result into weird visual glitches wherein the sprites don't load properly depending on the device, cache, or internet connection. For example◊.
• Growing the Beard:
  • The earliest English localization of the game is often criticized because of its grammatical errors, inconsistent naming, and inconsistent writing quality. Events written up to the year 2016 were least-favored by the English fans because of these. It's only from 2017 onwards did the writing quality improve, thus increasing the number of fan-favorite events. As Cygames finally had its own in-house localization team, the English setting significantly improved.
  • Granblue became more generous and F2P-friendly over time when it comes to free gacha draws and rare items, especially on holidays, anniversaries and Milestone Celebrations. The Roulette Draw is notable as each new iteration usually gives more total free draws than the previous version.
  • "Platinum Sky" is where the game took stride for many English players, as noted in Surprisingly Improved Sequel. So much that the event got a rerun almost a year after its first run on January 2017 along with Meteon, the event's starring free SR character, getting his 5★ uncap, one that radically boosted his effectiveness.
  • The main story is generally agreed to start picking up at one of two different points, improving on what was a fun old-school fantasy, but fairly weak otherwise.
    • The Amalthea Island arc finally breaks away from the formulaic beating up each island's Primal as a self-contained situation, becoming much more serialized as the pacing ramps up, and the antagonists become a lot more proactive both in their goals and conflict with the protagonists, with the stakes becoming higher as a result.
    • When the crew enters Nalhegrande, the conflict becomes much more political in nature as the crew has to mediate their way through the war between Rhem and Idelva. This has been praised for creating a more complex situation that isn't so easily resolvable. In addition, there's much more character exploration like Eugen confronting the loss of his wife, going into why Io is so attached to Tzaka, Rosetta bonding with other Primals, the difficulties Pholia and Reinhardtzar bear as rulers in some capacity, and Cain and Leona struggling with the loss of Abel fifteen years ago.
  • The game is known for its tedious grind, but numerous Quality-of-Life changes were added to alleviate this by streamlining the gameplay and user interfaces, making raids much easier, increasing drop rates, or removing restrictions. These were also done to help newcomers catch up and make progression faster than before.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • From the "Touken Ranbu: Fate Horizon'' Crossover event:
    • An episode has Mutsunokami and Tsurumaru wonder about how the skies in the Granblue universe work. Seems innocent enough, but when the events of "What Makes The Sky Blue" is taken to account, the whole question takes a murky turn.
    • Some of the dialogue (like Yamanbagiri calling himself a replica and Mikazuki wondering if the heat on the forge is unbearable for Honebami) can come across as such to Touken Ranbu players considering the lore of their origins as swords.
  • Percival's introductory fate episode seems doubly awesome and funny at the same time, but a part of it is now this in light of the "Between The Frost And Flame" event. His family's carriage was attacked by the burglars they helped out before, out of desperation to survive, with his mother dying from blood loss from the rubble of the destroyed carriage. With the NPCs in this event being in an almost similar situation as his back then, their state would have felt like it's close to home for Percival himself. Granted, Percival was a child back then and the heroes are there with him to help the NPCs in this fate episode, but it doesn't make this any less harsh.
  • In "What Makes the Sky Blue", Sandalphon is introduced as a backup of Lucifer if the latter fails his duties or some tragedy incapacitates him. Many fans wanted "Sandy" to be redeemed and Promoted to Playable. True enough, "What Makes the Sky Blue II: Paradise Lost" made him playable, but at the expense of Lucifer dying at the hands of Beelzebub. Sandalphon really became a replacement for Lucifer, the very same idea that drove him to villainy in the first WMTSB event.
  • With her Summer version, Granblue now has a Jeanne d'Arc who is weak to fire. Considering what happened to her historical counterpart, this can be hard to take in.
  • "New World Order" sounds like a triumphant song at first, but its lyrics turned out to have darker meanings after the Evokers became playable three years after the song was released. The lines mentioning the Major Arcana somehow foreshadow their respective Evokers’ stories. For example, the line "Death! Let love burn to its silent end." actually involves the literal death of a lover. "Silent end" might refer to Nier committing suicide in one of her Fate Episodes.
• Heartwarming in Hindsight:
  • Fans expected Eahta as the strong catalyst for Narmaya's future Character Development. This is proven true with her 5★ uncap, and Eahta even appears as a shadow behind Narmaya in her new artwork.
  • "Coffee Boy" is a common Fan Nickname for Sandalphon ever since "What Makes The Sky Blue II: Paradise Lost" revealed his obsession to the drink, all thanks to Lucifer apparently inventing coffee if Sandalphon's fate episode is any indication. The event mostly deals with Lucifer's death, yet fanworks would usually depict the two boys drinking coffee in a garden, one of the memorable flashback scenes from the event. The ending of "What Makes The Sky Blue III: 000" actually has Sandalphon and Lucifer meet once more in the garden, talking about coffee before saying goodbye.
• High-Tier Scrappy:
  • Dark (both Omega and Primal) gets flak for being too strong, upending the game balance entirely in favor of that element, and MVP-stealing during raids. Further compounding it, several of its better known aspects being rather gacha dependent has it seen by some as a "pay to win" element. It has since fallen into the opposite end now with more and more content they can't burst past and the developers are slowly introducing characters and weapons that suggest an alternate playing style, their fear of returning Dark up to its game-breaking state hinders more substantial additions, like tanks. It's evened out as the Charge Attack meta became an option for Dark Omega and grids with Fallen swords (which has a stamina skill) allow for stamina or stamnity (mix of both Stamina and Enmity, ensuring some sort of boosted damage)
  • Water has gotten flak for two different reasons. Water Primal (gacha weapons) for having a hard to dent combo of very high HP and Stamina (higher HP% = higher damage) modifier, where some characters become monstrously strong (5★ Anre among them). While it doesn't have the raw high damage that some other elements, it has a higher sustained damage that doesn't have to worry about the pitfalls an enmity element might face either due to being able to survive most attacks and heal spam benefiting them. Water Omega however is seen as very weak with Omega II doing little to improve things, likely because of the Primal Grid's strength and has gotten to the point where people joke that most other elements can do more damage to a fire boss than Water Omega... until the middle of 2018 with the Kengo class and the Charge Attack cap up Omega II weapon water has, causing something of a resurgence of late-game water Omega, though before Omega II/Kengo it's still in the rough spot.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Many Cygames fans, especially from the English Granblue playerbase, remembered the "Monkeygate" controversy of this game and its company when EA faced a similar (yet more widespread) controversy regarding the microtransactions in Star Wars Battlefront II (2017). Newcomers weren't aware of the "Monkeygate" until GBF is being compared to SWBF2, so they were surprised knowing that Cygames changed just because a streamer spent a lot of money trying to get Andira.
  • The game has characters who fight using summoned entities, as well as Tarot-inspired Arcarum summons ever since 2016. The fanbase grew accustomed to making crossover fanworks with the Persona series, which somehow became prophetic once Cygames announced a Persona 5 collab event.
  • Speaking of Persona, The Star summon turned out to be a reference to Star Platinum of Jojos Bizarre Adventure via its similar Rapid-Fire Fisticuffs attack. Some wondered if Granblue might also reference Persona since it's another franchise relying on Tarot Motifs. Guess what? Even before the Persona 5 collab, the "Handsome Gorilla" event has a reference via a suspiciously-similar "All-Out-Attack" CG artwork. It didn't stop there as the Oracle characters turned out to be officially localized in English as "Evokers". Persona 3 fans who play GBF were surprised because the S.E.E.S. of that game use guns called "Evokers" to summon their Personas.
  • When Producer Kimura once mentioned that NieR: Automata is one of his favorite games of 2017, some fans joked that because there's already a character in Granblue identified as an Automata (Lloyd), Cygames would be naming a future character as Nier. When the 5th Anniversary update introduced the Evokers, the Lovers character is officially named Nier in the English translation. Her name has been treated as a Shout-Out to that game, especially when her summon, Death, is a reference to Simone.
  • In 2017, the "Poacher's Day" event ran in time with the Summer season in Japan. One week later, a "Unite and Fight" event has Oktopode as the main boss. In other words, a swimsuit fanservice event being set close to a Giant Octopus event reminded players of the "I've seen enough Hentai" internet meme.
  • Zooey's (localized) original name as a Primal Beast is "Grand Order". Years later, her permanent gacha version is unlocked by obtaining the "Ruler of Fate" weapon. Interestingly, Fate/Grand Order also became one of the most popular games of the Fate Series, and is considered a strong competitor of Granblue in Japan. That's quite a coincidental theme naming there, Zooey.
  • Fans loved the beautiful uncap artwork of Summer Jeanne so much that many wished the subsequent Summer characters to receive arts with this high quality as well. It's also believed that Summer Jeanne crashed the game servers upon release just because of her uncap art. When the EX Poses were implemented for the Summer characters in a later update, these fans were glad that Summer Jeanne perhaps started the EX Pose trend in retrospect.
  • The "Flat is Justice" meme became ironic and funny after the Justice Arcarum and her Evoker, Maria Theresa, both turned out to have big breasts.
  • Threo once said that she "eats dragons for breakfast". This became ironic later on after she became friends with Scathacha (a "true dragon") in the "Bzzt! Amped Up Summer" event.
  • The summons Agni, Varuna, Zephyrus, Titan, Hades and Zeus have been collectively called by the playerbase as the "Primal Summons". Later on, Cygames officially updated the group names for similar summons, so the aforementioned six were categorized under "Optimus Summons". Whether this is coincidental or a deliberate Shout-Out to Optimus Prime of Transformers is unknown. In other words, they are quite literally Optimus Primals.
  • "Salty" is a slang synonymous to being upset. In gacha gaming communities, a "salty person" refers to those who feel bad about their gacha results. In the "Dinner at the Turned Table" collaboration event with Princess Connect!, the boss Voracicat can debuff your entire party by sprinkling them all with salt, giving the word "salty" a literal meaning in a gacha game.
  • There's a sizable camp wanting a collaboration event with one of Arc System Works fighting games like BlazBlue or Guilty Gear. Then in December 2018, it turns out that Cygames and ArcSys were planning something bigger. A Fighting Game Spin-Off called Granblue Fantasy Versus.
  • The final Fate Episode to recruit the Arcarum Evokers always starts with a Time Skip which lasted several months after the previous episode. Considering the time-gated nature of Arcarum materials, several months may be the bare minimum to finally unlock that episode in the first place.
  • Vira, Narmaya and Gisla are the three dakimakura (body pillows) officially licensed as merchandise. While the first two are popular characters, Gisla is a Game-Breaker weapon that many Granblue veterans like Yuki Ono collected over the years. Players then wondered if the Gisla body pillow is Cygames's way of Pandering to the Base, or merely a joke since Gisla is not playable. On June 19, 2019, Kolulu arrived with the Gisla as her weapon, causing fans to meme and name her "Gisla-chan". Veterans were surprised because Gisla is now technically playable. Yuki Ono himself Tweeted his joy of getting her immediately.
  • Suda Masaki, the live action actor for Shimura Shinpachi, has acted for a series of Granblue Fantasy related apps before and this was referenced in Gintama itself at one point. Come October 2021, some months after Gintama officially concluded the animation run through the movie, Granblue Fantasy is announced to be collaborating with Gintama for October.
• Ho Yay: See here.
• Hype Backlash: The sixth anniversary event was very polarizing because of initial expectations from the trailer that it would focus on Seox, but ultimately ended up being an event giving the spotlight to most of the Eternals with the consensus being that there were way too many plot threads that got tangled up in this one event. That the event ultimately put more focus on new characters Mugen and Rei - the latter of whom was poorly received by fans - than the advertised star Seox and the better-received newcomer Nehan didn't help matters, either.

I-O

• I Knew It!:
  • Every time a new Trial Character is released, fans create discussions for predicting that character's name based on the resemblance of its skill set from other existing characters or raid bosses. Currently, it worked for two pre-existing raid bosses who were Promoted to Playable:
    • Olivia's trial was released as early as late September 2017, with the primary focus on her skill set having almost the same debuffs as her raid version. Other guesses included an alternate version of Forte or Lucifer, but the case was proven true when a player once data-mined the character ID, revealing a placeholder named Olivia with the same skill set as the Trial Character and posted it on social media. Cygames quickly responded to it by giving a ban to the in-game account associated with that player.
    • The Trial Character pre-March 2018 was easily guessed by the fans to be Tiamat mainly because the first skill is an exact copy-paste of Yggdrasil's first skill, as well as the passives similar among the two. Like Olivia, players have also compared the debuffs provided by its skills and linked it to Tiamat's, along with another evidence where her "NPC artworks" were released months ago for Rackam's 5★ uncap.
  • To those who knew their Rage of Bahamut lore (may also be applied to the card Flavor Texts of Shadowverse), a lot wondered if Zwei could make an appearance in Granblue just because she has deep connections with Orchid (based from RoB's Orchis) and that Orchid has her own version in this game. When the trailer for the third arc of the main story was revealed, a new character was introduced, and she bears a great resemblance to RoB's Zwei. That being said, the character really has a resentment to Orchid even in this game, much like a Mythology Gag. However, as the characters of Granblue have altered backstories, her true identity has been left for debate for weeks. But that doesn't stop fans from calling her "Zwei". It turns, out she is Zwei, and Furias gave her the name on Chapter 119.
  • Granblue fans have speculated a Fighting Game spin-off even before Granblue Fantasy Versus was announced at Cygames Fes 2018. The gacha game had several "hints" on catering towards the Fighting Game Community; from the Street Fighter crossover events, the The King of Fighters references in the Divine Generals' Charge Attacks, character skills (such as Zeta's and Vaseraga's) having heavy metal references like how Guilty Gear does, the "A Thousand Reasons" event being a melee-based Tournament Arc, to Cygames sponsoring EVO 2018.
  • One of the complaints about "What Makes The Sky Blue II: Paradise Lost" is that Azazel and Olivia, two fallen angels imported from Rage of Bahamut weren't present in the event at all despite "Paradise Lost" now focusing on the fallen angel characters (though technically, Belial was the only one present in the event). Some fans have felt that the event was indeed short, leaving a lot of lore for the sequel. Plus, there's also the Fate Episodes of the two which lampshade Lucio's strange identity and mentioning Pandemonium. This, combined with the "Bzzt! Amped Up Summer" event featuring Olivia and recalling her original goal (of rescuing her fallen brethren from Pandemonium), as well as the teaser for WMTSB3 putting emphasis on the fallen angels, Lucio's true name and Pandemonium, caused a lot to believe that they will appear on the next story. Finally, all of these came true, as the third arc of WMTSB titled "000" included Azazel and Olivia in the prologue.
