The gacha game has leapedinto full-blown action RPG and it’s great. It’s filled with stuff to do, so can you finish those quests on the go with the Steam Deck?
Granblue Fantasy: Relinkis a solid action RPG with a heavy emphasis on questing. Outside of the main story, you’ll be spending a lot of time in theMonster Hunter-esqueloop. This consists of completing a quest, realizing you didn’t get the dropped item, and repeating it to get another to upgrade something.
It’s fairly addictive and the quests themselves are short enough to be perfect on theSteam Deck. During the review process, we finished the game on the Steam Deck despite the caveats for goinghandheld.
Granblue Fantasy: Relink is great on Steam Deck
Outside of easier access wherever you go to polish a couple of things off, the Steam Deck does have some limitations.
We usedProton Experimentaland the latest release during testing and found that the game worked best at 30FPS with everything set to standard. There are not a lot of customization options onPC, and you’ll be stuck at 720p for best performance too.
We did manage to get it to hit40FPS, but this wasn’t as stable as 30FPS. If you want to extract more performance out of the Steam Deck, you’ll want to alter a few more settings.
Granblue Fantasy: Relink doesn’t support 16:10, leavinglaptopsand PCs with that aspect ratio with black bars on the top and bottom. This includes the Steam Deck, which features an 800p 16:10 panel.
It’s not too distracting, however. The game is fairly fast-paced and you lose no information while playing it. The chaotic battles in Granblue also never really see the performance dip below maybe 25FPS in our testing and this only happened in the late game.
Granblue Fantasy: Relink launches on February 1 on PC, PS4 and PS5.
Joel Loynds was Dexerto’s Deputy Tech Editor in the UK team. He has been writing about tech & games for over a decade, specializing in PCs, hardware, and handhelds such as the Steam Deck. He also has bylines at Scan, WePC, PCGuide, Eurogamer, Digital Foundry and Metro UK.
