Granblue Fantasy: Relink is Cygame’s most awaited Action RPG where the franchise goes beyond the mobile platform and into the semi-open world, taking flight from its successful roots in gacha-gaming. We got our hands on an early copy which allows us to lay out some details for you so you’ll be prepared for your very own adventure into the Zegagarde Skydom. Today’s agenda in this Granblue Fantasy Relink: Weapon Upgrade Guide: Weapons and unleashing their full potential.

How to Upgrade Your Weapons in Granblue Fantasy Relink

We’d be hard-pressed to go on adventures without the means to protect ourselves, and the exciting Weapons in the game allow us to do just that. We’ll be putting all cards on the table here about how to make your characters’ Weapons stronger throughout the game, and all the different mechanics and features that go along with it. Zegagarde is rife with danger, as much as it is with majesty and wonder, and with ever-growing challenges ahead you’ll need bigger and bigger guns. We’ll be discussing this and more in our Granblue Fantasy Relink: Weapon Upgrade Guide.

Granblue Fantasy Relink Guide: How to Unlock Weapon Upgrades?

You’ll need to have your Weapons keep up with the stronger enemies you’ll be facing as you plow through the game’s main campaign. Weapons have their own levels apart from your characters’ levels, and this is what you’ll mainly need to upgrade.

This feature becomes available to you as early as Chapter 1 when you arrive at Folca Town and visit the Blacksmith for the first time, as the game introduces you to a town’s basic features. Once unlocked, you’ll be able to access the Blacksmith feature anytime you’re in a town, and through the green Hallowed Ground crystals you’ll find when you’re out and about on your adventures.

Granblue Fantasy Relink Guide: How Does Weapon Upgrading Work?

When you try upgrading your Weapon for the first time, the game will guide you through the process. For gacha fans, you’ll quickly be familiar with the system as GBF: Relink has incorporated the usual gacha system for upgrading gear. To upgrade your Weapon, you’ll simply need to select the Weapon you want to upgrade, and then allocate Fortitude materials for the process to give the Weapon some EXP. 

Each tier of Fortitude material gives increasing amounts of EXP. You can also click on the Auto Level function to have the game quickly allocate materials for you. Increasing the Weapon’s level will increase both its HP and Attack stats, which contributes to the stats of the character wielding it. You’ll see how the Weapon’s stats would grow after the process here as well.

Afterward, simply confirm the process to have your Weapon eat up the EXP and level up accordingly. Note that there is a cap to how much your Weapon’s level can currently increase, which is shown through the number after the Weapon’s level whenever you view it. You’ll quickly notice once you’ve maxed out your first Weapon to its level 10 cap, you won’t be able to level it up any further.

Granblue Fantasy Relink: Weapon Upgrade: How to Uncap My Weapon’s Levels

As I’ve mentioned, the game has adopted a system reminiscent of upgrade systems in gacha games. In Chapter 4 when you visit the Blacksmith you’ll find a new option on the menu for upgrading your Weapon called ‘Uncap Max Level.’ It turns out that uncapping your Weapon’s level limit is a different process altogether and will consume different materials. This time you’ll need Refinium along with other materials and rupies as you uncap a Weapon more and more.

Just like with leveling the Weapon up, the game will show you the changes that will occur if you were to confirm and let the process proceed. Afterward, you’ll be able to use the upgrade process to level it up to its current cap, and then rinse and repeat. One of the weapon’s six stars will fill out every time you uncap a Weapon’s level limit, as you’ll see before you confirm the process.

Can Traits in Weapons Level Up?

On the same screen, you’ll notice that the Trait that the Weapon comes with will also increase in level once you confirm the uncapping process. It’s important to note that Traits in Sigils also have a maximum level they can increase to, but unlike Weapons, they cannot be uncapped. Therefore, uncapping Weapons might be a good way to increase a Trait to a level higher than you could get them with low-tier Sigils.

You can quickly check all the Traits your character has equipped through the Main Menu to see how all the Traits stack up in levels, and how much of their bonuses are currently active.

Where to Get Upgrade Materials?

You might be thinking, “Oh no, this really is similar to a gacha system, and like gacha upgrade systems, I’ll have to grind for all these materials.” Well, you will have to acquire a lot of these materials somehow, but it’s actually not as grind-y as you’d expect. The game allows you to employ some useful tools and features to make upgrading your characters and Weapons a walk in the park.

Both Fortitude materials (Fortitude Shard, Fortitude Crystal (S), Fortitude Crystal (M), Fortitude Crystal (L) ) and Refinium materials (Standard Refinium, Quality Refinium, Exceptional Refinium) can be largely acquired through the game’s Side Quests. You’ll also be able to pick some of these up as you beat enemies and bosses throughout the Main Campaign, but later on, most of the higher-level materials can be more reliably acquired as rewards for clearing Quests at the Quest Counter.