  • Grand Series characters were once reserved for the gacha SSR versions of the main cast, especially those whose SR versions are obtained through story progression. However, the inclusion of Vira's Grand version made a lot to believe that a Grand version of Ferry is no longer a matter of if but when? (Vira and Ferry were introduced in the main story as minor NPCs encountered in the early islands of Albion Citadel and Mist-Shrouded Isle respectively) and with the trailer for the main story's third arc reveals Ferry being story-relevant once again. This solidified the theory that her Grand version's release would only be a matter of time. Lastly, fans were able to correctly guess that her Grand version will be Dark-elemental, because it has story-related implications. And with the fact that there had been no Dark-elemental Grand Series characters prior to Ferry, many believe that Cygames is bound to release one. True enough, Ferry received a Dark Grand version on February 2019.
  • Many players correctly guessed that one of the most prominent characterizations of The Lovers/Nier is the Yandere trope. Her Fate Episodes unlocked through uncapping Death reveal the reason why.
  • The year 2019 introduced a new gimmick for certain characters via "Crest" buffs - permanent, undispellable, and can be consumed by said characters to power-up their skills. The first character whose skillset was revamped to implement this gimmick is Lily, followed by Macula Marius and Medusa. Players have noted that there is a common ground among the three "Crest" units and that it could serve as a hint for the next ones - They are all original characters imported from Rage of Bahamut. And indeed, the next batch of character upgrades announced on May 29, 2019 revealed Forte to have the Crest mechanics. Forte is yet another character who originated from Rage of Bahamut. This also verifies the speculations of those who predicted Forte to have the Crest mechanics as soon as Cygames announced on May 1, 2019 that Forte is included to the list of those who would be rebalanced, without further going into the details just yet.
  • In regards to the lore of the Love Live collaboration, Door To The Skies, several players had guessed correctly that Aina, the mysterious girl aiding the crew, is actually Nihilith from Aquors Sky High, or at least, she's the dormant form of Nihilith.
  • The Granblue Reddit was suspicious of how the event's announcement page shows only Meg, with a popular theory that suggests the event being a POV of Meg who just wanted to enjoy her vacation on Auguste despite the crazy stuff that happened there in the previous Summer events. The next day, this theory is proven true.
  • When a secret recruitable character for the My Hero Academia collaboration is announced, many players and fans predicted that the secret character is actually Toga Himiko, or potentially a dual unit of Toga and Twice due to the two villains being revealed as part of the story in the first half of the event. Come the update in January 18, this guess is proven true as Toga is recrutiable once players obtained the ending of the collaboration event.
• Incest Yay Shipping:
  • Ayer X Jessica to a certain crowd.
  • There are a number of Aglovale X Percival shippers thanks to the "Between Frost and Flame" event.
  • Both sets of the Primarchs of Instruction (Halluel X Malluel, and Azrael X Israfel), due to them always being together and the former two being incredibly flirty with each other. The fact that they're artificial beings helps them be popular with people who want to brush aside that aspect as well.
  • Feower/Quatre and Tien/Esser to certain people. Overlapping with Twincest.
• It Was His Sled: Sandalphon's relationship to Lucifer and his fate are climactic twists of the first "What Makes the Sky Blue" event, but nowadays pretty much everyone knows about it because of how much later events hinges on that reveal.
• Junk Rare:
  • The Blackhole difficulty of the April Fools boss, "Vyrn?", has a chance of dropping a Vy-Ball in a gold or red chest. This item does absolutely nothing besides sit in the player's inventory. Doubles as a Cosmetic Award as beating that boss is difficult at that time (it's comparable to end-game bosses like Ultimate Bahamut).
  • In Omega raids, SSR weapons without any Attack-based skills are deemed useless. And even if the Omega weapon does have Attack skills, it's still subjectively useless if it's out of the meta. Who needs Tiamat Gauntlet Omegas when you can just get more Tiamat Bolt Omegas for an Enmity Grid? Omega Summons never become this, however, as they can be reduced for valuable quartz.
  • Once you max uncapped the Omega Weapons that you need, any duplicates tend to be reduced since their weapon stones are valuable for the final uncaps. After that, duplicates become skill fodder.
  • The Vortex Dragon is joked as a good source of Light Quartz over the years, so it gets reduced immediately once obtained. It has an aura that boosts both Light and Fire attack. Unfortunately, the attack values are mediocre if not outright weak (40%/60%/80%), easily beaten by Genesis summons like Lucifer (with values of 100%/120%/130%). The Vortex Dragon boosts two elements at once, which is niche to the meta that demands mono-elemental teams.
  • Supreme Merits were this for a long time. While they're important for uncapping SSR characters, they had little use outside of that and can't be converted into many variants (Supreme Merits can be traded for Legendary Merits, but that's it). By the time Supreme Merits became useful again, veterans already amassed huge amounts of them from farming. Opus Weapons then required an incredibly staggering 130^note 100 straight and 30 for crafting ten Legendary Merits) Supreme Merits to uncap to 4★, which means that it would take a while before they become junk rare again.
  • The Zone of the Enders crossover summon, JEHUTY. It has a versatile aura that works with all elements, gives a useful 10% boost to double rate, and has an acceptable call. It’s good for players who don't have anything better and those who are too weak to use the Omega summons yet, but it gets outpaced relatively. What makes it really junk is that you can't get rid of it.
  • The Nobiyo summon from "Together In Song". He has a great aura that boosts drop rate and experience points by 10% and boosts attack and HP by 20%. His call is pretty respectable since it provides three useful buffs. However, he gets outclassed later on in both aura utility (Black Bunny and White Bunny can be obtained fairly easily without the gacha and they have better drop rate/exp boosts, while almost anything else outclasses his offensive aura) and summon call. Thus, players don't use him on the mid-game onwards. Like JEHUTY, you can't get rid of him. Thankfully, Nobiyo was later given a 4★ uncap that makes him superior to the rabbits while also providing a far quicker initial call that gives him a significant niche.
• Just Here for Godzilla:
  • When crossover events happen, it's common for the other franchises' fans to join Granblue just because their favorite characters are in here.
  • Players who join or come back to Granblue Fantasy solely for the free Gacha rolls (Roulette, Scratchers), livestream reward benefits and Milestone Celebrations and leave once it's over are so prominent that they've even garnered their own Fan Community Nickname; "Seasonals" which is sometimes used in jest and other times derogatorily by dedicated players. They've even begun to call themselves "Seasonals".
• Launcher of a Thousand Ships:
  • Gran/Djeeta to spades. There's quiet plenty of ship tease in context with several characters which adds the fuel and due to Purely Aesthetic Gender, the ship tease works both ways. Either Ho Yay and/or Les Yay and heterosexual pairs. Even more so now that gender settings for Valentine’s Day and White Day have been removed, so Gran can give/receive chocolate to/from men and Djeeta give/can receive chocolate to/from women.
  • Sandalphon has been shipped with every cast member of the What Makes The Sky Blue storyline, including Gran/Djeeta and Lyria. That said, his most popular and go to ship is still with Lucifer, which is heavily supported across canon material.
  • While not as big of one as Sandalphon, Lucifer also gets this treatment because of how intrinsically connected to everyone in What Makes The Sky Blue he is and how they all view him, which has lead to many ships. Sandalphon is all but stated to be in love with him (though it’s already been confirmed that he loves him), he’s implied to be the only thing that Lucilius cares about beyond his plans, Belial hates him which is implied to be because of Lucilius’ favoritism for him, Beelzebub hates him because he’s more powerful than him (and prettier), Azazel is still loyal to him despite Lucifer being on the side of good in this universe, all the primarchs look up to and respect him but but especially Michael and Lucio gets thrown in there solely because they look like each other and he’s shown to respect Lucifer because of the role he previously held. He’s also more rarely paired with the fallen angels like Olivia and Astaroth who hold a misguided grudge against him. Similarly to Sandalphon, however, his most popular ship is with Sandalphon.
• LGBT Fanbase: The plethora of attractive characters of either gender, Ho Yay and Les Yay has formed one.
  • Eugen, Jin and Soriz are conspicuous in this regard, attracting LGBT fans to the game.
  • Cagliostro and Ladiva have gained some fans due to their mostly positive portrayals, according to those fans. Ladiva loves her body so much that she refuses to have Cagliostro build her a female one. Ladiva's popularity increased even further after starring in "No Rain, No Rainbow" and showing everyone how much of a sweetheart she is without needing to get her from the gacha.
  • The existence of pairs that are all but confirmed to be romantic but are explicitly written as such like Grea/Anne, Sandalphon/Lucifer and Yuel/Societte have attracted some LGBT players, the main source of the outcry of gay rights in the fandom. Belial also has a huge LGBT fanbase due to him being a confirmed bisexual and for canonically having romantic feelings for Lucilius. Vane/Lancelot and Tweyen/Silva also both have a following, for having signs that are picked up by homosexual players, though they aren't as big outside of there due to not being as obvious as the three pairings and Belial.
    • Meg and Mari, from the summer events of 2020 and 2021 also have a large following. Auguste of the Dead seemingly canonises them.
• Love to Hate: Belial and Lobelia became very popular in the fandom because of their villainy. In fanworks, discussions, and memes, players simply love to bring up their antagonistic traits, devious facial expressions and wrongdoings until those things are all what's mostly remembered about them, despite any redeeming factors. Specifically, Belial is known as a Memetic Molester while Lobelia is known as a Memetic Psychopath in both canon and fanon.
• Low-Tier Letdown:
  • Fire's basic omega grid is considered bad as Colossus Canes are not strong Omega ATK weapons in general and have little sync up with top-tier Fire characters. There are the Ancient Ecke Sachs (having a mix of attack up/enmity/crit up) to push them above a number of other elements, and being swords sync up well with a number of characters. However, just to get one requires either Twin Elements dropping that specific weapon or grinding 2500 Prestige Pendants to buy one. Per month. Although this case becomes easier now that they're a drop from Arcarum Extreme chests, and the price for AES (and other Olden Primal weapons) are reduced to only 1000 pendants per piece for maximum of two per month. The advent of AX skills on Omega weapons (including AES) alleviate their position even higher.
    • In a weird twist of events, Fire Omega II weapons is slowly becomes this compared to their basic Omega I weapons they were supposed to be superior when compared with. All three Brahma weapons have weaker skillset compared to even base AES, since none of them provides the element with the same amount of consistent burst power that AES has despite the higher raw numbers, with only Brahman Scimitar/Nilakantha only ever used for endgame raids for the extra bulk. They also has yet to receive AX skill benefits, so stacking more than one of them per grid isn't as powerful as AES (or even AX-powered canes), so they only seen as a stopgap to fill the empty spaces.
  • Wind Primal is disliked as to really make it effective you need to heavily whale to get the needed weapons, and even then the amount of money spent would get more results in other elements (Water, Dark, Earth, Fire). Wind Omega and perhaps the element itself was generally seen as a newbie grid for a while due to the lack of a higher-end elemental summon and its gradual enmity playstyle was easily outpaced by some other elements. But with the introduction of summons like Grimmir and Raphael, Omega II harp weapons and buffs to both Siete and Niyon (Wind's Eternals), enjoys a boost that only 1-2 elements enjoy, like Staminity builds.
    • Wind comps were quite stagnant for some time, but 2021 completely revolutionized the element, at the cost of centralizing it around two characters: Grand Narmaya and Summer Korwa. Top-end Wind comps are simply those two and whichever third unit you have that further enables Narmaya. Competing in Wind GW without both of them places you in an objectively weaker position. This is especially grating since S. Korwa was previously an undesirable mediocre unit before her 2021 rebalance, and is both a time limited summer unit and was subsequently never featured on a gala banner, making her very annoying to acquire compared to Narmaya, who is always available on Legfests. Eventually Wind receives more useful enablers that you can get without having to wait until Summer to get, like Caro, reworked Petra, and Transendence Niyon.
  • Earth was once considered to be the weakest element in the game. This was due to the fact that most of its extremely powerful core characters are limited (Summer Alexiel, Christmas Narmaya, Christmas Anthuria, Mahira, etc.), with the regular options being noted to not be as powerful as the limited ones provide. However, it's not entirely the element's fault, as it's also due to the fact that many of the Water bosses are That One Boss thanks to having some of the nastiest and most crippling mechanics compared to other bosses. Cygames tried to remedies this somewhat by reworking older unlimited characters (Aletheia, Arulumuya, SSR Soriz, Sara, etc.) and adding really good new unlimited characters (Satyr), but the damage is already been done.
  • Apsaras is a rarely used class. It actually has decent skills and main hand weapons (the Xeno Sagittarius spear is basically tailor-made for it, ala the synergy between the Xeno Vohu harp and Elysian class), but it doesn't provide any essential utility to raids, which means that it has to compete for slots with more essential classes such as Spartan or Sage.
  • Most of the EX classes fall under this. A lot of them have extremely niche skills and rarely-used main hand skills, to the point that most only level them up for certain sub-skills and permanent Mastery bonuses for the captain. Also, all of them become surpassed by Tier IV classes, to the point where only a few might be used for niche purposes. Ex II classes released seek to change this with mixed results so far.
  • Chat Noir is also treated as a scrappy due to his kit relying too much on RNG, and his self-buffs are just plain boosts, one of which relies on the sole condition wherein the Delay debuff must land on the enemy. Oh, and did we mention Chat Noir's Charge Attack is also RNG-reliant? All of these situational effects just place him far below the players' rankings and more akin to a joke than an actual character despite having three reworks. It would take the fourth rework in May 2022 to finally get him Rescued from the Scrappy Heap and become a genuinely good and serviceable option for Water teams.
  • Christina is a "free" SSR Wind character and one of the few characters with bounty-raising mechanics (and the only SSR Wind character to do so besides the Captain). Unfortunately, the only way to obtain her is to turn-in an outrageous amount of chips in Jewel Resort Casino (77,777,777!!) which is already tedious enough because the amount of chips you get is completely reliant on luck, and what you get after all that hard work is a mediocre unit with unfocused kit that's strictly inferior to a base Hawkeye. The 5★ uncap she got later on doesn't help matters, as the mechanics that makes her worth the space tied you to a dilemma where you had to choose to keep your chip stack for the extra supplemental damage, or consuming it for extra effect on her skills. It's generally better to play a Bandit Tycoon/Street King or use Tien as an off-element option if you really want to stack up bounties.
  • Among the Crest summons, Nyarlathotep is widely considered to be the worst of the bunch. This is because Dark has little to no options for Crest-based teams, with the only two available characters (Dark Cagliostro and Forte) being very mediocre in performance. Compared to Princess Long Ji and Heimdallr, who are a straight up Game-Breaker in Water and Light Crest teams, respectively, Nyarlathotep stands out as the weakest link.

