BODY: Cygames' fighting game Granblue Fantasy Versus -Rising- continues to grow, and its latest addition looks like a gift to newcomers—right up until he sprouts wings and claws. AUTOMATON went hands-on with both the freshly launched Nintendo Switch 2 version and new playable character Id, and came away with a familiar GBVSR takeaway: easy to start, deep to master.
At first glance, Id is a powerful, straightforward bruiser. His normals hit hard, his approach is aggressive, and beginners can pick him up and immediately feel the payoff of landing big buttons. It's the kind of accessible design GBVSR has leaned on to court players intimidated by the genre.
That impression flips once Id taps into his "draconic transformation." Shifting into dragon-humanoid form overhauls his toolkit and playstyle, rewarding players who learn when to transform, how to manage the state, and how to weave it into combos and neutral. It's here that the character reveals the layered "yarikomi" (deep-dive) mastery that GBVSR fans expect—the same tension between approachability and technical ceiling that defines the roster.
The Switch 2 release, meanwhile, brings the crossplay-friendly fighter to Nintendo's new hardware, letting the audience test whether the portable-hybrid platform can keep pace with a title built around tight inputs and online competition.
The insider take
From Tokyo, GBVSR occupies an interesting niche: Cygames built it as an on-ramp to the fighting-game genre for the massive mobile audience of Granblue Fantasy, and characters like Id reflect that dual mandate—flashy and forgiving for the RPG crowd, yet loaded with execution depth for the arcade-bred competitive scene that still fills venues like Tokyo's Mikado. The Switch 2 version matters here too: Nintendo hardware is where casual Japanese players actually live, so a smooth port could meaningfully widen the game's domestic base beyond the usual PlayStation-centric FGC.
Originally reported by AUTOMATON (Japanese).