Granblue Fantasy: Relink

Granblue Fantasy: Relink is the palette cleanser after something like Black Desert. Missions run fifteen to twenty minutes, four players, gorgeous anime presentation. I picked this up expecting pretty but shallow. I was wrong. Class builds matter in later missions, and boss fights have real mechanics to learn instead of just bigger health bars. It lacks the world persistence of an MMO, and the story mode is short. For a weeknight session with two friends who do not want homework, though, this is one of the easiest recommendations on this whole page.

Granblue Fantasy: Relink is the game my group reached for after burning through Helldivers 2 missions and wanting something with more structure per session. The co-op quest loop is well-designed: pick a quest, run it in 15 to 20 minutes, upgrade your characters, pick the next one. Each of the playable characters has distinct mechanics and build paths, so four people in a party are genuinely doing different things rather than just pressing the same buttons faster. The main campaign is shorter than you might expect from the presentation quality, but the endgame boss hunting extends the life considerably. Even solo, the RPG systems here are stronger than borderline action-adventure games that get genre-labelled as RPGs by default.