• Memetic Badass:
  • Walder, everyone's guaranteed tutorial gacha character, also known for randomly replacing other characters' uncap arts, is actually willing to take blows from Fenrir just to save his friend Jade. Fenrir herself is surprised at his sheer willpower. To "commemorate" this, high-level Japanese players brought Walder to deliver the killing blow to end-game bosses like Proto Bahamut.
  • The Young Cat that you can recruit from "The Many Lives Of Cats". He's an R character but he is so adorable, comes with nice passive skills, and geared a lot to support, so some players let a mere cat to deliver the killing blow on an Ultimate Bahamut Raid.
  • Gachapin. His Parody Sue status (demonstrated in his crossover event) has been embraced by the fandom and he has three of the most notable skills used by the Eternals. People claim that he's the 11th Eternal (or actually a canon character in disguise), a God on par with Bahamut, and one of the only people who can take on Lucilius. Hilariously, the third one actually happened in the Harder Than Hard difficulty, and that's without the third skill unlocked.
  • Ilsa, as of the seventh Society event, for casually ripping off an Otherworldly Being's head with her bare hands in Tranquil Fury, which has led to many comparisons to Doom's main character for the sheer metalness of that moment.
  • The two new Illustrous weapons for Dark and Earth respectively, Ereshkigal and Hrunting, is considered a powerful Game-Breaker for each respective elements that it's worth sinking 150 Gold Moons just to get your hands on one. It goes to a point where players believed that both of them are the strongest character for each of their respective element, even more so with Hrunting since there are no Earth characters with the perfect 10 rating in Gamewith ever since the Qilin nerf.
• Memetic Loser:
  • At least when the anime is concerned, Gran is a loser compared to Djeeta. While he's stuck with the main story party, struggled with monsters, and had to do quests first to improve his gear, and stuck with the basic Fighter-line class (with the exception of his Luchador outfit he dons at the fighting tournament in season 2's episode 14, implying that at least he has unlocked a Tier IV class), Djeeta's episodes, on the other hand, have her fight with nary a scratch, surrounded by fan-favorite characters, has already mastered several classes (as hinted by the outfits she hangs on a clothesline) and one-shots monsters without a sweat. Cue the flood of jokes at Gran's expense, usually alluding to the "Casual Free-to-Play VS. Hardcore/Grinder/Pay-to-Win" nature of gamers. This is a far cry from how the fandom portrays him in Versus, where he is a Memetic Badass.
  • For a long time, Earth is joked as the most neglected element of Cygames due to how it receives characters at an infrequent pace, and the characters usually end up mediocre or locked behind a limited banner. This even extends to other Cygames titles as they have the exact same Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors chart except for Earth, which is either left out (Dragalia Lost) or replaced entirely (World Flipper, in which it's been swapped out for Lightning). It says something that the best Earth character is not even a character, but a mainhand weapon for the captain to use.
  • Although not as infamous as their orcish brethen from the game Nobuo Uematsu has made their soundtrack on, (almost) the entirety of the male Draph characters is considered as one by a good portion of the fandom (the one who's not interested in the GAR side of the game that is) for the reason that they're pretty much being vastly overshadowed by their female counterpart, for two big reasons. Aside from characters like Vaseraga who is steadily gains popularity and is fleshed out more and more for each of his appearance on the Society Events^notewhile she chosen to keep her figure and is proud of who she is, Ladiva is identified and addressed as female and as such counts as a female Draph regardless of how she looks, there aren't many other notable Male Draphs to speak of. Combined to the fact that the amount of named female Draphs introduced to the game (whether it be playable or not, time will tell) steadily increases more and more while there aren't many Male Draphs introduced in comparison, and the unfortunate side effects of the in-game spritework that makes them a lot more stubbier and goofier in-game in comparison to their big and hulking presence in their artworks, makes them acknowledged by a good part of the fandom as the "meme" gendered race in the game, while the other would probably think "wait a minute, there's a male Draph in this game?".
  • The Tyrannosaurus Alpha (the scientifically accurate Tyrannosaurus) is this compared to the more popular, more menacing, and culturally iconic Tyrannosaurus Beta, especialy during the Auld Lang Syne 2020 event where the playerbase would eventually fulfill the conditions so that the next Unite and Fight will have the Beta Tyrannosaurus as the raid boss of that event instead of the Alpha variant. During the Auld Lang Syne Age of Tyranno event, more people are playing the Beta version of the raids than the Alpha variant especially earlier on because of better prizes it provides, and the Alpha variant itself is described as the lesser variant of Tyra's treasured Tyrannosauruses in the event's story. It doesn't help as the Alpha variant attacks looks much less flashy and dangerous compared to the jaw-clenching, meteor-dropping animations the Beta variant had, on top of already being engraved to the player's memory years prior.
  • Deliford has been an SR unit since 2017, and not received an SSR despite three prime chances to do so. Starting in 2021 with a summer sauna event starring him, he was passed over on the gala for co-star Yngwie, and Izmir who barely held any story relevance in the event. In April 2023 the event reran, only to get ignored again, this time for SSR Jasmine and Yaia, who were not present in the event. Finally, in late June 2023, Deliford's sauna event gained a sequel once again with him as the star. In a hat trick of events, Summer Cupitan and Pholia featured on the banner instead of Deliford. At this point, many players have given up on the idea of Deliford ever receiving an SSR... Until their hopes are answered in 15 January 2024 where he's released along with Earth Olivia.
  • Stan received quite a bit of this with the release of Summer Aliza; as her fate episode involved him refusing to go to the beach with her because he can't handle seeing her in a swimsuit, despite the two having been in a relationship for quite a long time by this point in their arcs.
  • After being regarded as one of the best Fire character in the game for quite some time, Shiva got hit really hard after new endgame raids and GW changes causes the entire Fire element to eschews prolonged fights for something faster and discourages turtling, essentially kicking him all down to the lower part of the endgame tier list. Not only his 5★ update only further exacerbates his shortcomings by making the ramp-up longer, he's also quickly outclassed by a certain rubber man who's not only a free character you can get from a tie-in event, but he's more consistent and takes much less effort to ramp up. Needless to say, he's quickly become the community's new laughing stock and an example of how power creep could greatly affect a character popularity, and only seen in really hard endgame raids where sustain is more important.
  • Zooey receives this treatment after "Created By The Stars, Loved By The Skies" event, which hits her with massive worf barrage that she never recovered to this day, where her existence in the current story events is only to hit the main threat with the Gamma Ray and got scrubbed out to make the current threat much more dangerous than what it is. Gameplay-wise, her Summer variant that becomes a staple metagame for so long has quickly become powercrept even in Dark element due to Dark's no longer being reliant on Enmity builds plus lacking endgame utilities like damage cap up or supplemental damage to make her relevant for endgame racing, while her unlimited Light version 5-star uncap is just underwhelming.
• Memetic Molester: Belial is mostly remembered for his perversion, especially when he points out and says innuendos. It helps that one of his expressions became a meme template known as "Belialface". He's also associated with the words "Climax" and "Come". Fanworks depict him seductively or copping a feel from other characters. Others decided to attack his crotch and legs in-game.
• Memetic Mutation: Enough examples to within the fandom to warrant its own page.
• Memetic Psychopath:
  • Europa is often portrayed as this among the Primarch Disciples, despite her kind and gentle nature. This is due to a Japanese artist who continually drew her this way (most prominently with a club covered in nails), which the community noticed.
  • The normally gentle Noa has been portrayed as one specifically against rats and mice, after it was revealed that he dislikes those animals and prefers cats. This extends to portraying Noa as an unstoppable bully to Vikala because she's associated with the Rat Zodiac.
  • Lobelia is mostly remembered as a sadist. As such, fanworks and memes edit him into places of pain and suffering (such as wars and torture chambers).
• Misblamed: Just like Shadowverse, both the English and Japanese Granblue fans love to attribute Cygames Producer Yuito "KMR" Kimura to almost any stuff that's implemented in the game, even if there are also other key members such as Granblue Director Fukuhara. Likewise, whenever there are updates, collabs, general news, or even player ban announcements, fans usually mention him having a part in all of it. "Sasuga KMR" is also a common fan phrase or meme used to attribute him to favorable GBF-related news.
• Moral Event Horizon:
  • Sandalphon crosses this when, rather than accepting atonement that Lyria pleaded for on his behalf, he pushes the protagonist off the island, sending them plummeting to their death. While this was mitigated by Lyria's skill Fate Episode (which is implied to be after the event) and Chapter 7 both confirming that the protagonist is indeed okay, the fact that he was willing to feign honor and kill the protagonist in cold blood just for his own personal revenge shows that he had pretty much crossed it before "What Makes The Sky Blue". The sequel, "Paradise Lost", is more or less about trying to get this character back over the other side of the horizon.
  • The True King crossed this long ago when he used the Great Wall to destroy the Torhid Kingdom and then, when he realized that he couldn't use it further, had Baragona slaughter the rest of the Torhid royal family so that nobody else would be able to use it. Even worse, the True King claims that his only regret was that he didn't use it efficiently because he didn't sacrifice enough people for fuel.
  • And as far as Belial goes: Just in case you're thinking he might be redeemed and be Promoted to Playable during "000", a flashback of when he and Beelzebub first meet again after millennia shows that he sent out his current mortal lover to fetch some wine, and when she returned, he toasts "the fallen angels"... and then immediately beheads her without missing a beat to keep the secret.
  • Dear lord, Lobelia. His first descent of jumping down to the slippery slope is when he killed his parents just to hear the sound of bones being broken, and hear their screams of pain.
  • Nier, who is considered the second most malicious Evoker after Lobelia. Long before she even made a pact with the Death Arcarum, she began using her "boyfriends" as test subjects for dark magic once they refused to love her. Even after joining the crew, she still isn't fully reformed, as she allowed Death to destroy whole villages of innocent people.
• Narm:
  • In the first season of the anime, the scenes between Io and Tzaka in Episode 7 are meant to be heartwarming and dramatic, but viewers found it hard to take seriously when Io repeatedly mentions the word "Shishou" a lot.
  • Xeno Diablo's 50% HP trigger onwards makes his red orb gradually expand. It can be really hard to take seriously since a gigantic pixelated red orb JPEG is covering the entire boss.
  • One of the weapons that Leviathan Malice drops is called Kaladanda, which is a legitimate Indian name... except it translates to "Black Stick".
  • Aoidos' true name, as revealed in "The Doss", is Benjamin. While it's a legitimate English name and even belongs to the face of a rock band just like Aoidos, it's revealed in a dramatic scene where two thugs are trying to re-awaken his violent nature by having him try to cut them up with a sword. It's also safe to say that having such a normal English name being revealed in such a dramatic scene sucks the drama out faster than if they simply said Aoidos.
• Narm Charm:
  • Some of the characters' birthday messages to you can be very cheesy to be taken seriously, but nevertheless, sweet. The holiday messages in general can also apply because even if they can be hard to take seriously at first, it's still nice to see them enjoying the holiday.
  • "The Maydays" event was intentionally full of this, capturing the suckiness and entertainment value of shark-related BMovies and deliberately throwing pop-culture references.
  • The "Dancing Avengers" event was also intentionally this, being written as if it's a Bollywood movie, complete with silly-yet-charming acting, the standard narrative of Indian films, and musical numbers Bollywood is known for. There's also a scene that can leave first-time viewers surprised as it comes out of nowhere - Two inanimate objects, a gearcycle and a candle, can sing! And the narration just names them "Gearby and Candlee" as if they're living beings.
• Never Live It Down:
  • Koichi Haruta, producer of the game from 2015-16, will most likely only be known for the various scandals and controversies that happened in the game under his tenure. A small smattering of them include:
    • The infamous "Monkeygate" scandal, which forced Cygames to rehaul their gacha and introduce some kind of safety net for whales.
    • The introduction of Luminiera Sword Omega, which was immediately agreed upon to be easily the best Light weapon bar none and subsequently had only a limited number of them in stock for the shop, with it slowly increased over the years.
    • The introduction of Korwa, whose absurd buffs snapped game difficulty in half and had to be quickly nerfed with generous compensation for everyone.
    • The introduction of Summer Zooey with a skill so incredibly broken, a sizeable part of current game design from increased elemental resistance to plain damage being a regular part of raid bosses' arsenal to get around her Unchallenged buff to putting a hard cap on the damage limit to the move away from Enmity weapon grids by encouraging high HP and Stamina weapons exists solely because of her.
    • In fact, it is due to Korwa and Summer Zooey's Game-Breaker status that the English fandom began using the term "HRT Tier" to both as a Fan Nickname and a meme in old English Tier Lists that even Japanese players found funny.
    • Defense Order and the original version of Arcarum, which were so massively unpopular due to whales easily dominating the leaderboards, abundance of bugs, and incredibly impractical times to play even in Japan that neither turned into fully-fledged gameplay modes and soon shut down after release.
  • Newcomers who joined on the "What Makes The Sky Blue II: Paradise Lost" event were surprised since a teaser shows Sandalphon with a condescending face even when he became playable after being the villain of the previous event. This brought jokes about the possibility that he will throw the Captain plummeting down the skies again. Another side jokes that the Captain will throw Sandalphon down the skies as a form of revenge. Sandalphon did receive a significant Character Development, but some players just can't forget his act of throwing people to the bottom of the skies and thus associate him with jokes like this one]]. The sequel, "What Makes The Sky Blue III: 000", perhaps turned this into a Fandom Nod because several dialogue options there give you the chance to guilt-trip Sandalphon by saying "Your fingers are delicate", the line that he says before he threw the Captain down.
  • There’s also the "coffee thing" regarding Sandalphon, as it was meant to give sentimental value to his relationship with Lucifer, but ended up being so prevalent in regards to his character that it’s essentially become Flanderized within the fandom. Doesn't help that it's more or less canonly flanderized as well. In relation to that, the fact that he wears heels and is still shorter than Lucifer despite this. The fandom always depicts Lucifer, who is rather tall on his own, towering over him. The revelation that Sandalphon's official height includes his heels, making his actual height even shorter, has worsened this.
    • Lucilius gets this treatment as well. Though the fandom initially speculated that he was shorter than Lucifer and this theory was translated to fanart, it wasn’t officially confirmed until the June edition of Pash! magazine 2019 where his height is stated to be 175 cm, only one centimeter taller than Sandalphon (In heels), officially confirming that he is indeed the shortest Luciface at least until he’s given Lucifer’s body. He’s depicted as the same height as Lucifer sprite wise, even though he wears heels in that new body and Lucifer does not. It’s currently unknown what his actual height with heels is. As with Sandalphon, before and after this revelation, his height is exaggerated and Lucifer, Belial as well Lucio are depicted towering over him.
