Granblue Fantasy: Relink's Endless Ragnarok expansion adds a full summon system

Endless Ragnarok, the big expansion for Granblue Fantasy: Relink, is just weeks out, and at SGF the developers sat down with press for hands-on time alongside a chat with creative director Tetsuya Fukuhara and narrative director Sanshiro Hidaka. The headline feature is a fully fleshed-out summon system — something the base game never really had.

Summons are tied to a new resource bar that charges as you fight. Calling one out costs one, two, or three bars depending on how powerful it is. Rather than a health bar, each summon runs on a timer and stays on the field until that expires. Crucially, summons are invincible, which makes them excellent for soaking up boss Overdrive attacks — one of Relink's nastiest damage spikes. The system works in multiplayer too: each player brings their own set of four summons, but only one can be active at a time across the whole party. To compensate, there's a chain discount — every subsequent summon called by any party member costs one bar less, down to a minimum of one. That pushes players to burn cheaper one- or two-bar summons first so the heavy hitters come out at a discount.

Fukuhara said the system was a late addition to development and he genuinely wasn't sure how the team would take it. "From the beginning, there was the wish to have everyone you meet as an option, but he was expecting pushback — that the staff would say, 'We can only do half, we won't be able to meet deadlines' — but instead the response matched the vision as intended. It did require a lot of elbow grease, but everyone was having a lot of fun while they were doing it."

Some summons have already appeared in earlier trailers, including Relink bosses Furycane and Nazarbonju. The expansion is restricted to its own content and the new chaos difficulty, so veteran players will need to push into fresh territory to unlock the system.