It should be no surprise that I'm playing Granblue Fantasy: Relink. I'm an avid player of the Granblue fighting game, which I still believe is an excellent way for new folks to get into the genre, and needed a brighter RPG experience after my long haul of Final Fantasy 16.
What I found surprised me. I was under the impression that this long-delayed Granblue experience was a lengthy narrative game and while there is a story to clear with some flashy high points, the post-game opens up to a Monster Hunter-esque loop of heading out to challenge bosses and returning to town in order to upgrade your characters.
There's a pretty huge roster in Relink and that means you need a lot of experience points and supplemental currency and items to upgrade your crew. An endgame mission called "Slimepede" drops players into a gilded room of lucrative slime that drop gold, give quick experience points, and even have a chance to spawn a rare enemy that gives amazing upgrade materials. It's a hot spot of player activity. But how do you farm most efficiently?
This post isn't really about Relink as a game. It's about the odd ways in which communities form unspoken rules. How even after a week or two, the notion of what's optimal becomes what's expected and then finally what's believed to be courteous. Slimepede is a case study in how gamers develop mores and taboos. And honestly? I don't know how it happened. Okay, well, I have some idea but it's weird.
Because there is an expected way to play a certain mission in Relink and those expectations tell us something about the game's community and perhaps gamers more broadly...
Being based on one of the largest gacha games, a huge appeal of Relink is the ability to play as popular characters in a fully-realized action RPG form. The encounters in endgame Granblue Fantasy are nothing to scoff at but there's only so much you can do with chibi-art. Relink is a chance to see how your favorite characters move and act in 3D. The animations are lush and their abilities, transferred from the gacha, burst forth with a sublime mix of sparkling effects and charm. Now, I wanna ignore the pitfalls of the Granblue brand a bit here. As a dedicated player of Granblue Fantasy Versus Rising I've always need to content with the fact that this a franchise whose roots are firmly placed in a problematic field of games. But this really is a series about Cool And Gorgeous Men and Women among other things, so there's inherit appeal for many players leaping into Relink; you get to play a really fleshed out version of your favorite character.
For instance, I like Ferry. She's got a tragic backstory as a ghost who never passed on to the afterlife but her design is also really cute to me because she travels with a pack of blippy-blobby ghost animal friends. In Rising, she uses her whip to carry out an interesting keep-away game and her little cat ghost... thing.. can be used for setplay. The fighting game really made me like her so watching how that transferred to Relink was a blast. She ended up being a cool support character who can buff her team but also use her whip for sweeping attacks that control packs of enemies. I excitedly built her up as my main character and she's usually who I take into online missions. As far as translating my personal favorite into a character who is also fun to play, Relink really succeeded. And this is the joy of the game outside of the crunchy loop. If you're a fan of the cutesy alchemist Cagliostro, you'll be happy to find she has a mix of powerful magical attacks and even the ability to toss traps on the ground like in the fighting game. If you're someone who loves the grim knight Siegfried, his big sweeping sword attacks recreate the hard-hitting gameplay of Monster Hunter's greatsword but he also has risk-reward elements incorporating his tainted dragon's blood.
Tons of fan favorites are here! Then there's the "main" crew.
Granblue's arguably more popular for its side stories now than the main story and as a result, there's a cadre of characters who are not necessarily as popular with players (though they are not unloved) even as they are present for pretty much all the narrative. While someone like the stalwart knight Katalina might be popular even as a main crew members, you also have folks like the young child mage Io or the sniper Eugen. Not disliked but if you that the chance to play as Narmaya, the voluptuous samurai, you probably aren't gonna be itching to play as someone like Rackam, the helmsman of your flying ship.
Slimepede is almost always run with a party packed with Rackams and Eugens. If you're bringing anyone else, you're either trying to power level that specific character or you're trolling. If you want the big returns during your slime hunt, you gotta bring the grizzled old men with guns. Leave your handsome knights and gorgeous dragoons at home.
What's the deal? Why do you gotta bring the tough old guys?