  • The phrase "server crash" is quickly attached to Summer Jeanne because her release on March 16, 2018 was met with an unexpected Demand Overload (thought to be caused by a lot of players accessing the Draw screen at the same time) and a long maintenance. Players also thought that this was unprecedented, so whenever Summer Jeanne is mentioned, that incident is also brought up. The game's servers crashed yet again on March 18, 2019 when Summer Jeanne returns in the gacha, so some blamed her again. In reality though, the second incident's main cause was Summer Yuel and the Lucifer summon (the latter was made Sparkable for the first time).
  • Vira, in the years since her debut as a character, has had numerous moments of being humanized and developed beyond her obsession with Katalina, with multiple alts depicting her as being on good terms with the rest of the members of the Grandcypher, some like her Grand's fifth-star Fate Episode going as far to imply Katalina may even reciprocate Vira's feelings by now. Despite this, discussion about her rarely will move past calling her an evil Yandere and pointing out how cruel she is to Lowain's group, despite a large amount of their interactions straight up taking place in Lowain's imagination.
• Obscure Popularity: In spite of having over 30 million registered accounts and at one point being considered one of the biggest mobile games on the market, Granblue Fantasy isn't nearly as well-known as say, its current biggest competitor Fate/Grand Order in terms of mainstream popularity, and that's going for both it's home country and overseas. One article even described it as "The biggest game in Japan you've probably never heard of".
• Older Than They Think: When SR La Coiffe was released on September 30, 2019, her Fate Episode teased Veight crossdressing◊ in his sister Vania's clothes. Veight became a hot topic and received several fanarts on Twitter that day, but the idea actually existed way back in Rage of Bahamut as seen in this image◊, making it a Mythology Gag.
• One True Threesome: Post "What Makes The Sky Blue III: 000", an interesting portion of the fandom have taken a liking to shipping the Lucifaces together.

P-S

• Pandering to the Base:
  • Breakout Characters and Ensemble Darkhorses like Sandalphon, Belial, Lucifer, Narmaya, Vira, the four Dragon Knights, De La Fille, Cagliostro, Zeta, and Beatrix receive a lot of real-life merchandise because they're popular. Non-popular characters don't even have Image Song singles, though if Producer KMR talking of plans to make a character song for Aoidos is any indication, they're seemingly breaking this trend.
  • Fan-favorite SR and SSR characters usually appear in story events and receive alternates more often than R characters. Only certain R characters break this trend though; the Lowain Bros, Rosine, Mary, Lunalu, Lamretta and Rosamia received more content because of their popularity.
  • The latter episodes of the anime (especially 12 and 13) feature Continuity Cameos of the game's popular characters, to the point where newcomers were surprised at how these episodes seemed to be released purely for giving "fanservice" to the playerbase.
  • A select few characters are so popular that they have SSR versions for every element, Vira being the most notable example.^note Her Fire SSR version is exclusive from the Granblue Fantasy The Animation 2nd Season Blu-ray disc, however
  • The "What Makes The Sky Blue" trilogy resulted from popular demand, as the Director and the Producer originally planned the first WMTSB to be just a one-time anniversary event, but the fans loved the villain Sandalphon so much to the point that Cygames made the entire trilogy to be his own character story arc.
    • A few months after the trilogy ended, there was a follow-up summer event, "The Maydays", in which Sandalphon also received an SSR Summer unit. The event also serves as a bridge between the trilogy and any future event that brings back the Primarch characters.
    • In the history of Granblue, "What Makes The Sky Blue II: Paradise Lost" was the first event that was extended past its limited-time schedule from February-March 2018, making it run simultaneously with another limited-time story event. Cygames said that they detected a surge of new accounts/players at that time, and there was a fan demand of it online.
    • It goes without saying that this could be the reason why the main story of Granblue Fantasy Versus features Belial, Avatar and Beelzebub as the main antagonists (with the latter being the Final Boss).
  • At least in the English community, Catura is quickly seen as Cygames's way of pandering to the male anime fans because she wanted to be married to you (the Captain) as soon as you meet her for the first time.
• Periphery Demographic: Some are fans of Granblue not because of its gacha aspect nor its JRPG mechanics; there's Fanwork-Only Fans who recognize the IP for its fanservice, fanarts and doujinshi, there's the LGBT Fanbase who love the portrayal of Ladiva and Cagliostro, and there's the Fighting Game fans (thanks to the Versus spin-off).
• Player Punch:
  • For a lot of players, Lucifer's death in "What Makes The Sky Blue II: Paradise Lost" and uncertain fate at the end of Part III hurts a lot because he's one of the prime Big Good.
  • "Primal Resonance" introduced Geo, who is made up of the despair and anguish of primal beasts. He spoke up in what can be summed up as a You Bastard! for players who enjoy Guild War events.
    Do you know how many times your people have come to this island? How many times they have scarred it with their wars of supremacy?
• Portmanteau Couple Name: There’s quite a number of these in the fandom:
  • For non-“What Makes The Sky Blue” pairs:
    • Lanvane for Lancelot/Vane
    • Stanliza for Stan/Aliza
    • Rackanoa for Rackam/Noa
  • Most notably for Boys' Love pairs especially popping during the “What Makes The Sky Blue” Trilogy.
    • Lucisan/ルシサン or サンルシ/Sanluci for Lucifer/Sandalphon.
    • FaaBeli/ファベリ or BeliFaa/ベリファ for Belial/Lucilius.
    • For Luciface pairs, there’s ファフェル/Faaferu for Lucilius/Lucifer and シオファ/Shiofaa for Lucio/Lucilius.
    • For those that ship Bahamut/Lucio aka Helel Ben Sahar there’s バハシオ/Bahashio.
    • For Sariel/Belial, their ship is referred to as サリベリ/Sariberi。
    • On the Yuri front, there’s ガブミカ/Gabumika for Gabriel/Michael.
• Rescued from the Scrappy Heap: Rebalance updates were made to save some characters, weapons and summons from being mechanically scrappy units. These are some of those who received significant upgrades:
  • Sara is perhaps the first significantly-improved character, although her whole odyssey happened before English-speaking fans noticed Granblue. When she was first released, she was hated for being terribly-designed, especially since she was the free event character and was considered weaker than the gacha characters. Her SSR version came out months later and was so damn good, she utterly defined the tank archetype in ''Granblue'. SSR Sara's art and story were also well-received and considered as improvements to the first version. After being dragged down due to power creep, Sara finally receives a 5★ uncap that really helps her a lot as a tank in earth endgame compositions.
  • Ghandagoza's twenty-second Solar Crown blind debuff was considered a useless ability since it would override much longer blind debuffs. It was later changed to stack on top of other blind debuffs instead.
  • Summer Io's first skillset was considered odd or bland, as she was an Attack-type unit who barely has offensive abilities, while her self-buff actually made her a Glass Cannon. Her only saving grace were her 4 Critical Rate Up EMP nodes. On early 2018, she received several buffs to all of her abilities.
  • Light De La Fille's kit was also considered flawed or bland by some Light Primal players, as she was deemed usable only on end-game compositions and weapon grids. She later became genuinely viable for most Light teams after she received her 5★ uncap.
  • Dark Beatrix's initial skillset relied too much on her "Delta Clock" mechanic (wherein she gains buffs depending on the magical clock hands' positions), while her abilities just move, stop, or extend the clock hand. She was considered a very odd character with an out-of-place gameplay because of these. She was later completely reworked on 2018, her Delta Clock got extremely simplified to a passive, and she became more viable on Enmity Grids.
  • The original Fire Zeta was considered an underwhelming One-trick pony Break Assassin who has niche uses, since her main Break gimmick was practically useless against most HL bosses as they can immediately reset their Mode Bar on certain HP thresholds. With the "Spaghetti Syndrome" event, Zeta received her 5★ uncap, plus various revamps such as the Arvess Fermare debuff, and a powerful skill that can deal up to a million Plain Damage, delay, and dispel, which can be activated twice thanks to her passive. Overall, Zeta became a more versatile attacker than before.
  • Aletheia was one of the oldest character ever released in the game, and it shows. His super simplistic kit with straightforward offense makes him a good character for farming early game contents like Omega raids and such, but quickly falls off anywhere further due to being too reliant on skill damage and charge attack for damage and not bringing much else onto the table. The fact that Cygames were reluctant to update him for a long time due to Chikao Ohtsuka's untimely passing doesn't help, further leaving him behind the power creep. Eventually Cygames decided to gave the old man another chance to shine and reworking him as well as giving him the 5★ uncap he deserves, which not only boosts his firepower even further to the game's current standard, but also giving him slew of useful utilities such as dispel and plain damage onto the table, which not only making him even better for his previous roles, but also makes him a viable problem solver when dispelling is needed, since with the right setup he can easily dispel up to three buffs in two turns. His newfound power is enough to make him one of the best non-limited character to be used on Earth Unite and Fight honor grinding as well as dispelling nasty local buffs from the current bosses.
  • Chat Noir was derided by the playerbase as being one of the worst SSR character for Water elemental due to how gimmicky and underwhelming it was. It essentially relies on casting a personal buff, landing a delay to an enemy, then use charge attack to inflict random debuff to your opponents. Thing is, the debuff that he will inflict is RNG based, and only one of them that's remotely useful, which only has a small percentage of it to trigger. This makes him one of the most unreliable debuffer in the game. Because of this, Chat Noir receives many buffs and reworks that tries to elevate him back to relevancy and make his gimmick feasible in the modern era, but none of the attempt works. It's not until the May 2022 Balance patch that they realize his old gimmick is just not worth to be kept on the game, being reworked for the last time and turning the gimmicky Forewarning and Riddle playstyle into a more straightforward debuffer, with Challenge Card inflicting a permanent debuff and also granting a single-target mist with decent accuracy, his Riddle effect being reworked into a stackable buff that grants him extra parameters, and all of his three riddle based debuffs were moved to his third skill, where you can choose between one of three different debuffs that you want to inflict to your enemy in a generous six-turn cooldown. Overall, Chat Noir's outing is much more useful and reliable than his previous iterations, even if he's not the best for his role.
  • Among the ten Arcarum Summons, Death was initially the least-favored since her summon call kills a random party member and her main aura reduces the HP of Dark allies by 30%. At that time, the summon was only crafted either because of her sub-aura (which was later copied to Sariel), or because of the earlier chance to recruit the Evoker Nier (who's considered a fan-favorite). The 5th Anniversary Update later released the Evokers and 5★ Uncaps to the Arcarum summons. 5★ Death no longer reduces HP. The summon call's ability to kill a party member is no longer that bad since Death can be used to forcibly swap in an Evoker from the first backline slot, activating the Evoker's second passive. A rebalance update on June 2019 reworked Death's summon call so that she always kills the party member in the fourth slot, albeit it would only work on Dark allies.
  • The Cosmos Weapons had tons of conditions and they weren't worth having. First, they only boost weapon stats, which was odd when grids are more reliant on weapon skills. Second, they only boost weapons of their own type. Third, each Cosmos Weapon had variants based on the character types (ATK, DEF, BAL, SPEC, HEAL), which again, was odd because "character-types" are ignored in every other gameplay aspect anyway. Finally, you could only have one Cosmos Weapon, period. Compared to the more powerful Atma/Ultima Weapons that have fewer variations and allow you to own more than one copy, Cosmos Weapons were extremely niche. But with the release of Grand Order HL, all Cosmos Weapons were consolidated to have only one variation for each weapon type, and there's no longer a limit on how many you can have. Their 4★ uncap also unlocks a skill that raises the damage cap of all characters depending on the number of similar-type weapons in the grid. These upgrades made Cosmos Weapons more viable in grids that already have several weapons of the same type.
  • Primal Wind grids/Zephyrus grids were frequently mocked due to the lack of a centralizing weapon and poor racing potential. This changed when Grand Narmaya came out alongside her weapon, Evanescence, giving Wind not only a strong centralized weapon for the grid but also a very potent Lightning Bruiser for racing.
• Sacred Cow: Granblue is usually held in high regards within the general Cygames fanbase for several reasons; it became the company's Cash-Cow Franchise, it's a long-running gacha that's popular in Japan over the years, it's the Cygames IP that received several spin-offs, let alone a Fighting Game made by Arc System Works, and the fact that the bonus codes for GBF helped in boosting the Blu-Ray/DVD sales of other Cygames anime. Even outside of the Cygames fandom, long-time gacha gamers also commend GBF for its longevity, freebie generosity, and for implementing the "Cerulean Sparking" pity mechanic which is often thought to have spread to newer gacha games.
• The Scrappy:
  • Rei, who debuted in “Seeds of Redemption” and was promptly put in the gacha as a Premium Gala Grand (which is predominantly for plot-important characters and Zodiacs) was very poorly received. The biggest reasons are her role in the event, where her exclusive role was being a Deus ex Machina, and her personality being just a collection of Sueish traits. Namely, she’s: Last of Her Kind, has psychic powers tied to her special eyes that are also omniscient, on par with or stronger than the Eternals, the head of a Neighbourhood-Friendly Gangsters mafia group despite having purely altruistic views, she's immortal, and most bizarrely, she’s fetishized^note mind control, “mommydom”, not helped by literally being called “Mother” by her subordinates, she wears a school swimsuit-looking outfit for some reason, and her uncap has a boobs and butt pose, and that her toolkit is designed to augment other characters, thus never be power crept and always relevant, doesn’t help her case on her traits.
  • Prince Ceodric from the "Heart of The Sun" event. Already an unpopular addition the event, Ceodric managed to quickly gained hatedom for basically dragging the event down by taking Phoenix's advice at face value and instigating another conflict between him and the captain for completely irrelevant reasons, essentially adding himself and his kingdom into another rogue faction to the Mêlée à Trois aiming for the Captain's head and Phoenix's seemingly omnipotent powers, only for it to fail miserably as he was quickly dealt with by Seofon and given a well-deserved Undignified Death at Sabrina's hands. That, and his treatment of Sabrina, seals his fate as an irrelevant tryhard that tries too hard to be relevant by the fans, being a scapegoat that marred the otherwise fantastic anniversary event.
• Scrappy Mechanic:
  • Early on, several gameplay elements were considered cumbersome, most of which are attributed to the game's user interface, menus, or for being browser-based:
    • Players used to wait before using another skill, but then a skill queue was added to fix this.
    • Sometimes, the game would forget that you've selected the Full Auto option in a battle, reverting it to the default Semi-Auto option instead.
    • You can only uncap one step at a time. This was later made obsolete where now you had the option to uncap more than once, provided that you have enough materials to do so. Uncapping using consumables like Codex still forces you to uncap one step at a time.
