Granblue Fantasy: Relink

• For the story missions, the Captain has to be in the party for a lot of them, so it would be wise to get used to their skills as well as building them up faster relative to the others in your party. If you're running someone else as the leader, you can at least make sure they can keep up with you along with the rest and it should be fine. For free quests, though, anyone is fair game, so bring whoever you'd like.

• Early on in the story, you'll be able to start recruiting new characters for your crew at Siero's Knickknack Shack for the cost of a crewmate card. Keep in mind that the initial strength of the newcomer is relative to where you happen to be in the story, so if you don't want to spend your cards as you get them, that's fine. Depending on when you bring them on, they may already start better than the initial members aside from possibly the Captain (depending on what you've done).

• Reserve members do collect EXP over time, but not a whole lot. It's not too much of a deal, but it is something to be aware of if you plan on swapping someone new into your party.

• If you've been turning in side quests for townsfolk, you can check Lyria's Journal and then leave it so that any new ones can load in since that counts as a transition to get them to pop. You may be doing this anyway because doing certain things gets you certain items from the Journal, so may as well.

• The mastery system can be daunting, but keep in mind that MSP drops plenty as you get further in the story as well as when your crewmates level up. Focus more on the people you plan on using first (especially the Captain, of course) and then you can worry about the rest.

• Keep up with your sigils and upgrading the weapons you're using. You won't necessarily have to start upgrading sigils until the late-game, though, so trade up for higher-tier ones instead. The max tier for sigils is 5. Once you unlock the ability to forge ascension weapons, focus on those for your main members if you want to have an easier time further down the road, but there will come a time where you forge everything and level them up for more mastery nodes in the collection tab for your characters. One step at a time, no need to rush.

• When you're fighting, you can cancel some actions by dodging and then continue your assault. There's also a setting in the options menu to auto-sprint if you get annoyed by having to constantly start it up every time. You'll want to be fast on the battlefield, or at least predict where the action is going to move to if playing as a slower character (which will take a bit but you'll get the hang of it) so that you can assist your team.

• The block is capable of reducing damage to zero, but it has some durability to it that takes time to recover to full. If you get your block broken, you'll take damage from that attack while being opened up or even knocked down if the attack is strong enough. Keep in mind if the attack causes a status effect, you run the risk of being affected by it even when blocking. Finally, some attacks are just plain unblockable (and it will be pretty clear which ones those are, in my experience), so watch out.

• You only get to dodge three times in a row before a brief recovery period where you're open, so make sure to space them out.

• If you or someone else goes down, you will run down a timer measured by a bar as the fallen member enters critical status. If more than one is downed, this timer will tick down faster. Everyone in the party starts with one revival potion to hop back up for half of their max HP, and having more than one person pick up the fallen member speeds up the recovery. If you are the one knocked down, you can mash buttons to speed it up yourself if your team is getting blocked off. You also get a brief bit of invulnerability as you're getting up, but it's not that long so don't expect it to save you from getting socked by a wide AoE attack and make sure to block/dodge accordingly.

• There's a super move in the form of Sky Bound Arts (SBA) that can be chained together with the rest in order to perform a high-damaging finishing attack at the end of the chain. Boss enemies can go into Overdrive and be whittled down until their meter runs out and enters Break mode for an opening. It would wise to use SBAs to cause Break status instead of saving it for when they are in Break, as doing so will immediately punt the boss out of Break and whatever damage is inflicted will fill up the Overdrive meter again. If you're so overwhelmingly powerful that that is not an issue or you are capable of dealing with it otherwise, then go ahead and ignore this.

• After every boss comes treasure chests. You've 30 seconds to open whatever chests pop up, but the contents are given to you regardless. If with an online party, it's up to your discretion.

• The Quick Quest system is how you get Gold and Silver Dalia Badges, which can be traded in for fabulous prizes at the Knickknack Shack. Be advised that the quests are always randomly selected from a range of lowest difficulty to whatever is currently your highest. Also be advised that there is some measure of strength scaling in case you're too strong or too weak for it. It used to be pretty bad if it choose a low difficulty quest and beaned you with heavy scaling, but an update fixed that and things ought to die at a reasonable pace. Just don't expect to get S++ on certain missions or something and keep in mind you're in it mainly for the Badges. Every 3 done is one gold ticket, which can give you another Gold Dalia Badge for each one spent up to 3, and you always get one ticket every day at midnight (or at least it's set to midnight for me).

• Playing online, you can pick the same character as someone else and this will inevitably happen when running Quick Quests. Go nuts.