The slimes constantly respawn, granting mastery points (these are used to unlock nodes on all characters' skill trees) and tons of goodies. In the best case, a "prismatic" slime can spawn. Defeating one of these gives "Damascus Ingots" and "Azurite's Splendor." These are use, respectively, to quickly upgrade weapons and fully boost character-augmenting sigils that grant abilities like exceeding the damage cap, automatically reviving on defeat, and more. These are even more valuable than the experience and mastery points. They're way more crucial than the gold that erupts from the slimes like pinata candy. After a certain point, you're heading into Slimpede simply for a chance to get these rare items.
Which means you gotta run the mission fast and clear the field over and over to make a rare slime spawn more likely. The best characters to do this are Rackam and Eugen, who use guns as their main weapons. They can quickly rain down explosives on the simes and rapidly fire away, hitting enemies at a faster pace than any other members of the cast.
If you know a gamer who fancies themselves knowledgeable about design, they've probably spewed the idea of optimal strategies at you. Many gamers getting a taste for design concept in the 2010s from places like Extra Credits adopted the notion of "first oder optimal strategies" with the same stickiness as ludonarrative dissonance. Useful terms! But they've snaked into gamer-lingo in an interesting way. On the one hand, understanding optimal strategies is important for designers and players. All games have methods in them for extracting the greatest rewards for the least straining means. On the other, I often find that gamers on places like Reddit overstate the term. What's that gotta do with all this?
Rackam and Eugen are very useful in Slimepede. That's no up for debate. But gamers have strict ideas of what is "optimal" and they often build value judgements around what is or is not perceived as the best possible strategy. It's the mindset that excludes certain character classes in MMO raid teams or chides someone for choosing an imperfect weapon in your economy round. What's "very good" eventually morphs into the only socially acceptable option. Why are you playing that character? Do you want to hold the team back?
I can't pinpoint the exact moment when Rackam and Eugen became the acceptable characters for Slimepede and I surely can't determine patient zero. If there's a YouTube video or Reddit post on the BEST WAY TO FARM SLIMES! I've not seen it. But at some point, barring those players taking in lower level characters who need their initial boost to the max level of 100, it became expect that you bring Rackam or Eugen to Slimepede and if you're booting into the map today I can't imagine you'd end up in a party without them.
Is this a bad thing? It's obviously not a "bad" way to farm your slimes. Does it start to create a stigma for people who play their favorite characters in Slimepede? Probably. Does it also indicate the existence of a community instead of a bundle of disparate players? Absolutely.
From there, we start to ask what the values of this community are. They don't fully different from the gacha game's population but that's less a matter of "This is a Granblue game" an more a matter of gamer values in general. Power, expedience. Gamer values are maximal values. For all the talk of fun, player trends don't place it at a premium. Notably, this unspoken meta isn't one where diversity is championed. Not in terms of demographics but in terms of characters. You play to fulfill a need and to help others fulfill their needs. Which is numerical growth and power acquisition. There's not a world where you play Slimepede for "fun" even if you might enjoy the spectacle. (Playing at Rackam and Eugen turns the mission into a Vampire Survivors' scale display of visual noise.) It's not a space where you explore a character or where standing out is valued. You are of use to the team or else you are considered RUDE.
This is maybe too damning a picture . Part of the reason you adhere to the etiquette of the Rackam/Eugen team is the explicit purpose of helping folks gain the necessary resources to power up their favorite characters. So while, yes, the values on display are grim in isolation there is charity and cooperation on display as well. You slot into this meta and blast these slimes into bits so that both yourself and others can then power up more interesting characters. Sure, you're also doing that so they can be in their best shape for endgame raids and monster hunts but the reason that expedience is valued is ultimately because the appeal of Relink is not the act of farming slimes. It's the other stuff.
These values don't entirely clash but they also don't entirely merge. There's a friction at play in the Slimepede meta. A risk that you are playing "wrong" or impeding others. Yes, maximal play is also something that benefits the community to some extent. since you'll eventually get to play your favorite character at high strength Yes, it can help newbies leap to suitable heights to play the interesting stuff. Damn you, at least to some extent, if you're bashing slimes on, say, a slow character like Vaseraga. That ain't the way.
All this arises largely through the gameplay itself. Maybe it also lives on message boards and Discord servers but you can avoid those spaces and eventually understand "Oh, this is how I'm expected to play this mission." It's impressive. It's depressing.
But listen here pal. I need some more Damascus Ingots and I need them now!