  • Amira's "Half-God, Half-Demon" mode doesn't show any visible buffs on the status screen, which makes it difficult to track how long has it been active, and for how long will it last. This would also make it difficult to manage the Cooldown Manipulation mechanic added to her 5★ Charge Attack.
  • The Hype buff provides stronger effects based on the number of its stacks. Problem is, the stacks given by the Hype buff depend on RNG. Hype-based characters are considered bad because of this.
  • The Casino is hated by most of the playerbase. There are only three mini-games; Slots is considered useless, Poker gets tedious really quick, and Bingo might pay big but uncareful players end up losing a lot of their casino chips. Unfortunately, Casino is the most viable place to stock up on useful rewards as a beginner (especially the AP potions and EP berries), so players are basically "forced" to try Casino early on to have a steady amount of AP and EP going forward. The introduction of 1k Poker alleviated the ire that players have with Poker since, while still tedious, you can easily amass a decent pot in a shorter amount of time. And when Earth De La Fille's passive skill was introduced, she basically convinced more players to leave the Casino games since she can passively farm casino chips in battles instead.
  • Characters will automatically change to their second artworks once you uncap them to their penultimate star. It was later patched to remove the automatic switching, but players who preferred the second artworks were disappointed by that patch because they had to click more buttons to manually change the artwork. Another patch sought a middle ground but only for 5★ characters by automatically switching to the 5★ artwork when it's unlocked.
  • Omega II uncap grinding. First of all, like many other uncaps you need hundreds of elemental quartz and weapon stones, which are already hard to come by (especially for free players since the biggest source of these items is reducing unneeded gatcha items). Then, you need 10 Primarch Animas for each uncap, which can take loads of Primarch raids. What makes Omega II land firmly into this trope's territory, though, is the animas from the Omega II raids. You need 10 gold anima in order to uncap the summon, 10 more for each of the new Omega II weapons, and another 15 to uncap the first wave of Omega weapons to 5★. However, the gold anima only randomly drops from the red chest you get from hosting or MVPing or the blue chest which drops randomly. The normal anima which drops slightly more often can be traded in at a 10:1 ratio for the gold anima, but each exchange also costs 30 quartz. And that's not even getting into the actual Omega II weapons, which also only drop from red and blue chests (Making bounty hunter-type hunting skills useless for that) and require a months worth of Prestige Pendants otherwise.
  • Just like the Ultra-Rare retrofits of Azur Lane, some characters have 5★ uncaps that require a unique item from their respective story events. This means that the buffs given by these 5★ uncaps can become Permanently Missable Content if you aren't around during that event or forgot to obtain the unique item. Initially, players had to wait for the event's re-run to have another chance at obtaining those 5★ event uncap items, but Cygames later added them as exchangeable items in the permanent shop. Unfortunately, the items required for the exchange are even more expensive and rarer compared to your typical 5★ SSR character uncaps^ExplanationTypically, 5★ uncaps for SSR characters would cost you 2 Blue Sky Crystals, 2 Omega unique items depending on the character's element, 3 Supreme Merits, 6 Champion Merits, 50 Elemental Orbs, and 25 Elemental Whorls alongside the Rupie cost for uncapping, and they can be grinded as early as possible. Meanwhile, a 5★ event uncap item costs a Legendary Merit, 30 Blue Sky Crystals, 8 Elemental Centrums, 1 Bright or Murky Spirit depending on the character, and the additional Rupie cost for uncapping. All of those 5★ event uncap items can only be obtained after reaching Rank 101 and beyond since Elemental Centrums can only be grinded from Omega Impossible raids, barring the uncaps for the Eternals and the Grand series characters.
  • The Trial Mode for raids, which was intended for players to practice difficult raids without wasting valuable host materials and attempts, was immediately declared dead on arrival due to its unbelievably awful implementation. In spite of being only a practice mode, it can only be used twice a day regardless of the raid, which defeats the purpose of a practice mode to begin with. And these trial attempts are used up as soon as you enter the raid, so if you picked the wrong raid and left, you're not getting your attempt back. And to top it off, you cannot use a friend support summon unless you drag a friend along to waste their practice attempt with you. Even worse is that on release, Super Ultimate Bahamut, currently among the hardest endgame raids in the game, wasn't even available as an option for practice.
• Scrappy Weapon: All of the Class Champion Weapons not named the Unsigned Kaneshige are considered to be this, as they provide no direct damage boosts, and are generally considered obsolete with the release of Ultimate Mastery. Only the Unsigned Kaneshige escapes this fate because the benefits it offers more than make up for the lack of direct damage boosts in its weaponskills.
• Seasonal Rot: The 6th Anniversary story event, "Seeds of Redemption", was not very well recieved for a variety of reasons. Firstly, it attempts to juggle too many character arcs at a time between the ten Eternals, the Captain, newcomers Mugen and Rei, the antagonist Nehan, and to a lesser extent the Enforcers, that it doesn't leave room for any of them to breathe, even with three more chapters than most Story Events. Compounding this is the fact that the event was billed as focusing on Seox, but his arc ends up being rather rushed. Secondly, much of the event is spent resolving the much maligned Stardust Town subplot. Thirdly, the antagonist Nehan ends up not doing much during the plot and his entire backstory, rather than be explained during the story, is instead crammed into one of the game's longest journal entries. Foruth, not only does the event get inevitably compared to the "What Makes the Sky Blue" trilogy as an anniversary event, but it also comes right off the heels of "Spaghetti Syndrome", a much better recieved Society story event with lots of lore reveals.
• Self Cest: Gran and Djeeta get shipped together a lot, and if you believe they’re alternate versions of the same person, it could count as this. Also Shipping the Lucio/Lucilius is this due to Lucilius being Lucio's clone.
• Self-Fanservice: In-game, Danua is a Cute Mute young girl. In fanarts and doujinshi, she's commonly depicted in a sexier and more mature teenager or adult form, taller, and usually with bigger breasts than usual.
• Self-Imposed Challenge:
  • It's common for high-level players to try and defeat end-game raid bosses (like Impossible Proto Bahamut or Ultimate Bahamut) alone and/or without relying on SSR characters. Others came up with more gimmicks like:
    • Defeating Ultimate Bahamut using Grand Order as a main summon.
    • Defeating Ultimate Bahamut with no mainhand weapon equipped.
  • High-level players who invested a lot on their grids and summons even attempt to ignore the Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors on Solo Nightmare bosses, such as this Fire team going against the Fire-elemental Hellfire Bonito.
• Ships That Pass in the Night:
  • They haven't met, but fans are already doing fan-content and fan-art of The Arcarum Evokers and The Eternals together. Especially with the Arcarum Evokers being Shadow Archetype's of The Eternals, other than a ship, players are also hoping for an Eternals Vs. Evokers scenario as well. For the ships, however, Siete/Seofon and Lobelia is very common. Followed by Six/Seox and Nier.
  • Belial/Lobelia is also becoming common on both sides of the seas due to them both being depraved, Draco in Leather Pants characters, to an extent having similar names and them both deriving pleasure from unconventional things.
  • While incredibly rare, Sandalphon is sometimes shipped with Olivia due to them both being "fallen angels" at one point that participated in the rebellion against the Astrals and due to their voice actors being married in real life. While the fact that they both participated in the rebellion leaves open the idea that they interacted at least once at one point in time, they’re never actually seen onscreen talking to each other as of yet and Sandalphon has made no mention of her or vice versa.
  • Also rare, but Sandalphon is sometimes (mostly platonically) paired with Vira due in part to their similar characters that lead to their popularity; they're both former Yandere characters that were heavily fixated on a character of the same sex and they both eventually mellowed out, becoming friendly with the crew but not losing their original affection for the character in question that they used to obsess over. Though the circumstances for why they became the way they did are different, at the baseline, fans acknowledge that they're fairly similar. Though more speculative and memetic, fans also pair them over the implication that Sandalphon will one day be a rainbow element character to represent his LGBT, similarly to Vira who has a unit in every element and is widely accepted to be a lesbian. As of January 2021, Sandalphon has an alt in three of the seven elements thus far (Light, Water and Earth).
• Shocking Moments: On December 2018, the announcement of two upcoming PS4 titles Granblue Fantasy: Relink and Granblue Fantasy Versus was a major surprise to fans because it's seen as Cygames planning to expand the Granblue IP, which started off as a niche title known only in Japan and in specific gacha/anime communities.
  • Relink is a rollercoaster. Fans were initially surprised because it's co-developed with PlatinumGames, but they were later shocked on the February 2019 announcement mentioning that the future development of Relink has been left into the hands of Cygames, with PlatinumGames stating that their contract has ended.
  • Versus being made by Arc System Works is a surprise as well since that company is known for their impressive visuals in fighting games. What caught the fanbase off=guard, however, is the game being released earlier than Relink even if the latter was announced first.
• Signature Series Arc: "What Makes the Sky Blue" trilogy, for several reasons, but mainly because they're tied with the anniversary events from 2017 to 2019 (when many newcomers arrived), and because the angels (particularly Belial, Sandalphon, and Lucifer) are Breakout Characters in the fandom. In general, the WMTSB trilogy is often remembered as the best-written, fan-favorite story events. "What Makes The Sky Blue III: 000" is also considered as the longest event in terms of story-writing or chapter length.
• Spoiled by the Format: Story characters are normally barred from being played if they cannot join for narrative reasons. However, the fact that Katalina and Vira remain playable all throughout "Let's H.A.N.G" and "Table For Six" is a big giveaway that the whole thing is All Just a Dream.
• "Stop Having Fun" Guys:
  • High-level or Impossible-difficulty raids are endgame contents wherein players are expected to perform well and/or coordinate their skills efficiently, so it's usually the case wherein Co-Op lobby hosts set up Player Rank requirements and wait for someone to use the recommended, optimal character classes and/or summons first before starting the raid. For example, Spartans and Holy Sabers were practically required in the Impossible Bahamut or Ultimate Bahamut raids in order to have a raid-wide damage reduction and healing to protect against the dragon's Skyfall Signature Move (which could otherwise cause a Total Party Kill for a lot of players if not anticipated, thus presenting a greater risk of failing the raid).
  • It's also common for serious Co-Op lobbies to kick out any player who doesn't take advantage of the Elemental Rock-Paper-Scissors mechanics (i.e. those who use the wrong element against the raid boss).
• Surprisingly Improved Sequel: Well, maybe not "sequel" in the traditional sense, but the game's English localization saw considerable improvement after release and especially in 2017. The "release" version, such as it once used to be (when the option was added into the client on 2016), was not particularly good, with individual game segments having been farmed out to dozens of individual translation houses with no effort to coordinate or ensure quality, and the game's script was all over the place as a result. Just prior to release, however, Cygames got serious about establishing an internal English TL office, and this group took over handling all of the game text. By the end of 2016 and going into 2017, they had really found their feet and the main story, events and Fate Episodes released around this time and afterward represent a noticeable jump in quality and consistency in writing, with the "Platinum Sky" event often being pointed to as the moment where the English team really began to find their stride.
  • Event-wise, after the somewhat underwhelming and disappointing "Seeds of Redemption" anniversary story event, the next anniversary event, "Home Sweet Moon", took the community by storm. Not only does it continue the very well-received "Spaghetti Syndrome" Society event, it keeps the tension high all the way to the end of the story event with a long and arduous, but a satisfying conclusion to the Moondwellers saga with the crew finally reunited with Cassius and Isaac. While the event has some hiccups (see Ass Pull entry above), it's widely accepted to be far superior to "Seeds of Redemption" and managed to make the Society storyline an equal to, if not better than, the Primarch saga story events.

T

• Take That, Scrappy!: Rei not appearing in any event since her debut in "Seeds of Redemption" and being given a Written-In Absence for "And You" is seen as payback for her stealing the spotlight from the Eternals.
• That One Achievement:
  • There is a special Wonder called "Shield of Eternal Splendor" that grants bonuses to your Eternals during battles if you have obtained all ten Eternals. But getting one Eternal itself is a tedious task as mentioned in That One Sidequest below. Multiply that effort for all ten Eternals and you'll earn this achievement.
  • Some battle-specific Gold Trophies count as well, which may only be achieved by high-level players with advanced teams and weapon grids. An example of this is the Trophy that requires you to finish the "Wyvern Reverie" quest in just 3 turns. To add context to the difficulty of this task, Bahamut places a debuff on your entire team that prevents the usage of skills for the first 2 Turns. This means that as soon as the debuff wears off and your skills are unlocked by Turn 3, you must kill Bahamut on that same turn to unlock this trophy.
• That One Attack:
  • Proto Bahamut's Skyfall, a Last Ditch Move it uses at 25% HP and 5% HP. It deals ten million damage, practically ensuring that the entire party gets wiped. The only way to survive is to buff your damage cut and/or defense buffs up to 100%. The second time makes it worse by pairing it with full debuff removal, and since it's a raid battle, multiple people are probably going to trigger it over and over again, making it impossible to make any debuffs stick.
  • Grand Order has her own version, Gamma Ray, that her second form uses after she hits 50% HP. Luckily, she stops using it once she enters her final form, which is only 5% more HP later. However, in this final form, her Overdrive charge attack becomes the even more dangerous Conjunction, which reduces the entire party's HP to One and scrambles their skill cooldowns, which is effectively a death sentence to the entire party if unprepared.
  • Proto Bahamut's Impossible version also has Skyfall and adds some other fun skills, like Hyper Dimension and Supernova. Hyper Dimension (used in Overdrive from 50% to 25% HP) hits random allies four times for 55% of their maximum HP a pop. And it completely ignores damage mitigation, so if any character gets hit twice, they're gone. Supernova (used out of Overdrive from 25% HP to the end) deals 95% of every character's maximum HP. It's telling that most guides to this boss actually prefer that he uses Skyfall over Supernova.
  • Avatar has its own equivalent of Skyfall in the form of Archenemy which also ups the damage done to one hundred million.
  • Uriel's version of Earth Crash III, an absurdly powerful Earth attack that targets three party members at a time. The aforementioned Impossible version of Proto Bahamut also has this skill, but his version only targets one person.
  • For beginner parties, Tiamat Omega's Tempest charge attack qualifies, being a 4-6 hit random target attack with each hit doing heavy damage, often enough to overwhelm most phalanxes alone, often enough to decimate most parties. However it's offset by either a Tank-type using a Def Up/Substitute combined with Phanalax or a Fire element Dark Fencer with well timed Delays and Gravity waves.
  • Luminiera Omega's Aegis Merge. It gives the boss and absurd amount of defense, couples it with refresh and debuff resistance, and clears all debuffs on top of it all. It casts it after the first attack anyone who joins the raid makes or as its charge attack as long as its above half its HP. The boss will clear all the defensive buffs if you use Dispel on it, but there's nothing more annoying than unleashing a charge attack chain against it, only for it to be reduced to scratch damage because someone activated Aegis Merge just before you attacked.
