Granblue Fantasy is crazy popular in Japan with a massive playerbase of over 10 million. Packed with some of the biggest names in the Japanese industry, including classic Final Fantasy composer Nobuo Uematsu and artist Hideo Minaba of Final Fantasy Tactics fame, the game is a massive nostalgia rush for those that enjoyed console RPGs in the ’90s and early 2000s.
Earlier this month publisher Mobage released an update for Granblue Fantasy adding a full English-language option to the game in lieu of an actual English release. It’s fully-playable but requires one to jump through some hoops to play it an actual mobile device.
In order to play on an Android device you will have to download the game’s latest APK via a third-party website and give it an install–this is easy enough but becomes troublesome once the next update is released and you have to manually download the next version.
iOS device owners who want to play Granblue Fantasy must make a Japanese iTunes account to download it. If you’d like to take this route you can follow the instructions in our easy to use guide to making a Japanese Apple ID without a credit card.
If you don’t want to deal with a bunch of hassle just to give a game a try, which is perfectly understandable, you can instead play the game on your PC via Chrome.
Granblue Fantasy on Chrome works almost identically to its mobile device counterparts, with the only differences lying in longer load times between screens and the ability to change the window size.
You can download the game’s ChromeApp version on the Chrome Web Store at this link. From here you can sign in with a Google account and play with no hassle.
No matter what device you’re playing on, you will have to manually choose English as the game’s language a few screens in after you launch the app. Don’t freak out at all the Japanese at initial launch–it doesn’t take long to switch the language.
If you’re aware of how Japanese mobile gaming works and just how low the chances of good units are, you may want to reroll after your first few tries at good units. The easiest way to do this is to sign up using a Gmail account with a + and a number after it, for example “[email protected]”, “[email protected]”, and so on. All emails will be sent to the primary email address.
Granblue Fantasy does live up to the hype if you’re hungry for a turn-based RPG, especially if you enjoyed the console RPGs of yesteryear. Give it a shot on Chrome, it’s not like you have anything to lose.