The game will actually help you out a lot as you prepare for these higher-level Quests to progress your Weapons and characters to the level you need. The following features will help you get some materials without any problems.

Materials Tips: Trade with Siero!

Treasure Trade is a feature that becomes available as early as the first chapter when you automatically speak to Siero in Folca Town, even before you get to the Blacksmith. Afterward, you’ll be able to access the feature through any Hallowed Ground as well. With Treasure Trade, you’ll be able to exchange any minor Treasures you find, may it be from exploring, beating up enemies, or extra drops from Quests, for more valuable materials, or even just ones that you really need currently.

As you progress through the game and gather more and more materials, you’ll have more and more options for trading at the Treasure Trade menu as well. Whenever you find yourself lacking in materials for a Weapon you want to upgrade or uncap, be sure to check in at Siero’s!

Materials Tips: Use the Wish List System!

Another feature you can use that the game implements to make gathering materials a lot easier is the Wish List System. Whenever you look at the materials needed to upgrade your Weapon or uncap its max level, you can press the Details button to view each material on the list. You can then choose the option to add that material to your Wish List. You can even tell the system how many pieces of it you want the system to watch out for.

Putting materials you need in the Wish List System makes it so a little magnifying glass symbol will appear on top of them whenever they are included in rewards for any Quests you undertake. They’ll also be highlighted the same way on the Treasure Trade list at Siero’s. At the Quest Counter, this lets you home in on the Quests that will reward you with the materials you need. Once you do undertake these Quests, doing well and getting a high rating at the Battle Results will net you multiple instances of the rewards, giving you more of the materials you sought out.

What’s Next After I Max Out Weapons?

With enough materials, you can upgrade and uncap a Weapon to the maximum level of 150. Most likely at that point, you’d have made it to the end of the game’s main campaign and have already gathered up a lot of materials to get your Weapon to that point. So what’s next?

At post-game, you’ll actually be introduced to two new features that will upgrade your weapon further, depending on how you want to build your character. At this point, you’ll have the most difficult levels of post-game content to clear and will need to build your characters more intricately. Here are two new things you can do post-game to improve your Weapons even further in our Granblue Fantasy Relink: Weapon Upgrade Guide.

Weapons Postgame: Imbue

Some of the newer and more difficult Side Quests will now have different Wrightstones as rewards for completing them. You can also get a random Wrightstone by chance from the new Transmute Sigils feature at Siero’s.

Once you get your first Wrightstone, you’ll unlock the new Imbue feature on your next visit to the Blacksmith. Wrightstones have Traits attached to them that can be Imbued onto Weapons so that they can have more than just their innate initial Traits. As such, they can now join Sigils as mechanics that you’ll have to manage to customize your character’s Traits. When imbued, these Traits will be highlighted orange to differentiate them from the Weapon’s initial Traits which are grey.

The Traits that Wrightstones have are mostly random. However, each type of Wrightstone probably has a pool of Traits that the game randomly chooses from.

These newly-imbued Traits will also level up whenever you uncap your Weapon’s max level. Therefore, there is tremendous value in forging a new Weapon at a lower level, imbuing it with the perfect Traits that you want your character to have, and then upgrading and uncapping it from there.

Weapons Postgame: Mirage Munitions

The final feature that you have for making your Weapons stronger is adding Mirage Munitions to your Weapons. When Mirage Munitions are added to your Weapons through the Blacksmith, their HP and ATK stats will slightly increase for each munition added.

We have only been able to collect a few of these Mirage Munitions so far, by collecting rewards from the Tropy section of Lyria’s Journal. So far, the slight stat increases seem negligible unless you can add a good amount of munitions to the Weapon. Nevertheless, this feature will be available to you as soon as you collect your first Mirage Munitions and will prove valuable for inching out even the slightest advantage against the impossible-level fights that Cygames has promised us at post-game.

This concludes our Granblue Fantasy Relink: Weapon Upgrade guide for upgrading your Weapons to the fullest extent! We hope that you found these helpful. If we missed anything or if you have any questions, please don’t hesitate to leave a comment down below!

Don’t forget to visit our website and wikis for more detailed guides on the many aspects of the game that we touched on here. Happy gaming!

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If you’re looking for more Granblue Fantasy Relink don’t miss our coverage on its extensive end-game and which characters to play. You can also drop by our wiki for all the latest info on Weapons, Armor, Skybound Arts, Sigils and more.