  • Colossus Omega's Dimensional Cleave. It can deal over 60k damage, instantly killing a character without proper preparations.
  • The Justice Arcarum boss fight has the Jurist Scales ability that runs on a not-so-simple algorithm. The sub-boss Astraea always casts this every time its Charge Diamonds are full. Said ability deals plain damage to the entire party based on the difference between the HP percentage of Justice and Astraea. Should the difference between their HP bars become to high, expect a Total Party Kill. Fortunately, this can be somewhat manipulated by the player - By attempting to equalize the percentage of their HP bars, or even if the difference is less than 5% (i.e. Justice has 40% and Astraea has 38% HP) Jurist Scales would only deal a two-digit damage, making its effects laughable. But if the player's party is otherwise strong enough to kill Astraea in one turn, they may completely avert this trope in the first place, removing one of Justice's tricky gimmicks.
  • The raid version of the battle against Lucilius. Especially if you're playing it on hard mode or Impossible difficulty. It's locked on a six man raid with no way to use a full elixir to help you, and it opens up with Lucilius firing Paradise Lost, where, compared to the fight during "What Makes The Sky Blue III: 000", it's now a plain damage nuke of 30,000 on your party. It's technically avoidable by having all six participants in the raid use a different class, but the fight is so hard that this is currently considered unviable over running six Spartans and having Phalanx active every turn. Not inoptimal - unviable.
• That One Boss:
  • Yggdrasil Malice and Akasha from story Chapters 52 and 62 respectively can potentially wall many beginners, particularly those who aren't well-versed with the game mechanics and damage formula yet. At this point, players are expected to have a working Omega grid made up of SSR Attack weapons already.
  • The Rock Winger in Chapter 75. It has only one charge diamond that allows it to spam its unique attacks, complete immunity to any debuffs nor attacks that could prevent it from charging up, and it hits like a tank. What is this bird and why is it as strong as a Primal Beast?
  • The Xeno Showdown primals are considered hard to defeat for new players but Xeno Vohu Manah deserves a mention for killing teams with deadly debuffs that the skill Veil and Clarity are needed to survive a Xeno Vohu Manah run.
  • Some Guild War/Unite and Fight bosses may qualify when they have attacks that are aimed to counter popular party builds.
    • Oktopode makes Hallessena's 5★ Uncap useless when it was released. You generally don't want her to get hit so as not to suffer an attack penalty debuff. The problem is, Oktopode's attacks hit all members at the same time, constantly reducing Hallessena's attack power per turn. Fortunately, Hallessena received a Balance Buff sometime in June 2019 that no longer weakens her everytime she gets hit.
    • There are Light bosses than unleash Plain Damage nukes as early as Turn 2 or 3, just to counter the game-breaking enmity meta brought by Summer Zooey's Conjunction, with Metatron and Xeno Corow being quite the notable examples.
  • Many of the Water-element bosses are infamous for having some of the nastiest boss mechanics in the game, to the point where one has to wonder what the devs were thinking, making these bosses a terror to face. It goes without saying that debuff removing skills like Clarity are absolutely mandatory to even survive. If you don't have a good Earth team and grid, you WILL dread having to fight these guys...
    • Gabriel is considered by many players to be the most difficult of the Four Primarchs to face, and for good reason. Once you get her to 75% health, she casts Cloak, which grants her a Damage Cut, a Mirror Image, and inflicts Skill Seal on your party for 5 turns! If you're fighting her solo version, don't bother trying to remove the debuffs or dispelling her buffs, because she also fills all her charge diamonds and casts the same dang thing again! Once you start bringing her health down, she'll cast White Ray, a very damaging attack that inflicts the Purified debuff, which instantly kills the afflicted party member after 5 turns if it isn't cleansed. Once she's at very low health, she'll unleash Tidal Erasure, a severely damaging attack that removes all your buffs and cuts your charge bar by 20%. In her raid version, when you get her to 3% health, she'll spam Tidal Erasure every single turn, which means you have to defeat her fast before she destroys you. It's quite notable that she is often the main cause of wipes in the difficult Four Primarchs raid, due to her nasty debuffs.
    • Macula Marius loves to smack your party around with irritating charge attack and skill sealing debuffs, Sleep debuffs, and multiple cuts to your charge bar, often making attempts to hit her with charge attacks quite frustrating.
    • Neptune is regarded to be the toughest of the primals in Rise of the Beasts, no thanks to the fact that she comes with Leverrier, her serpent mount, who sports his own set of triggers and annoying debuffs, and also grants Neptune a hefty Damage Cut buff for 3 minutes, which is irritating enough on its own, until you take him down and fight Neptune by herself. Neptune on her own doesn't have any super crippling debuffs save the rare Shorted debuff (charge bar frozen), but she sports some very nasty damaging attacks, with her Aura Trident hitting random allies 3 times for massive damage (and Bahamut help you if she hits the same ally more than once), and Vouru-Kasha, which removes two of your buffs and removes one of her debuffs. Fortunately, if your Earth team/grid is sufficiently developed, Leverrier is quite easy to take down, and Neptune's health isn't quite as high as the other primals as well.
    • Leviathan Omega (Impossible) is one of the nastier Impossible raid battles when you first enter the Impossible tier. He comes with an Azure Halo, which acts as a separate target and if you don't keep it debuffed to force it to use Rejuvenate (removes all of its own debuffs, resetting its charge diamonds as well), it puts up a barrier that makes damaging Leviathan nearly impossible, forcing you to attack the halo first to get rid of his buffs. And if you don't keep the halo debuffed to force it to use Rejuvenate in Overdrive, it casts Resonance, giving Leviathan a buff that makes his next attack Perilous Tidefall, which is most likely a Total Party Kill unless you put up defensive buffs beforehand. That's not even getting into Leviathan's ability to inflict the infamous Azure Spike debuff, which forcibly changes the party's attacks to Water-element and HEALS Leviathan if they attack him.
    • Once you reach Rank 120, Europa makes Leviathan Omega look like a mere Warmup Boss in comparison. Her regular and 85% special attack trigger, Floral Prison, removes all buffs on an ally (so kiss your Veil goodbye), and inflicts Azure Spike and another nasty debuff, Held Under. While under the effect of Held Under, your character takes heavy damage over time, can't be healed, and also gets afflicted with Blind to add further insult to injury (though it should be noted that if you can't remove it yet, missing your attacks is preferable than outright healing the boss). She also packs Mana Blast, a powerful multi-hit attack that removes one of your buffs and ramps up her attack power to absurd levels, letting her nearly One-Hit Kill anyone in your party, with the attack getting stronger and nastier the lower her health is. Then, once you've reached 25% of her health, she casts Taurus Blight, another painful attack against your entire party, and gains a greatly increased triple attack rate for 3 turns, in which she will destroy your party if you don't defeat her quickly at that point.
  • While the normal version of Lucilius' raid plays quite similarly in his "What Makes The Sky Blue III: 000" boss fight, the Impossible "Dark Rupture" Lucilius raid takes the cake as one of the true end-game raid bosses of Granblue. He has a version of Paradise Lost that deals plain damage even before the players' turn, as well as preventing the use of summons for 3 turns. He also has a passive that caps the damage you dealt to him based on the number of classes in battle. And to summarize the rest, he has a plethora of gimmicks, including 11 HP Triggers as well as unique "Twelve Labor" mechanics when his HP is halved. These are his self-buffs which can only be removed by meeting specific criteria during your attack phase. All of the raid battle's gimmicks are detailed here.
  • Pride of the Ascendant quests are this way by design; intended to be the toughest possible solo content. The first of these quests is a battle with Gilbert, who requires you to keep at least six debuffs on him at all times and regularly dispel the buffs he raises to prevent him from activating powerful nuke skills at the end of his turn. The Proud+ variant also caps your HP at 20,000.
• That One Component:
  • Huanglong and Qilin (Omega) Anima are the most infamous drop, as they exclusively drop from their combined raid. Said raid is only accessible with an event exclusive item, two Golden Beast Seals forged from treasure obtained in "Rise of the Beasts". The raid allows 30 players and is incredibly difficult to join outside of dedicated raid rooms because any public raid is almost instantly filled by high tier Japanese players who kill it within minutes of it being made available. This bottleneck of exclusivity has been encouraged due to the high amount of things that require Omega Anima from the two, which include Eternal Transcendence, Beast weapons being uncapped and doubly so if players wish to obtain the four Cardinal beast costumes for the Captain, and Seraphic weapon upgrades. It's worsened to the point where Cygames had to remove blue chests from the raid entirely just to see if it would stop the raids from being killed so quickly for anyone who wanted to try and obtain animas.
  • Eternity Sands, which are only obtained via an incredibly rare drop from the high tier Ennead/Six Dragons/Malice/Revans raids or some of the highest tier achievements and their corresponding trophies (ie. fully upgrading all Arcarum summons, recruiting all Eternals or Evokers, upgrading all Eternals, or obtaining the Guider to the Eternal Edge costume). They are only used for two things thus far: Transcending Lucifer and Bahamut or uncapping New World Foundation weapons, which are a requirement for fully uncapping Evokers. Due to this extreme rarity, players have been forced to figure out what to prioritize since all of them represent a significant power boost in gameplay.
• That One Level: Any Arcarum stage where the player is forced to use only R characters or in a milder case, having their abilities locked, combined with the objective of defeating all opponents in order to progress. These downsides would serve as a nightmare to those who have not prepared otherwise. While there is indeed a way to remove the restriction via opening silver chests, it is determined by luck, and while weapon grids do increase the overall damage of your parties, players who haven't created R-rarity elemental teams (or haven't leveled-up R characters in the first place) will be forced to create them for the sake of Arcarum, unless they want to spend dozens of TP trying to brute-force defeating enemies with auto-attacks or using low-tier characters.
• That One Sidequest:
  • Getting one of the Ten Eternals. This is due to the very high material costs that could easily take players a while to gather. Over time, the process became slightly easier, and with the "Seeds of Redemption" event becoming a Side story, you can recruit one of the Eternals for free.
    • And if you think obtaining one is absurd, wait until you see what you need to do to get their fifth uncap. To elaborate: first you have to craft an entirely new weapon. The material needed to craft the new weapon only drops from a quest that only randomly shows up after completing another quest. And even then there's a chance that the boss won't drop the material. You need 10 materials for one copy, and you need 4 copies to uncap it fully, so you'll be spending a lot of time and AP on this part alone. Then you need to fully upgrade it, which requires more hard to acquire materials, one of which you can only get enough of by disassembling two fully-upgraded Revenant weapons (the same weapon you had to upgrade to get the character in the first place). There's a way arround using an additional gold brick for the fully upgraded weapon, but it still requires reducing ten element-changed Revenant weapons (which means farming for fourth individual copies) And you don't even keep the new weapon in the end since you have to disassemble that weapon for the item that you need to start the uncap Fate Episode.
  • The Guider to the Eternal Edge character skin, the reward for uncaping all ten Eternals. However, there are other requirements to get the skin and they are all ridiculous:
    • 9999 Whorls of each Eternal's element. This is by far the easiest requirement if only because 1) they drop from Angel Halo, which is available at all times and 2) because the player most likely has a sizable stockpile from when they had to farm Angel Halo for the Eternal uncaps.
    • 2000 of each type of weapon fragment. The second easiest requirement because if a player has managed to play long enough to have uncaped all ten Eternals, then they most likely have plenty of weapons from the Gacha that they can reduce. From here, the requirements get more absurd.
    • 50 of each Revenant weapon fragment. The same material that you needed for the Eternal uncaps that required reducing either a fully-upgraded Revenant weapon or ten element-changed Revenent weapon. The later requires not only farming Guild Wars, but also waiting for them to occur, and you most likely don't want to use Gold Bricks for the former, because another requirement for the skin is...
    • 3 Gold Bricks, which requires either getting the Valor Badge reward from the Guild War, or hoping that it drops from an endgame raid as a host or MVP reward.
    • 4 Sunlight Stones, which can only be consistently acquired outside of promotions or giveaways by trading Valor Badges (there's a stock available for Arcarum Points, but it's limited), and might be needed to uncap rare Gacha or Arcarum summons.
    • 100 Primeval Horns, from the Proto Bahamut HL raid, though it's thankfully become very easy from the massive power creep the Dark Opus weapons created.
    • 250 Hollow Keys, from the Akasha raid, a very hard raid.
    • 20 Huanglong Omega Anima and 20 Qilin Omega Anima, from the Huanglong and Qilin Dual Boss raid, which is time-gated by the Rise of the Beast event due to the item needed to host the raid.
    • 99 Ultima Units, from the Ultimate Bahamut HL raid, which as of writing is easily the second hardest raid in the game.
    • And assuming that you manage to get all of the above materials, you still have to complete one more quest, a Boss Rush against all ten Eternals. You don't get to use your own Eternals, they have very high debuff resistance, you have to fight all of them in one go, and they are all extremely difficult (for reference, Threo can potentially triple attack for 9k damage per hit, and she's only the first fight) and ends with fighting Seofon and Anre, the former of whom wipes your entire team - front and back row - if you don't meet an arbirary check you aren't informed about. Needless to say, if you somehow manage to unlock the skin, then you've earned it.
  • Gathering materials to unlock a Class Champion Weapon is slightly harder as many of the materials can only be found by playing Co-Op quests (As opposed to Guild wars characters where a majority of the materials can be found through story/free quest and raids) and chances of getting the drop you want are close to null because some of these required materials had low drop rates. And you have to at least get one of these weapons to unlock Class IV job classes. Plus some of these weapons are too good to pass up for older players. The first time is made easier via a material discount on the first one. It gets worse if you want the EX II classes since each one requires getting the specific Class Champion Weapon related to the class, meaning you have to make one for each EX II class.
  • Gathering materials to unlock and forge an Arcarum Summon is also a tedious task as the mandatory items (Sephira Stones, Astras, Hazes, Ideans, Verum Proofs) are obtainable from the Arcarum Mode, which is time-gated. You can only enter an expedition if you have a ticket available. And once you do participate in this mode, RNG will be a major factor in deciding the elements of the item drops that you can obtain from enemies. This becomes a problem if you are focusing to grind for a specific Summon, as the Arcarum Summons have varying materials depending on their element. Fortunately, you can buy the crafting materials of your choice at the cost of Arcapoints, which is also capped by a weekly limit. Additionally, the Globe of Stairways is an item that would let you pick the boss that you want to fight at the end of the expedition, but it can only be bought using said Arcapoints. Although the release of Ticket Caps and the Extreme difficulty would expedite this process a bit with its increased drop rates. For an estimation, one can obtain and forge an Arcarum Summon to SSR within 3 to 5 months depending on the player's luck.
    • It gets worse. To actually recruit an Arcarum Evoker, you need to uncap their respective summon to 5★ (by no means an easy grind). THEN, you need to trade materials for their Tarot card in order to unlock their recruitment episode. Said Tarot card requires an Evolite, a special item from the Arcarum shop that costs 40000 arca points (that you can only buy one, it only gets restocked randomly), an amount of Ideans and Sephira stones, and 200 ASTRA, which meagerly drop from bosses in the time gated Arcarum mode, cost 1500 arca point EACH and also required in order to uncap the summon in the first place. And may Bahamut help you if you want to recruit the Dark/Light Evokers, because they require the even rarer Darkborne/Lightborne Astra with the same quantity requirement as the others.
  • The Hype buff Scrappy Mechanic goes full-force in the Elite 1 Tackle Drill of the "No Rain, No Rainbow" event. You need to have Hype 4 on all of your party members as the objective, so Anthuria and Aiodos are your key contributors of Hype. However, Anthuria is the determinant unit as her first and second skills are used to continously provide Hype if she can dodge. Pray that the Random Number God makes Anthuria dodge as early as the first turn, as well as providing more stacks of Hype... because this quest is also limited to a few turns.
• Theiss Titillation Theory: A lot of Djeeta fanarts in Pixiv and Twitter use the Doctor outfit, simply because fans easily noticed that a side of the lab coat is about to fall off, exposing Djeeta's shoulders. To many, it's an obvious fanservice. Some fanartists would also draw other characters wearing the Doctor outfit, such as this one with Clarisse.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Given their connection to Bahamut and the fact that they are among the oldest creatures in the Granblue Fantasy universe, you would expect Lucio and Helel ben Shalem to be given far more lore weight and to play a larger role in the story than simply acting like retired Primarchs, but you would be mistaken. Lucio is an especially egregious example, as he was left out to dry just three months after his playable unit was released to usher in the real Lucifer and his crew. Until "000", he wouldn’t appear at any events, with his main contributions to the event being his lore-dumping and making Lucilius a bigger problem than he would have been if he hadn't confronted him and allowed himself to be absorbed. From that point on, he would be reduced to a gag character that borders on an uncomfortable stalker whose primary role is to harass Sandalphon while Lucifer is gone. On the other hand, Helel ben Shalem would be revealed, adding more lore implications to his existence as well as Beelzebub's and the Granblue world's overall... and after that they'd both be reduced to unserious joke roles. Since then, the most either of them has done was destroy Pandemonium, which only created more problems for Sandalphon to fix for them.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot:
  • A vocal minority has expressed dissatisfaction over the focus of "What Makes The Sky Blue II: Paradise Lost". While the arc is a way of presenting Sandalphon's acceptable transition from a villain to a hero, and a new greater Big Bad who even kills Sandalphon's friend Lucifer, fans have wondered why two of the Breakout Characters from Rage of Bahamut did not even make an appearance (namely the fallen angels Olivia and Azazel) since "Paradise Lost" revolves around the threatening existence of fallen angels being backed by a former Astral. Others have pointed out that they may actually appear in the third part of "What Makes The Sky Blue", and only time would tell if they do get their spotlight.
    • Both of them finally appeared in the flashback scene during the prologue of "What Makes The Sky Blue III: 000" fighting alongside Sandalphon. However, they do not get enough screen-time than expected because both of them hold a deep grudge against Belial, and won't possibly desire to work with him despite being a fellow fallen angel.
    • Lucifer himself has a lot of wasted potential. Despite being a Breakout Character himself, and an incarnation of the wildly popular Cygames Series Mascot, His fate is him waiting in purgatory alone for Sandalphon rather than learning to live for himself, but the implied finality of the ending implies that they'll never explore how he can interact with characters other than the primarchs unless there's suitable fan demand. And though Lucifer and Sandalphon have reconciled their regrets, there's still far more issues in their relationship that were never addressed and were really just swept under the rug. Not to mention, we never really see that much of how he even interacts with most of the other Primarchs themselves outside of Sandalphon or much of his duties as a the Supreme Primarch. That being said, while the ending of "000" implies the finality of the Primarch trilogy, it doesn’t necessarily imply that they won’t tackle these things, along with his character on its own, in the future considering how open ended everything was and how it was confirmed by Word of God that there are still more things they will tackle.
    • And speaking of Lucifer, for as much as Sandalphon talks about wanting to be reunited with him, he's never shown discussing the extent of Cagliostros's abilities with her and how they could potentially be used to bring Lucifer back to life. You'd think he would bring it up at least once considering they're pretty well-acquainted at this point and he has to know about her ability to transfer souls into new bodies. Heck, considering Cagliostro's level of knowledge and power, she could probably resurrect a primal with the proper amount of research and with Halluel and Malluel's help. Instead, Cagliostro is mainly in the story now to fix up Azrael and Israfel's bodies and climb the seemingly neverending Tower of Babyl with Sandalphon, making her character largely wasted.
    • And again on Lucifer, a number of fans were disappointed by what his role in "Created by the Stars, Loved by the Skies" amounted to. He was important to the second part of the event, with many fans believing that his appearance and the demonstration of his playable unit meant that he would be revived in the third part... only for all that set up to amount to explaining why Yuni looks like Lucifer, as she was made in the vague image of him after Cosmos realized he was dead and wouldn't be around to judge the singularity for her. Needless to say it came off as a bait and switch, only made worse by the fact that the anniversary Flash Gala that came toward the end of the event released a playable version of Yuni instead of Lucifer who was teased in the event and everyone was expecting/hoping for.
    • Also with "What Makes the Sky Blue" is how "000" put a lot of focus on faction leaders who, while relevant, wouldn't be the biggest characters who you'd expect to see in the fight. Instead of characters like Albert and Charlotta, who can command from the back, characters such as the Eternals and allied primal beasts would be much more realistic as frontline fighters due to the situation essentially being what they were formed for and being stronger than regular humans, respectively. It would also give them an excuse to go all-out in combat instead of holding back or doing stuff off-screen like they usually do in events because of how strong they are.
  • There's also some who feel that Scathacha's cross-fate episode was a bit wasted on Sara, not because it's bad in any way (it's actually very sweet) but because they wanted to see Scathacha interact with Grea instead. Grea in Granblue is, as she is in other stories, the child of a dragon and a human - which, as we learn from Scathacha's various Fate Episodes, should actually be a really big deal in the world of Granblue because there is no consensus among the True Dragons about what their relationship with the Skydwellers (i.e. humanity) should be. Especially with Scathacha's rising prominence in the Granblue lore in 2018, it feels to some like a waste that she and Grea haven't shared so much as a single conversation yet, especially since there's no-one else in Grea's life at the moment who can help her understand the dragon side of her heritage very well.
    • Another thing with "000" is that despite taking place at the location Pandemonium is (and even venturing inside of it at one point), neither Olivia or Azazel are even mentioned despite Olivia's motivations being to free her bretheren from the prison. It would be the perfect time to advance her arc by having her betray the crew because of both the location and that they're occupied with the more pressing threats going on to stop her.
  • A bit of feeling emerged fairly quickly over this concerning the "Walk on the Wild Side" event, from two angles:
    • Firstly, while imagining stuff is kind of the schtick of the Lowain Bros, this is the first event where we see them getting to interact in reality with a bunch of the crew. These segments are usually really sweet and funny, even moreso than their trippy fanfiction to many, and there's a definite subset of fans who wish the event really had been more outright "Grandcypher Slice of Life on their day off after a hard adventure", since we don't actually get to see much of their downtime usually.
    • Secondly, while the event featured a wider cast than normal even for a Lowain Bros event, there was one character conspicuous in her near-total absence: Yggdrasil. Specifically, there's the fact that in-between "Table for Six" and "Wild Side"... Yggdrasil became playable and joined the crew, and she's human-size to boot. This should, given previous characterization, be Elsam's dream come true (and even addresses one of the biggest problems he'd previously identified with trying to woo her) and many fans were looking forward to him having a Total Bro Freak Out over it, but through the entire event, Yggdrasil is mentioned exactly once and Elsam himself never brings her up.
  • "Seeds of Redemption" introduced a character who named Nehan, like Seox, was a Karm survivor, and feels very, very bitter about the clan's prodigy who wiped them out being allowed to live a happy life while he ended up enslaved. What does this character do during the event? Practically nothing aside from make Seox go berserk (which does nothing, as it ends almost as soon as it began and has zero consequences despite opening wounds the Captain has from their father), Mugen go berserk (also nothing), and challenges Seox to a fight at the very end. While the fight provides a lot of closure for Seox's arc, Nehan has almost nothing about him revealed, with any focus he could get going to fellow new characters Rei and Mugen. It's not like they wanted him to be mysterious, either - his journal entry is massive and details his entire backstory. Backstory that wasn't hinted at at all in the event.
  • So the May 2020 "Cinderella Fantasy'' crossover event gives plot relevance to Puns of all things, especially when the second part also introduces Kaede Takagaki who's a Pungeon Master, as well as Sierokarte of this game who's also good with wordplays. But the missed opportunity here is - Where's Tweyen? She could have also been plot-relevant to the event because she's also a Pungeon Master like the two. Nope, she doesn't appear at all.
  • Vaseraga's 5* Fate Episode reveals that his former crew was all wiped out after a battle with Lich went south. When Lich was Promoted to Playable, some fans expected a tie-in to this plotline in her Fate Episodes, but it doesn't happen — Vaseraga isn't even so much as mentioned in them.
  • The anniversary event "Created by the Stars, Loved by the Skies" pulls the rug from under the feet of Zooey fans in a number of ways after they went in expecting Zooey and Geo to have an epic face-off, instead getting to Zooey being demoted to "clone-status", her story-arc and role being given to a completely new character that was only briefly mentioned by name in "Primal Resonance", and a falsely advertised Zooey vs Geo event when in reality it focused on a new primal character named Baldr and his journey into developing human emotions during the time of the war, Cosmos and her journey to developing emotions (as well as how she helped primals become integrated into the human world after the war). By the end, it finally became about Zooey and Geo... as they are freed from their roles of arbitration because of Cosmos' Lucifer-esque Passing the Torch to her successors so they can live freely.
  • The 10th anniversary event "Heart of the Sun" literally set up a perfectly good opportunity to resurrect Lucifer from the dead, with Raziel, another one of his creations introduced in the event, even outright saying it was her goal in Part 3, with all she needed was a Phoenix tear and Lucifer's head to restore him to his original state. Then, for reasons that make no logical sense, the event goes to great lengths to prevent from actually being able to do it: Sandalphon, of all characters, who had spent years pining for Lucifer and expressing a desire to be reunited with him, suddenly become enraged at her for even raising the possibility of resurrecting him and “disturbing Lucifer’s rest,” treating the proposal like a sinful idea, and also refusing to disclose the location of Lucifer’s head. Then the Phoenix itself, who Lucifer had watched from afar and trusted, is revealed to be a lying manipulator who never had any intention of giving Raziel her tears after stringing her along for hundreds of years in a false friendship. The event ends with Raziel still being determined to resurrect Lucifer in her own way… making the fact that the event proposed a way to resurrect Lucifer in the first place pointless since it was All for Nothing in the end and essentially a glorified way to make Raziel, another one of his creations, playable in a similar way to Sandalphon, with both even being free Light units on debut. It especially angered people that, aside from the bad writing overall, this was a 10th anniversary, which would have been one of the best opportunities to resurrect the character that people had been asking for for years at that point.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!:
  • How quite a few western fans feel about some of the Dub Name Changes, some of which are deemed unnecessary by the fan base (like in the case of the ten Eternals). Interestingly, however, it would appear that some of these translated names have received the Approval of God, as they have begun to appear as the official signatures for the characters written on the real-life Valentines return gifts over their Japanese names.
  • Forte's Adaptation Species Change from a demon in Rage of Bahamut to a Draph (along with physical changes to reflect this) in Granblue is a controversial topic, with her fans wondering why Cygames had to resort to this decision when her fellow RoB imports like Amira, and especially Grea, retained their original race here. Then this reaction opened a can of worms to other related topics, such as the fact that for a very long time since this game's conception, Forte barely even has any plot-relevance in GBF despite being a very popular character in other Cygames IPs like Rage of Bahamut, Shadowverse and Dragalia Lost. It disappointed her fans even more, fearing that Cygames have intentionally forgotten about one of their Series Mascot, Forte, in their Cash-Cow Franchise, Granblue.
• Tough Act to Follow: Fans have expressed that the "Together in Song" event set the bar higher in terms of the story-telling quality of the game, mainly due to its Tear Jerker and Heartwarming hell of a ride as it also differs from the usual story events of Granblue which focus more on comedy or action. As such, any story event released after "Together in Song" will usually have players comparing them to this event. The only other events that have been accepted to be on the same caliber are the "What Makes the Sky Blue" events because of their more serious nature, and focus on presenting actual threats that can pose a risk to the protagonists. The thing is, "What Makes the Sky Blue" events only come once a year, which allows an open room for speculation and wild-mass guessing for the greater scope of the game's lore. The bar was seemingly set even higher with "What Makes The Sky Blue III: 000" with one of the reasons being its length, satisfying those who play Granblue for character interactions and lore.
  • "What Makes The Sky Blue: 000" suffered a bit from this after "Paradise Lost" due to the latter being a stakes raising Player Punch of an event that was extremely popular. While "000"’s first half is widely considered good, most players agree that it kind of fell apart in the later chapters for various reasons despite Lucilius’ otherwise carrying it. It still managed to be an extremely popular event that managed to boost interest in the Angels event further. It also helps that the Angels event that followed a few months later "The Maydays" was also well-received due to it’s light-hearted and comedic nature.
  • "Seeds of Redemption" suffered from this twice in one go. Firstly, as it's an anniversary event, it had incredibly high expectations set on it mostly due to the involvement of the Eternals, and needed to be at least as good as the second or third "What Makes the Sky Blue" event. Secondly, it came immediately after "Spaghetti Syndrome", which is both a Society event (which tends to have the same hype anniversary events do), and completely smashed expectations. The event itself turned out to be on the lower end of decent due to the Nehan sections carrying it, but even if it did turn out decent but not great, it'd still end up as a disappointment. To make things worse, after the "Seeds of Redemption" event ended, it was made increasingly obvious that the anniversary didn’t meet the creators expectations either, as it had gotten worse treatment than any of the previous anniversary events. It was rarely referenced after it ended, and received no merch and little promotion despite how heavily promoted "What Makes The Sky Blue" was and still is long after it’s ending. They also still haven’t updated the Twitter banner from the "000" 5th Anniversary art to match "Seeds of Redemption" despite months having passed (At least until "Home Sweet Moon" was launched), meaning they either couldn’t be bothered because they felt no one cared about the anniversary event, or the event was received so badly that they simply do not want to acknowledge that it happened in such a public way.
  • Pretty much every anniversary event released after the "What Makes The Sky Blue" trilogy has been met with mixed reception due to the higher standards that the trilogy set. "Created by the Stars, Loved by the Skies" got the worst of this thus far, though not without reason, as the twist that Zooey is an off-shoot of a more powerful primal that was created by the Astrals was one of the many things that ticked fans of Zooey off.
• Too Cool to Live: Lucifer, the Supreme Primarch.
• Toy Ship: Alec with an NPC girl from his 5★ upgrade fate episode.

U-W

• Underused Game Mechanic: Limited-time story events from 2018 onward usually have thematic mini-games. However, since they are tied to story events, these mini-games are considered as one-shot features as well, and are only available for a limited period. These minigames also won't be brought over if said story events were eventually turned into a side story.
• Unexpected Character:
  • Mordecai, The Duelist being the primary antagonist of the Shadowverse collaboration event "Duelist of Eternity". Not much explanation was given as to why he became the antagonistic representative for the Shadowverse event. In the first place, Mordecai originated from Rage of Bahamut. They could have instead used characters who actually originated from the card game. Second, Mordecai was only an extra playable Leader, and there are other Shadowverse characters who were properly given the role of antagonist in their story, such as Eris and Nexus.
  • Gachapin and Mukku, characters from the Ponkikki series of Japanese kid's shows (Hirake! Ponkikki and Ponkikkies) made an unexpected appearance in Granblue Fantasy as hosts of the 2017 New Year's Eve celebration. In the second unexpected move, the former got Promoted to Playable two years later.
  • Almost 2 years have passed since Bakura became known as the last R character in the gacha. And as SR and SSR characters overshadow the R-rarity ones in terms of utility and strength in the game's DPS-focused meta, players have started to believe that there will be no more R characters planned in the future. But in 2018, Spinnah was eventually released alongside the "Handsome Gorilla" gacha update, and is hilariously themed after spinners, no less! Prior to the "Handsome Gorilla" event, there had been no news, nor had any Grand Blues! comic teasers^note If a character or NPC suddenly makes an appearance in a Grand Blues! comic, chances are, they will have a new version in the gacha or a new event focuses on them. of him being the latest R character. It's just like he appeared out of nowhere. He continues his streak of being unexpected when it was announced that he would be getting a Christmas version for 2020, as he had been in very little content prior to this announcement.
  • Jeanne was the first character to be given a Grand solely because of her popularity, with Word of God confirming as much in an interview that followed. This came as a shock to most fans and an annoyance to others, and started the trend of characters getting Grand depending on how popular they are or once were, with characters like Narmaya, Cagliostro, and Lancelot being promoted to Grand status because of their popularity.
  • No one expected Macula Marius to have a Summer-themed summon for two reasons: It was unheard of for a Summon to be themed after occasions which only generally applies to playable characters. Like Spinnah, she also didn't have some sort of Foreshadowing from the Grand Blues! comics prior to the release of her Summer summon, and thus came out of nowhere without built-up hype.
  • Because he doesn't appear in, nor voice the story trailer for "The Maydays" event, no one expected Lucio to appear immediately on the first chapter, even wearing a complete summer getup - tanned skin, sunglasses and a surfboard.
  • The Grand Series of characters were originally reserved for those who have relevance to the main story or anniversary events. But on November 2019, Jeanne d'Arc received a Grand version, despite her not having any significant plot relevance beforehand. Absolutely no fan expected this to happen, hence there was a confusion or debate when she was released. Word of God states that this is just one of their attempts at Breaking Old Trends, that Jeanne became a Grand Series character because she's very popular in Granblue Fantasy and Rage of Bahamut.
  • Because of how Granblue had been primarily seen as focused on crossovers with idol franchises like Love Live! and THE iDOLM@STER: Cinderella Girls for 2019 and 2020, the announcement that the game would be doing a crossover with Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba took the fanbase by surprise.
  • While Sandalphon was expected to get a (Grand) version sooner or later because of his popularity, no one expected said (Grand) version to be his pre-redemption "What Makes The Sky Blue" self in all of his evil glory.
  • Rei and later Mugen being promoted to Grand status during Seeds of Redemption. Due to Rei's small role in the event, many fans agree that it was out of nowhere and underserved due to her not checking most of the boxes that are usually associated with whether a character gets a Grand version or not; for instance, not being a popular character or someone who is story relevant. Mugen, at least, had the benefit of being a bit more relevant to the event he was introduced in.
  • Helel ben Shalem. She was added to the Flash Gala Grand pool out of nowhere without an event to introduce her and all of her characterization and mysterious backstory was left to be established in her fate episodes. It's even more strange because she came out a few months after 000 in which the lore surrounding the Speaker of the Omnipotent was explored and her existence wasn't hinted at all, making her appearance seem as though Word of God decided to create her character after the fact.
  • Poseidon had little relevance following "Blade of the Young Champion," only gaining a Premium summon four years later, so his return in "Auguste of the Dead," which also revealed that he will be playable, was quite a surprise for a lot of people. However, many people were shocked when his playable version would be a Grand character, which is reserved for main-story characters, important characters in anniversary events, and highly popular characters, of which Poseidon is none of these.
  • The August 2021 Summer Flash Gala introduces a summer variant of Mandrake, which is even more unexpected than Macula Marius above as Mandrake is an unnamed common mob who is also an unassuming R summon stone and had a little relevance to all grand scheme of things (she's didn't even appear in "Auguste of the Dead" event last month), other than some players noted that her new redesign looks rather similar to Kolulu, having tan skin and nearly identical green hair.
  • The September 2021 Flash Gala introduced a playable version of the Lich and caught the playerbase off guard for two reasons: First, Lich is a Grand despite being an unimportant character that has not appeared in any story event or is remotely popular. Second, Lich followed "The Dragonblood War" event, which introduced The dark dragon Fediel in human form and some players thought this would mean she would be playable soon, but Lich dashed that expectation. The fact that Lich's humanoid form is a woman was also quite a shock, even after Fediel.
  • Pretty much no one expected Lucifer to be given a scripted battle in which he's not only temporarily playable, but where he challenges Bahamut to a battle that determines the future of the Sky Realm and the then-unborn protagonist's involvement in it in Created by the Stars, Loved by the Skies.
  • No one expected Yuni to be the Grand character for the 8th Anniversary Flash gala, as she wasn't teased as a unit in the event like Lucifer was and seemingly disappeared alongside Cosmos once the event ended. Naturally, due to her small role in the anniversary event, players were mixed on her sudden promotion to Grand status, with some claiming it was out of nowhere and undeserved in a similar vein to the criticisms toward Rei and Mugen being given Grands during Seeds of Redemption.
  • When the My Hero Academia: Rescue Another World event story supporting casts were revealed, no one expected Lobelia to be part of the supporting casts, surprising the fanbase on both fandoms, especially those who have both read and/or watched My Hero Academia and played Granblue Fantasy.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic:
  • Sandalphon's motivations for his actions in "What Makes The Sky Blue" gets a lot of players sympathize for him, but compared to many of the event and story villains, most of whom are misguided and/or, good people who pulled a Necessary Evil action due to circumstances, Sandalphon is seen as petty and childish to several players because of how willing he was to commit the Moral Event Horizon above just to get the revenge that he wanted.
  • Al-Khalid, who commits a number of crimes and cheats in his own tournament to paint himself as the hero of the "A Thousand Reasons" event because he's unable to come to terms with Harvin being physically weaker than other races. While his gripes are valid, his method of handling them already make him come across as the one in the wrong, compounded by the fact that it's implied that he merely took the wrong path (he did a lot of strength-building when his body is suited for agility) in becoming strong and calls it a flaw in his body than his mindset. On top of that, there's the fact that he says that all the big-name Harvin that participate in combat use magic to make up for their lack of physical strength. This is true...if you only look at the Eternals^note while Anre doesn't use magic himself, he fights on a flying pillar, as the fourth strongest Harvin (at the time of the event's writing) is Charlotta, who uses no magic in spite of her strength.
  • Some of the Evokers due to their wildly dark backgrounds are veering into this territory as their sad backstories serve as reason for what they do but don’t always make them anymore sympathetic in some fans' eyes. It's gotten to the point where some people in the fandom don't want to recruit the characters at all due to the implication of having serial killers in their crew, but this is more in the case of characters like Nier and Lobelia.
  • The Foe, especially Grace and Heisenberg are portrayed as a well intentioned villains who think that the Society needs to be always alert to prepare them for anything that poses a threat across the skydom, like Moondwellers and their Automagods, with Grace acting as a Stealth Mentor for Gwynne, and having both her and Isaac sympathizing with the former's death. Thing is, what they did across the society events is anything but; Heisenberg is The Mole responsible for several things that happened to the Society and some of its members, including the destruction of Eustace's home village and the subsequent murders of his family for testing the superweapon Yama. Grace herself is a former pupil of Yodarha who turned heel and used his taught techniques for murder and a serial murderer who gleefully murders innocents, with the sole justification for her murder spree being some Otherworlders disguised themselves as normal civilians, something she doesn't always get right as shown in the latest "Home Sweet Moon" event, and that's not including the murders she committed prior to her debut. Somewhat downplayed as neither of them really ask for sympathy to begin with, but it's still jarring when some people still express grief over Grace.
  • For some, Lucio in his summer Fate Episodes isn't nearly as sympathetic as he was intended to be due to the fact that he essentially ends off the Fate Episode by guilt-tripping and gaslighting Sandalphon into accepting him as his own person rather than a copy of Lucifer because he is unwilling to change the face his master gave him. The sentiment didn't translate well with the audience due to them being aware that Lucio has another form that was also given to him by Bahamut that he can change into at will in order to lessen Sandalphon's discomfort around him, making him come off as a jerk that prioritizes his own ego over the comfort of someone he wants to be friends with. His lack of regard for Sandalphon's personal space throughout the Fate Episode, bordering on harassment, didn't help his case either, and he lost a lot of popularity with his fans to the point of falling off the Valentine's and White Day rankings completely from 2020 onwards (Starting with The Maydays in which fans were also put off by his behavior) whereas in the previous years he would be in the top 10 with the other Lucifer-faces.
  • Ceodric from "The Heart of the Sun" lost respect from many players as the event story update continues as he not only never loved Sabrina, his main goal was ultimately to prove superiority against her out of envy, and also to Seofon whom he had a grudge on for not doing anything when an epidemic hit his kingdom and took his mother's life, believing Seofon to be hoarding on power for the sake of so-called fairness. He later went on to claim Sabrina a cheater due to learning the revelation that Sabrina is the reincarnation of Abramelin's lover, his actions and motive instead coming off as too entitled and misogynistic. His hypocrisy of his claims and grudge against Seofon while being a prince himself also made players see him as a power-hungry bastard on a power high trip on top of that, with these players rejoicing when they saw that Sabrina killed him in retaliation of his murder of Fenie.
• Viewer Gender Confusion: One can easily mistake Feower for a girl based on his art, especially his 5★ uncap (which exposes his Erune trademark)... until they realize who his voice actor is.
• Vindicated by History: Thanks to the "Monkeygate" scandal being resolved, no matter how low the rates of recent gacha games turn out to be, they are given the green signal to continue operating for as long as they remain transparent with their draw rates, a trend that came out to be from this Granblue incident. And as such, some gacha titles even had their way of ensuring a "safety net" or "pick anyone" mechanic in their games which is, also an idea that originated from this game as a consumer-friendly strategy or compensation. From 2018 onwards, gaming articles that refer to Granblue Fantasy titles such as Relink or Versus remember this game as one of the hits or highest-grossing titles in the mobile games of Japan, no longer mentioning the controversy because it has already been resolved years ago.
• What Do You Mean, It's for Kids?: Granblue Fantasy in general is light-hearted with a handful of dark, somber and serious events. But the fate episodes of the Arcarum Evokers really take the cake in how dark Granblue can be with the Evokers' backstories being even darker than the Eternals in general.
• Woolseyism:
  • Some characters like Yuel and Societte have a distinct Kansai accent compared to the Tokyo accent that most characters have. In order to apply this to the English localization, Yuel's dialogue is written to mimic the Southern / Texan accent (For example, a line of her says "Yer' goin' down!" in the "Forgiveness and Gratitude" event) against the North American translation of the other parts of the game.
  • In Olivia's Summer Fate Episodes, the Japanese dialogue audio mentions the snack "ice candy" in what will sound like fluent English to most Anglophones - this is the loanword from English attached to the item in question in modern Japanese. However, the English text and narration calls it by the name most English-speakers will actually know it by: a "popsicle".
  • The English event preview for "The Many Lives of Cats" fades out certain letters to only have the word "cat" as the title for each slide, further emphasizing the prominence of cats in the event.
  • Another event preview with "Seeds of Redemption" was notable for retaining the numerical structure of counting to ten in its preview, to the point where both Cygames and the Japanese fanbase notably drew attention to it as an interesting way to handle the translation.
  • Even some acronyms undergo a rewrite in the English translation so that the supposed joke will be understood by Anglophones. For example:
    • The Lowain Bros' signature attack pose is "K.B.S.N." in Japanese, referring to kibasen or "cavalry fight". In English, this gets changed to "H.P.A." or "Human Pyramid Attack", which has the same implication. However, this also falls under Dub Name Change since the Japanese audio is retained.
    • In the "Fall of the Dragon" event, a Trophy is named "TKG" in Japanese, referring to tokage, while it gets renamed to "L1Z4RD" in English. Because tokage simply translates to "lizard".
  • Likewise, memes, Shout Outs, Fan Nicknames or internet slang that did not originate from Granblue may pop up often in the English localization that are also not otherwise present nor applicable in the original Japanese script. As such, only the English-speaking fanbase of Granblue would understand most of the translated jokes. For example: In "Primal Resonance", Satyr at one point calls Medusa kawaii (cute), yet the English localization displays the word as "Adorkable", a term that originated as an English Internet slang.
  • Even disregarding the fact that Rage of Bahamut characters had their localized names carried over from that game to Granblue, fans of this game still find Vampy's official English name, "Vania", to be fitting for her vampire nature since it can be interpreted as a reference to Castlevania, a franchise well-known for revolving around vampires.
  • Lucio is notably more teasing and playful in the translation than in the original text, which some western Lucio fans like as it gives him a bit more personality.